Desire as Bait: Life's Intelligent Design

Desire is often taken to mean chasing something that will finally end restlessness: a person, a city, a job, a version of yourself. Look closer and the object is rarely the point. Desire is what moves a life. It points you somewhere. It gathers force. It pulls you toward places you could not have planned cleanly from where you stood.

I have understood desire as a vector: it has a direction, and it has strength. The thing you want is often bait. What matters is the movement that follows, and where that movement puts you. Desire does not mainly promise fulfilment. It relocates you. Sometimes that relocation opens the next chapter right away. Sometimes it plants something that only makes sense years later. Once you arrive, the original lure may fade, or turn out to have been a doorway rather than a destination.

Consciousness, on its own, has no hands. It cannot issue orders the way a manager issues orders. So it works through desire. Wanting is the tool. That wanting is enough to move a person, and often the movement is the deeper purpose. What follows is my life, used as a map of that mechanism, a clear look at how bait and placement work. If you look back at your own life with the same attention, you will likely see the same mechanism at work: a pull that seemed to be about one thing, and a placement that turned out to be about another.

The intelligence you cannot see while moving

While you are inside a desire, the pattern is hard to see. You win some things. You lose others. Both can feel random. You tell yourself stories that sound like understanding. Only when you look back along the whole arc does the mechanism show.

Sometimes desire gives you the thing it pointed at. Often it does not. Either way, it has usually changed your position. A new city, a new skill, a new set of people, a new inner question. From that new ground, doors appear that were not visible before. Fresh desire rises. The board shifts again. Life uses restlessness less to satisfy every wish than to keep placing you where the next phase can find you.

Bangalore: the bait I took

Bangalore is one clear example. I was about eighteen. It did not feel like a symbol. It felt urgent and young. I was hemmed in by expectation and hungry for a larger life. The city meant nightlife, music, strangers, motion, the relief of being less known. Officially I went for engineering. Under that story ran another: I wanted freedom, or what I then mistook for freedom.

What I was actually chasing was atmosphere: late nights, social heat, permission to loosen. Intensity looked like depth. I did enjoy myself there: the late nights, the parties, the company of women, the fun of being young in a city that felt larger than the life I had left. The glamour still thinned with time. Even rebellion repeated itself. The entrance I had imagined from a distance became a room I knew from the inside. That did not make the move empty. It meant the lasting meaning was elsewhere.

I did not finish the degree. By ordinary scorekeeping, that alone could brand Bangalore a waste. What endured was not the engineering course or the fantasy of freedom, but the relationships that formed while I was busy wanting something else.

One thread later became my marriage, though not in a straight line. In Bangalore I was with a girl who had a friend in Hyderabad. When she visited me after I had moved there, she introduced us. That friend became my wife. Another thread ran through AIESEC, the student organisation I worked with. Independently of the romance, I made a friend there. His father and my father had been in college together when they were young, then completely lost touch. Years later, through me and my friend, the two of them met again. After my father retired from the Army, my friend's father offered him a place in his Hyderabad business, and my father did very well there. At the time these were just ordinary friendships and ordinary romance. I had no sense they were loading milestones into the future. Later it was obvious: the network was the real cargo.

Desire baited me with one story while life wrote another. Bangalore did not give me what I wanted. It gave me coordinates.

Australia: the next pull

Australia did not rise straight out of Bangalore. From Bangalore I went to Hyderabad and married. About six years into that marriage, my wife decided to pursue a master's in fine arts at the University of California. Her decision was the main influence that pushed me toward my own next step. I did not follow her to California. I went to Australia, a different country and a different bet, and it was her move into higher study that made me take sound engineering seriously as mine. In that sense, marrying her was itself a vector. While we were still together, that marriage pointed me toward the craft that would eventually carry me to Bombay and NCPA.

Her movement and mine happened in the same season of life, but they were not one shared journey. Mine still carried the old hunger for elsewhere: mobility, reinvention, relief from what had become too familiar. Freedom, more than education, was the pull. If Bangalore had meant youthful release, Australia meant an adult version of the same vector: competence, independence, craft, the hope of remaking a life.

I chose sound engineering. On the surface it was a practical path. Underneath, I wanted a world where feeling and technique meet. Distance strips romance fast. Fantasies travel with you; rent, work, loneliness, and unfamiliar systems test them. Australia was less an escape than an education in reality.

The marriage did not end while I was in Australia, and it did not end the moment I returned to India. I finished a bachelor's in audio engineering there, came back, moved to Bombay, and only some years after that did we separate. It was not a bitterly remorseful chapter for me. I did not mind it in the way people sometimes expect. Another imagined future closed, quietly enough. Looking back, Australia had already been doing more than preparing that later ending. It pressed into me a craft I could stand on, a thicker resilience, and a self that could keep going when an old structure fell away, capacities an easier path might never have required. What I had been chasing and what I was actually given were not identical. They were still joined.

