Two men two Choices

Two men and two choices
Punam Khaira Sidhu

IT's the examination results season. Every day has results splashed across the newspapers: ICSE, CBSE, ....the list seems endless. The toppers have scored higher marks this year than ever before. They all want to become doctors, engineers, or IAS officers. Everyone is waiting for the results of the competition exams to come in the IITs, CETs, PMT etc.

Like a film rewinding, reading through the papers brought to mind the time my younger brothers had waited anxiously for the IIT JEE results a decade ago. Life is about choices and the successful man is the one who makes the right one. But what is the right choice is also relative. The perspective you view it from, determines your assessment as the story of Khaira and Khemka illustrates.

Khaira came from a professional family in Punjab, the son of an Army Colonel, Khemka from Calcutta from a Railways family. Their rivalry was the stuff that IIT legends are made of. Willy nilly everyone on campus was drawn into the awesome conflict. While one had blazing intellect, the other was a brilliant strategist with nerves of steel. Students, staff, they were all on one side or the other. At stake was the Ultimate award, the PGM, ie the President’s gold medal. No one bothered to enquire into the origins of the rivalry. No one was quite sure whether it was the outcome of the ego of two intelligent young men or whether their ambitions had been stoked by staff who felt that competition brought out the best in young minds.

What bothered Khemka was that Khaira acknowledged the superiority of Khemka’s intelligence privately but still challenged him and promised to beat him, God willing, with better strategy. So the two sides worked, guided by a superior power. More midnight oil had never been burned before. The lights blazed through the night at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. The two young men set determinedly trying to pen their destinies. Strategy won eventually over sheer intelligence. Khaira walked proudly down the aisle at the convocation to resounding applause to receive his President’s gold medal.

Their paths thereafter forked in separate directions. Khaira went on a scholarship to do his MS in the USA. Khemka took the civil services exam. Khaira was recruited by Intel Corp and rose to be their youngest ever Principal engineer. Khemka qualified in the IAS and was allotted the coveted Haryana cadre. As time and the travails of their careers took their toll of them, each thought of the other and the heated rivalry of their youth. Each knew the other would make his mark.

And then years later as Khemka opened the business page of The Tribune, there it was, a little piece on Khaira and the company he had founded after quitting Intel. In a reversal of roles, Khemka, was now the career bureaucrat and strategist, who routinely made headlines. He was comfortable in his job and daily routine. The afternoons meant a leisurely siesta and the evenings a time for pleasant social interactions. There is time for the family and especially for his growing sons. He can be there for his parents. Cynicism and the civil service has perhaps taken the edge off his drive to excel and create. The days meld seamlessly into a pleasant epiphany for him. When he drives out in his white official Ambassador, the red light atop blinking, the people stop and stare admiringly.

Khaira is now the techie-manager building his own hardware company on venture capital. For him the day is too short. He travels six days out of seven overseeing operations around the world, touching down at home base only once every week to the children and wife who provide him the inspiration to back his dream. He’s still chasing his aspirations, strategising to achieve it, albeit business class. His parents yearn to see him and their grandchildren. But he doesn’t know the world leisure or relaxation. He’s still driven by his passion to excel and create. When he drives out in his BMW the people stop to admire.

Two men who made two different choices. Who won? Who got life’s ultimate prize and what if any is it? Who made the right choice? I will let the readers answer and decide.