Yehi Hai Right Choice Baby

"There is no such thing called choice. It is just an illusion.... You have already made the choice. You only have to understand why you made it in the first place" .

--Told to Neo in "Matrix Reloaded"

I am a confused person from a few days. I have been asked to make a choice. Now this gives me the shivers. For what if the choice I make is not correct??The consequences of a wrong choice can be very bad. So whenever I have to make a choice I take a lot of time, with decisions changing faster than a pendulum. This has been the case with almost all my decisions or rather decisons involving choice (I think almost all do).

The latest case is for choosing electives for my second sem. Well all the electives are equally good, but I have to select only two. What stream do I choose? Do I go into a particular stream or become a "Jack of all trades" ? Do I go for subjects that have research potential or go for ones that are good from job point of view?

Okay finally I decided on five. The concern now is what will happen if I do not get the ones that I wanted. Will the ones I get be good enough .Or will they be "orthogonal" to each other as described one of our TAs. Well only time will tell.

At the time of writing this, I had submitted my choice of electives. Now just wait and watch. Talking about the first line in this post, have I already made my choice? And this wholw process is just an illusion? Are my electives already predestined? I do not know.




PS: By the way, I am already thinking of changing my electives.... :-)

Superstitions

My dictionary defines superstition as "An irrational belief arising from ignorance or fear". Humm.... ignorance or fear. This means that ignorance is one factor that leads to blind beliefs. But we see that educated people (like me :-) ) are also superstitious. Many artists, sportspersons, people in high places are also superstitious. Does it mean they are ignorant? No. So why do people believe something that has no logical reason??

I would like to say that superstitions are of two types:

1) Your own beliefs: Beliefs that are unique to you.
Say something that makes you feel confident: say you do well in the exams if you wear particular clothes.
Something that causes fear in you: If you see somebody in the morning, then the day will go bad etc..

2) Universally accepted beliefs: These are the ones that are followed by (almost) eveybody. The belief of 13 is very rampant in the west. So are many such beliefs in India and elsewhere. The list is very huge.

So, coming back to the basic question, why do people believe something that has no logical reason?

Now, we all do our jobs. We all want to succeed in our lives and nobody wants to fail. But when we fail, we look out for reasons why we failed. Many times we find reasons but when we do not find them, we blame it on 'luck' and take refuge in superstitions. We say that we failed because such and such thing took place etc..

When we succeed, we desire for more success. Then in a similar situation, we try to imitate the earlier conditions that resulted in success. We hope that this will bring us success.

But what we are really doing is we are programming our brain to believe that we can succeed. And many times we succeed. If we see a bad omen, we feel that we are destined to fail. And many times we fail.

This shows that the real power lies in our brain. We are what our brain tells us we are. So the whole thing boils to confidence. I will talk about that later....

Procrastination and Me

Okay finally I got about to write about this habit of mine. I do not know when I picked up the habit of procrastinating. As far as I can remember, I was always a punctual guy in my childhood. Somehere down the line, this habit has come into my life and has threatened to trouble me no end. I have suffered a lot due to this and also troubled my family members for this.

I still remember the last time I had trouble with this. It was in Feb '04 . But the amazing thing is that someone always helps me out in this regard. Most of the time, it is my family members. Of course I am lucky, but I have a feeling that I am pushing my luck too far.

And the worst part is that I am still not learning from it. This habit which has caused lot of destructions the world over, has afflicted me. Somehow I have to get rid of this. So the first step was to put it somewhere where I can read and never forget it.

But, as usual , I had planned to write this a week ago, I created the blog yesterday and today I am writing it.

But I am not losing hope. Everyday is a great chance to set the record straight.
Bye.

First blog

First blog. Well the second one to be technically correct. Thats because I forgot my password for the first one!!. I do not intend to forget this one ......