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Baradwaj Rangan

Readers Write In #888: Lines of Destiny

Posted on November 11, 2025

15


ByJeeva P

I should have been in my teens when I found this out. We were taking a walk through the busy Chromepet market.

I asked dad one day about how he managed to get into the ranks of the most coveted Central Government Service having absolutely very little backing from his family in terms of education and finance. I knew from childhood that he had a Masters in Commerce and had assumed that it was his degree that had helped in getting him employed as a bureaucrat.

But ‘No!’, he told me. Before completing his Masters, he had a Diploma from some Polytechnic and that probably had I surmised helped him get his job. He nodded once again.

“None of your hard-earned educational qualifications helped you? Are you kidding, dad?”

“I completed my Diploma in 1975. I did not have a job for two years. When I was at home, my friends asked me to enroll myself in Typewriting classes. I completed Intermediate soon. And when I joined Government Service, I was hired as a Steno”, my father recalled with pride. “I completed M.Com after I joined service through correspondence”.

“So, something which you learned because you had so much leisure, a course that you did not expect to pay you any rewards came in handy when you badly needed a job? So, from what you are saying, the next twenty years of your life as a government official happened purely because of an accident? Didn’t you plan any of it?” I asked with wide eyed amazement.

“Yes. Life takes us in directions which we don’t expect it to. A lot of great, memorable, life-altering events happen merely by chance”, dad explained in a warm, satisfied tone despite so much din emanating from a Biriyani stall nearby and the motionless two-wheeler traffic that had engulfed the market junction.

***

Jyothish suffers from vitiligo that has succeeded in leaving very conspicuous marks and patches not only all over his face but also on his psyche. He nurtures a secret wish to act in movies but he is so resigned to his condition that he has allowed his passion to die a slow death. He has half-decided to go abroad for a living and needs a new passport size photograph for the process. He knocks the door of a modest photo studio where he is surprised to find that a short film is currently being shot inside. The film-making crew suddenly finds that they are an actor short and Jyothish is forced to fill in. He complies. The short-film is completed and it gets released on YouTube.

A young woman comes to occupy the first-floor portion of an independent house. The son of the house-owner who lives in the ground floor is attracted to her. He has patches of white hair as early as his 20s and he dyes them in order to appear young and cool in front of his newfound love. He picks his friend Jyothish to express his love to her since among his friends due to his skin condition, he is the least likely person for the girl to get attracted to. Jyothish accepts the mission and proposes to the girl on behalf of his friend.

ButThalavara, the destiny has other plans. The girl to everyone’s surprise falls for Jyothish for reasons that are not so easy to explain. She is the one who turns out to be the staff at the agency that has promised Jyothish to send him abroad. She is the one who asks for a new passport size photograph for processing his application and this event is the one which has in turn triggered the event at the beginning of this story.

The short film releases on YouTube and surprisingly a young director having been impressed by Jyothish’s performance in it reaches out to him for a new film. The first meeting unexpectedly collapses due to the reluctance of the producer to hire a man of his appearance. Soon Jyothish is found driving the autorickshaw of his friend who had eloped with his sister but who now is dead due to a chronic heart condition.

The same young director one day is found waiting for an autorickshaw ride to go somewhere. Luckily, the auto-driver turns out to be Jyothish and a new, delightful opportunity arises for him.

Let me stop here as what follows is a series of accidents, coincidences and unfortunate events that go on to form the remarkable story of Jyothish who finally reaches where he had been secretly wanting to go to all the time – the cinema industry.

***

I was supposed to be hired by TCS, one of the largest companies in India that visited our campus first for that year’s hiring season. Everyone in my class were betting on me getting selected first by the prestigious company since I was touted to have in college parlance, ‘above-average soft-skills’. I cleared two difficult rounds – one that tested our mathematical and logical skills, two – that tested our coding abilities and we were all set for the third round which was assumed to be just a formality – a five-minute discussion with the HR who would just ask basic questions about us. Once I cleared the first two rounds, I was reliving Sarath Babu in the film Annamalai’s iconic scene where he is congratulated based on the assumption that he had won the Hotel-Owners’ Association election.

