That was a hot monsoon day. I was at home on an about-to-end vacation. As the noon progressed to dusk the sun shone brightly through the window panes and its rays invaded the room at its will. I was watching TV sitting in a sloppy posture while my family members followed their routines. My mother was weaving embroidery on a sari, my father reclining on a bed and reading a book, my brother sleeping. Weary silence and stillness were hanging in the air despite the TV playing. Even as I was relaxing with a reckless abandon, I kept brooding about the monotony of town life and about packing bags soon for the hectic school life. While these thoughts were unsettling me, suddenly the light receded out of the room through the window panes and they had stopped shining. It was as if the shadows spread out and conquered the room making the rooms dim. Something twitched inside me to go out and see what the weather was up to. But my laziness ignored it as an ineffectual passing cloud. But soon the room took a dimmer tone making the corners invisibly dark and suddenly a gusty cool wind shut the window door open and forcibly entered the room ruffling papers and toppling small objects. I was now delighted by the goings-on and rushed outside to see how exactly it looked while my father asked me to turn off the TV and unplug the wire and my mother asked me to get the clothes dried out in and close the windows. They too loved that weather but they had these other things to take care of. I went to the terrace and was awestruck to see dark clouds spreading out through out the sky from the horizon, in every direction. Darkness descended on the town with an envelope of clouds cupping the whole flat earth my eyes could see. The gusty cool winds added to the beauty of it. Everything turned beautiful in a matter of minutes, the chimney of a nearby mill, the swaying trees in distance, the litter flying off an open dump, the birds flying for cover. Even my self-importance notched up a bit as I stood there with hands on my hips and head raised to the sky enjoying the breeze and waiting for the first drop of shower. The clouds burst open to a deluge after a series of thunders. I went down to the space under the portico where my mom, dad and brother all gathered and were enjoying the rain. That space under our portico overseeing a small garden always held my best moments at home. That is where we always had an evening cup of tea, brushing aside the trivial day to day worries for a while, feeling good about ourselves and talking dreams. Then, we were a unit and my dreams contained only my family, our future. I hadn’t grown up enough to have independent dreams. So that day we had tea under the portico surrounded by the transparent curtain of water shower which made things obscure beyond a point, watching the plants in the garden treated by rain, listening to the pleasant din of the rain and talking about ourselves and future. I savored that moment more than anything in life. I wanted to seize that moment for a long time because I knew when the rain stopped and the runoff settled, we people would resign to the mundane things of life and life would be normal again. I feared that moment might not come again. Even if that moment came, I wondered if we would be able to enjoy that to the same extent. Because, I thought as we grew up we would have personal dreams and personal setbacks in life which might not blend with the mood of the setting. But life repeated in cycles. To my delight that moment came again and again. And contrary to my apprehensions we enjoyed that moment fully devoid of any worries.
I realized life is such. As the parching summers, refreshing monsoons and chilly winters segue into one another, life has it all. Only the life's seasons are not as regular and as definite as nature's. I have gone through several lows in life when I felt I was irreversibly damned and was on the verge of losing all the hope of good things to come. But I knew, if not anything I had a loving family and I slowly tried to work things out. I don’t know whether it was sheer randomness or the mercy of some supernatural force, but I got enough opportunities to get back to normalcy. To everyone who go through such phase in life I say, with little hope, little persistence, little courage just wade through the life. Sure, the monsoon showers of your life will come one day and wash away all the troubles.
These days I am quite depressed to observe how and where my career has been heading for a long time, more so when I know that I am the one responsible for all that and I have been helpless about that. Life has been a trading of interests for some intangible social benefits. Six years back, I settled with civil engineering since I got it in a reputed college when mechanical was something that interested me. I could not afford one more year for what I wanted. By the end of three years, somehow I liked some of the subjects in civil engineering and wanted to continue doing masters in it from US, but hesitated since I had a job offer in hand and that was recession time. So this time, I let the investment and job security concerns worry me. Two or three months into the job, I felt both technically and monetarily a career in civil engineering was not at all a rewarding one and I found a way to get out, to prove myself again, to study with the best minds of the country and then embark on a lucrative profession. That was writing CAT and getting into an IIM for MBA. This time interests and strengths didn’t matter. I just fancied the idea of hobnobbing with the best minds of the country and listening to intellectuals from various walks of life and finally being looked up to as an IIM grad. After slogging hard for one long year, I have somehow managed to get into a college, not the one I fancied all the way, but the one where I have an equal opportunity to get into a lucrative job. Now I am not any less excited about joining it for the plush job I may get after two years. I feel sometimes that my priorities have changed from time to time but my interests haven’t. When I pause and think whether I am cut out for what I will be doing in future, I get confused and worried. I must admit I was passive all the way for not seriously pursuing what I wanted. Since I don’t like taking all the blame, I would like to put half the blame on this society and pathetic education system.
