Regrets

A long time ago one of my friends told me a story. I don’t recall it exactly so I am going to put it down in my words. There was this smart professor at a college. One day he took all his students to a sugarcane field and told them that in order to make the best quality sugar, you need to have the best quality sugarcane. The best quality sugarcane is the one which is the tallest. He turned to one student and he said to him “Peter, go find the tallest sugarcane you can find so that you can make the best sugar out of it. But be advised, you are not to pick up a sugarcane on your way back. Once you have moved on from a cane, you cannot come back to it. You need to pick the cane on your way forward and whichever you chose, you would bring it back. ” The fellow was obviously overwhelmed by the task, because standing in front of him was a field full of tall sugarcanes. So he entered the field tentatively. He found one cane that was quite tall. But he thought that I have just entered the field, there will be many more canes taller than this one. So he proceeded ahead. Once again he came across a sugarcane which was taller than any he had yet seen. But once again he thought that there would be another one taller than this one ahead. This went on for a while, where he kept rejecting the tall canes in hopes of finding a much taller cane ahead until he reached the end of the field. There he realized that now he can’t go back, so he found the tallest one at the edge and came back out of the field. The professor along with his students were standing there waiting for him. The young boy sheepishly gave the sugarcane to the professor. The professor then went on to measure the length of the cane. “This cane is 5 foot 3 inches tall. I can stand here and see canes much taller than this. Anyways stand aside.”

He then asked another boy Charlie to go into the field and gave him the same exact instructions.  Charlie stepped into the field confidently and within 10 minutes he came back carrying a sugarcane. The professor measured this one and announced that this was 5 foot 8 inches tall. The professor turned to him and said “even though you have brought one of the taller canes in the field but I know for a fact that there is 6 foot 5 inches cane in the field. How is it that I sent two guys in to get it and neither one of you came out with it?”

Both of the students were embarrassed and suddenly found something interesting to stare at on the ground. The professor started laughing. He said “don’t worry guys. This was not a test but an exercise in practicality. There are two types of people in this world. The first type who keep on rejecting every good thing they come across in hopes of finding a much better one somewhere in the future, but when they reach the end of the road, they settle for something far less than what they had rejected. Such people end up regretting their stupidity and lead an unsatisfying life. Peter here, did emulate such people almost exactly. Then there is the other category of people who learn from other people’s mistakes. Charlie here saw how Peter screwed his assignment up and went into the field and found the first tallest cane he could find and brought it back. He knew that he needed to find one which was taller than what Peter had brought. You could see it from their demeanors when they came out of the field. One the one hand Peter came out looking troubled, Charlie came out like he had just won a championship. These other type of people, they recognize a good thing when they see one. Even though they know that there is something better out there, they don’t throw away a good thing just because they may or may not find something better in the future. They may not enjoy the best things in life, but the point is that they enjoy whatever they have.”

Regret is the one thing that poisons the well called Life and complicates what is already quite difficult. Every day we face millions of decisions, where we chose different things without even thinking about it. But then we take some decisions which we have to think about. And that is where we get to choose whether we act like the first category of people or the second one. Today we are standing at the cusp of a new era where everything is changing rapidly. So when you make a business decision, you already know that in a few months’ time it will be the wrong one.  What is considered cutting edge today may be termed obsolete tomorrow. So already regret the decision even before it is made. But in personal life, it is your decisions that cause changes and not some external factors. We keep on chasing perfection in an imperfect world and more often than not end up feeling regret. So instead of choosing regret over happiness, why don’t we cherish what we have?

Afterall even the tallest sugarcane has to be crushed in order to make it into sugar just like all the other not-so-tall ones.

Photographs

It was at last a Saturday night and as I lay on my bed, tired of all the hard work I had put into the day’s work, I couldn’t help but marvel at the limitless possibilities that it brought with it. I was in a city which I had inhabited for 4 glorious years of engineering and I didn’t have to wake up the next morning to join the hubbub of my new job environment. And yet, as most such occasions go, the plans hadn’t quite worked themselves out and I was sitting on my bed wondering about those few roads not taken and reminiscing how wonderful my Saturdays used to be in what now seems like an erstwhile life.

As I sat there in my lonely room of the swanky new guest house I had just started living in, I decided to start poking around the furniture lying around in the basement of the building. There were a few large cupboards stacked haphazardly around in the basement and I found a few of the drawers unlocked. I found a bunch of old family albums in there. Naturally, I started looking through them. The first one I picked up was a wedding album. I immediately deduced that the wedding had happened in the early 80’s and it was a bong wedding. I kept looking through the albums one after the other, the wedding pictures gave way to the birth of their first girl child then her achievements as she grew up, then the arrival of a baby boy, the photo of a proud father with his son holding a trophy of some sort, the graduations and finally the more recent ones of the wedding of their daughter.

By the time I put away the last album, I realized that I had spent more than an hour looking at pictures of complete strangers. Even though I felt a little guilty about invading someone’s privacy, I couldn’t help but feel a sort of connection to those people in the photographs. I started to feel a wave of nostalgia washing over me and I began to draw similarities with my own family albums. In fact I could remember a few of the same exact photos from my family as I had just seen. Here I was sitting in a barely lit room, soaking in my sweat and yet I wanted to sit there and contemplate how my life has been.

As I returned to my room, I wondered how the recent technological changes have affected our lives today. I remember an incident from a few days ago when my mother asked me to go to the nearest studio and get some photos in a USB printed out and I told her what a waste of money that whole exercise was since we already has the digital prints. Today with the advent of smartphones, digital cameras have become accessible to each and every one. Just click it and store it in your hard drive. We keep increasing the size of our photos folders and keep snapping away, but how many times do we really open that folder and look at the old photos stored there? And even when we do, we don’t really get washed over with nostalgia. And if by some technical error, if the hard disk crashes and you lose all your photos, you fret over it for like an hour and then you move on after promising yourself to keep the backup next time. I remember what a catastrophe it used to be in our household when just one picture went missing.

I believe that even though the digitization of photographic process has greatly benefitted us in terms of convenience and accessibility, they have inexplicably managed to drastically diminish the feelings attached to said photographs. They have managed to transform memories stored in our minds into megabytes.

I just visited the life of a family in just above an hour, I felt their joys with them, I was part of their important milestones, and yet I don’t even know their names, nor do I have the inclination to ever try to know them. And today I sleep with the nebulous question looming large in my subconscious: does the photographs on my computer and my mobile phone really do justice to the incredible life I have lived so far?