The first important decision that I had to make, a decision with implications for the rest of my life, was about whether or not I wanted to study at the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT.)
Within me, I knew that I did not want to study engineering. But I worried that I would be considered a failure if I didn't aim for those high rungs of the ladder of success that the world lauded, especially when I was a natural in math and science.
I was a 16-year old wuss.
So, when a friend said that he and another classmate were going to work with a tutor in order to prepare for the IIT entrance exams and invited me to join them, I did.
After the first week of faithful attendance, I started to skip the tutorials. After all, the heart knew what it wanted.
The month was over and it was time to pay the fees.
I walked up to the tutor with the rupees in my hand.
He commented that I had attended very few meetings. And then said something that I hadn't expected. He didn't want to accept the money unless I knew for certain that I wanted the coaching.
I was relieved of the pressure. I never went there again.
(The other two carried on with the coaching, and eventually gained admission to the IIT campus in Madras.)
Later, another friend, Kiran, who was also a neighbor, asked me if I wanted to split the cost of the entrance exam tutorials, which was through the mail. Agarwal Tutorials.
Without any real enthusiasm, the 16-year old wuss agreed.
Kiran was very keen on it. I faked it as much as I could. We split the cost of the test-prep tutorials that came in the mail. He became one of the very few who knew well that I didn't care for IIT and that I didn't care for engineering either.
One day he expressed his concern that we were splitting the cost but that I was not making use of the tutorials. He suggested that he pick up the entire cost of the remaining tutorials. Kiran was such a nice guy, even at that young age. Of course, I did not let him repay me.
Decades later, an email or two after informing me about Kiran's tragic and fatal accident, his sister recalled, among other things, my anti-engineering sentiments that she had gathered from her brother and how I had stopped preparing altogether. I can imagine that Kiran shared this with his family.
Cursing my undergraduate life in an engineering college of low caliber, I wondered and worried if I was a flake for not having been ambitious right from that early phase of life.
I worried even more when I finally dumped engineering in order to learn more about what really interested me. Math and science were ranked higher, way higher, in the social hierarchy than the social sciences were. Was I flaking out?
In the graduate studies, I was not interested in the mathematical and statistical approaches to understanding the human condition, even though those were the favored approaches within academia and in the outside world. I worried that I was flaking out yet again.
A few months ago, I was at a wedding at which every man in my age group with whom I chatted was an IIT alum. In the small talk, every one of them wanted to know where I did my undergraduate studies. Was it my imagination that their enthusiasm dropped a bit that I was not one of them?
Well into middle age, I know that none of those things matter. Choosing one's own path in life, away from external expectations and incentives, is, in fact, far from being a wuss--it requires a great deal of inner strength. It is far easier otherwise.
If only somebody had told the 16-year wuss that I was, something along the lines of what Bill Watterson told the graduating class of Kenyon College:
Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it's to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.
You'll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you're doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you'll hear about them.
To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble.
Yes, all the trouble has been worth it.
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