Today is the final day of Pitru Paksha – Sarva Pitru Amavasya.

I couldn’t tell you which day belongs to which ancestor.

Somewhere, I’m sure, there is a calendar. A system. A lineage of names and rituals and relationships that someone in my family understands far better than I do. Someone probably knows exactly which offering belongs to whom, which story belongs to which grandparent, which date belongs to which departed soul.

I do not.

What I have instead is a question.

Actually, a question that keeps changing clothes and showing up everywhere.

How much of who we are is actually our own doing?

Our genes. Our language. Our circumstances. Our values, beliefs, fears, privileges and limitations.

The very things that make us, us.

How much of us is really ours?

Not the motivational poster version of us.

Not the LinkedIn profile.

Not the carefully curated mythology where we are the sole architects of our destiny.

The deeper infrastructure. The mind. The temperament. The fears. The instincts.

The things we love effortlessly and the things we struggle against for years.

How much of that was chosen?

And how much arrived pre-installed?

We speak out identity as though it were a personal achievement.

My values. My culture. My intelligence. My resilience. My discipline.

But if the cosmic roulette wheel had landed two inches to the left, perhaps I would be speaking a different language, praying to a different god, arguing for a different political ideology, and believing with complete sincerity that the person I became was entirely self-made.

Yet here we are, so attached to the identities we happened to inherit.

The strange thing is that none of us chose out opening chapter.

Nobody submits an application to be born.

Nobody attends an interview.

No infant negotiates terms and conditions before arriving on earth.

We emerge from the lottery and immediately begin attaching ourselves to the outcomes.

Proud of certain inheritances.

Ashamed of others.

Protective of identities we never consciously attached.

But how much of it was ever entirely ours to begin with?

There is so much randomness in life. And so much unfairness.

We like to believe that the world is a level playing field, that everyone starts somewhere and makes their way up through hard work. But we know that isn’t true.

Not everyone starts from the same place. Not everyone inherits the same opportunities, the same emotional security, the same health, the same resources, or even the same fears.

And yet, we often judge people as if they did.

The more I think about it, the more fascinating the structure of nature seems to me. So meticulously organised, and yet so dependent on circumstances beyond our control.

The more I think about it, the more nature begins to feel like a quiet lecture on humility.

Take a mango seed. A mango — the king of fruits!

An absurdly ordinary object.

Dry. Small. Unremarkable.

And yet hidden inside it is the blueprint for an entire tree.

A future trunk. Future branches. Future fruit. Future shade. Future generations of seeds.

It has the capability to grow, to flower, to bear fruit.

The potential has always been there.

But potential is not destiny.

Take that same seed and place it in a desert, and its story changes. It’s fate might be entirely different.

Place it in fertile soil, support it with water, sunlight, insects, microorganisms and the invisible cooperation of an entire ecological environment, and it becomes something extraordinary.

The seed matters.

But so does everything around it.

The soil matters.

The weather matters.

The timing matters.

The ecosystem matters.

How different are we from that mango seed?

Somewhere along the way, modern culture become obsessed with the seed and forgot the rest of the equation.

The cult of the self-made person is perhaps one of the greatest works of fiction ever produced.

Not because effort isn’t real.

Effort matters deeply.

But effort is only one actor in an enormously crowded stage production.

Before effort comes genetics.

Before genetics come ancestors.

Before ancestors come circumstances.

Before circumstances come accidents of geography, history and timing.

Who gave us the mind that learns?

Who gave us eyesight good enough to read?

Who gave us a body capable of working?

Who gave us access to education?

Who gave us safety?

Who gave us opportunity?

Who gave us language itself?

At what exact point does “I did this alone” becomes mathematically impossible?

Even the things we think of as entirely our own — our fears, our patterns, our beliefs, our ways of loving and reacting — can be shaped by what came before us.

Generational memories. Family histories. Social conditioning. Economic circumstances. And even the effects of our ancestors’ experiences, which can sometimes leave traces across generations through complex biological and social pathways.

Perhaps this is why Pitru Paksha feels so fascinating to me.

On the surface, it is about remembering those who came before us.

