Are there specific instances when you feel guided?
We all do, especially when feeling most vulnerable and depressed. It is as if some hand was coming and lifting you up, with the most unexpected thing showing up when you feel you just can’t cope anymore.
I do feel things happen in the strangest ways, showing there is a larger pattern at play. It is too simplistic to think ‘if I pray for something, it will appear’, because this pattern is larger than us. So what we are asking for may be right for us but not for the larger pattern.
For instance, I never got married and was always happy that way. I was very busy working and always thought “not just now”. Until I decided it was just not for me. All my friends were telling me “you are having a great time now, but wait until you get older, you will be so lonely, who will be looking after you? Now it is ok because you have lots of friends and lovers but later on it will be very tough”. Most of those friends actually had quite unhappy marriages.

I was looking after my father during the age of 40 and 50, and then began to think that I may indeed become lonely. Then suddenly came a young girl. She just wrote to me one day, we then became very close friends and sort of adopted each other --- she being like my perfect daughter. She lives with me, she is caring and lovely, she is there for me at a time when most of my friends’ children have gone, and are all over the world.
I would have never dreamt of such a thing. Had you asked me if I would have wanted a daughter I would have said “God no, I am too independent!” Even the thought of a long-term relationship in my youth used to give me claustrophobia. And this happened most organically, without my thinking or even realizing we were getting so close and she was becoming a daughter to me.
So I think that in life, if you let yourself flow with it, things just happen.

Of course we should think, and introspect and not be just stupid assuming that things will happen without us playing a part in it. But at the same time we should let ourselves flow with the tide. We should be open to things that happen. And not just say I decided this is how things will be.
Another example is the way I ended up with Dastkar. I started off life studying fine arts, thinking I would be an artist with a capital A, feeling that business, running an office, management etc. were definitely not for me, were “bellow me”. But again without my realizing it, life took me into running a staff of 20-odd people, working with about 20,000 crafts people all over India who are like an extended family to me, putting together business plans, strategizing and so on. All those things that I would have never thought I would do, let alone enjoy. And I do wake up in the morning, thinking what a fantastic day ahead!

... contd.