This is my gift; this is my curse; it’s my destiny. Who I am? No I am not Spiderman. But seriously, what makes one what he or she is? Is it destiny or choices we make. I think a person is resultant of consequences of all choices he/she made in her life. Even the smallest of our decisions can affect us in strangest way. Sometime we realize it and most of the time we don’t. But it keeps molding our lives. We are rewarded or punished accordingly. So twins are not alike; even the clones who share the same genetic code will be different from each other. Everyone must have watched “The Matrix”. In that movie one thing which was most stressed was choice and its affect. Whether to take red pill or blue one….whether to take left door or the right one…whether to believe Neo is the one or not. We take small decisions everyday. When we have to make big decision we think over it and we remember it. My life is affected more by small decisions than big ones. I can remember at least 4 of them and I am going to say about 2 of them…the 2 good ones.
When I was in class 4, I met one boy (my father’s friend’s son). We played football and talked whole day and in one day only he became my good friend. I was looking to meet him again. I came to know that he goes to a coaching centre. I told my parents that I will also go to that coaching centre. My parents were happy because this was probably first time I was showing some interest in studies (till now they tell me sometime that you showed some interest in your academics only once). But all I want to spend more time with my friend, academics was not even in my back of my head. This led me finally to a residential school in Calcutta and this changed and affected my life more than I can imagine or understand. Similarly after many years, when I was counseling for iit, we were told to fill one preference form (for allocation of seats in different iits and bhu and ism dhanbad). I filled my preference sheet and submitted it to a guy who was feeding the data in his computer. He told me after sometime that I had made one mistake. I had filled the same option at no 12 and no 63. Now I had to remove one option. The whole thing was taking a lot of time and I was becoming restless. I told him remove anyone (I was thinking…does that matter). But he knew that it matters. He said “No you should think over it and better consult your guardians too”. At that time I knew nothing about computer and its applications. I told him to remove the 63rd option. I was thinking that it would be easier for him to remove the 63rd option. I was unable to grasp the seriousness of the situation. I will be placed somewhere according to my preference list, this thing did not come into my mind. Anyway, I got the 12th option and if I would have asked that person to change my 12th option I would have been an engineer by now from IT-BHU. I would never be an IITIAN then (I don’t know whether it is good or bad). But certainly things would have been very different. I made one decision. I thought about the comfort of the person who was filling the data into the computer at the time of counseling. I was not looking at the bigger picture at that time. These two decisions were not made by thinking even little of the consequences they lead to, but were made spontaneously considering totally different thing. And these two events are the one of the biggest events in my life. They made me what I am now. How different I would have been… no one can say. But some says it doesn’t matter. You will become what you really are… somehow finally. I don’t believe this one. They say its destiny that drives us. Then what they really want to say is that we don’t make choices, rather choices choose US. They drives us, motivates us somehow so that we choose them. I don’t agree with that notion, but I fear sometime it might be true. You choose for yourselves which category you belong to. And I am sure there must be some events like these in your lives too. I know most of you take big things more seriously than I do. But sometime I am just too scared when I get some options and I had to choose something.