But underneath it lies a far more uncomfortable proposition.

The possibility that we are not nearly as independent as we like to imagine.

Every person is carrying an invisible inheritance.

Some of it is obvious.

Names. Languages. Recipes. Religious traditions. Family stories.

Some of it is hidden much deeper.

Anxiety that nobody can explain. Patterns that repeat themselves across generations.

Ways of loving. Ways of withdrawing.

Wounds with fingerprints so old they’ve become unrecognisable.

We inherit far more than property. Sometimes we inherit unfinished sentences.

We don’t just inherit names, traditions, languages.

We inherit wounds, too.

This is where karma begins to become interesting.

Not as a mystical reward system.

Not as a divine scoreboard where good actions earn prise points and bad actions earn penalties.

That version always felt too small.

Instead, karma begins to resemble momentum.

A river of causes and consequences stretching far beyond the horizon of any single life.

We inherit currents that began long before we arrives.

A reminder that our actions take place within a web of causes and consequences. That what we do matters, that our circumstances matter, and that the two are constantly interacting.

Maybe we don’t control every seed we’re given. Maybe we don’t get to choose the soil we are planted in.

But perhaps we can still influence what grows from here.

And perhaps the real work is to recognise what we have inherited without blindly passing all of it on.

To question the beliefs we were handed. To heal the wounds we did not create. To recognise our privileges without becoming arrogant, and our limitations without surrendering to them.

To work hard, yes. To take responsibility, absolutely.

But also to remain humble.

Because self-made is a complicated idea when so much of our foundation was laid before we even knew how to speak.

We may have worked for what we have, but who gave us the mind to learn, the body to work, the opportunities to try, the people who helped us, or the circumstances that allowed some of our efforts to bear fruit?

This is not to take away from our efforts. It is to acknowledge the things that made those efforts possible.

Perhaps that is what an attitude of gratitude really is.

Not just being thankful when life gives us what we want, but recognising how much of life was never entirely in our hands.

To me, this is where gratitude actually begins.

Not gratitude as forced positivity.

Not gratitude as pretending life is fair.

Not because life is fair.

Not because suffering has meaning neatly packaged inside it.

Some people receive fertile soil.

Others spend year clawing their way through concrete.

Some inherit stability.

Other inherit survival.

Yet somehow, all of us are standing on foundations built by countless people we rarely think about.

Parents. Grandparents. Ancestors. Teachers. Friends. Strangers.

Entire generations whose names we will never know.

Every achievement contains fingerprints.

Every success contains invisible collaborators.

Every strength contains an inheritance.

Perhaps gratitude is simply the willingness to see them.

And perhaps Pitru Paksha, a time traditionally devoted to remembering and honouring our ancestors, offers a beautiful moment to reflect on this very thing.

We are not isolated individuals who appeared out of nowhere.

We are, in so many ways, the continuation of lives that came before us — through genetic variations, generational epigenetic changes, and the social, economic and emotional memories passed down through generations.

Their sacrifices, their choices, their struggles, their wisdom — and sometimes their unresolved pain — have all contributed to the people we are today.

We owe our ancestors gratitude, but perhaps we also owe ourselves the responsibility of deciding what we carry forward.

Because inheritance is not just about receiving.

It is also about what we choose to pass on.

And somewhere in all of this, one thought keeps coming back to me:

Karma changes direction when the intention behind it changes.

Perhaps we cannot rewrite every circumstance we were born into. But we can change the way we respond to them. We can choose a different intention, a different action, a different way of being.

We may not have chosen the seed.

We may not have chosen the soil.

But perhaps we can still tend to the tree.

And that, to me, feels like a reason to be grateful.

Not because life is fair.

But because, even within its unfairness, we still have some part to play.

And perhaps the first step is simply to stop taking all the credit for what we have become — and start acknowledging everything that helped us get here.

And perhaps the real purpose of remembrance is not merely to honour those who came before us.

It is to recognise that inheritance is responsibility, not just a gift.

We do not merely receive the story.

We become part of it.

Despite everything we did not choose, we have still been entrusted with a small piece of the pen.

And that, to me, feels sacred.