The computer engineer who ran the numbers on faith

A feeling that doesn’t need a job title 

In our lives, we have all gone through that one evening that was heartwrenching for us. Maybe a failure in an exam at some point in life, or a miscommunication at work that made us feel insulted in front of our colleagues, or the worst of all, the departure of a loved one from this world.

Life has its own ways of telling us:

“Heyy, you are going too fast, your tyres are all chipped off, the engine is rattling, and you are still dragging it all the way to a destination you don’t even know of.”

And one such way of life is to give us a deep reason, a “mishappening”, a “hadsa“, to stop for a while and reflect. To see our own selves beyond the filters of education, jobs, status, and monetary level.

These moments feel like a curse when they are happening. But I have come to believe that to give curses is not in the nature of the divine, that the only nature of Almighty is to give blessings.

The lens I was trained to look from 

There is a way in which young minds are trained as per the profession they choose. Doctors are molded to see ugly things and still not get affected by them, Lawyers are taught to argue from the side they choose, sometimes even at the cost of losing their integrity. We engineers are taught to look around with the lens of logic.

Over the years, I have met great peers, researchers, and administrators, and noticed the same thing in almost all of them: an instinct to find the logic behind everything. We are trained to measure, verify, and reproduce. Slowly, without us noticing, it becomes part of our personality. We start measuring our relationships too, verifying what we felt, and finding some logic to justify the verdict.

I remember a professor from my first year in college who said, “This world runs on a set of rules and logic, and you will be successful if you live by them.”

I believed him.

But every instrument has its blind spot, and we forget this about our own. The logic lens works beautifully on things that repeat. The moments that actually shape a life happen exactly once. A grief. Someone who stayed when they had every reason to leave. A last conversation you did not know was the last. None of this can be measured or reproduced, not because it holds less truth, but because our instrument was never built for things that happen only once.

I did not learn this in a classroom.

What I found when I finally checked 

I used to think the calm that arrived after those evenings was something I’d talked myself into. That a person in pain reaches for whatever comforts him and calls it truth afterward. That may still be partly true. But someone, it turns out, has actually been measuring pieces of this.

In 2010, Lauren Leotti, Sheena Iyengar and Kevin Ochsner published a paper called “Born to Choose”. Their argument was that our need for control isn’t simply a personality trait. It looks closer to something evolution built into us, because it once helped us survive.

A related study found something harder to shake off. People were shown cues, some promising a choice later, some promising nothing. They consistently preferred the ones promising a choice, and just the anticipation of it lit up activity in a part of the brain tied to reward, before any choice was actually made.

We’re not only rewarded for control. We seem to be rewarded for the possibility of it.

Which explains more about that evening than I expected. Why do we keep checking, comparing, refreshing a page hoping the outcome quietly changed while we weren’t looking. The grip isn’t a flaw. It’s something older than us, doing exactly what it was built to do.

Three years earlier, another team had found what sits on the other side of it. At the University of Toronto, Norman Farb and his colleagues scanned people attending to themselves in two different ways: once as a story stretched across time, our history, our standing next to everyone else, and once as nothing but the present moment.

These turned out to be two distinct ways of holding a sense of self. Usually fused together, but separable, especially in people trained to stay present.

Most of us default to the story. The comparing, the measuring, the commentary that never fully switches off. Farb’s team found this narrative mode uses brain activity that closely resembles the brain doing nothing at all – at rest. Which suggests something quietly important: it isn’t a decision. It’s closer to a setting we’re left on.

The other mode doesn’t seem to arrive on its own.

It has to be entered.

Everything I trust I have never seen

There is a strange thing about being an engineer that took me three years to notice.

I write code every day in a language I did not build. That code runs through a compiler I have never read, written by people I will never meet. Beneath that sits an operating system I don’t fully understand, hardware I couldn’t construct, physics I take entirely on the word of people long dead.

I have verified almost none of it. I have simply watched, again and again, that it holds.

That’s not carelessness. It’s the only way the work gets done. No engineer starts from scratch every morning. We stand on layers someone else already proved, and hand it forward to whoever comes next.

But what stayed with me isn’t what I trust. It’s what happens when something breaks.

When a program fails, I don’t think the universe has gone arbitrary on me. I assume there’s a reason, and I just haven’t found it yet. So I stay with it, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days, held up by nothing but the conviction that an answer is sitting somewhere underneath, even when the screen is giving me nothing back.

That conviction can’t be proven beforehand. It can only be held, and confirmed later.