“Advance Congrats Jeeva. The third round would be just a cakewalk for you. You just have to talk casually, shake hands and return with your offer letter”, my classmate told me.

I was beaming with pride and overflowing ecstasy.

The third round was over in ten minutes and I was fully satisfied as to how I had fared in it.

The results took a while to come out and it was already midnight. The names were being read out based on the order of the branches in the college. If I remember correctly 175 names were read and within minutes, it was clear that I was the only one among the favourites whose name had not made the final cut.

If I look back today it feels mysterious and silly at the same time. For one whole week, I was stunned into paralysis by how destiny had dealt with me. I had a lot of friends who then were calling me to offer their words of consolation.

 ‘Jeeva, you were like Sachin Tendulkar. You should have made it. How could they drop YOU?’

It feels funny today when I recall those words. It was not the first time I had started considering myself unlucky. Despite having been fully qualified and deserving of certain things, I already had previous experiences of getting rejected on totally mysterious grounds. This was not new at all but still it was a resounding reminder of that one important fact – even if Jeeva had proactively plugged all holes to keep his ship safe during a storm, destiny wouldn’t think twice about throwing a massive hungry blue whale aboard his ship and letting him sink into oblivion without a trace.

TCS was always the largest recruiter every year in our college. The terms of employment, promotions, job security and package were all unsurpassable given the list of companies that were to follow.

One week of heartbreak and soon I was hired by Infosys. Six months of rigorous training at Mysore and finally I was posted at Mahindra City, 50 km away from the city. Almost all my colleagues were disenchanted at the long and the tiring commute that took almost three and half hours a day even on days where the road traffic was minimal.

The first three months of the commute were no doubt, monotonous and enervating. Listening to the same set of songs and waiting for the stranded train to move during signals at Guduvanchery and Tambaram daily sapped all our energies. On the other hand, every single company that had hired from my college had posted their employees at offices in the OMR which was not only well-connected but also quick to reach by city folks like me.

***

Thalavarais already one of my favourite films of this year not just for the excellent performances of the cast and the warm, feel-goody tone of the story, a quality which seems to come to Malayalam films so easily. I last rememberMaheshinte Prathikaram, one of my all-time favourite masterpieces from Malayalam for having been plotted in such a dense, intriguing fashion.Thalavarawas on the other hand, a very lighter film but the zig-zagged narrative called destiny that deals the protagonist with a tight slap right when he expects it to give him something on a platter and rewards him with a warm hug when he least expects it to was reminiscent of my own experiences in life.

Had I been selected by TCS, I would have suffered much less during the days of training. I would have been paid much better, grown faster in the organization than I had actually done in Infosys. However personally, there is one much bigger difference. I would have reached TCS within thirty minutes from my home. I would have used my private vehicle for the commute. But on the other hand, Infosys gave me an opportunity to travel alone for four hours daily through patience-sapping public transport. I couldn’t listen to the same set of Vidyasagars and Harris Jeyarajs daily. I was forced to find a new way of passing my time. That was how I stumbled into books.

You could argue the other way,

‘Jeeva, you could have saved a lot of time by having been employed in TCS offices that were much closer to your home and devoted it towards reading at home!’

No, that was not a possibility at all. I still remember having harboured so much hatred for books having been trained in an educational system that was not much different from an assembly line delivering market-ready goods in a factory. I had never looked at books as things that were a window to the beautiful, unknown world out there till my days at Infosys and had I joined the TCS, I would not have been forced to spend so much time with absolutely very little company. Had I not suffered those many hours of boredom of simply looking out of the window of the train compartment, I certainly wouldn’t have acquired the drive or motivation to try something new in life. I would have spent the extra hours with my family or watched mind-numbing cable TV at home. I would have lived a very ordinary life for years together without having even an inkling about the salivating avenues that books carried within them.

