One Size DOESNOT Fit All

It has been exactly a year since I quit my corporate job. And first things first -that does not make me a quitter. All through my 28 years of life, I have been made to believe that life follows a single course and as if to reinforce this, everyone around me was taking the same course. School, under graduation, then a post graduation or a job, buy a house / car, get married, have kids, work, work, work, then go on vacations now and then, grow old and then die. The life in between is peppered with all sorts of emotions and dramas and love and hate and gossip and expectations and gratifications and disappointments and whatnots.

Well, I also embarked on the same course -school, under graduation in engineering, because only an engineering degree has job value and no one who does a BA Lit, or BA History or Journalism gets a well paying job, then a post graduation because I am not an engineer material and I wanted to escape working in an IT firm, got a job offer in a MNC bank, got married the same year I finished the PG, worked in the bank and hated every minute of it, after two years, quit this bank and joined another bank (frying pan to fire) and hated my job even more, faced the pressure to start a family and finally, when the push came to shove, I just stopped dead in my tracks.

That was not my path. I still don't know what my path is, but I definitely know what I was NOT supposed to do. To even revisit the years of constant internal conflict still makes me shudder. Stopping dead in my tracks made me go back to basics and I realized how much the fear of not having enough money has been driven deep within the subconscious. Yes, money is important -there is no denying that. It brings comfort and security and it is very essential for our existence -at least in this society. 

But, clichéd though as it may sound - money is not a measure of happiness. Neither is money a measure of success. If I go back to the course of life that I mentioned earlier, it is chartered by the singular compass called money. No other coordinates are taken into consideration. Because, right from the word GO, a child is trained & prepared for the sole purpose of earning enough to lead a comfortable life (standard of "comfort" depend on many socio economic factors). There is no joy in studying because the child does not study to learn new things, is not taught to marvel at the limitless potential of the human mind and this universe, the child rarely gets a glimpse of the world beyond the 5 subjects it is taught inn school, the child knows no joy of how knowledge can unfold its mind -but is made to study so that it can earn enough. Isn't it so sad and depressing? Yet, it is true.

While I loved science and math in school and had a special romance with history and languages, I just passed my engineering degree by rote. Yes, it is a shameful admission, but it is true. I am an electronics and communications engineering graduate and I don't know shit about circuits. I hated the 4 years of my under graduation because what I studied made no sense to me. There was no joy. And the teachers were narrow minded and full of shit. They themselves taught by rote. What marvels this technology is bringing to our lives today, but I didn't see any of that marvel in the curriculum or the teachers. Also, I was not made for engineering. I don't have a love for that subject but 4 years of my life was poured into it because an engineering degree meant a ticket to a bright future.

I was not encouraged to follow my passion for language or history because they did not guarantee a secure future. And this is why the one size does not fit all comes into play. Just because x, y & z did engineering and are earning big bucks, it does not mean that I should or I could too. The parents are not entirely to blame, because every parent wants only what is best for their child. Neither is the child to blame because it is still yet to discover its own path.

Then, who's fault is it that this world now has so many corporate zombies? People who hate their job and live weekend to weekend because they have a family to feed, emis to pay, things to buy and places to go? Where lies the solution for people who cannot afford to stop dead in their tracks and rechart the course of their life? Well, more in the next post.