There's a silent surrender to the drudgery of life. The dreams you once had are now packed and sealed...never to be opened in the portals of your "hallowed" workplace. You see your worst fears coming true day after day. A realization grows on you every single moment you spend at your desk. You are about to submit your desires, your interests and your love for an umpteen number of things just because waking up every morning, stepping into your leather shoes and following the daily routine of attending work is what evokes a mild sense of respect about being employed. It guarantees a paycheck every month to give you a false assurance about your present and about your future that's as hazy as your expectations at work. You retire your day as a tired, tortured, timid individual who has been enslaved by the corporate lifestyle leaving little or no time for yourself or to realize your dreams long cherished. At different points in the day in different ways for different reasons you wish you were doing something 'different'.
You didn't spend all those years in college getting inspired by success stories to assume a meaningless existence. You didn't yearn to grow up only to slaughter your notions of freedom and individuality at the altar of financial security and social acceptance. How many times have you used the word 'hate' before you began work? How many times have you woken up in the morning with nothing to look forward to before you began work? How many times have you wanted to break free? You have survived the toughest of all rules, the stringent of all laws, justified the hardest of all restrictions imposed. But today, your mind is not ready for this. A mind that was built to be creative feels straitjacketed at a place that has little to offer in terms of creativity. It feels sapped due to lack of an intellectually simulating environment. It needs a place to breathe and feel alive again.
To be stuck in the wrong job is a slap on the face of a well qualified individual. A tighter one on that of an MBA. Now how many of those lakhs of MBA aspirants really hit the nail on the head? As a proud holder of a management degree, you realize you are not just fortunate but also worthy... a lot more than the present situation forces you to believe. You cannot forfeit your dreams and aspirations thinking the world is too small a place and it will arrange your tryst with opportunities. You need to breed them. The least a good educational degree offers you is the power to think beyond the limits of the obvious. The one thing it never teaches you is to be brave. It never teaches you to take a detour in your career to follow what you know you are naturally good at. Instead it nestles you under the comfortable blanket of all your educational degrees and certificates, and ushers you on a path that has been tried and tested by the educated and qualified strata of the society. The question is how far will this path take you? Sooner or later any sane person who has not sold his dreams during his ascent on the corporate ladder will be left with an emptiness inside of him. An emptiness that will bite him hard as he stands on one of the rungs of the same ladder, more often than not not the highest one, as his looks back and counts the years that he has lost after having renounced his dreams to conventional wisdom.
Sometimes workplaces demand a certain level of dumbness. While this doesn't come naturally in the first instance, you get accustomed to doing things the dumb way, and over time is seeps into your blood and then you become comfortably dumb in your own frame. This transition from being someone who questions dumb behaviour to someone who sets higher standards of dumb behaviour sometimes goes unnoticed by the eyes of the 'achiever'. This achiever is too far engaged in a chase for the higher and the fatter to realize the sudden increase in his DQ or Dumbness Quotient.
Remember it's never too late to start and it's never to early to give up on things that don't matter. Remember that every person you know has the same fears as you do, and that they don't turn true so easily if you only try not to let them turn true. Remember that faith can keep you alive but hardwork can give you a second life. Remember that you might have the worst job in the world but you might be the lucky chap to have the best person in your arms. Remember that person is here to stay with you forever, through good jobs, bad jobs and no job. Remember to appreciate the finer things in life when you suddenly feel crushed under hammering thoughts. Remember life isn't that bad afterall. Remember that as much as you would like to curse your luck and blame your destiny, there are better explanations of why something went wrong. Take life the way it comes, one step at a time and live each moment - good or bad - to the fullest. Such moments build memories, create experiences, shape your life in a countless different ways and paint it in a thousand myriad shades lending it a brilliant uniqueness. A uniquness that's you!
Life is perfect, only when you think it is or when you don't think at all.
2 comments:
Siddhesh said...
Beautiful post Shilpa!!
Agree with it completely.
EggHe/\D said...
Comfortably dumb :) that should be the "coup de grace".
Lovely use of words that does not jitter while reading.