Saturday, September 1, 2012

How we take the fixed path to success


Were you born in India? The chances are that your life will be decided before you were born. Your parents will send you to a “good school” with “good teachers”. Your initial years at the school will be fun because you are young and have no responsibility. Before you know it, you reach middle school and you are supposed to get serious about studies. If not, you are put into tuition. And when you reach high school, some wacked up parents (thankfully not mine) put you into coaching classes for competitive exams (Note how I am not naming these exams, but we all know them too well). Then you reach that phase where everything is made to seem like a life and death situation where you cannot have fun. This is because you have to become an engineer or a doctor or an accountant. That is just unfair! I mean, you are 17. How do you know what to do with the rest of your life when you are not considered responsible enough to come home after 7.30 PM? How do you know you have found your passion when you are not ‘considered responsible’? How in god’s name are you supposed to put your foot down and say –Hey, this is what I want to do with the rest of my life! But all that doesn’t matter. You will eventually grow into the fat salary ass who will sit at home and say the same things to your children because ‘the safe path is a successful path’. Well don’t! Safe path is not necessarily a happy path.

“When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life” ~ John Lennon

2 comments:

  1. The problem in India is passion isn't given as much importance as winning the race. Regardless of whether you want to be in it or not.
    Like in Taare Zameen Par. Doing something safe might not be safe for someone who is bad at it.
    Engineering the most "safe" path in our part of the world has SO many failures, yet they are pushed into it.
    I totally agree when you say the safe path isn't always the happy path.

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  2. Yea. It doesn't matter if your passion lies in something else. It's just that you are *not* allowed to take risks.

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