To top it all, nothing beats the experience of reading a book during commute. At home, when you find a novel difficult to decipher and engage with, your mind immediately switches to the easy comforts of remote-controlled internet television that teems with endlessly inventive and easily accessible content. But long train or bus journeys in my opinion demand a kind of Spartan discipline. You need to sit upright all the time in your seat unlike how you read at home and without an active mobile data connection, your phone can offer you nothing more than the same-old photographs that you took during your last Diwali celebration. It was only this kind of discipline that those dreary commutes succeeded in drilling into me that kept instructing my ever-wandering mind to return back and re-engage with the lines and phrases that I had found difficult while reading a Darwinian or a Dostevyskian treatise.

***

I know there are people who say,

“Whatever happens, happens for your own good”.

I still need to travel a long way in life to verify this time-worn aphorism. I still don’t have answers to a lot of unfortunate events that have happened in my life. But however for now, I to an extent trust in the below lines,

“Enge vaazhkai thodangum, enge evvidum mudium, Idhu than vaazhkai idhu than payanam enbadhu yaarukum theriaadhu!”

15 Responses “Readers Write In #888: Lines of Destiny” →

  1. Beautiful writing, nanba and you capped it with Kannadaasan’s immortal lines!

    When I was wrapping up CA, I had a thought that I’d rather go into research than take up a corporate job. Parents were supportive of the idea but put me in touch with a distant relative who was an academic to guide me. So I headed over to Chennai and met him and he asked me to pay a visit to IFMR. Meanwhile, my mother got in touch with an old college friend who was now a lecturer in a college and she knew one of the lecturers in IFMR and suggested I visit her.

    So, thru my relative, I got an appointment with the dean/director of IFMR who received my request very warmly and asked me to enroll ASAP. He also suggested I go and attend a guest lecture being given by an eminent personality who I am not going to name just now in this story.

    After meeting the director and attending the guest lecture, my mind was almost made up to pursue this path. But I then met the lecturer too (the one referred to my mother’s college friend, sorry, too many hyperlinks!) and she was like, ok, if you wanna have a comfy job with ok but not great pay, you’re welcome. But if you really want to do research and are ambitious, there is nothing here for you, go to the US/UK.

    Heh, had today’s version of yours truly heard the words comfy job, I would have signed up! But I was 23 then and those words went over me like a bucketful of ice-cold water! So this opened a new tangent.

    Again, through friends of friends of relatives etc, I got in touch with someone who was finishing up at LSE. This was 2009 and the panic in his voice was palpable from thousands of miles away. He said he was unable to find a job and was compelled to contemplate returning to India. In other words, don’t come, now is not the right time.

    Disheartened by all this, I ended up dropping the very idea and started applying for jobs in the corporate world. And here I still am.

    Now, here’s the kicker – the guest faculty whose lecture I heard was none other than Raghuram Rajan! I wasn’t up to date about who exactly he was or his famous paper that provoked Larry Summers to call him a luddite. Had I known exactly in whose presence I was, I may not have even visited that other lecturer. But where is RR? Back in the US since he left the services of this govt in 2016! So maybe she was right to dissuade me!

    My mother was surprised that her friend would recommend me to meet someone who poured water over my dreams but I guess she didn’t know that this is what the lecturer would say. A chance encounter with a person I had never met before changed my life…but not in the way they show you in the movies!

    LikeLiked by5 people

  2. Jeeva: Beautiful, beautiful writing! The way you are able to weave your personal experiences with the movie and bring the whole thing to a very satisfying end with the great philosophical line of Kannadasan, whose simplicity might mask its philosophical depth, is absolutely breathtaking. There is not a single waster line or observation.

    The best line in this article to me in spite of all these great things, is a wonderful picture of Madras:

    …despite so much din emanating from a Biriyani stall nearby and the motionless two-wheeler traffic that had engulfed the market junction.

    In my mind, your father is becoming almost as gigantic & idiosyncratic as Bahuleyan Pillai, though I am sure he is a far kinder & gentler soul.

