Serendipity, Choice, Destiny - ch.1

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Preamble.

this piece marks the beginning of a series of musings on this centrality of life.

you can say that, when taken together, think.feel.am and serendipity.choice.destiny*, as a matrix, is the Life grid.

when you think further, we can see that, with the self-image, and the corresponding sense of purpose & meaning, the framework is kind of complete, each interlocking neatly with the others - to give a holistic sense of the wire-frame and dynamics of life.

seen - looked back - through this template, or crystal, if you wish to accommodate the space-time dimensionalities of life - every one of our lives fall into this framework so clearly.

so it has been in mine too. and in this first of the pieces to come, i look at some of those pivotal choice moments of my own life, to see these adjunct elements around it.

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{* here i should clarify what is the meaning in which i see, and use the word destiny. it is obviously a loaded term - much misunderstood, misused, maligned. the word originates from Latin word 'destinare' which means, "make firm, establish".

thus, to me, this word always has an emergent character - it is "a set of destination *probabilities* that the combination of serendipity, sense of purpose of the individual, the resultant set of choices in front of him/her, the choice he/she makes, and their expected play-off, all pointing to, as end point(s)".

thus it is never a predetermined end, to my mind, but - till the end is actually reached - it is always emergent, and subject to the forces of the factors called out, where any or all of them could still change and thus shift the destination..}

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the second* journey into the unknown..

(*will write about the first one, which occurred earlier, when i finished my viii standard, sometime down the road.. :)

it was sometime towards the end of 1978.

i was 17 odd years of age, sitting in my second year undergraduate program class, studying physics as major, in vivekananda college, mylapore, chennai.

there was this friend of mine by name b. chandrasekar, chandra, or BC, for us, who happened to be sitting next to me that day, which he doesn’t normally do..

it was a stuffy afternoon, and the lecture was droning on; you know that somnolent state.

out of the blue bc takes out a longish newspaper cutting from i think “the hindu”. it was an announcement calling for applications from the shipping corporation of india (sci) for direct entry deck apprentice officers.

bc thrusts it in my hands and says, "see this. it’s a great opportunity" - somewhat like what rishi Vishwamitra told lord rama in king janaka’s court, to 'see' the great bow.. (“vatsa, rama, dhanu: paschya…”)

a career and life at sea…??

though an ocean was always known to me as a madras boy who had gone to the marina beach from birth every summer vacation, a career on it? for a tamizh brahmin iyengar boy with reasonably orthodox upbringing? the thought was indeed as alien as mars or jupiter were..

the advertisement said that first the applicant will have to write an all-india entrance examination, and if selected from that, would be called for interview, and then, if successful there too, will be taken on rolls of sci for 36 months of directly on-board ships at sea training, in order to then appear for the second-mate’s foreign going merchant officers’ qualifying examination that would be conducted by the ministry of shipping. it is from thereon, the big bucks come.. :)

as far back from childhood that i could think back to, i had *always* taken my own decisions in my of course not-extraordinary-in-any-sense life - which is however an extremely *extraordinary* thing about my life; or more precisely, of my extraordinary parents..!!

and by turn of circumstances, i had been away from my parents from my 10th standard schooling onwards, that was from the age of about 13/14 onwards, which had added to this peculiar fact - that i was taking my own decisions, big and small, without at that time even realising how BIG a deal that was!!

and here i was - with this slip of coarse newsprint clipping with that strange calling - with the biggest of them all decisions up till that point, to take...

i asked bc why was he showing it to me, and more importantly, was he himself also not applying?

i don’t think he really answered the first part of the above, but said he cannot apply as he did not have 6/6 eyesight. he used to wear spectacles with lenses that must have been already then of a power minus-seven or eight, or perhaps even more !! it used to look pretty thick to us.. i think he also said something about him being age-barred to apply; there was some age cutoff. (i was within that cap, threshold.)

so he said he was giving it to me.. to this day i don’t know why, but he did.

i took it, and put it inside my note book - which was what we used to bring to the class - one single note book in which we would take down notes across all subjects classes - and had thrust it into my shoulder carry bag..

i slept on it overnight. the next day, i wrote the application. strange as it seems now thinking back across all these years, bc actually took the money from me to buy the application fee pay order from the bank that was to be sent with it, and also said to use his home address for the correspondence..!!

so off that letter for application went, and the formal application form came, which i filled and sent again, and, in due course, i received the hall-ticket for the entrance exam - all these sent of course to me care of bc’s home address ! :)

the exam was to be for half a day, to be written on a sunday forenoon, at the loyola college as the venue..

that day came, and it was not difficult for me to say some reason to get out of home to go to loyola college. it was the first proper competitive entrance exam of any kind i had written.

it was a new experience. it was for about three hours in all i remember vaguely. i wrote it. and came home, and forgot all about it..

the second year classes and exams got over and i had gone to bangalore to my cousin’s place for the vacation, along two of that cousin’s younger brothers who were of my age, who were also living and studying in madras.

it was a fine time there we were having. about a week into it, i got a strange call from home - i think it was a telegram - telling me cryptically, as all telegrams would do, to come back home asap - those days there being no phones etc at home to call from or to..

i rushed back home catching the first possible train, in a state of some wonderment as to what it could be..

on reaching home i found this letter from sci - this time addressed to my home, as i had to mention my address in the application form that i had got and filled earlier - saying that i had passed the entrance exam and should report at the sci bombay head office on so-and-so date some 15, 20 odd days away, to attend the personal interview..

my parents were obviously clueless - and wonderstruck.

here was what was strange and, i think, singular, about it.

they were not angry or upset with me. they were only in a state of some awe or wonderment as to what all this could be, what a career at sea could possibly be - as they had not even any remote reference examples in their lives to either relate or extrapolate from..

and here was the other thing. till that time, the northern most that i had gone to from madras, was bangalore - or so i thought then!!

fact is, for anyone that knows south india geography, bangalore was, is, actually a bit south of madras by latitude..!! it is on 12 degree 58 minutes, versus madras at 13 degrees 04 minutes - LoL!! i didn’t even realise it then.. !!! but then, it was more a figure-of-cultural-speak geography, where tamilnadu (along with kerala) are the southernmost, and everything else is above, karnataka and bangalore included, north of them..

since it was still vacation time, college was not an issue.

i bought the tickets to-and fro madras-bombay-madras, found some weirdly far off relatives as reference to go to in bombay when i reached there to stay for the day or two till the interview is done and get back, as i/we didn't have any from our own family anywhere farther than bangalore and hyderabad too, then.

and off i went to bombay - an introverted, hyper-imaginative, romantic boy-man, with a head overstuffed with book-reads - by that hoary madras-bombay mail - which would leave madras by about 10 pm on any day and reached bombay the second day thereafter, early morning about 6 am..

thus began my second (or, i actually should count and call this the first, and the previous one as perhaps a premonition to all that future ones to come?) ever journey of significance into the unknown…

why did bc choose to sit next to me that fateful day, with that paper clipping at hand..?

…to be continued.