Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
(“The Road Not Taken” - Robert Frost, 1-5)
O
ne morning in my English class
back in 7th grade, this poem
showed up on my Gulmohar text
book. Like every other poem, the teacher recited it once and explained to us the
meaning of the seemingly complex lines in
a manner that we could understand. Even
then, most of it went over our heads and
the memorized answers were more than
enough to fetch us good marks in the test.
Not once did I realise that there would be
a day when I would see the reflections of
my journey so far in this very poem and
that the question posed in this poem would
end up becoming the most important and
pivotal question of my life. Have I made
the right choice? This question haunts everyone at some point in time, after all what
we do or become in our lives depends
on the decisions that we make today.
Looking back at the road that I’ve travelled so far, there were the good ol’ carefree
school days where you could just blindly
hold the hands of your parents and be
guided by your teachers past every obstacle.
Right after the Class X boards was when
most of us were faced with the 1st diverging road, - ‘Biology or Computer Science?’
- Which logically, to Indians anyway, leads
down to the choice between Engineering
or Medicine. It’s still school and we’re still
“kids”, so most of our parents make possibly the biggest decision of our lives for us.
Then there were two crazy years where
we frantically ran from school to coaching
classes with only one thing in mind - IIT. So
far it seems like everyone’s story. We were
probably too naïve to make a choice and ran
along with the crowd – herd mentality as
many would put it.
THE
And then comes engineering, when
your life is set for the next 4 years.
But the decision making doesn’t end
there- You have to choose from 9 odd
branches - tough task you’d say? Nah!
If you’re a topper, there are only one
or two branches that you will even consider. Then there are those who kind
of have an idea about what they’d like
to do and make their decisions accordingly. But for most of us, “we go with
the flow”. My story is no different. I By Amrutash Nanda
took Civil, but in an NIT and not an
missed out a little on scoring on the social
IIT. People asked me: “Why civil? Are you front in the 1st year, but now it felt like it
happy with your decision? Don’t you think was all worth it. Or so I thought...
you should have just stayed with RVCE,
When I recounted the decision I had
Bangalore having an option of EEE?”
made to my friends, they were sceptical. A
Did I make the right choice? Well, I had common response was “What?!....Trical? It’s
no answer.
the hardest of all branches man.” I knew
I had heard of something called a EEE wouldn’t be like a walk in the park, but
branch change at the end of 1st year, a how hard could it be?
chance to move up the geek ladder. So I decided to give it a shot and it worked! At the
Did I make the Right Choice? I had no
start of my third semester I was all ready answer .
to move into Mechanical Engineering, the
branch I thought I’d get. When I stepped
The concept of two choices is a
in and took a chair in the committee room thought-provoking one. Whenever there
on the first floor of MB, I had no idea that are two choices, it renders one wrong and
things would no t go as I had imagined ...
the other right. If not, one is considered
ROAD
Prof 1: You’ve performed really well
and in your choice you‘ve indicated that
you’d like to take up Mechanical, right?
Me: Thank you sir. Yes, I’d like to take
up Mechanical.
Prof 2: It is however our duty to inform
you that we have seats vacant in CSE and
EEE as well, so you could change your options if you wish to.
What?! This put me in a fix. Suddenly
my parents’ voice of taking EC/EEE echoed in my head. The temptation of high
packages in CSE placements flashed before
my eyes. It seemed more like I was playing
Kaun Banega Crorepati rather than sitting
in a branch change committee room. And
so, I took Electrical and Electronics Engineering a.k.a Trical.
Unlike my friends, I might have
30
The Shoreline
superior to the other. At another level, one
is considered default and natural; the other
unnatural and deviant. The hard fact is that
accepting a choice means declining another
choice. For every path we take there’s another path we don’t take, and we will always
wonder about the outcome of the roads
that we chose not to try. And this was exactly what was happening at this stage.
I was flung into the gruelling 3rd semester. A day passed and then a week and
things that should have made sense didn’t.
Some part of me kept gnawing inside me, “I
should have stayed in civil”. Doubt quickly
changed into panic. I was no longer my cool
and composed self. There were many first
times: sitting for a one and a half hour mid
sem exam and not knowing a thing, trying
to copy from the guy in front of you and
the girl behind (while one tried to emulate
the elastic guy from Fantastic 4 and cover
his paper with his back, the other shouted
loud enough to grab the invigilators’ attention.) Oh! They were both branch changers
like me but were class toppers even now
unlike me. In retrospect, they had made the
same choice as I had; they had chosen the