Sometimes life unfolds in ways that we cannot foresee, shaped by a mix of choices, opportunities, and coincidences

I joined a premier engineering and science institute after my schooling. I quit two years later as I failed to secure an engineering seat. I joined another engineering college and then the prestigious railway services. My entry into the railways could also be attributed to good fortune as the organization increased the number to be inducted. My inability to join the civil services was a sore point with my parents. I would often tease them that I might have done much better had I continued to pursue science.

They would retort that I might have been working as a clerk in some obscure government department. Who knows! I might have worked harder to clear the civil services examinations had I continued to pursue science in the premier institute or had I not been selected for the railways.My father often narrates the story of his friend, a civil engineering graduate from his college, who joined the state services.

He was afraid that the bridge that he had designed might collapse. He followed my father’s advice to join academics. He is now an internationally recognized geotechnical engineer in America. My father is an electrical engineer who joined the engineering college a year into postgraduation. He had wanted to pursue his MSc and then enter academics if he could not join the prestigious IAS.

My father does not regret his choices.He does have one memory that he regrets whenever he remembers about it. This also is from his college days. A few of them decided to indulge themselves with an evening out. My father went to the friend’s room to take him along. This young boy appeared cheerful but refused to accompany them. He had committed suicide by the time they returned. My father still ruminates, “Maybe, we could have saved him had we stayed back or pushed him to accompany us.”I know an engineer who joined a famous engineering college.

The branch that he had joined was not considered well-placed. He was offered the branch of choice in another college a year later. He left the overnight without consulting anyone. He is extremely successful in his chosen profession. However, he has pangs of regret that his life would have taken a different trajectory had he not taken the impulsive decision and waited the night out to reconsider.The two of us recently bumped into another well-known engineer at Mumbai airport.

This gentleman almost quit the structured and disciplined life of the engineering college which was in stark contrast to the relaxed environs of the science graduate course he had completed. He went to his friend’s hostel room with the admission forms for the postgraduate course, to realise that the studies were as structured and disciplined as his engineering course. He completed his engineering, joined the railway services, and successfully headed a leading metro rail organization in India at the time of his retirement.

We were walking to our car after a beautiful laser show in Connaught Place in Delhi a few years back. I was approached by a lady requesting if she could use my mobile phone to contact her husband. They had got separated in the crowd. The husband spoke to me to thank me for the courtesy. It turned out that we were together during training in my first job.Douglas Coupland, Canadian novelist and designer, said, “Every single moment is a coincidence.” It is up to us to use this joker in the pack to play this game of life.

(The author is an electrical engineer with the Indian Railways and conducts classes in creative writing; views are personal)