To Choose or Not to Choose

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People can roughly be divided into two broad groups: ‘Pro-Choice’ and ‘No-Choice’. There are several subgroups in both and much overlap and incursions and borderline cases.

1980: Gole Bazaar, Kharagpur. Just then the toothbrush-market was opening up. A dhoti-clad Marwari gentleman asks the Fancy-Shop owner: “Ek toothbrush dedo!” “Boliye: Colgate, Forhans or Binaca?” “Colgate dedo” “Hard, Soft ya Medium” A 1-minute ponder and: “Woh brand dedo jisme koi phalthoo choice nahi hai!”

He is the typical No-Choice man.

“Would you like cream or lemon in your tea, Mr. Feynman” “I’ll have both, thank you”. And that led to the “Heh-heh-heh-heh” and the title of the bestseller: “Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman!” Feynman also was fed up with the daily question in the restaurant: “What would you like to have for your dessert?” I think he settled for the same damn pudding everyday, wasting precious time pondering a couple of days.

The Marwari trader and the Nobel-winning Feynman are not goats when it comes to things they are particular about.

A friend of mine dragged me to at least a dozen shops in Calcutta in search of a suitable pocket transistor (all of them creaked and croaked), but was willing to marry any girl she and his parents agreed upon; which means that some people love to be choosy about their trivial hobbies, but would like to leave life-and-death choices to others.

Parkinson, I remember, quoted Minutes of a Board Meeting where there was a one-hour debate on whether to repair or rebuild a cycle shed that cost a few hundred dollars, but the decision was made in minutes when it came to a half-a-million dollar purchase of a power plant about which none but an EXPERT was deemed to have knowledge!

My wife loves to spend a half-hour choosing a sari in a shop, while I go for a cup of tea and a long walk; but on my return to the shop she would happily settle for a totally different (but a much costlier brand) sari I choose for her in 2-minutes.

I don’t recall choosing the womb that ejected me here on Earth, nor the name I was dumped on, nor my career, nor my wife and apartment (my sisters chose both for me), nor the IIT that gave me my fun job (I just applied as a lark and picnic with one of my friends), but I was hell of a choosy chap when it came to choosing my Ph D guide (the one and only SDM).

We are now trespassing on the vexed philosophical question: Destiny or Freewill? The short answer is that every choice we make out of our Freewill appears to be predetermined by our Destiny; so why bother!

To my third-hand knowledge, the first ‘arranged’ marriage I know of in our family was that of my grandmother, circa 1880. They were living in a sea-side village with a grand Shiv temple dating back to 1400s (with Krishna Devaraya’s inscriptions). Her father was the village pundit-cum-postmaster. One morning when she was 4 and building sand castles with her playmates, her mother dragged her home and dressed her up in a blouse and skirt and presented her to the father of my grandfather who approved her fair skin, good looks and erudition (she could recite her entire textbook blindfold) on condition that she drops out from school till her marriage 2 years later (when she would be 6). A fortnight on, the school master came to my great-grandfather begging that she be allowed to come to school just for ONE day to impress the Inspector of Schools so that his job is renewed for the next year.

I don’t like the ghastly dictum that ‘all cats are gray in the dark’, but can’t resist quoting our Maupassant’s Bartender (with the proviso that what is meat for the goose is meat for the gander): "To be brief, we reached his house and I took a look at its mistress. A beautiful woman she certainly was not. Anyone can see her, for there she is. I said to myself: 'I am disappointed, but never mind, she will be of value; handsome or ugly, it is all the same, is it not, monsieur le president?'
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