The Chain-Reaction that is Life.

Rather than destiny, I believe the direction of one’s life is entirely influenced by a sum of all the people and events (big and small) that one has encountered along the way. One tiny event that you mightn’t even feel is significant, and the trajectory of your life is sent careening off-course in a completely new direction, like a snooker ball on the billiards table of Time.

Let me explain. Till school Chance didn’t play much of a role in my life. Which school I was sent to and spent 12 years in was my parent’s decision. Even entry into University was more by plan than chance. But once in -- Coincidence and Chance kicked in big time, and the chain reaction thus triggered is still ruling every waking moment of my life.

When I say this, you must think I mean some HUGE thing that happened while I was in college. Perhaps my marks, or some professor who inspired me to be a great thinker, a second Mahatma. (I am, but credit goes entirely to me).

Au contraire my dear friends.

I had a GREAT gang of friends who would sit in trees on campus, eat fish and aloo chops, and while away the hours discussing the Meaning of life. Life was sweet. Then one day one of these friends (who I only hung out with because of the others) called me a poo-poo head. I asked him to piss off. That ONE thing…which we all forgot soon enough including me and the potty-mouthed friend, set my life firmly on one course unbeknownst (cool word, eh?) to me or anyone else.

Why, you ask? Because that gang of friends (who are still my closest friends, despite that little hiccup) chided me about my reaction. (What if he called you a poo-poo head? They said.) Things cooled distinctly between me and the group …and I struck up a friendship with a senior who I would never have talked to if things hadn’t been awkward between me and my existing friends. Just because I hung out with him now I started seeing a lot of a skinny guy with a guitar fetish who studied all the way across the campus in the Engineering department. Four years later I married him.

Having hooked up with HIM, I went to Hyderabad and am now in Bangalore, sitting in this office, writing this blog. Had I not married him…(and had that &^%$face not called me a poo-poo head four years before that) I would most certainly have been somewhere else. Maybe in Calcutta, still living with my parents. Maybe abroad married to an NRI doctor (a girl can dream, can’t she? Quit laughing!). Never here.

And had I not been here I wouldn’t have made myself the most wonderful life with my husband, had the best ever two years in a little company I’ll always adore, and met and worked with some pretty wonderful people. Two of these people in particular, have in turn enriched the fabric of my life, and who knows, maybe sent the snooker ball spinning off into a direction I will only realize in retrospect a decade from now.

So to Mr. *&^%face (who’s the poo-poohead now?) --Thank you for calling me names that day, I am eternally, undeniably indebted to you.