Regret?

I have heard many of my friends who did MS here in US complain that they should have stayed back in India and benefited from the IT boom there. Their logic is that, after 2 or 3 years, their company would have sent them to US. This way they would have had job security, visit to US and most importantly would not have incurred the educational loans. Sound as their logic might seem to the casual observer it is flawed. Firstly, when I and my friends came to US (Fall 2001), there was recession everywhere. People were laid-off in India too. A year before that, things had started becoming bad in US. Many of my friends who had decided to stay back found that the job offers from the companies through campus selection were delayed indefinitely. Luckily this scenario did not last long and things become rosy once again back home. In sharp contrast, situation in US continued to be bleak with slow growth. However, for those who have opted to come to or stay back in US did not know how things here would turn out. If it was a choice that we all made to stay back or come to US, we did it without fully understanding the consequences and knowledge about how things would turn out in the future. Yet, my friends still complain that they should have made the other choice. What they don’t realize is the fact that the life in US has changed them in ways they are yet to realize. They have become much more independent, confident, strong as a result of the taxing living conditions, and more importantly have become aggressively competitive. Each of them would have been a different person back there (not necessarily negative!). The fact that I find very interesting is that I am able to cherish all my experiences here. No point in wanting to be what you were and start all over again when you are what you are now. The greatest failure in one’s life is to look back and regret about the past. I hope I never do that. Every time I think about the past and wish to change decisions I had made, I always to say to myself that I had made those decisions with whatever knowledge I had then and even if I go back, I would make those exact same decisions all over again. The present and future holds still so much of promises. There are yet too many decisions to make whose impact on me would be so great as to make my past irrelevant. The greatest loss one would incur is to brood about the past while the present slips away.