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The interview with God !

All of us have given examinations since our childhood. Be it a simple painting competition at the age of 4 or an interview for a big-tech job or ivy-league school at the age of 25, exams are ubiquitous !
Everyone has to undergo an exam at every stage in life, to prove their worth, to justify what they did, to show progress in terms of numbers, to get promoted, to get paid, basically to be successful. Exams are those means for us all to get that, almost immediate, sense of achievement after we have done our part.  

If we look at the world today, we see different entities nested in each other. There are nations, then there are economies. Corporations/businesses are nested inside economies, with business units inside them. So goes on till teams within business units and individuals in those teams. This is a simple construct adopted by humans to understand the grand schemes of things. In order to measure the success of entities in this grand scheme of things, exams and their results are used at many levels - right from the bottom at individual level to up to the top at economy level. 

The limitation (and rather the reason of choice) of this nested view of entities is that human mind is finite. There is so much it can grasp and comprehend. Things often go beyond the radius of human comprehension. Thus, we tend to aggregate things together. This is like putting data from multiple streams together to get a more comprehensive view. Costs are added up together to arrive at aggregate cost. Revenues are added together to arrive at aggregate revenue.

We usually go with the assumption that the human minds which have better comprehension capability will eventually be up higher in the level of this nested scheme of things. Higher up, they will have more holistic view of things. This gives them the credibility to make decisions. These decisions in turn impact other entities negatively/positively and incite them to take some decisions based on their understanding of holistic view of things and so on ..... 

This scheme of things has been going for quite some time and we have seen fall and rise of many entities. Be it kingdoms, nations, corporations and individuals. Stories of kingdoms, nations and corporations are always told and heard. The common theme among those is that when there is some new entity which starts its journey at the bottom of the success curve, it gradually rises up to the top and someday destroys the so-far prevalent successful entity. But wait ! The erstwhile successful entity never planned to be destroyed. Does that mean that entity failed in the exam .... Maybe yes, maybe not .... but what all of us fail to realize is that the way exams work for nations, corporations and businesses is not how those work for humans ..... 

The most fundamental difference in the exams for individuals from that for nations and corporations is the teacher who will do the assessment !

For nations and corporations, it is probably other nations and corporations. All of these have always been the part of the earthly confinements. For humans, it is something beyond the imagination of the earthly confinements ....Most of us all humans call it "The God".....

For us humans, the exam is an interview we take up with The God at the end of our tenure within the earthly confinements. And the god, unlike all of us, doesn't have a finite mind. The god by his/her own virtue is infinite. He/she has the infinite mind. For the god to comprehend details of the grand scheme of things, we don't have to aggregate any numbers or put together a graph.

Instead, the god will ask - Hey, I put you in this circumstance, what did you do to make it better than what it was before ? Were you of any good use to anyone who was part of your life ? How many people felt happy in your company ? How many people would have called you first when they faced difficult times ?

If we truly understand the essence of this interview that will some day happen for all of us, we will realize that the nature of exams in our individual lives is not for the immediate sense of achievement but more of long term investment we do in the relationships we are part of ...

Numbers rule the universe ... but the idea is to not rule but to surrender !!! 

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