“You can only connect the dots backwards,” said Steve Jobs in his famous 2005 Stanford commencement address when talking about life.
Have you ever stopped to think how each of us is here today, right at this spot where we are right now, doing what we are doing in this instant, because of a myriad of things that happened at some point in the past? The environment we grew up in, the struggles we went through, the opportunities that life presented to us, the decisions we made in the face of choices, and, of course, the people who influenced us in life, all played a part.
Almost two decades ago, I was sitting in my room in a dingy lodge in a suburban area of Kochi – my abode for almost six months.
It was no luxury at ₹700 a month. The concrete floor was hard and cold, the noisy ceiling fan was barely running, and the two wooden cots on either side of the room meant I had to share that tiny room, and its attached bath cum toilet (sans any hot water), with a random stranger. It was what I could afford earning ₹3500 a month, taking CCNA classes at a local institute.
Sitting across me was Mohan, my co-occupant and who after a month or so of acquaintanceship, I considered a friend. He was a student studying a certification course at another local institute.
“Don’t do it! Take the offer,” he insisted.
Earlier that week, I had attended a local walk-in recruitment by a Bangalore-based Call Centre and was among one of the four people out of the initial four hundred-plus who walked out with an offer letter for the role of customer support associate in Bangalore.
However, I had graduated with an Engineering degree in Communications and like the rest of my fellow classmates dreamt of a job in one of the numerous mobile companies that had sprung up all over. BPL, Idea, Reliance Mobile (the ADAG group company that went bust), and BSNL, were all hiring engineering graduate trainees and while I was busy at my instructor job, my old classmates were bagging local jobs through walk-ins at every other mobile company. I attended this particular walk-in recruitment drive to gain interview experience, but now had an offer letter in hand.
I had thought over the offer for a day and was about to shred the offer letter into pieces and throw it in the dustbin when Mohan stopped me.
“But I’m sure I’ll probably get an interview call from Reliance soon when they start hiring graduate engineering trainees and if I crack that, then what’s the point of the call centre job?” I protested.
“Because opportunities don’t come every day. Destiny is giving you this choice now it didn’t give hundreds of others. Don’t throw it away” he told me.
I kept listening.
“You may not understand the value of lost opportunities but I do” he continued.
You see Mohan had a story of his too. He had dreams of being a movie star (did I mention he had the looks of one?) and two years earlier, in Chennai, had been picked by talent scouts and had made it to the final round of auditions, while still in his final year of college, for a movie that was looking for fresh faces to launch.
His father protested against taking it any further and asked him to wait a year till his graduation and then try again. He let go of that opportunity, never got a similar chance, and eventually gave up his dreams to pursue some technical certification that would help him find a job to keep afloat.
The pain in his voice, filled with so much regret, silenced me.
I took his advice and decided to take that job in a new city and state. I resigned from my teaching job a few days later, and later bid Mohan farewell, never to see him again.
That one decision changed the trajectory of my life – I moved to Bangalore, worked in that company that hired me for six months and later got a great job offer at a fast-growing software company where I built my career. I travelled to a dozen countries and later studied abroad. The universe it seemed had opened its doors to me, all those years ago, with that choice it offered.
Had it not been for Mohan, I’d probably have found a job in one of the telecom companies in Kochi, stayed in that city all my life, and may have never known what I missed in life.
I stand where I am today because of a choice I made in the face of an opportunity that I almost turned my back on, had it not been for the words of someone I had known only a short while.
If you ever read this one day, thanks a lot, Mohan, I don’t know where you are today and I only hope your life turned out great twenty years on. You taught me something valuable that day that I won’t forget.
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Oh, and before I conclude this post, perhaps it is worth mentioning why that old friend of mine regretted his decision so much. The audition for which he almost made it was for one of the leads in a Tamil movie that was released in 2003.
The name of the movie was “Boys”.
If that name doesn’t ring a bell, it was the runaway hit of that year which launched the careers of future stars such as Siddharth, Genelia, and Bharat.
Opportunity knocks but once they say.
Six Strings For Supper 