The Beauty of Randomness
A million million spermatozoa,
All of them alive:
Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah
Dare hope to survive.
And of that billion minus one
Might have chanced to be
Shakespeare, another Newton, a new Donne—
But the One was Me.
Shame to have ousted your betters thus.
Taking ark while the others remained outside!
Better for all of us, froward Homunculus,
If you’d quietly died!~ Aldous Huxley
Three years into my undergrad education in electrical engineering I realized that I was not happy. My interests were wide and divergent, science and poetry, math and visual art, literature and cinema… everything seemed interesting. But it wasn’t clear what I could or should do instead of this program I increasingly felt stuck in. What I did know was that I was not enjoying the experience and needed to get out. One day, walking back from a class in the civil engineering building, I saw a poster for a master’s in design program in Visual Communications at the Industrial Design Center (IDC). I was interested in film, inspired by documentaries such as Ascent of Man and Cosmos. Maybe there was a future where my love for science and math could be combined with my fascination with the visual arts.
Later that day I mentioned this to my friend Anand Narasimhan. Anand and I bonded over many things, not least of which was reading and writing science fiction. I knew he was as frustrated with engineering as I was.
And then being me, I did nothing about it.
Anand, on the other hand, went back and looked at the poster, and on his own sent in the Rs 40 postal order to get the application form for the CEED exam, a prerequisite for admission to IDC. And he didn’t do it just for himself. Though I hadn’t asked him he just did it for both of us.
We took the exam, got called for the interview, and went to Bombay together. I had decided on Visual Communications while Anand had selected Industrial Design. Once there he changed his mind, but in our excitement we didn’t realize he needed to take both interviews. He just went for the Industrial Design interview and told them, when asked, he was interested in Visual Communications. So, they crossed his name off their list. But since he never went for the other interview, he didn’t get admission. I did.
I joined IDC, fell in love with design, and found a path at the intersection of design and education, something that sustains me even today. It was at IDC that I met Smita, and we built a life together. Two kids, Soham and Shreya, testimony to that relationship.
Anand went a different path, getting his MBA and then his doctorate in business. He is now an incredibly successful professor and leader in Switzerland. I often wonder, what my life would have been, had Anand not sent in that money order for me? If we had listened to instructions and we would have been in the VC program together. I have, only half-jokingly, told this to Smita sometimes: I don’t think we would have gotten married if Anand had joined IDC. Anand and I would would have hung out together, done our thing, building on deep connections and experiences we had shared for four years in our undergraduate days.
Our lives would have been completely different.
This idea of how random our lives really are has always intrigued me. Seemingly minor events trigger effects, cascading through our lives, effects becoming causes, leading to profound changes and transformations.
People often say, everything happens for a reason. I have never believed that. I have always seen life as a mosaic of contingencies, these near-misses and chance encounters that make sense only in hindsight.
There is no master plan. Just stuff that happens.
Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Sound of Thunder” builds on this idea, where the inadvertent death of a butterfly, back in the age of dinosaurs, leads to profound changes in human history. Timelines shift, history rewrites itself. Bradbury was anticipating what would later be called the butterfly effect, long before chaos theory gave it a name.
A similar idea can be seen in the “What if…” genre of historical fiction. The question, “What if the Axis powers had won the war?” leads to Philip Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle. The question “What if the reformation had never happened?” leads to Kingsley Amis’ novel The Alteration. (Incidentally, something interesting I discovered while writing this post was that Amis’ novel mentions an alternate-history novel titled “The Man in the High Castle” by someone called Philip K. Dick!) These novels suggest that history is not inevitable, that the world we inhabit is just one of countless possibilities.
This interest in the contingent nature of our lives led me to finding other examples from fiction and film that aim to capture this idea in powerful and interesting ways. Cinema seems uniquely suited to exploring these ideas, perhaps because films themselves are edited sequences of moments strung together. The editing room is where contingency gets made explicit. Two shots of different events, juxtaposed, create meaning, suggesting causation or connection where there might have been none.
But leaning into randomness is a tough act to pull off.