    Madan: That is quite a story, almost a mini RWI in itself. I think in another thread you said that you do not have many regrets if I remember correctly. Do you regret that decision?

    LikeLiked by2 people

  3. RK: IIRC it was a thread about the concept of regret and I said I don’t get how people can say they have no regrets and vijay had said that maybe what I meant in that context was remorse.

    Well, if I thought deeply about that decision, then maybe I would start to develop regrets. I don’t. I just try to go with the flow. Maybe if I had delusions of grandeur – that I’d have done fin research and changed the world yada yada – I would regret not taking that path but in that case, nobody would have stopped me from going that way in any case. I was called ‘doubting Thomas’ by a prof even before I started studying CA (!) so I have never had very strong convictions about what I want to do. Just try to be going ahead, having a portfolio of work to show for myself in the near term and then see where life takes me. Like I couldn’t have planned to work in Zim, nobody does but it was so crucial in helping me completely see the back of long covid/CFS. Both the good and the bad events often seem to be out of my control so rather just focus on what I can control and leave it to beaver.

    LikeLiked by1 person

  4. Madan: Thanks for the reply because that was a very personal question.

    LikeLiked by1 person

  5. This is an existential question and keeps popping up.
    Although I have an idea of how I think about it, I find it hard to reconcile as well.

    Are there significant moments (known or unknown) that shape everyone’s lives – absolutely.
    Is there much we can do about it – I doubt. Isn’t that just what a life is – a series of events and turns and coincidences. Is there a point in overthinking what coulda shoulda been beyond some pondering ?

    Maybe you get into TCS, take a private vehicle and meet with an accident that changes your life (sorry to be gruesome).
    Or maybe you get into TCS and meet someone that got you into books and you still develop a love for them ? Who can tell ? The possibilities are endless.

    I think you try and make the best decisions at every point – with the options and information available to you and aligned to your priorities and principles. The rest is dependent on a million other factors not in your hands.
    Its human nature to think about the “whatifs” and it is a good exercise to do retrospectives so you can inform/shape your future actions. But, beyond that its pointless.

    Great write up @Jeeva. It was evocative. And a brilliant line from Kannadasan !

    LikeLiked by1 person

  6. Jeeva, if being appreciative of your eloquent philosophical musings were a competitive sport, I’d probably be one of the first to have enrolled in it!

    Coming to the superb piece, I see the overarching conundrum as this: do things happen for a reason, and if so, do bad things also happen for a reason? This is a bit of a tangent, so please mind the scenic route I’m about to take. It was around July 2022 that I decided to take a break from the corporate world. When I left my job, I didn’t know what I was going to do next. I just needed a break, period. I had meagre savings, not an inkling of an idea as to what the hell I was going to do next, but I wanted a break. I was searching for meaning, but I didn’t know what in the world I was searching for. You get the gist.

    I’m not sure if I’m ready to talk about the why, but that’s not really important. I was living in Madurai, and I wanted to go to Ladakh – at least in the physical realm, I knew where I wanted to go. I started my trip by travelling to Pune, figuratively falling at my then-girlfriend’s (and now partner’s) feet to give me more time, and then proceeded up north. I had a rough itinerary that would take me to Ladakh and subsequently to Turtuk – symbolically culminating in the last village of India. But the search, in a way, had concluded much earlier, when I was in Rishikesh.

    I met someone there, a stranger from the westernmost part of the country who caught my eye. We got to talking and realised we were both first-time travellers there. Naturally, we paired up and explored the terrain over the next 2–3 days before I planned to leave for Kedarnath. While exploring, we got to talking about life. A simple passing remark from that gentleman – which I’ll forever hold dear, and may take to my grave – radically upended my worldview. Ironically, what was presumably a blink-and-miss statement for him became catharsis for me. When I returned to Madurai, with this renewed worldview, and told my father that I had decided to give the corporate world another try, but on my own terms, he responded by saying, “இத புரிஞ்சிக்க தான் மதுரை ல இருந்து லதாக் வரைக்கும் போனியா?”

