Satish Kumar's Serene Spirituality

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The two sneaked away from government hosts in Moscow and eluded Soviet police all the way to the Polish border. In Paris, they were held for four days in a filthy jail cell after attempting to see Charles de Gaulle. Deported to England, they met Bertrand Russell, who raised the money for their passage to New York aboard the luxurious ocean liner Queen Mary. In Albany, Georgia, the owner of a lunch counter held a gun to Satish's chest as a way of emphasizing his refusal to serve brown-skinned customers. Satish and Menon met with representatives of Nikita Khrushchev, Harold Wilson, and Lyndon Johnson—but not de Gaulle—and gave each of them a packet of tea from a woman they'd met in Armenia, who said that leaders should brew a pot of tea before making any decision to fire missiles.

Upon returning to India, Satish promoted land reform issues and joined efforts to help refugees fleeing a bloody civil war in Bangladesh. His humanitarian work led to an invitation to London to exhibit his photographs of the war and speak. That's where he met June Mitchell, a librarian who also had done relief work in Bangladesh. Soon the two were living together in London with a baby son, making plans to move to India.

But one day while he was taking his daily walk, Satish bumped into John Papworth, an English social activist who had accompanied Satish on the United States leg of his peace pilgrimage and who later founded Resurgence magazine. Papworth was leaving to become an adviser to Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda, and he insisted right on the spot that Satish take over the magazine editorship. Although Satish had no formal schooling, a limited command of written English, and no means of support, he took the job, which paid nothing. "I didn't like to . . . refuse something which was coming to me by fate," he explains in his autobiography. "I decided to put off thoughts of returning to India. . . . I should have known that life does not operate on the basis of plans, no matter how rational. My nature is to let things happen rather than make them happen."

It is this spirit of Taoist detachment, paired with undeniable determination, that makes Satish such a powerful personality. He is a man toward whom the universe seems to bend a bit, a figure from whom seemingly impossible ideas sound somehow possible.

"Fragmentation is at the heart of modern consciousness," he says as we sit at the kitchen table eating fresh-baked tarts and sharing a pot of tea—equal parts Earl Grey and Assam. "You divide knowledge into subjects, you divide people into categories. But I think there is something more to the world than what you are able to measure, analyze, and quantify. In spiritual consciousness there is a dance between what you know and what you don't know. The place of mystery is an essential ingredient."

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