Category: Choices

  • The right turn

    On my way to office, there is a junction, and like many junctions there are rights and lefts varying from 1 degree to 179 degrees, and many times, i end up giving directions thus, “not that right, the other right’…
    A few days back, i ended up playing whistle blower on an online plagiarism case.. no second guess required whether it was the right thing to do, but the implications did make me wonder whether i could have maybe not have done it at all.. But i also got a forward around the same time.. it went thus – there are two sets of railway tracks. One used, the other unused.There is a warning board on the used one that warns kids not to play on it. The scenario is that a train is approaching on the used track, there are five kids playing on it. A single kid is playing on the unused track. You are in charge of the tracks. With a single button, you can divert the train onto the unused track,saving five kids and sacrificing one. You obviously can’t do the movie hero stunt of running faster than the train and rescuing all kids concerned, and you have only moments to decide. Before you make the decision, remember that the single kid was following instructions and doing the right thing.
    There is no ‘correct’ answer, it is a choice, but it helped me stick to the decision i made. Maybe, it is a step towards a ‘no compromise’ policy towards doing the right thing… Meanwhile, the turn to my office is the exact right, all of 90 degrees 🙂
    until next time, i write, you read 🙂

  • An eternal twist

    Read something that i thought was definitely worth sharing.
    If you had to choose between a woman you had met the day before and God, who would you choose? And the weaver said, The woman. Is there any doubt about that?
    And the mullah asked him, If you had to choose between a song and God, what would you pick? And the weaver said,The song, of course.
    And the priest from the temple asked him, Weaver, if perforce you had to choose one or the other, a beautiful sunset or God, what would your choice be? And he said, Isn’t it obvious? The sunset.
    And they asked him how he could blaspheme so. And the weaver said, Why sirs, God has eternity on his side, he can always wait. Will the woman, the song or the sunset wait for me?
    God’s Little Soldier, Kiran Nagarkar
    until next time, maybe there is no right answer…

  • Life is like That?

    Heroes – the only show i watch regularly.. like i’ve said before, i’ve always been a sucker for the superhuman variety… but okay, thats enough for context…
    last week, i heard a very interesting argument on the show. and since the premise was the choices we make in life, i was intrigued even more, and enought o make it a debate..it went this way..
    every person has a choice – he can have a life full of meaning or a life full of happiness… if he wants a life of happiness, he has to live in the present and if he wants a life of meaning, he has to wallow in his past, and obsess about the future.. both cannot happen simultaneously…whaddya think?

    until next time, the choices we make…

  • Options

    Not the kind thats given in KBC, more of the kind thats given in mobile handsets and computers.. Both of the above, at the time of purchase, are loaded with a set of features that the manufacturer feels, are enough for the model to give its user a good experience… But of course, the user doent exist in a static world. he sees other people around him with models that are loaded with features, perhaps the same model with better downloaded stuff. and so, even though his model might be giving him a good experience, he tries to better it by downloading stuff and installing more features.. some of these do help him get a better experience, but some of these end up spoiling the set or the comp totally..maybe, the manufacturers have seen all this happen before, and therefore they have a little option given in between all the features, that says Default Options… and all is back to the way it was before…
    Perhaps we live life the same way we use the devices too, unfortunately, the manufacturer in this case doent believe in resetting to the default options… however, it is possible that he has left enough features for the user to get back to default options..

    until next time, no locking the options….

  • Beginnings and Endings

    Saw a lot of new year resolutions on blogs, and that sparked a little post in my head, and it was given a little more sense of direction by a couple of posts – by Aqua and Hyde…
    It is customary to fix a few resolutions on New year, or so they say.. from going to the gym to stop being rude to others to control on number of parallel love lives, it could be anything, depending on subjective fancies..some of us keep it, and some of us just keep it…
    On a larger canvas, by the time we reach the age when we can decide about ourselves, and have quite about decided on ourselves, there are some goals we set for ourselves – personally,professionally and a lot of things that are general, and having to do with the fact that we will be living a certain number of years on the planet… things that we must do (we feel),things that we aspire to do, and things we would love to do… (i wonder if the higher power interferes while we set these)
    as we progress in life, and as our lives progress on us, a lot of these get changed, because of time, the people we interact with, and ironically also because of the sheer inertia that prevents us from changing our habits… (i would love to be at x kgs all my life, but i cant wake up at x am daily to exercise)..and suddenly one day, when we sit staring at the stars, we realise how much we have changed,and how different we are from the original age when we had set these goals… the arbit comments we make on ourselves like ‘i had never thought i would do this’ are only words and we are perhaps not aware of the statement’s depth…
    maybe the initial ideals were right, and maybe the current ‘us’ is right… there is no way to anlayse the paths that might have been… do we owe something to the first time we set our goals, and do we owe something to a higher power which might have set a goal for us…meanwhile, life happens, and perhaps we only happen to be in it….
    until next time, whats happening??