Kindred Spirit

A link arrives on my screen. A location to check for a new outlet.

I click. Check the specifics. Do my diligence — a few more searches, and my AI-based location evaluation tool built on Google API with its own constraints and guardrails. I send my feedback.

The reply: “Yes, this is what I also thought.”

And on the occasions there is a gap — a quick call, screen shared, rationale explained. Next response: “Ok.”

That “Ok” means 100% alignment. No second discussion on the same. Done and locked.

I have felt this more than once. With the same colleague. Across different situations. What I used to call coincidence, I now see differently.

Till about a year ago, I took quiet self-credit for making this happen. Never said it explicitly, but somewhere inside I believed I was the reason it worked.

Then I turned 50. The observer mindset crept in. And I started seeing this differently.

This alignment is not something I engineered. It is outside my control. It always was.

My life mentor used to say — “Doodh jaisa saf dil hai tumhara. Tumhara iss duniya mein kya kaam?” I never fully understood it then.

At the battery manufacturing company where I served as CFO, the MD once said at an all-India team meet — “After my mother, Jaspal’s number is the most called number in the summary of calls feature on my phone.” This, after six years of working together. I had not planned it. I had not strategised it.

What connects these two — the colleague who says “I was thinking the same” and the MD who called without agenda — I am only now finding a name for.

Kindred spirit.

Research calls what happens between people on the same frequency — cognitive frame similarity. Shared values, beliefs, orientations. When this exists, people anticipate each other’s interpretations without prolonged explanation. The alignment arrives before the words. Scientists have even measured this — brainwaves synchronise between people on the same wavelength. It is not just a feeling. It is neurologically real.

But for me, the more interesting question is — what makes this possible?

I think it is selflessness. Not as a virtue to perform. As an absence — of calculated desire, of hidden agenda, of needing the outcome to serve me specifically.

Even when one does not know what ‘observer’ means, selflessness keeps one open and receptive. No pretended interests. No positioning. Just present.

As a Drishta, I see myself increasingly devoid of selfish interests. Not trying to control anything. And in that space, the kindred spirit is felt. Not found. Felt.

I call it unintended consensuality. Two people arriving at the same place from their own separate thinking, with no coordination.

I used to consider this a coincidence. An exception.

I now think — for those with a clean intent — it is closer to a norm.

Intent with no calculative mindset. Maybe that is what a kindred spirit recognises in another. Not the smartness. Not the experience.