All these years as I grew up, I have learnt to make some extremely confident decisions on certain things which were important to my life. Few proved to be right and few proved to be horrendous.Whatever were the consequences, I took them in my own stride. Even while expressing my opinions on certain issues like politics, sports, religion, youth, love etc., I will be candid in my reasoning with atmost clarity. If there is one thing that I do not have clarity even today, then it is my stand on god. I am so unsure about it such that I cannot even name it as Theism or Atheism. Because even today I chant 'Kandha Shashti Kavacham's, few Stotras on Sri Raghavendra Swami, Lord Ganesha, Venkataraman Swamy etc., but not regularly. But when I do them it is because I want certain things done which is not in my control, something which should happen by the virtue of it and I should chant all the above ones to increase my chance of luck.I grew under an extremely theistic atmosphere where in every other thing happened around in my home was credited to god. May it be my dad's career growth, buying a home, a car, I doing well/not well in my school examinations everything was attributed to god. My parents hail from places called 'Mannargudi' and 'Kumbakonam' a deep interior town in the Tanjavur district of Tamilnadu . Both these places have got some of the famous temples of Tamilnadu. So naturally they had a great amount of clarity on understanding of god. So much clarity that I felt they were able to perfectly balance between the spiritual and material life. Right from my school days I was caught between the extreme material atmosphere at my school and other extreme of spiritual atmosphere at home. Whatever small or big I was achieving in school, there was a 'god' tag attached to it at home. On the other hand at school I was seeing my best friends who did not believe in god(but were too young to be called Atheists) and were doing much better than me in certain departments. So what kind of equation was this?
But all this really didn't matter to me until I joined my Intermediate(High School Diploma/11th standard). In my tenth grade I suddenly got energy from no where, to focus on my studies, extra-curriculars etc. So much focus that I decided to prepare for IIT-JEE. Little did I realize at that point of time that I am going to basically mess up my other Engineering entrances like EAMCET, TNPCEE etc. Few months into my coaching classes for JEE I began to get uncomfortable with spending time in the puja room since I weren't doing well in the weekly tests particularly Physics. But on the other hand I was able to grasp few concepts in Physics like rotational dynamics, optics, electricity . I was able to cope up with Maths and Chemistry syllabuses. The result of the two year mess was that I flunked the JEE, obtained a not so decent rank in EAMCET, my percentage in Intermediate was way below my score in the tenth grade(My graph fall began here). The only positive outcome of this entire 2 year episode was that I became strong in the fundamentals of Physics and Maths ofcourse. I entered my Engineering with one agenda in mind and that was to maintain an overall percentage of 80-85% and I was confident of this because of my prior coaching in JEE. My whole idea at that point of time was to identify my areas of interest in Electrical Engineering and parallely get into a job. And that was the whole idea of having a mindset to maintain a good percentage. All this meant that I wanted to work for about 2 years after my graduation, complete all my financial commitments and then set of into search for what I was passionate about. Though I was confident in performing in my semester exams I used visit the local Balaji temple regularly.
My biggest shock of my life came in the form of my 2nd year I sem. results. We had the practicals going on for the II semester on that day when we had received the transcripts. I looked at my transcripts and was in a state of shock for almost about 2 minutes. My friend beside me stopped looking into his transcript and began to look into mine and asked "Hey! Enti Ra Idhi"(Hey! What is this?). Few minutes later I forcibly digested what I had seen. I had hit the rock bottom in my life with an all time lowest score (56%). I immediately also realized that the ghost of my exam vows continued from where I left. So all this meant that I am not going to get a decent score in the II semester too, which really did happen again, and I was just thrown out of my track which I had planned for the next 4 years. The damage was already done and till today I am used to the mixed results that I achieve in anything. Though I realized that the damage was already done I began to find the reasons where I could have gone wrong and in the process I began to totally neglect praying/chanting/meditating in front of god. At one point of time I became totally convinced that it is me who has to respond to a certain situation and act accordingly and there is nothing that could be achieved by sitting infront of god. I maintained the same stand on god till I returned to Chennai from Bangalore(where I was working previously) to set out on my next goal. My mother immediately insisted me to get on track with regards to prayers and chants. I was still adamant until I started visiting some temples like 'Singaperumal Koil', 'Maangaadu', 'Amman Koil' in K.K.Nagar etc. which made me pull into some sort of focus, concentration, mind control you name whatever spiritual terminology you want to!!! My goal was achieved against whatever I was destined for and my faith in prayers were back again. I was infact happy for this, not for myself but for my parents. That is because whenever I used to not care about prayers, my parents were so disappointed with me that they started complaining that there was lot of change in my nature compared to what they have seen in me a few years back. Though I was strong enough outside to tell them that I was not worried about it, I infact started worrying about it at one point of time and even used to get upset particularly after witnessing some unpleasant things happened around me.
The whole point of the story is that I am still haunted by some unpleasant past which happened both in my academic and my personal life. All my successes, I was able to happily attribute it to the god but for all my failures(which were extremely crucial in deciding my future) even today arouses this confusion in me that is GOD OR NO GOD.
