The thought and forceful coercion

I have been thinking a lot lately. I don’t know why? Not that I don’t usually think, just that the way I think has come to change a lot in recent times. So much so, I spent a large part of the last semester of my graduate major thinking rather than studying. But, I feel it has been one of the most productive times of my life. These thoughts all appear to be so random, yet, I have always felt a hidden geometry.

This is my attempt to arrange my chaotic thoughts.

Most of my thoughts are spurred on by the various people around me, the different people I see, the people I read about. And yet it’s never about one particular person. I have grown up with a particular feeling, it was not inherent; yet, from somewhere, during sometime in my teenage years, I have acquired this random notion that, “I do not matter. What matters is the world around me, the people around me.” Why is that? I have asked myself this question among the several questions that pop up in my head.

I do this when I am bored, not playing football, not watching movies, not sleeping or not studying; which constitutes a large amount of time, considering I am bored whenever I am not doing one of the above, and I don’t involve in any of these activities for more than 2 hours a day lately except for maybe sleeping, of course, for which I gladly devote somewhere between 6 to 10 hours. So, barring these 14 hours when i am actually doing something, i have 10 hours each day to be mentally and physically idle.

Now, is it just me or is everybody this idle for these many hours? And if so what do they do with these hours? Oh, yeah I forgot, many of you are running after your lives, running the rat race (why is it called a rat race, ever wondered why?). But then instead of running after your lives, why not hold it by the scruff of its neck and ask it to behave. Is it possible to do this?
Let’s start from this last one and then we will try to answer to all the other questions, some already mentioned, some not mentioned.

Whenever I have thought about the question of running our lives, I have felt, maybe, just maybe this is because we, the people of India in particular, want to be a somebody. A somebody in the society who is respected, somebody who is sought after, somebody who is synonymous with the word SUCCESS. So we vie for jobs that are synonymous with all of this, and also pay you handsomely. We look around in our society and everybody in the society points at certain select vocations. Everybody is swept up in this strong stream of suggestions, whether he likes it or not; burn midnight oil over vocations we don’t desire. The problem arises mainly due to a person’s desire for social approval. We want what others think we want, not what we really want or could be. “My biology teacher tells me that I would be good as a doctor, but then my mathematics and physics professors tell me that I should be a physicist or a mathematician, my mother wants me to be an engineer, my father says a you have an innate ability to manage, so go for a management degree, also guarantees you lots of money, my uncle says lawyer.....and so this goes, only I have never thought what I want”.

Of course, money is another factor. Society demands that a successful and respected person be rich. So, we the people of the supposed “X, Y and Z”-generations, aspire to become engineers, CEOs and doctors. After all, Uncle Sam has done it, our Japanese cousins have done it, not once but twice, our Aryan relatives once removed(if you still don’t get it, the Germans) , have done it not once, not twice but thrice. So why not us, why can’t we pull it off? What is wrong with building up a country with people who are skilled in any of the different fields of science and engineering, management and medicine? After all, it is the engineers who build and design things, it is the doctors who take care of our precious health and of course the managers, who oil and watch over the cogs and wheels of the machineries of most of the fields. One could even liken them to the “Trimurti Gods: Brahma, the creator; Vishnu, the Preserver and Shiva, the destroyer” from Hinduism.
Well, there is nothing wrong.

To me that says it all. That one statement summarises in itself, not only everybody’s lack of interest in anything that he/she would like, but also the greed and ego, shoved into every innocent kid from the moment they are born, by the society and their parents.

Many of you would be shaking their heads right now, thinking, poor guy, what a load of crap he has written, how much time he has wasted on something so worthless. Well, as I have already told you, I have a lot of spare time. At least, I am doing something to utilise it and am actually spending it doing something I would like to do. So, coming to my point, the more one thinks about this, the more one comes to believe, that in 60-70% of the cases, he/she has no idea why he is pursuing his job. He is confused whether he is right for the job he is studying to become. She wonders whether she should have been doing something else from day one. They wonder if they had been pushed in a mildly persuasive yet forceful manner by the society to being something they don’t want to be.