At a local school function in Karjat, an adivasi boy takes to the stage and performs his improvisation of the tribal haldi dance with the agility of Michael Jackson. ‘How did you learn to move like this?’ A few members of the audience ask him when he steps off the stage but the lad shrugs his act off as no great a feat. He is but one of the many children whom Villy Doctor and her Light of Life Trust have given a platform to.

It’s a warm and sultry Sunday morning. I wait patiently out on the green front lawn; Villy Doctor emerges from her quaint house in Karjat dressed in a crisp cotton saree. Highly competitive during her college days, a time when coming even second in class was not an option, Doctor is now quite a study in contrast.

She tells me about her father, a compassionate man who immersed himself in books on meditation and her mother, a gentle woman who could never turn away a person in need. It was through them that she began to take interest in the workings of the human psyche and the influence of meditation. She narrates, how at a young age, she began analysing people and having her own little conversations with God, asking him why he had put her on earth, while her mother was working in the next room. “We were a happy family,” she reminisces.

She was the apple of her father’s eye, “completely spoilt”, she jokes. But in a bizarre turn of events, when Doctor was just beginning her eighth standard in school, her father laid down a new rule. “You have to learn to take care of yourself now, Villy. Anything you want, you have to pay for it,” he said, sealing the topic with finality. Determined to do anything to support her education, the 14-year-old girl began giving French tuitions to a family friend at Rs 60 a month. The experience taught her the value of money and the benefits of hard work for which she is eternally grateful to her father. Working her way through an MA in Psychology, she went on to set up a counselling centre, Psyche, while teaching in some of the best institutes in Mumbai, like Nirmala Niketan, St Xavier’s College and Sophia College. These days, although the subject matter is no longer French or psychology, Doctor is still teaching meditation and some of her most eager students are the children of Anando.

“I honestly never thought I would be doing social work,” says Doctor who left her husband, Vispi, in charge of Ormax, a market research company that they founded together, to establish The Light of Life Trust in 2002. In the months that followed, Doctor kept herself busy tending to all the formalities that came with setting up a project of this scale – making presentations, getting grants and scouting for property to establish a base. She laughs as she confessed, “One day, all I knew about Karjat was that you got the most delicious vada pavs there and the next day, I was a land owner.”