The Exam called Life…

It is amazing how, at times, some routine thing like a forwarded message or an email gets you thinking about something profound… an SMS I received some time back caught my attention… it said:

‘Just when we get all the answers of Life, God changes the question paper… That’s Life!’

Ring a bell somewhere…? The biggest nightmare for any student is to realize he has prepared chapter 5 for the test and it turns out he needed to cram chapter 4… right?

Uncertainty in anything is probably something people hate. How wonderful if we are always certain… that there are no doubts and peace reigns…!!! Not really? Exactly!! The uncertainty is what wakes us up every morning… I wake up every weekday wondering what cases I will be handling in office today and I rise on every weekend imagining how the holiday would go.
As a kid in school, my only desire was to graduate and be a school teacher… ya… fab teacher I would’ve made… ;-) but then, as I grew older, I got enamored by the ‘intelligent kids do only science-maths’ thing… at one point of time I sucked so bad at math that I prayed to god to make me 15 soon, so that I could go to college and kick the math out…!! But I turned 15 and god changed the QP… with a 99% in math as well as science I was in the 11th std with both… n a major uncertainty in life whether to be a doc or an engineer…!!!

A few years later, as an engineering student, I loved looking at the green n red triangles during the market updates in the 9 o’clock NDTV news… so NIFTY n SENSEX are up… yeah… but what it meant to anyone, I was clueless…!!!

4 years and an engineering degree later, yes, the QP changed again… as an MBA student, the SENSEX n NIFTY were much more than green n red triangles to me… so much so, against my parents’ fond hope that I would go into HR, I jumped headlong into finance. I believed then that I had all the answers… after MBA, cool life in an apartment in a big city… 12 hr wrk days, Friday night parties and a cool pay packet… majjani life…. Right…? WRONG…!!!

So I got married… n there my life somersaulted to an extent I could have ever imagined… since the last 3 years, the QP changes daily… n I m the circus juggler with too many rings to handle n just 2 hands…

As Geet said in ‘Jab We Met’ … ‘Babajee boring bana do jee ab is raat ko’ I also cry… God…Give me the answers fast n don’t u dare change the QP again…!!! But anyway… God shall be God… n I, measly mortal, will be left grappling all my life…

“Do ur best and leave the rest”, said Swami Chinmayananda… a dear friend reminded me the same thing recently… QP will keep changing… just make sure u r prepared… and as I continue to make sense of it, the Exam called Life is ticking away…!!!