From Another Life:
Wednesday, July 30, 2003
Stillwater, OK

One of the things I have wondered about frequently is my career choice. I have always had ambition - oodles of it. Now we must not mistake that for drive, which is an entirely different thing altogether. But ambiton - that I have. My mother says "You know you want to be at the top of the mountain. But you dont know which path to choose." I beg to differ. I know I want to be near the summit, but I dont even know which damn mountian to start climbing. I was an indifferent student all through highschool, I made above average grades because I have a good brain, but I never tapped my resources up there much, let alone put it to full good use. So like every other South Indian girl who is squeamish about blood, I found myslef in pre-engineering. Come entrance examinations, I found myself concocting long winded, implausible and purely ingenious answers to questions pertaining to quantum physics. Needless to say, I did not make it into an engineering college. I bitterly exclaimed over the injustice of being expected to study for admission!(can you imagine! Damn!) simply because my mother is a school teacher and not a bank clerk in Dubai, sheesh! From then on the journey from two toruous years at an all girls covent college to my esteemed (read third tier) University in USA - it was a saga of near misses and complete lack of decision making skills. Late applications, lack of money(see? again my poverty strikes at me!) and my innate laziness chose my future, my major, my graduation and now my master's. Do people like me succeed? Do we ever, deep inside of our hearts, take credit for where we have arrived - be it a good or bad destination? People clap me on the back and tell me what a little miracle worker I am. And I cringe and think of all the mountains of guilt I would feel if I were noble enough to feel anything of the sort. Because, the truth is galling, I am gagging on my smug acceptance of unworthy laurels. Didn't know I had it in me! And now, when I want to do justice to my career (non)-choice, when I want to do something right because I f-in want to, instead of the fortunes being kind and fluking a score,- I don't know if I can! I have never feared that anything I wanted to become would be denied me - not because I have faith in my abilities - nooo, that would be unforgivable blindness - but because the Heavens have been very consistent. I have never worked for a goal I deliberately set out for myself - not whole heartedly. Thats perhaps why I never sang proffessionally, never published a book, never lost weight.A thought occurs to me though - perhaps the reason I am riding crest after crest of favorable Divine intervention; why, despite everything I choose not to do, I always land on my feet is because I make no effort to tame the chaos. Perhaps the winds of change don't break those that sway in tandem to their erratic whims. Perhaps floating, half sunken on your back with water blocking yor hearing and your eyes squeezed tight against the sun, drifting effortlessly without control,is the only way to swim.Ciao