You said it’s first a local quest which can then become universal?
It can be very local and grassroots. You could be in a village, applying yourself to certain problems and factors within that little society. And at the same time you can see the bigger picture.
Seeing the bigger picture is actually an important aspect of spirituality. Prophets are those who have no personal agenda. They have a larger human agenda.
Are there prophets today?
If you are weightless, you are prophetic. If you have no demand from the world, and have only to give to the world, then you can be prophetic.
Of course, who knows who is the ultimate prophet… but at least there are some pure people.
Have you met some?
Every day you meet them in the form of carpenters, crafts people, people who work with their hands. When you work with your hands, you are using a different soul. Or rather, you are using your soul for something devoid of any immediate gain. You are applying sensitivity to a medium. Spirituality could mean empowering them, protecting their vulnerability. Because in fact some of them are very vulnerable. We have the intelligence so we can protect them.
This is one of the reasons you got involved into fashion, isn’t it?
Definitely. Though as very often, your original motivation gets defeated. You get involved into something with a particular objective and something very different happens. We started with the idea of empowering those people and enabling them to stay in their villages without having to come to the big cities. Because I feel that they lose everything when they move. They lose more than what they gain. I thought craft was a way of empowering them, so they can stay where they are.
But sometimes you feel you are fighting a lost cause. And so many of them ended up in Delhi, doing their work here. The whole purpose was defeated.
Regardless, there is a lot of spirituality in art, crafts, painting, poetry. Poetry to me is the mother art. Because when you write poetry you do not need anything. Just a paper and a pencil. Your flow from yourself to the world is unlimited. It doesn’t need anything but a state of mind.
