Puttaparthi, 1995

In 1995 I turned thirty. From a very early age I had known, not planned or hoped but known, that something significant would happen to me at thirty. I could not have told you what, or whether it would be good or catastrophic.

By then the minerals business was gone. It did not end in a day. Through the middle of 1994 and into early 1995 it wound down, as the supply from Rwanda and eastern Zaire stopped. We owed nobody, and nobody owed us. It just ran out. I came back to the UK penniless, the second time in my life I had left Africa for England with nothing. I stayed with my parents and worked as a factory cleaner. The days were full of self-doubt, and of a promise to myself never to go back to Africa. Nobody who had known me in Uganda or Australia would have predicted any of it.

In late 1995, with almost no money, I booked a flight to Mumbai for December, to go and see Sathya Sai Baba.