There’s a reel I keep coming back to. A woman, speaking plainly, no dramatic background music, no fancy cuts – just her, sitting somewhere ordinary, saying something that refuses to leave my head: “We spend half our lives waiting for fairness. We complain about the cards we were dealt, our background, who betrayed us, what went wrong. But what if the cards were never the point?”
She goes on to talk about two Sanskrit words that I had heard before but never really felt until that moment. Prarabdha – the destiny you arrive with, the circumstances of your birth, the family, the geography, the timing, all the things that were handed to you before you had any say in the matter. And Purushartha – your effort, your will, the part that is entirely and always yours. Her argument was simple and almost brutal in its clarity: most of us are so busy cursing our Prarabdha that we never actually use our Purushartha. We pull out the victim card, hold it up against the world, and then wonder why nothing changes.
And then she said one name that stopped me completely. Karna.
If you know the Mahabharata, you know that Karna had the most impossible Prarabdha imaginable. Abandoned at birth by a mother who was afraid of what the world would say. Raised by a charioteer, which in the social order of that time meant he was automatically disqualified – from tournaments, from recognition, from the identity he deserved. He was called a sutaputra – a charioteer’s son – by people who knew, somewhere inside them, that he was greater than almost everyone in that room. He was denied his guru’s blessing through deception. He fought a war on the wrong side, not because he lacked wisdom, but because he chose loyalty over convenience. He gave away his divine armour – his one protection – to a stranger who asked, because giving was just who he was. The man had every reason to stop. To say: this is not fair. To pull out the victim card and sit down. And he never did. Not once.
I sat with that for a long time. Because I know, in a much smaller and much more ordinary way, what it feels like to be handed a situation you did not ask for.
I did not choose my geography. I did not choose this project. These are two facts about my current life that I have had to sit with, turn over, and eventually make peace with. When I was assigned to this district, to this particular set of villages, to this particular intervention – I didn’t raise my hand for it. It came to me. And for a while, if I am being completely honest, I carried a quiet version of the victim card in my own pocket. Not loudly. Not in a way I would have admitted then. But it was there – the small inner voice that says, if I had been placed somewhere else, or on a different project, things would look different by now.
That voice is Prarabdha talking. And the reel told me something important: Prarabdha doesn’t ask for your opinion. It never did. Karna didn’t get to choose being born to Kunti. Viktor Frankl didn’t get to choose the camp. The communities I work with didn’t choose the geography that made them invisible to development for generations. And I didn’t choose Kanker, or this project, or the conditions I landed in. That’s just the field I was given. The question the reel asks – bluntly, without softening it is: so what are you going to do on this field?
And that question is entirely about Purushartha.
Once I stopped negotiating with my Prarabdha and started putting my energy into my Purushartha, something shifted. Not in the external conditions those stayed exactly as difficult as before. But in how I was moving inside them. I stopped spending mental energy on the comparison – what if this had been easier, what if I’d been placed elsewhere and started spending it on the only thing that was actually mine to spend it on: the work in front of me, the relationships I was building, the small decisions that compound over months into something real.
Ratan Tata once said something that I have carried with me quietly ever since I first heard it: “I don’t believe in taking right decisions. I take decisions and then make them right.” When I first read that, I thought it was about confidence. A successful man’s swagger. But sitting with it now, in the context of a project I didn’t choose, in a geography I didn’t pick, I understand it differently. It is not swagger at all. It is the purest definition of Purushartha I have ever heard in a single sentence. You don’t wait for the right conditions to arrive before you commit. You commit fully, completely and then you pour everything you have into making that commitment count. The decision was never the point. What you do after the decision is.
That is exactly what I have been learning to do. I didn’t choose this project. But I have chosen, every single day since I arrived, to make it the right one. That choosing quiet, daily, unglamorous is mine. No one assigned it to me. No one can take it from me either.
The geography I didn’t choose started teaching me things I couldn’t have learned anywhere else. The project I didn’t choose started showing me capacities in myself I didn’t know were there. That’s the thing about Prarabdha that the reel captures beautifully it is not just what is done to you. It is also what is done for you, even when you can’t see it yet. Karna’s impossible circumstances made him who he was. The sutaputra who couldn’t be broken became the greatest warrior of his age precisely because the world kept trying to reduce him and he kept refusing to be reduced.
I’m not comparing myself to Karna. But I understand now, in a way I didn’t before, why the hardship was the making, not the undoing.
The reel also mentions a Holocaust survivor and she is clearly pointing to Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist who survived the Nazi camps and later wrote about how even in conditions of total dehumanisation, the one thing that could not be taken was a person’s freedom to choose their response. His Prarabdha in those camps was unspeakable. He lost his family. He lost his manuscript. He lost everything that the world uses to define a person’s worth. And in that darkness, he found the one thing that darkness cannot reach: the will to mean something. To decide what the suffering would make of him, rather than letting the suffering simply destroy him.
This is what I have been learning – slowly, imperfectly, still learning in the field. There are stretches when nothing is working the way it should. The community is fatigued from too many interventions that promised and left. The counterpart has been transferred, again. The data doesn’t look the way we hoped. The timeline is tighter than it was on paper. And in those moments, there is a very real temptation to build a small, tidy victim narrative. To say: the conditions were never right. The system is too broken. I was set up to struggle. It would be completely understandable. And it would also be, in Frankl’s language, a surrender of the one freedom that nobody can take.
The conditions of the field are Prarabdha. The effort I bring every morning is Purushartha. They are not the same thing, and confusing them is where it all goes wrong.
Here is what the communities I work with have quietly taught me about this though I don’t think they would use these words. The villages in my project didn’t choose their geography either. They didn’t choose to be in districts that successive governments forgot for decades. They didn’t choose that the nearest hospital is two hours away, that the roads flood every monsoon, that the schemes designed for them exist on paper in a capital city none of them have visited. These aren’t complaints they are facts. Hard, structural, generational facts. And yet every time I have seen real change not the kind that gets photographed for a report, but the kind that quietly roots itself into a village and stays it has come from someone who decided to exercise their Purushartha anyway. One woman who taught herself to read government orders. One SHG who tried to collect a food grade mahua when everyone said the buyer wouldn’t allow it. One women who walked four kilometres every morning to attend a training that no one in his family believed in, and who now runs it himself.
None of them waited for fair. They couldn’t afford to. And watching them, I realised I couldn’t afford to either.
The reel ends with something I wrote down immediately: “Stop crying about your Prarabdha. Love it. It is the field you were given to fight on. And fight – with everything your Purushartha allows.”
Love it. That word surprised me. Not tolerate it. Not accept it. Love it. Because the field you didn’t choose is still the field where everything you are capable of will eventually be proven or not. And that proof has nothing to do with which field you got. It has everything to do with how you showed up on it.
I don’t know yet how this project ends. I don’t know what April will look like, what the final numbers will say, whether the change we worked toward will hold after we leave or quietly dissolve the way so many well-meaning interventions do. That part is not entirely in my hands. But the way I have worked – the honesty I brought to the community, the consistency I showed up with even on the difficult days, the relationships I built without agenda – that part is mine. That is my Purushartha. And whatever the result, I will be able to look back at this project and say: I played the hand I was given. I played it fully, and I played it with everything I had.
That, I think, is all Karna ever wanted people to say about him too.
The cards are what they are. What you do with them – that part is always, only, entirely yours.
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