Choice

Choice

I saw a movie this weekend . Fanaa. I loved it . Amidst all the shero shayaeri that captured most of us in the first half , the protagonists parents told her something very real .

They said " It isnt difficult to choose between good and evil . What is hard ..and what ultimately defines us as a person is the choice we make inorder to choose the greater of two goods and the lesser of two evils " .

I thought about it all weekend long and had a very bittersweet after taste as a result .

In the years when I was growing up - trying to become the person I now am ..the focus ..whether it was in highschool or at home was always surrounding the empowerment that came from being able to choose . Choose - what you wanted to be , who you wanted to be and how to make that happen . Choose ..good friends , good habits , good values ..good careers . I remember being so fraught in the seams trying to decide whether I wanted to become an Accountant , An Editor , A Doctor ..An Engineer ...I still cannot fathom the few seconds here and there when I was 15 ,,making that decision . It seemed so huge .
Am I a good engineer ..or would I have made a better doctor .(I already am a much better artist :) I guess Time will tell as it always does.
Choose - between boyfriends , soulmates , colleges , books and people.

Life is what we choose to make of it .

The biggest paradox to this was when one day -I realised that sometimes what makes or breaks us as people are unfortunately not the choices we make ..but the choices that others around us do .
And though we will always wonder the ifs and buts surrounding our own choices ..walking two steps slowers bearing that cross of doubt ...It is much harder to move on because of the choices others make - that impact our lives so much harder than some of our own .

This thought wasnt something that came to me in the recent years . It came to me in a flash - surrounded by a plethora of brilliant merit list holding students ,under the the beautiful arched corridoors of VJTI . It was a mellow afteroon one hot summer in Bombay , where seems like everyone is waiting for the rains . MRF Rain day . Lives were changing regardless between those 4 walls.

Everyone who had gathered was solemn and at the end of a 3 year long journey - that originated with trying to get into a good science college and culminated in 3
words decididng futures ..yours and that of others . PCM .

I work as a system analsyst and PCM is an abbreviation that we use for Process Control Management . Unfortunately - for me it will always be the PCM :) ..back from that MRF Rain Day. There was no one in that room who had less than 97 percentile ...and we are talking about the entire state here .
Yet - depending on whether the guy in front of you chose UDCT Chemical ..or VJTI Computers ..you would have to settle for being either a civil engineer or a computer engineer.
Life in its twisted way was dealing out a choice that would probably change the course of many years of your life .

I didnt know what that meant half as well as I do now . That was one of the smaller choices .

I've had to make much harder choices in the recent years ..but still ..
the ones that have always left me feeling like i've died a little on the inside are
those that havent been my very own .

So what do we do ? Not too long ago when I was grieving the death of a dream ..my best friend said to me .."Kau .Let it go . Its not something you can control. "And I did .Its not hard to hold on and its not hard to let go . Once again the twist is lies in deciding what to do .
And life goes on ..a little less extraordinary for a while ..but Time always outweighs the moments .

In the interm - we must make a choice . To get up and walk ...with a limp maybe ..
but walk nonetheless. Because until we do .
.no matter how hard and winding the road might be ..we wont know what awaits us at the end of it .
So dont reel under the twist of someone else's choice today .
You've got 24 hours to make your own and the clock is ticking .

One day is all the seperates us between yesterday and tommorrow ..One minute can be the rest of our life and afterall how we spent our minutes is how we spends our days
..and how we spend our days is ulitmately how we spend our lives.