Life

I got home at 2.30am last night and got a serious flak from my parents for it, with very good reason though. There have been too many late nights in the past week or so. But last night was different, as the rest. A very good friend from my four years of engineering went back home to Gurgaon this morning and so we had to make last night a memory for this lifetime.

This gravity of this morning hit me like a brick in the face. We were a group of five and with two guys gone – one back home and the other posted in Cochin for his job, we’ve come down to three. It is then that I awoke to the reality that life is moving on. The selfish fiend that it is, it does not let the good times last. Maybe its giving us opportunities for more but till then, I guess, it will simply be toil and days off the calendar.

What got me thinking, and eventually writing this post, is the short heated conversation I had with my father this morning. Alike every other father he is concerned for me and so he said what he must. I understand. They want me to study further, work hard, become rich and famous, be ‘ambitious’. But I am ambitious. I will do everything I can to reach for those stars. But I am from a different school of thought. People termed me to be a rebel in college. It was not because I chose to oppose everything the system put before me but just that I refuse to look at things the way most others do – something they do out of habit. I do not blame them or lower their way of being, the system made them so. But there is nothing wrong in living life by one’s own ways. The purpose and ultimate goals of life still remain the same. I respect and acknowledge the fact that academics are vital to one’s growth and have become a necessity in today’s times. But I am of the belief that life is a better subject to learn and I am my best teacher. The future course of my life will be solely dependent on the way I choose to make it.

Today, on my way to work, I enjoyed an intriguing conversation with the rickshaw driver. He asked me about the recent news of ten boys getting into trouble with a ragging complaint filed against them. I explained to him the whole concept of ragging in college and where hostelite ragging crosses lines. Interestingly the topic then moved to him being critical of parents who make their children go through academic courses not out of choice but by sheer parental pressure. A 7th grade student in his neighbourhood committed suicide a week ago - thanks to this parental pressure. The poor boy had simply gotten poor marks. It was not like he failed or committed any crime; and yet his father beat him saying he has disgraced the family, he is a failure and that he is his parents’ biggest regret. A 12 year old does not have the mental capacity or maturity to comprehend any statement of the sort. The boy consumed domestic pesticide that night and didn’t wake up the next morning. He was their only child.

So who does one look at for a solution to bring to an end such happenings? The system, over decades of mindless brain-washing, has made people think and believe a certain way.

A recent Bollywood flick – 3 Idiots, has a sequence where a boy commits suicide because the system refuses to give him a second chance. The scene where they show his corpse hanging in his hostel room, has the words ‘I QUIT’ scratched on the wall. It is these words that shook me more than the sight of his lifeless body. Why does our society and system create these sort of circumstances when the only option left for the individual is to ‘quit’? Have people not heard of second chances? Have parents become so obsessed with ‘successful children’ that they forget their children are human?

Everyone has their own limits; and more than people realizing their own limitations, it is far more important that those, who are around and close to them, realize it. There is a world full of opportunities and a role for everyone to play. Let everyone choose his or her own role. Everybody cannot be ‘king’.