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Rohini Balakrishnan Ramanathan

All about choices

That great baseball hero Yogi Berra's profound advice to those faced with various dilemmas in life: if you come to a fork, take it. He meant crossroads in life, not the variety we use to delicately thrust food into our maw.

Upon close inspection, I see that this delicate 18th century European invention (the kind we use today) called the fork, meant to separate the humans from animals, to make the dining experience an elegant affair, usually has four prongs. All of which are employed in elegantly digging into the food set before us. Come to think of it, maybe Yogi Berra was indeed thinking of this piece of cutlery. Because when you are faced with forks in life or practically speaking on the road itself, you can choose only one and not all the prongs.

It is said that life is better when one has choices. It's better to have more to choose from than less. Personally, I'm not so sure. I truly believe there is less stress in life when you have to think less, when you have less number of choices, or sometimes even no choices. This is one reason I like uniforms. No need to think every morning what to wear today, inevitably only to discover I don't have a thing to wear!

They say life is about choices. Wish this wasn't so. Let me examine the areas where mercifully this claim does not pass muster and thus makes life only less stressful. For example, I don't have a choice to be a man or a woman. I'm simply a woman. Surgery can only alter my external appearance. The basic functioning will still be the same. Here, I truly love not having a choice. If I had a choice, for one thing, I'd have to maintain two separate wardrobes (as I'd actually want to be both man and woman, not the Ardhanareeshvara style, but two separate bodies that can alternate) -- an expensive proposition, so a stressful situation.

Let's examine another area where I am delighted I have no choice. When it comes to death, I'm glad nobody is going to check with me, hey, what do you want Life or Death, to be or not to be? Even without such a menu of choices to pick from, if the world population is exploding I can only imagine how much worse off the situation will be with a choice like this: life or death? So another scenario where no choice is a far better choice!

In the Op-Ed page of the July 15 New York Times is a photo commentary on the probable results of the current bioengineering (man's desire to constantly improve our environment to the point we will probably destroy it) fervour. I shudder to think that one day, thanks to genetic engineering, I'll need to choose between regular oranges and caffeinated ones promoted as a "perfect one-stop breakfast", or between rectangular zucchini or the present round ones. The list could be endless.

This column was inspired by a recent dilemma I had while filling out a form. In one of the rows, as a woman the choices I had were Miss, Ms, Mrs, Dr (a gender neutralizer). I truly was not sure how to fill out. Living in a country where reinventing yourself -- physically through dieting, plastic surgery, hairstyle change, clothes, etc; mentally by changing one's mindset; financially or in whatever other way your heart pleases as the mood of the moment strikes you -- is not an uncommon occurrence, I can indeed be any one of these choices depending upon what I wish to accomplish.

Passing myself off as a Miss I stood the chance of being perceived as 'young' and glamorous. A very useful image in this youth-plus-glamour-obsessed culture. A Ms offered the possibility of being perceived as a liberated independent woman, which offered its own kind of appeal in a world that admires women who have "arrived". But the flip side was that I might be perceived as a woman who is advertising to the world, hey, I am available, too. Sounds delicious, but this would be false advertising.

So why not pick Mrs and thus stick to the truth, nothing but the truth? In this day and age of multiple truths, this argument is but a diluted one. Moreover, by checking Mrs I'm coming across as a man's shadow. Forget it, over my dead body! Hey, why nor Dr? Sounds impressive, nor will it be a lie. But then such a title might create a divide between me and those who consider such titles vanity plates. So not a good idea!

For instance, in academia, it's perfectly acceptable to use this earned title. But in corporate America, a doctor title will probably prove to be a strike against you. A doctor title is usually associated with ivory tower-type impractical folks. In corporate America 'impractical' amounts to a death knell.

So faced with these varied choices, I'm not sure what to check off. My un-knotty proposal: just a Ms would do, like for men it's just a Mr when it comes to gender identification.

In the above Miss, Ms, Mrs, Dr example, a fork is inevitable, but my dilemma may be unique only to myself as a person who loves to consider all options in life before making up her mind. Personally, I don't believe life is about simple yeses and noes. Life is not just about black and white, although I wish it were.

I don't mean to beat a dead horse to death, that is, my belief that it's not always fun to have choices, but I'd like to end the column with one quick illustrative story. Recently, my 16-year-old son got two summer jobs at two different places almost simultaneously. When he heard from the first place he was quite elated and accepted the job immediately. Within the next hour he heard from the second place -- more money and more hours. Now he was faced with that proverbial fork.

He felt bad about turning down the first offer. They had been nice to him, and if he went back and told them he didn't want the job, they would need to start their search all over again. He was truly torn, and said, "Mom, instead of feeling happy about getting two offers, I'm depressed. It's really not fair to turn down the first offer." Not such an atypical quandary, I guess. Me, as a business worldly person, I thought over his predicament for a second and then explained to this first-time job-seeker the realities of the business world. I explained how it's self-interest that rules in the not-so-gentle market place.

Clearly, there was really no contest between the two job offers as the second place offered him more money per hour and more hours. Not that this kid had not known about self-interest instinctively as this is the first ingredient for survival as programmed by Nature, but he clearly seemed not to understand this purely-for-survival practice at this particular moment.

As I wondered about his final decision and he was still wondering aloud what to do, his close friend, a Jewish-American kid, who was with him at that time, advised him Yogi Berra style, "Hey, Ash, why don't you take both?"

My jaw dropped. Wow, why didn't I think of that? But no matter, because the new-to-the-labour-force recruit, after some pondering, on his own, decided to take the second job, the more paying one and no less exciting or interesting than the first one.

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