The Point

Like every other post in Noodle House, this post also has a point to convey. Said point is, however, still roaming freely just outside the skirts of my brain and I am waiting for it to get in so that I can go ahead. As I wait for that point to find an unguarded entry into my brain, I might as well get done with the irrelevant digressing that I do in my writings.

Buddha, Gautama - Bodhi Tree, Bodh Gaya. This is probably how the telephone directory would list The Enlightened One though you might ask why the directory would list someone who apparently had no phone leave alone a phone number! Anyway, like I mentioned above, that phone book entry thing was my quota of irrelevance for this post. And that irrelevance has also heralded the entry of the point I wanted to put forth, so let me now get to the relevant part.

First: The briefest possible version of the story of Buddha that I can come up with. Born a prince, shielded from life, faces life, goes in search of truth, becomes The Enlightened One. Of course, there is a lot of meat to this bare bones story but that is not what I am interested in. Neither am I interested in what transpired after the enlightenment. The pay-keen-attention-to-this-point point of the brief story is that he faced life and then went in search of enlightenment.

Second: The not-so-brief version of the story of one of my attempts to get into a business school and the after effects. I have made a handful of attempts to get my butt into a B-School worth its name but this story is about that one time when I almost made it into one. Almost because I had both my feet and part of my torso inside but my butt didn’t make it. For those of you who didn't get it, that was my figurative way of saying that I missed it by a whisker. That whisker being the two questions asked in the final interview - "Tell us about yourself" and "What differentiates you from all the other applicants coming from an IT background?" For all the stories I can spin out of thin air, I couldn't string together a proper, coherent sentence to answer the first question and for the second one I displayed the emptiness afflicting the top part of my head in exemplary manner by saying, "I am passionate about what I want to do." I bet the guys on the interview panel had an extended ROFL moment after I left them but at the moment when that answer was making its way out of my voice box, I really didn't notice their reactions. I was thinking, "What!!?? Aww! Crap!"

That interview was my 'faced life' moment and I have been in search of my version of enlightenment ever since. It's been a couple of years now and I don't seem to be any closer to attaining it. My B-School application process is currently waiting for that enlightenment. The point is, I should probably go and sit under a tree.