Eternal Questions on a Sleepless Night

Choices have daunted men for quite a long time. Even Hamlet had to choose "To be or not to be" and Frost had to choose between the two roads that diverged in a wood. I have always wondered if life would be simpler if each person brought into this world was born with a to-do list, kind of like instructing the person which path to take in life.

--You will be too advanced for kinder garden, jump to primary.
--Pick maths with biology, study computers on the side.
--You have to write GRE / GMAT.
--Marry the second guy/girl you see, have kids after 3 years, run around kids, be chased by wife/husband for the rest of your life.

Parents do take care of most of these things these days. I mean with the pressure that the kid is put through to take medicine or engineering is insane, but then they successfully manage to eliminate the bothersome job of choosing what to study.

Even with marriage and kids, I've honestly seen parents discussing and eliminating scores of girls and boys amongst themselves while the prospective victim to be is sleeping thousands of miles away. They even instruct the bride to have kids soon and then take a job, so the grandparents can take care of the kid. I mean, could life get any simpler???

I guess I am an anomaly amongst the many hundreds who take this path. I fought back for the first time in my life to take up child psychology during graduation, when it seemed as if becoming a doctor or an engineer was the fashion of the era. It’s a different story that I was finally forced to take up engineering!!! Then I went one step further and announced that I wished to do an MBA and that too in India, when the entire family was busy sending their kids abroad for MS, PHD and what not. OH MY GOODNESS… the reactions from the relatives were a little too melodramatic… I virtually ceased to exist for a few weeks. People thought I was in there just to rebel. I would talk and whatever came out of my mouth, disappeared into a vacuum. There were quite a few incidents between then and now, which made me feel as if I was doing a huge crime.

But then I just realized something, I was not making a mistake; I was just following my dream. We have a seemingly limitless number of choices before us, but shaped by our background and community we often make a choice, to please people and assume that that is what we want to, only to end up miserable in our forties and blaming our parents for our childhood.

My mother is an amazing woman who supported me, even when she disagreed with my choices, and I have made quite a few absurd ones. I am sometimes scared of making choices for the simple reason that I do not know where I would end up and if I would regret the choice I made. I wonder if I should have just studied child psychology and wonder where I would be now if I had done so. But then I stop and breathe. Past cannot be undone. I love the life I am living now, I am making choices which are often considered wierd, but there is this whole unknown in front of me, that makes it exciting, I am raring to go and unearth my life.

I know for sure that I am not going to be in front of a circuit board or over an operating table all my life. I am also excited to be an anomaly. It is the anomalies who make history. You never hear about a person who studied biology, went to study medicine and become a doctor. You hear about the person who studied medicine and became an archaeologist instead. That is fun. It makes for an interesting, intelligent person, with a focused yet diversified mind. I just have to keep in mind that whatever choice I make I should not look back and regret. I have to make history and make my autobiography more interesting.

My autobiography???? There is still time for that… the plot is after all becoming more and more interesting day by day…

The name of my autobiography???... “ Steaming Cups of Coffee”… :o)