I’m not saying this is the same as faith. A compiler has earned my trust ten thousand times over. The divine hasn’t given me that kind of record, and I’d be lying if I said otherwise.

But the posture is the same. Both ask you to keep moving while the reason stays hidden. Both ask you to sit inside not knowing, without deciding that means nothing is there.

Engineering never taught me to believe in the unprovable. It taught me something smaller than that. That the absence of an explanation isn’t proof that one doesn’t exist.

More often, it just means I was standing in the wrong place to see it.

Krishna said this to a warrior, not a saint

No two of us arrived here the same way. Different mothers, different houses, different decades, different hours of the night. Some of us were wanted for years before we came. Some arrived into a family already breaking. And no two of us will leave the same way either — not at the same age, not the same season, not the same cause.

Both ends of a life belong to no one else.

And yet somewhere in between, we quietly expect the middle to line up. Same milestones. Same timelines. Same pace. We look at someone whose beginning we never saw and whose ending we can’t know, and we measure ourselves against them as if we’d both been handed the same map.

This thought came to me on a morning walk. When I went looking to see if anyone had said it before, I found someone had, far more directly, several thousand years ago, to a man having a much worse day than any of us.

श्रेयान्स्वधर्मो विगुण: परधर्मात्स्वनुष्ठितात्
स्वधर्मे निधनं श्रेय: परधर्मो भयावह:

It is far better to walk one’s own path imperfectly than to walk another’s path well. It is better to die in one’s own dharma than to live in another’s, for another’s path is fraught with fear.

Krishna isn’t gentle here. He doesn’t say comparison is merely unhelpful. He says the other person’s road, however well you walk it, is bhayāvahaḥ, fraught with fear. That your own life, walked imperfectly, is still worth more than someone else’s performed well.

He says this again later in the same conversation, which tells you how badly he wanted Arjuna to hear it. And a few chapters earlier in the Bhagavad Gita, he’d already given the instruction that makes it possible:

कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन

You have a right to your actions. You have never had a right to their fruits.

I used to read that as a consolation for people who lose. It isn’t. It’s a precise account of what was ever actually ours to hold, and the fruit was never on that list. Not because we don’t deserve it. Because it was never the part we were holding.

What I keep returning to is where this was said. Not in a monastery, not to someone who’d renounced the world for the mountains. It was said on a battlefield, to a warrior who had put down his bow and was shaking, convinced he couldn’t go on.

Krishna doesn’t tell him to leave. He tells him how to stand there.

That’s the part I needed. Not an escape from the pressure, but a way to stay inside it without being consumed by the comparison. To keep building, keep showing up, to a life whose outcome was never mine to hold in the first place.

The blessing that arrived looking like a curse

A fountain rising from its own source, arcing through the air, and falling back into the water it came from. 

There’s one detail in that scene I keep going back to.

Arjuna doesn’t receive any of this while he’s fighting well. He receives it after he’s already come apart, bow down, hands shaking, unable to take another step. The teaching arrives at the exact moment he can no longer continue.

That order isn’t incidental.

The research points the same way. The mind that measures runs on its own. It’s the default, always on, quietly rewarded. The other way of being here has to be entered on purpose, and almost nobody does that while things are going well. Why would we? The comparing mind feels like competence.

So it rarely loosens because we decide to loosen it.

It loosens because something interrupts it.

The failed exam. The humiliation in front of colleagues. The person who left and isn’t coming back. These arrive without asking, at hours we didn’t choose, and they do the one thing we could never do for ourselves. They stop us. They break the running commentary long enough for something quieter underneath to be heard.

We call them curses because that’s exactly what they feel like while they’re happening.

But we’re naming them from inside the event, at the precise moment we can see the least of it. That isn’t a failure of character. It’s simply where we happened to be standing.

And there’s something worth sitting with here.

You were never given the same beginning as anyone you’ve measured yourself against. You won’t be given the same ending. Every comparison you’ve made, every night you lay awake certain you were falling behind, it was between two lives that were never running the same course.

There was no race. There has never been a race.

When the noise finally settles, what remains isn’t a student, or an engineer, or someone behind schedule. It isn’t the version of you that got the plum job offer, or the one that didn’t. Those were roles. They came, and one day they’ll go, and something will still be here after they have.

A drop that belongs to an ocean, it never actually left.

The heart slows. The night stops feeling like a verdict.

And the thing that arrived looking like the worst season of your life turns out to have been the only door wide enough to bring you home.

My mishap was His happening.

I suspect yours is too.