It all happens for a reason

I have enough proof!

Jun 07, 2025

Wylis, the big and kind soul was a stable boy in Winterfell. His smiling personality often masked the trauma he went through in his childhood. No matter what you tell him, he would always reply with Hodor. So much for saying a word that everyone started calling him Hodor — his whole personality reduced to the only word he could speak.

But this wasn’t always the case. He was a normal boy in Winterfell, catering to the horses and spending his time like other kids in his neighborhood. It all changed when Bran Stark bridged the past and future together through his ability to warg (enter the minds of others), inadvertently causing young Wylis to experience his own death in the future. This traumatic experience results in him only being able to say the word Hodor, a contraction of “hold the door,” which he says as he sacrifices himself to protect Bran and Meera in the past.

This incident was a part of the sixth season of the much loved series created by HBO, The Game of Thrones.

We essentially waited for six seasons to be able to understand why Hodor only speaks one word and no one really bothers to explain that to us. It created curiosity in the beginning but it slowly subsided because there were other more important and more interesting story arches that captured our attention.

But the writers of the show and George R.R. Martin didn’t forget. They waited for the right moment to connect the dots.

Genetics is funny. It gives you hair you didn’t ask for, moods you didn’t sign up for, and sleep cycles that are more confused than Delhi weather. But once in a while, it also gives you tiny family quirks that feel oddly poetic.

Like the weird habit me and my brother shared — reading while eating. My mom tried everything — lectures, threats, hiding the books — but we were committed to our chaotic literary mealtime. And surprise surprise, we inherited it from her. Maa, the OG bookworm who’d munch roti with one hand and turn pages with the other.

There was no fix book that we would read. Someday it would be Champak, sometimes a Hindi comic, at times it was the latest short story we read in the newspaper, or it could be the only interior decoration coffee table book we had. Yeah, I had a coffee table book before I knew what the term meant. But the undisputed star of our dining table library? The Atlas.

Yes. The big fat book of maps that smelled like stationery and mystery. A treasure trove of rivers, flags, countries, capitals, and the occasional "Oh, so THAT’S where Burkina Faso is!" moment.

My brother was the captain of this ship. He knew that book inside out and naturally used it to assert dominance. He taught me a great game, Atlas! He’d name a place, and I had to find it in a limited time. Spoiler: I rarely won. Not because I was bad, but because the book’s spine was stiffer than my resolve, and the place he picked always fell right in the gutter of the two pages. Coincidence? I think not.

But then we grew old, the Atlas game got replaced as we got less occasions to eat together. Our taste and preference evolved. We had other things to look after. I mean, sure, we still knew the difference between Slovenia and Slovakia, but life started giving more tests without answer keys.

Life happened.

I was a socially awkward and underconfident kid. Humor was my armor. Still is. You go to a class / party / gathering and see someone effortlessly talking to people, having the brightest smile and saying the right things at the right time to the right people.

That’s not me.

The idea of being around people wasn’t very appealing to me. Yet I went for MBA (this is a different story for some other day.)

To get into a good MBA college, you need to clear the CAT (Common Aptitude Test) exam. And it is unpredictable exactly like cats. I personally hated the verbal ability part since English wasn’t my strongest area. Who makes you choose the most appropriate subjective answer among the options? Objective marking in a subjective scenario is unfair, to be honest.

Here is a dramatized example.
Question: Choose the most appropriate answer for ‘Life is…’

a. a bitch
b. God’s gift
c. meaningless
d. what you make it

Now can you for the love of Chhole Bhature choose which is the most appropriate answer in the above question? Your answer depends on your mood and the correct answer depends on the mood the person who set the question. Now how on Earth am I expected to match the mood of the paper setter?

Me practicing verbal ability questions. Source

I survived it and by God’s grace I cleared the exam, narrowly escaping the verbal section cutoff by 0.68%ile. I sighed in relief. But now, the tougher part awaited me. Round 2! The dreaded interviews and group discussions. My detergent cost increased during the preparations as I used to shit my pants at the mere idea of appearing before a panel and answering questions on anything and everything.

