Today, I was writing one of my Haas essays…

If you could change one thing you’ve done in your life, what would it be, and how would you do it differently? (250 word maximum)

First of all, I find the 250 word limit itself challenging. On top of that though I have made mistakes and missed many opportunities in life, there is no significant choice that I have made that I would want to do differently. Those mistakes, missed opporunities and choices that I thought was not the best have led me to better opportunities, ones that I probably would not have got if I had made a different choice. I am still struggling to get a decent answer to this essay.

But the blog post is about something else. While I was thinking about this, I remembered an old blog post I made in my crazy blog, all the way back in April 2006. I thought I should repost it here…

This has always been in the back of my mind, picking at my brains. But I decided to blog about it when I saw this entry in my friend DDey’s blog.

Robert Frost is a great poet, who has given us such wonderful poems (I loved his works right from high school, my personal favorites being Birches, Mending Wall and Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening).

But reading Dey’s blog entry, the poem that came to my mind was Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken“. Its the story of a traveler who reached a fork in his journey and decided to take the less traveled road then reflects on it later with a pleased demeanor.

As DDey says,
“I believe every moment is a forked road. You choose one path, and that determines what happens next, and at the next fork, you choose yet another path, and so on. The point is, you decide what path you take, and hence, you decide what happens to you next. Therefore whatever happens in your life is a consequence of a decision that you made at some previous instant in time.”

I have faced the “Fork of Life” a lot of times. To reflect back on it makes me neither happy nor sad, just contented that I have chosen what I have (the less traveled road or not).

May be I’m too nerdish, but the fork is a place to analyze life as a tree (binary or otherwise). Trace the graph of the consequences of your selection and predict the approaching “forks” in life. It can help you make a decision in the most optimized way.

But then again, its all crap… I had a fork in life where I had to decide, where I had to do my graduation. One was a college, well known for there academic excellence (BITS Pilani) and known to groom the best engineers in the country, one was a safe option of staying on the home-turf in a college near by and then there was Manipal (the unknown, the unexplored, the lesser trodden road) about which people told me all kinds of stories.

I was “Forked” and the logical solution cried out to me saying “go to Pilani for God sake, even if it was to study something that I didn’t enjoy”, my mother wanted me to be at home and was keen not to spend unnecessary money on my education… But I dared to take the less traveled road and packed my bags to Manipal.

The 4 years I spent there was perhaps the happiest of my life. It taught me a lot of lessons, evolved me into a true MITan and landed me into a job that even the best dream of. But looking back, I often think how it would have turned out, if I had taken any of the other two roads. Where I would have been and how different it would be. But now,

“I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
-Robert Frost

There is always an amalgam inside your soul, of destiny and determination, that makes the decisions for you, for the better or for the worse…

I’ll end with an addendum to the post, again from DDey’s post 🙂

So, you might ask, are ‘Destiny’ and ‘Fate’ a whole lotta bollocks? In my view, here’s how they fit into the scheme of things. As I mentioned, you reach a forked road and you choose the future course – course means path, what a happy coincidence! – of your life. Destiny, in my view, is what brings you the choices, the paths, that you choose from. It’s like you’re walking on an unknown road, and suddenly you reach a point where three paths go in three different directions – Town A, City B and Village C. The choice of these three destinations was brought to you by Destiny. However, where you decide to go, is your decision, and within your control.

Since everything that happens to you is a result of a decision you’ve made, this leads to so many what-if scenarios. “What if I had left the party early and never met her?”. “What if he hadn’t been sitting next to me at the examination, would I have passed?” You wonder how life would be now if you’d taken a different path at some moment in the past. It’s something worth thinking about.