The butterfly effect is real. One moment can change everything - quietly, unexpectedly, irreversibly.
In September 2024, I landed in London for what I believed was the start of a dream chapter: a prestigious fellowship, a city I loved, and a future I had worked relentlessly to build. I remember stepping off the plane feeling hopeful. Ready. Certain that life was finally aligning.
Twenty-four hours later, that certainty shattered.
I was assaulted on a London street - an experience that carved a fault line straight through my life. Before I even knew how to process the shock, I was on a flight back to India. My body ached. My confidence trembled. My spirit felt broken in ways I couldn’t name.
And yet, this painful moment - this abrupt collapse - became the trigger for a transformation I never saw coming.
Back home, I felt lost, unmoored, unable to return to the person I was before. But instead of forcing myself into old routines, I surrendered. I let life redirect me. I moved onto farms - first in Chennai, then Bangalore, and eventually, far away in Montana. I learned to wake with the sun, breathe in silence, and reconnect with something I had forgotten: myself.
In those months of stillness and soil, something unexpected happened. Words poured out of me - 100,000 of them. A book I had postponed for years began taking shape. Creativity returned like a tide. I launched a podcast, then a newsletter, then a course. I started building things not out of ambition, but out of truth.
And somewhere along the way, an idea that had lived quietly in the back of my mind became a reality: the largest immigrant summit in America. It wasn’t part of any plan. But it was absolutely part of a purpose I didn’t know I had.
Sometimes life collapses so that it can rebuild you. Not into the person you were - but into the person you were meant to become.
Looking back, nothing went to plan. Not one thing. And if you asked me in those early days - sitting alone on that flight back to India, wondering why this had happened - I would’ve given anything to rewrite the moment that changed everything.
But today? I wouldn’t.
Because that moment redirected me towards a life more aligned, more meaningful, and more mine than ever before. It stripped away the noise. It stripped away the illusion of control. And it taught me that purpose doesn’t always show up gently. Sometimes it arrives disguised as chaos.
The butterfly effect is real. One moment can change everything. But sometimes - if you let it - it changes everything for the better.