Bangalore had given relationships. Australia had given formation. Bombay would be where those earlier placements turned into work, and then into another kind of test.

Bombay and NCPA: landing where I needed to be

By Bombay the texture of the pursuit had changed. I was no longer chasing nightlife as freedom, or a foreign country as reinvention. The pull remained. Bombay meant possibility and professional seriousness, a life large enough for what I had become.

After reaching Bombay I chose live sound as my specialisation. I joined one of the larger live-sound vendor companies in India and worked there for three or four years. That stretch was the precursor. Then I moved to the National Centre for the Performing Arts.

Landing at NCPA did not feel like the arrival of a master plan. At the time I knew nothing about desire as a vector or coordinates prepared in advance. It felt more like an ordinary step into something a little larger. I am writing this from inside that placement, not looking back on it from years later. From where I stand now, NCPA has turned out to be one of the finest works of my life so far. I have been here for ten years. I head the sound department. When I arrived, NCPA did not have the sound installations it needed; I put that sound in place. I built a team of twelve engineers. In a heavy month we can take care of as many as a hundred and thirty events. The bait that pulled me toward craft and Bombay did not announce this future. It positioned me for it.

Work anchored one layer. Underneath, life kept moving. A love at NCPA felt genuine and possible (in my mind). For a stretch it seemed the long sequence might land somewhere mutual. Then she ghosted me, abruptly, without a clean ending. Being left without explanation is a particular kind of rupture. The mind replays every signal. Hope and humiliation occupy the same room.

That rupture drew me inward with a seriousness comfort would never have required. I had to sit with old wounds, old needs, and the patterns I had been running without watching them. Out of that looking, something in me opened that had not opened before. The spiritual life I live now did not arrive as a theory I adopted. It bloomed from being dropped, and from having nowhere to go but in: the lotus that rises from the muck it grows in. She was not the destination. She was the pressure that forced a door. Wanting to be chosen by her was real. What life actually needed me to know was who I was when nobody was choosing me. Life arranged the falling in love, and life arranged the ghosting, so that I would have to meet myself without an audience.

Across these movements the outward forms changed and the mechanism did not. Appetite and escape in Bangalore. Freedom, craft, and a slow unbinding in Australia and after. Vocation at NCPA, then intimacy and heartbreak in Bombay, turning into interior work. Each longing presented itself as an end. Each functioned as repositioning, sometimes into a result that arrived years later.

What the pattern is and is not

I am not saying pain was secretly good, or that disappointment should be dressed up as destiny. I am saying something simpler. When a desire misses the thing it pointed at, the move can still have done real work. Desire often talks in ordinary language (a city, a degree, a marriage, a job, a person) while what it is actually doing is changing your position. Bangalore, Australia, Bombay, NCPA: none of them gave me exactly the future I first imagined. I would not call those desires wasted. Each one put me on different ground. From that ground, the next chapter became possible, sometimes much later than I expected.

Acting without needing the ending first

Old teachings say to act without clinging to results. From here that does not mean going numb, and it does not mean outcomes do not matter. It means I aim at what I can see, because action needs an aim, while admitting that the deeper result may not match the story I am telling myself. I can care fully and still refuse to demand that life prove me right on my timeline.

Bangalore's chase for freedom quietly loaded the relationships that became a marriage and later helped my father. I was still married when her studies pushed me toward sound, and still married when I went to Australia. That marriage pointed me toward the craft while we were together. Australia then built the craft and harder self that followed, and the separation came years afterward without the drama I once would have expected. Bombay and NCPA turned vocation into a body of work I am proud of. The ghosting that hurt so much became the doorway into the spiritual life I have now. What I wanted mattered. It did not always matter for the reason I thought. That recognition has not made me passive. It has made me more willing to move without forcing desire to guarantee the ending I prefer.

Desire as compass

I no longer treat wanting as a flaw to be disciplined into invulnerability. Desire does not vanish because we condemn it; it changes costume and object, and it remains one of the main ways life keeps drawing a person forward. When it appears now, for a project, a person, a place, an outcome, I try neither to crush it nor to weld myself to it. I read it as a pull toward movement and follow with more trust than certainty, knowing the exact thing is optional and motion is the constant. Life can't hand down an annotated map; more often it plants desire, desire begins the motion, and later the movement itself looks like the instruction. So I keep acting, desiring, and allowing myself to be carried without insisting that the bait become the meal. That is not passivity, and it is not blind trust in every impulse. It is a different contract with uncertainty: sincerity in the act, humility about the eventual meaning. Desire has its own intelligence as a compass. It has been truer than my expectations. It rarely points where I expect. That is no longer a reason for distrust. It is the reason I have learned to follow.