    Jokes apart, and coming back to your core musing: does everything happen for a reason? I don’t think so. But with a slight adjustment to the question, I present the answer: everything happens for no fucking reason.

    LikeLiked by1 person

  7. Also, Jeeva, on a much lighter note – the fruits of neoliberalism in the previous RWI, flirting with destiny in this one, and quoting Kannadasan (who famously went through an ideological transformation). What is happening? Did a time traveller move a chair or something? (jk)

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  8. As long as we are being wistful… 🙂

    LikeLiked by2 people

  9. Jeeva: Like others have said, this is a beautiful piece. I look at your writings as a unique kind of autobiography, where you try and make sense of a life via external stimuli.

    Karthik Sridhar: if you don’t mind sharing, what was that passing remark?

    And about this:everything happens for no fucking reason.

    But of course 🙂 Life’s just a random river you are tossed into, and you have to keep figuring out ways to keep afloat! – Swami BR-ananda!

    LikeLiked by4 people

  10. That was a great article, G Waugh.

    Except that I was no star student of my college by a long shot, my experience with long commutes was pretty much the same. I did not clear the interviews that would have given me shorter commutes so had to commute to farther offices during the time when WFH wasn’t a weekly option as it is now.

    But G Waugh. How do you read in a bus? I have very much tried and failed. I regret that I found audiobooks only from 2019 though I had smart phones from 2015. For 12 years I listened to music which is fine only that music in traffic isn’t what music is in your room. So I derived much less from the songs than what the songs were willing to give.

    But you are talking about actual physical books. Did your eyes not tire? Is it better in trains? I have read in trains but not as much as I did in a stationary situation.

    LikeLike

  11. @BR – I’ve emailed you 🙂

    LikeLike

  12. How do you read in a bus?

    @Rahini David: I have read in the bus in my teens but would never suggest it to anyone. The constant movement of the bus is really tiring on the eyes that only a teenager can ignore. The only mode of commute where you can read is train. Even cars are pretty tough on the eyes.

    LikeLike

  13. Thanks Madan! What an unexpected cameo!!

    RK, You are already one of my best buddies in this blog! We seem to have a great wavelength with each other!

    Thank you so much Ace!

    What a comment Karthik Sridhar! I just want to tell you only one thing – “Poraamaya Iruku Saami!” I too really want to travel like you as in a GVM picture and contemplate life.

    Thank you Rahini madam. It is still a wonder when I think about it. The only thing that distracts me from reading is heavy noise. Motion, jerks, vibration,etc have not hindered my reading abilities thankfully. I have read a lot only in old, creaky TNSTC buses that are already past their prime juddering all the way towards Vandavasi, Tindivanam or Acharapakkam. But back then I was in my early 20s at the pink of health. Allow me to quote my Gounder from Nadigan here – “Isai ke naan thaanga main! Ivanuku current kambathula ukkaravechu sollikuduthirken! Thandavalathula ukaravechu sollikuduthurken! Ivlo yen Marathumela ukaravechu kooda kathukuduthurken!!”
    Now it has been more than a decade. I will try once again and let you know. The only place where I cannot read is in my office cab. I get motion sickness easily.

    Lastly, Rangan Vaathyaare! You have no idea how much I value your comments. Also this is the period when you have been so actively engaging with your fans and followers in the blog and it is so unfortunate that only nowadays I am not able to write as much as I would like to and get a pat or two on my back from you!

    LikeLiked by3 people

  14. @Karthik Sridhar – I am curious about the remark as well.

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  15. Thank you for sharing Jeeva. Such an honest expression of your experiences

    And yes , randomness is the God I worship. To leave life to plans is too much stress for me. And when I mess up , I pray for a random reshuffling back to beauty. When people scheme or do multilevel planning forecasting into future I get visuals of brownian movement and I laugh to myself about the illusion of patterns we have.
    I even believe in random acts of kindness which have the most power in keeping humankind together.
    funny that most of our jobs (epidemiologist here) depend on identifying and using patterns

    LikeLiked by2 people

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