The constraints and factors that changed my direction several times are not too trivial to dismiss. Time, money and social status are slowly getting hardwired in our minds as scales for measuring one’s success and becoming determinants of one's career goals. I think everyone's life is pretty much designed in the same way. Designed on the basis of how much money we want, how quickly we want, how high we want to see ourselves in the pecking order of the social status. A nice flat in a metro, a luxury car, a high paying job in an MNC and a timely marriage are the walls to fend off society's apprehensions about us. These are our ends and they have become more important than the means. I don’t get how many people take up civil services to bring about some positive change in the administration of this country, how many give first preference to computers or electronics engineering if not for the software boom all over, how many desire to do MS in US if they are not allowed to stay there long after they graduate, how many wish to work in foreign banks if not for the huge pay packets. Maybe it is simple supply and demand economics at work. But economics should not be meddling with people’s career choices I think.
Another thing is our sham education system which puts liberal and creative arts on the back-burner and force feeds us with what sells well. We are not encouraged to read a book, paint a picture, or play a sport all our lives. Halfway through the career if one realized that he was good at something like literature, history, politics, music, or dramatics, he would not have much to do about it. He would be stuck in a vacuum not being able to do what he wanted and not taking interest in what he did. I hate the thing that I haven’t been learning anything with interest for the last two years and still getting away with it because of this false sense of security or purpose acquired from working in this company. I think there are many more phonies around, who do their day to day work halfheartedly or mechanically and still feel some sense of purpose and pride for themselves. What’s the pride and purpose in doing something that you are asked to do instead of doing what you love to do. I call it delusions of grandeur.
This is about the two great personalities of India whose every success makes its hundreds of millions of people elated and whose every failure makes them lament silently. These are the men who have touched hundreds of millions of lives without having added anything concrete to their lives.. These are the men who can bring together a nation by simply putting their skills on display. These are the men who are always present in the collective consciousness of people as icons of india . They are Sachin Tendulkar and A R Rahman. There might be other people from indian soil who are equally succesful in their carees but no one has occupied so much space in the minds and hearts of people of india as them. What did the magic for them to have reached such heights and exude such an aura?.. This is partly because of the mass popularity of the fields they are in. Cricket and movies are like bread and butter ( or rather daal n roti) to Indians and they appeal to us in no ordinary way. Hence Sachin's cover drives electrifies the crowd more than Vishwanad Anand's chess moves and A R Rahmans's melodies mesmerizes us more than M S Subblaxmi's classicals.
But equally importatnt is their unmatched passion towards their arts.Both Sachin and Rahman are gifted geniuses, yet possess a great passion for what they do. The passion which drives one through their highs and lows and gives the joy of pursuing an art for the love of it. Money, fame, ambition, nationalism and everything else are secondary. These are too mild tonics to achieve something pehenomenal like them. Sachin could not have started his career wishing he would score his 100th century one day or break every existing record on earth. If he did wish, I think he would not have achieved this feat. It is just the love for cricket which drives him through evrey innings and makes him perfect the way he work the ball into gaps adding beauty to the game and thus giving sheer joy to millions who watch him. It is also the love whcih has not faded a bit and urges him to continue playing even after 23 yrs of association with the game and achievieng everything one could possibly conceive of. And similarly Rahman's passion is evident in the hard work he is said to put in and the soulful music which comes out of it. His reclusiveness and simlplicity tells a lot about his priorities. Hence I believe the magic lies in finding out one's calling and devoting oneself to it completely. Real happiness is found in doing that. If one does that everyrthing else like money, fame and awards automatically start pouring in. A bit idealistically ,they are just the byproducts in one's pursuit of happiness. Finally these words of Ayn Rand defining happiness, I feel are true in every sense and are close to the values embodied by the duo I mentioned.
"Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy—a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but of using your mind’s fullest power, not the joy of faking reality, but of achieving values that are real, not the joy of a drunkard, but of a producer. Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions."
This is a small tribute to the two people I admire the most.
