Ever since I was a child, I knew I wanted to dance. I started learning when I was about five years old and haven't stopped since. I went pro when I was in my early teens and took a couple of years off after graduating from highschool to pursue a serious career in the performing arts. Music has also always been a passion. There are pictures of me, all of three years old, banging away on a set of tablas at one of my mother's dance rehearsals. To this day, rhythm drives me obsessively. If I'm walking with my ipod playing, I have to pace my steps to the beat. I've never really had any serious formal training in percussion, but I can be pretty handy with a dholak, ganjira, or even a djembe.

Come age 14 and a whole other field catches my attention. Motion graphics, digital media and the technology of visual communication. I enrolled in a six-month diploma program and laid the foundations of what became the subject of my college education; a degree in Multimedia at the U of Arts in Philadelphia. That's where my interests diverged even further, into web and interactive design and the programming that supports it, into design that can solve problems and create systems to better our lives.

Today, age 21, two weeks away from graduating and entering the so called "real world", I am about to become a fresh graduate: a motivated, intelligent, creative, and hard working, (I never said I was modest!) young man, ready to take on the world. But yet, despite all that, what often bothers me is the fact that I'm not as accomplished in any one skill or profession as I'd like myself to be. I am the proverbial Jack of All Trades, Master of None. I can make a decent website, but will never be a programming wiz. I can move, but I'm not as flexible as the dancer who works his ass off eight hours a day. I can play percussion, but I'm no Sivamani.

Having given this much thought, I have often wondered why exactly this is the case. Its not that I'm not motivated enough to stick with one thing, nor that I give up too soon. The fact is, I can't live with just one thing, without the other. I'm sure if I put my mind to it, I could be the hot shot programming wiz that knows php like the back of his hand. But then I'd be sitting in the audience during a performance thinking to myself, man I wish I was on stage. So its not that I'm not happy with whatever I do, or always think the grass is greener on the other side, but that I'm never content doing just one thing. Life has too much to offer to restrict yourself to just one thing.

Ever since the beginning of civilization there has been division of labour. With cultures that had the caste system, a person's birth in a particular family or community in itself decided his profession. In later times, the caste system broke down and a person could choose her own profession, based on her skills, or purely based on her interests. Yet choosing one profession has always been an expectation. In schools in India, children have to pick a field of higher studies and narrow down their career options to only one from business, arts or sciences as early as age 15. Do we really know what we want to spend the rest of our lives doing as early as that? Do we ever really know? And do we really ever need to choose one over the other? Yes we need our specialists, but we also like our Man Fridays. With times changing, maybe the trends are changing too, to become more diverse and universal, curious about the world and ready to take on anything that may come in one's way.