Crossroads
On Sundays, I make time to think. A few weeks ago, on a Sunday morning, I thought about my past - the delicate chain of life decisions that have brought me here, precisely at this point in time, at Northern Massachusetts Ave in Washington, D.C. Any two links connected differently, and life would have had a completely different outcome. Some decisions were driven by determination and conviction, and I’d sailed against the tide with every cell in my body. On the other hand, some decisions were driven purely by belief; belief in what? My gut? Destiny? A superior power? I do not know. But I do know there was a general faith that things would work out for the best, and they did. When I was done thinking, I had my moment of epiphany - at every crossroad, life dangled two maxims before me, ‘If you want it, go get it’ and ‘If it’s meant to be, it’ll be,’ insisting that I only choose one.
Let us talk more about these maxims.
‘If you want it, go get it’ accentuates pushing your hand. Nothing in this life will be handed to you. Anything worth something has to be fought for and earned, even if that means going against the natural flow of things to turn a ‘no’ into a ‘yes.’ In 2014, I lost touch with an acquaintance/friend. It was not a big deal; I had sent a couple of messages without a response from her, and we phased out. One day, months later, I pushed my hand and I sent another text. This was unusual for me, but she responded, and one text led to another and then another, and we fell in love and created some incredible, incredible memories together over the next few years. There were so many such instances when we had reached a dead end, and a simple “Hey, can we talk about it some more?” led to a completely different outcome. In 2014, again, my friends and I started our very first startup. We had a Mac, a paper napkin with a business plan on it, and no name. The idea was straightforward: make great music for whatever comes our way. And as fate would have it, our very first contract was a video game. None of us had done this before so we were just trying our best, really. For eight months, we tried - we’d send over what we thought was ‘the next big thing,’ and we’d get an email saying, “This is good, but this isn’t it.” Like clockwork, we would send music and get the same response, and we saw no success and made no money for months; eventually, we even stopped receiving the rejection emails, which officially marked a dead end. When our enthusiasm had run its course and turned into bitterness, we sent one final piece of music. Unsurprisingly, we did not hear back. Later that month, I was on vacation in Shillong, a hill station in eastern India, when I got a text message from our client, “Game is released.” And so I mustered up all the kilobytes of data the mountains had to offer to download this game, Ashwathama, and absorbed the soundtrack. It was the final track that we had sent. In a month, the game hit ten thousand downloads. In six months, we hit a million, and in a year, twenty-five million. It was surreal, and our startup finally had a name, “Ashwathama.” But there’s the rub, and I’d do injustice to the maxim if I didn’t mention this - sometimes, pushing your hand may have the opposite effect and lower your chances of a successful outcome; it may piss someone off and simply backfire. Again, that is only something you find out in hindsight.
‘If it’s meant to be, it’ll be’ hints towards the existence of fate, that the universe already has a plan for you, that the right things will happen at the right time (caveat, you don’t get to choose what the right time is), and that certain things are beyond your control after a certain (read: critical) point. And that critical point is precisely where you go against the natural flow of things. In 2018, when applying to business schools, I poured my heart and soul into my applications. I went the whole nine yards; I researched schools day and night, prepared for GMAT, talked to alumni, introspected (this was the hardest part), and worked on myself every day, one day at a time, to achieve one goal and one goal only - getting into London Business School. The unexpected happened, I got an interview. I arrived 45 minutes early for the interview and waited in my car. I had played this evening over and over in my head a bajillion times, and yet, my jaw was stiff, my body was restless, and I could fucking hear time. I went in there and did my absolute best and waited patiently for the results. It was a December night in New Delhi, and I was in a hotel room, my body burning up with a high fever. My lock screen lit up with an email from LBS. I can recall no more than three instances in my life when I felt that time had stopped just for me. This was one of them. “The applicant pool was of great caliber, and we regret to inform you that…”, and I kept my phone aside and went back to sleep, and that was it. In hindsight, not getting into LBS was one of the best things to happen to me. The following year, I was back at the drawing board, this time a carefully curated list of safe, competitive, and dream schools, and one more school purely out of spite. Diya, who was helping me with my applications at the time, told me I shouldn’t apply to Duke because I’d never get in, so that’s precisely what I did. Truth be told, I had no plans to go to The United States, and Duke was the only American school I had applied to. It was a December night in Calcutta; I was coming home from a fantastic evening with my best friend, trashy music (not my choice) blaring on the radio of my cab. My lock screen lit up; it was an unknown number from Durham, North Carolina. Diya, if you’re reading this, I want you to know that I owe you the most memorable year of my life. Thank you. I went to Duke, and my next few years in the United States were incredible; I met some of the most intelligent, most empathetic people I’ve ever known and gained more perspective than I had in the twenty-three years before Duke. To think about what would have happened had I gotten into LBS in 2018 would be to deal with counterfactuals. We can never know that. But I’ll let you in on a little secret - it scares me to even think of an alternative to my time in the States; I would trade this for nothing else. And so the universe did what it does best - it let the right thing happen at the right time. For this part of my blog, I had shortlisted six stories from my life; I went with the one you just read. I imagine there are a million such instances when the right things happen at the right time, only if you go with the natural flow of things and just…believe, and trust that things will work out in the long run.
And so the question remains, which maxim should I live by? Do I fight to push my odds, or do I hang tight and hold my ground? The sword or the shield? If you’re thinking that there’s no right answer to this, you’re probably right. There isn’t. You can never know which road to take looking forward, you can only wonder if it was worth it looking back. And there lies the beauty of crossroads – the mystery, the uncertainty, the risk, and sometimes, if you’re lucky, the reward. I suppose the secret lies in maintaining a balance - giving it your best shot when you have a shot while also embracing the possibility that certain chapters of your life will only unfold when they’re ready to unfold.
// If Hugh Everett’s theory is true and parallel universes actually exist, there’s likely a universe out there where Rishabh wound up in London and Ashwathama is not a thing. I’d be curious to know if parallel universe Rishabh is a happy man.
Blog - Rishabh Poddar
