The Hope of the Chooser

The last couple of weeks carried me across different parts of the World (and thus silence of blogs), including a return to Kolkata, timed to coincide with the annual celebration of Durga Puja, that monumental festival now inscribed by UNESCO as part of humanity’s intangible cultural heritage. To speak of it only as spectacle is to miss its essence. Yes, it dazzles with light, sound, artistry, and scale, but beneath the grandeur it is a profoundly human moment of communion, where families, friends, and even long-forgotten acquaintances find occasion to reconnect, while others are quietly abandoned as unnecessary, redundant, or too heavy to carry forward. Festivals, at their core, are crucibles of choice. In choosing to attend one gathering, one implicitly declines another; in choosing certain companions, one silently relegates others to the margins. This truth confronted me in an almost mundane way. Each evening of the five-day celebration, my neighborhood cultural club staged performances by neighborhood talent, and I, weighing my options, decided to spend that time elsewhere. By the fourth day, a friend from the neighborhood asked me bluntly, “Where were you all these evenings?” The question carried no malice, but it illuminated a fact I could not ignore: my choices had been noticed. In that instant, regret flickered through me—regret for what I had not seen, for the music and laughter that had unfolded in my absence, for the simple joy that might have been mine had I chosen differently. It is here that psychology offers a sobering lens. Barry Schwartz (2004) described this tension as the paradox of choice: the more options before us, the less satisfied we are, for every decision not only selects one path but simultaneously closes off others, whose glow intensifies in memory. The chooser, caught in this trap, convinces themselves that the unchosen must have been superior, though there is no proof—only imagination painting in brighter colors what is forever beyond reach. And because the human spirit craves novelty, we tend to privilege what is new. Zuckerman (2007) reminds us that sensation-seeking—our pull toward the new, the risky, the untested—often lures us away from stability. What is loyal and familiar begins to fade into invisibility; what glimmers with freshness captures our restless attention. Yet choice never ends with clean lines. To abandon the old for the new is rarely without residue. There is guilt—sometimes faint and unarticulated, sometimes overwhelming—that stains the act of leaving behind what has been loyal, stable, and familiar. The chooser, even while basking in the intoxication of novelty, senses the wound inflicted on the old, and in response, often attempts a strange form of cooptation. The discarded is not fully discarded but instead held in reserve, folded into a narrative where it continues to exist as a silent back-up, an unacknowledged insurance policy against the uncertainty of the new. In this way, the past is never entirely severed. It is reimagined, summoned occasionally in conversations, perhaps maintained through small gestures of contact, or carried within as a repository of reassurance. This strategy reduces guilt by convincing the chooser that they have not fully betrayed the old; that should the new falter, the old remains retrievable, waiting faithfully at the margins. The very act of keeping a foothold in the abandoned past is a way of anesthetizing the anxiety that comes with risk. In truth, however, this is less preservation and more possession, an attempt to domesticate memory so that the old can be called upon when needed, without demanding daily presence. Here the paradox sharpens: the chooser seeks freedom through novelty, but simultaneously clings to the stability of what was left behind. The old is made to serve two roles at once—absent in the present, but vital as a safeguard for the future. And in this duplicity lies both the cruelty and the tenderness of human choosing. For even as the new enchants, the old lingers quietly. The old friend, the trusted path, the familiar self we once inhabited—these do not vanish. They wait, silently bearing witness to our restless movement, to the cycles of attraction and abandonment that define our lives. And the paradox deepens: the very act of choosing, which we imagine as freedom, becomes a form of loss. To select one option is always to forget another. And in the ache of that forgetting lies both the tragedy and the hope—that one day, clarity may return, and we might recognize that the new was not always better, and the old was never gone, only waiting for us to turn and see it again. Just like the mythology of Durga, even though the celebration is over there is always the comfort of knowing that She will be available and She will be back in a year – just when we will need her again – after the new has disappeared and the trusted one comes back. And sometimes the words of Tagore ring true in the translated song, albeit in reference to Divinity, “I have come to you with great hope.” Hope that, in case the choice made was erroneous, there is still always hope.