I spent three weeks in Varanasi in 2019, mostly failing to write the thing I’d gone there to write. One afternoon I was sitting outside a chai stall near Assi Ghat when a woman named Lakshmi — her actual name, which she found funny, given how things had turned out — started telling me about her son. He’d just cleared the civil service preliminary exam. Fourth attempt. Five years of studying, she said. Then she looked up, almost as an afterthought: “But his luck was also good.”
Double-Vision
I’ve been thinking about that sentence for years now. Not because it was profound, but because of how ordinary it was. She wasn’t making a philosophical claim. She was just describing reality as she understood it.
A study in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology a few years back found belief in luck was significantly higher in South Asia than in Protestant Europe, even controlling for religion and education. The researchers seemed surprised. I don’t know why.
Across the subcontinent, this double-vision is everywhere. Work hard, but understand that forces beyond your control will have their say. I’ve heard versions of it from software developers in Hyderabad, rickshaw drivers in Lucknow, garment workers in Dhaka. People across South Asia consult an astrologer about opening dates, work brutal hours building his business, make cricket bets on odds96 and thank gods when profits come.
Karma, Kismat And Purushartha
The Arabic word qisma, which means “your portion” or “your share,” is where the Hindi word kismat comes from. It came in through hundreds of years of Islamic influence and spread through the languages of the subcontinent. Ghalib used it all the time, and sometimes it was very beautiful: ye na thi hamari qismat ki visaal-e-yaar hota — it was not in our fate that union with the beloved would happen. But in everyday speech it’s slipperier than destiny.
The saleswoman, whose merchandise was quickly sold out, says she’s had a stroke of luck today. The taxi driver, who found a passenger without searching, simply dropping him off along the way, says the same. There’s a certain lightness, even humor, to it. It’s not the grim fatalism sometimes attributed to believers in predestination. My Urdu isn’t strong enough to capture all the nuances, but I heard the difference between Lakshmi’s use of the expression and its heavier, theological meaning.
Hindu philosophy operates with its own unique concepts. Karma is often mistakenly understood in the West as divine punishment — if you do bad, bad will come to you — but in Hindu understanding, it is a more subtle concept — a kind of accumulated residue of past actions that shapes current circumstances. The Mahabharata constantly returns to this theme, arguing that if fate acted on its own, it would be “neutralized.” Without human effort, fate is inert.
When Pew surveyed religious beliefs across India, they found something unexpected: 77% of Muslims there believe in karma. Same percentage as Hindus.
This very effort is called purushartha — human striving, effort, free will. Vedantic texts discussed how this is connected to prarabdha, the karma with which a person is born. There’s one vivid image that particularly stuck in my mind: a man tied to a pole with a rope. Within the circle formed by the rope, he moves freely. The radius of his movement is limited. But the movements themselves, their direction, strength, and speed are not.
These ideas aren’t relics, but working tools that people in South Asia use to interpret their lives. An engineer in Pune might never utter the word “purushartha” and might not even know it, but their thinking reflects it. They’ll talk about working hard, doing everything right, and then add something about auspicious times or circumstances.
And the astrology apps used by tens of millions of people in India don’t negate the importance of effort. People consult their kundli not to avoid action, but to time it correctly.
I asked a friend of mine — a rationalist, an atheist who rolls his eyes when visiting a temple — if he’d ever checked his horoscope. He had. Before his wedding. “Just in case,” he said, laughing sheepishly. I don’t think he believed it much, but he didn’t completely deny it either. It’s a little more complicated than pure faith or pure skepticism.
Luck vs Effort: Choice
The Indian middle class — the people staffing IT firms, whose kids sit for competitive exams — tends to emphasize effort. They’ve bet everything on meritocracy. Education unlocks opportunity: that’s not just ideology, it’s survival strategy. Families mortgage houses to pay for Kota. Mothers move to cramped rented rooms near coaching centers so their children can study without distraction. I met one woman who hadn’t seen her husband in eight months — she was living with her daughter in Kota while he worked in Mumbai to pay for it. When I asked if it was worth it, she looked at me like I’d asked something stupid. “What else is there?” she said.
But something like a fifth of Indian graduates under thirty are unemployed. The entrance exams get harder; the number of seats stays roughly the same. I talked to one young engineer in Pune who’d graduated near the top of his class and was now delivering food. He said something about being told the country needed people like him, and then it turned out nobody was hiring. I’m paraphrasing. He wasn’t bitter, exactly. More just — tired.
For daily wage laborers, garment workers, the math is different. Luck isn’t abstract — it’s whether you get picked at the labor chowk that morning, which contractor shows up, whether the monsoon has delayed the construction project you were counting on. A rickshaw driver in Lucknow told me getting work even two days a week was “excruciatingly difficult.” His word, though he said it in Hindi.
Even so, even the poorest aren’t simply resigned. Bangladesh’s garment workers — whose labor accounts for over 80 percent of the country’s exports — have repeatedly taken to the streets. In 2023, tens of thousands of them protested for weeks, facing police violence, demanding a minimum wage that would still leave them poor. That’s not fatalism.