What helped immensely, was taking coaching for the exam from a popular institute. They helped me focus and prepare well. Once the exam results were out, they formed a new batch for students who had qualified for the exam. The Delhi center had the best of the lot from all corners of the city. Ones who spoke fluent English with such confidence that if they told me that 2+2=5, I would start questioning my knowledge. Ones who even dressed confidently. I wasn’t even aware that you could dress to kill. They did. And it killed my morale and confidence.

Despite the mental spiral, I showed up. Because deep inside, I knew something would click. Someday. Maybe. Hopefully?

These classes focused on honing our personalities and general awareness. It matters in personal interviews. Who would want a dull candidate to lead their company eh? It made sense. And I wanted to learn all this from my peers.

Every class felt like an episode of Shark Tank where I was the unpaid intern. While others could sell sand in a desert, I was just trying to not sweat through my shirt.

Being a nobody in a large group isn’t great. I had friends in the phase one preparations but they were in different batches now. I had to start all over. Ugh.

There’s no correct way to crack the interviews though being confident and smart certainly help. It wasn’t easy for me and I wish I trusted Mike Shinoda’s words more than I did back then

A night gets darkest right before dawn
What don't kill you makes you more strong
And I've been waiting for it, so long

It was all about to change for good.

Then came a 4 PM class on one particularly soul-sucking winter evening. A two hour commute to reach the center just to attend a two hour class was tough. My energy was on life support gasping for breath but it didn’t deter me from giving my best.

That day I saw a new teacher enter our class. He was short with a belly that indicated that he was living a comfortable life and enjoyed good Biryani as and when he desired.

He introduced himself and then turned to the board and wrote Geography.

Wait. What?

I couldn’t believe this was also in the syllabus.

He started talking about random trivia on the deepest point on Earth, highest mountain, longest river in Russia and my self esteem sprung back to life.

Then came the moment.

He declared a rapid-fire round. Name the capital when I say the country.

India? New Delhi.
Nepal? Kathmandu.
USA? Washington DC.

Everyone was acing it. Then he upped the level.

Poland? Warsaw.
Hungary? Budapest.
Georgia? Tbilisi.

Now most of the class had died, unlike me. My mind was as awake as you are after 3 espresso shots.

The game went into the God mode when he turned to Africa.

Of all the places in the world, the teacher said, Madagascar.

And within a split second, quicker than the reaction time of a F1 driver my hand went up and I blurted out Antananarivo.

Mic drop.

Let me explain what happened next.

You know that mythical ‘female gaze’ every straight guy dreams of? That slow-motion head turn followed by an impressed silence, a soft "Wow, he’s smart"? and the slight raised eyebrow in admiration.

Yeah. I got that. Not from one. From many. Possibly double digits. A statistical anomaly in my life.

The girls sitting in front turned. The ones on the side turned as well. I swear someone in the back also whispered, “Who is he?” And just like that, my geography-fueled redemption arc was complete.

I didn’t just say Antananarivo. I became Antananarivo. A place ruled by King Julian in some parallel world. Exotic. Unexpected. Hard to spell, but unforgettable.

That was my Hodor moment.

That day, more than anything I learned forgiveness. I forgave my elder brother for defeating me in all the Atlas games we had played till date. I forgave him for the day he made me bowl 50 overs in a summer afternoon and scored 1034 runs with 0 wickets down and bowled me all out for 42 runs in 6 overs. I forgave all incidents where me made me feel weak and small (I was and I still am. I had a habit of running away from facts. But who cares?)

That one correct answer gave me the biggest spike in my confidence.

If you plotted my confidence on a graph, this moment would defeat even the most bullish bull runs in the history of stock market in India.

I may not be a mystery like Hodor, whose one-word vocabulary took six seasons to decode. But if you’ve made it this far, you now know why my brother and I played so much Atlas growing up.

You’re welcome.

Now, your turn.
Now let’s hear from you. What’s your Atlas moment?