One fine day, I was just thinking about my lecture on Social and Economic Network Analysis. This is not one of the regular electives. Only the few of us who missed our chances at doing additional electives and NPTEL courses had to choose it. It was not like we missed those chances. But alas, the NPTEL exams were postponed due to COVID-19, almost cancelled and they doomfully coincided with our semester exams and so we had to cancel the exam.

That was when I decided to do another course this semester. For NPTEL, we had done all internal assessments well and objective tests at the end wouldn’t have been hard to crack. We were regretting about the hardships of how the efforts of watching NPTEL videos were going to go waste. We had to anyways attend the regular classes, tests, assessments, assignments and project reports of this other course we had to start now.

Setting things apart, I put my heart and mind to study Social and Economic Network analysis. There were certain aspects about it which was awesome and interesting. Graphs, Community Detection, how social networks can be modelled mathematically, Six degrees of separation, Page rank and HITS – the ranking algorithms, Auctions and Matching markets, Sponsored Search engine market, and much more. Our instructor was so cool, explored a lot and let us experiment too. And listen! I scrapped a huge number of tweets about IPL auctions, analysed and visualised it. That was one of the most fun projects among the 3 or 4, I was doing that time. It was like - everything I wanted to do - put down as a course for me to study. The course I would not have thought about – if everything had been fine.

This is not just this. You may face failures, discouragements, lack of recognitions and rejections. But it is all ultimately to let you help reach the exact place where you belong. Those temporary things are miracles which help you get things you deserve – and would not have got without these seemingly bad things.

I realised as I have done many a times before. Often things do happen for a reason. Everything. What you seek is seeking you too. Things meant for you find its way to you no matter what. So, when you are so struck and label something which happened as bad, do realise that, it happened for a reason which you would realise, one fine day and then, there will be a smile on your face. Take life with a pinch of salt. If it causes you to smile, smile; for that’s what most men desire. If it causes you not to smile, then realise it is preparing you for a day when you can smile.