The example most people give me when I share these ideas is Sliding Doors. And at some level, this appears to be a perfect setup. The film shows two parallel timelines: in one, the protagonist catches a train; in the other, she misses it. From this single moment of randomness, two completely divergent lives unfold. But here’s where the film reveals its unwillingness to truly embrace the idea. Both timelines, despite their divergences, arrive at essentially the same place. She ends up with the same person, achieving roughly the same romantic destiny. The contingency turns out to be cosmetic. Fate ensures that no matter which path is taken, the universe conspires toward the same conclusion. Borges’ story “The Garden of Forking Paths” has a similar theme.
Both Sliding Doors and “The Garden of Forking Paths” want to have it both ways: to suggest that chance is crucial, while reassuring us that deeper forces will steer us toward our rightful endings anyway. They set up the philosophical problem and then retreat from it, offering the comforting illusion of contingency without accepting its true implications.
But there are films that tackle this head on.
Run Lola Run, a German film from the 1990s, is a masterpiece of this kind of thinking. The film shows the same twenty minutes of time, three times, with each iteration slightly different. In each version, Lola must try to help her boyfriend out of a difficult situation. But because of tiny variations, whether she runs down this street or that one, whether she bumps into this person or that, the outcome is radically different. Some versions end in tragedy, others in salvation, and the differences that determine the outcome are almost invisible. It’s a visual meditation on how much of life is determined by the slightest variations in how events unfold.
You have to watch the full movie, but there is a 3-min introduction to the movie that I am including below.
And there are films that explore contingency in specific sequences. My favorite example comes from The Curious Case of Benjamin Button:
And of course there is the amazing scene from The City of Lost Children which has a narrative payoff built on an absurd chain of circumstance.
A world where everything was predetermined would be a world without stories. A world where everything was truly random would be a world without meaning. We live in the strange, beautiful middle ground where contingency and pattern coexist, where randomness and meaning dance together in ways we can only partially understand.
Stanislaw Lem, the Polish science fiction writer, captured the philosophical heart of this in his novel The Chain of Chance. The book is structured as a detective story: the narrator investigates a series of mysterious deaths at an Italian spa, searching for the hidden cause, the conspiracy, the design behind it all. And the revelation, when it comes, is that there is no design. Things just happened. Coincidences converged. Random factors aligned. But the human mind can’t accept that, so it keeps looking for the story.
As Lem writes:
There’s no such thing as a mysterious event. It all depends on the magnitude of the set… Out of a sufficiently large set of events, any particular event is bound to occur, no matter how improbable it might seem.
The point isn’t that miracles will happen if you wait long enough. The point is that some outcome, expected or unexpected, will occur. And whatever that outcome is, we will look back and construct a narrative around it. We will find the pattern. We will say: of course it happened this way.
Kierkegaard wrote: “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
A million million spermatozoa, Huxley wrote, and only one survived. You’re here not because you were destined to be, but because someone was going to make it through that cataclysm, and it happened to be you. You are the One, not by design but by accident. The story you tell about it comes after.
Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” is perhaps the most famous poem about encountering a fork in the path. The speaker describes two roads in a yellow wood and must choose between them. He concludes with the now-famous line: “and that has made all the difference.”
But notice: Frost’s speaker is already anticipating the story he will tell. “I shall be telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence.” The poem isn’t really about the choice itself; it’s about the retrospective narrative we construct around our choices. Whether we choose deliberately at a fork in the road, or step on a butterfly without knowing it, or catch or miss a train by chance, the result is the same. In hindsight, we will craft a story. We will retrofit meaning. We will say: that made all the difference.
There is a beauty in this view of life, this sense of meaning rising from randomness. Darwin closed out the first edition of The Origin of Species with a similar thought:
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
(Note: Darwin changed this quote in subsequent editions, adding “by the creator” after the phrase “originally breathed,” most likely due to external pressure.)
“Shame to have ousted your betters thus?” as Huxley put it. Perhaps. But here we are. The one who happened. And that, for better or worse, has made all the difference. Grandeur may be too strong a word for one life, one set of accidents. But there is a beauty in it.
Addendum I
Finally, a short film called Spin that speaks of some of the same issue, in a very different manner.
Addendum II
Avani Bhagdikar shared this quote below with me. I think it resonates well with the rest of the piece. (Added April 4, 2026)
“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”– Richard Dawkins in Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder