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Whose life is it anyway?

So how many of us remember the age old saying that started like this “Beta _____ mein mehnat kar lo …aage future secured hai!” Although, fortunately for me, I wasn’t put up to such a situation, I have pretty much heard most of my friends’ parents, relatives etc. using the above quote almost as if under a spell or an enchantment! The “_____” usually makes its first appearance in the form of Class X…and then starts the never ending cycle…Class XII, IIT/PMT…MTech/MS/MBA/CA/CS…IAS and so on till the child forgets to take his own decisions and becomes a product which is a mixture of what people in his/her surroundings want him to be. I know this topic is cliched and there would be loads of experts out there who would have given enough thoughts and discussions to it in a much more detailed manner, but today I just felt I needed to express because of this being the same story everywhere (so, in essence, this is my first article and I am not that great a writer, hence,please pardon me if I make mistakes or am not upto the desired standards ? )

So I could hear them speak volumes about innovation, creativity etc. which their child is learning in their school (till std VIII), but the moment he enters Std IX, the lectures start…”Next year is your board, std IX is your base for it..now stop playing, study more, forget playing in this time etc. this is the time when you make your career (which essentially would mean getting high marks in boards so that you are eligible to take the fancied stream of Science in Std XI as doctors and engineers, supposedly, are the only two professions worth pursuing in India). The same people would happily watch “Indian Idol, India’s got talent, Little champs” etc. and talk candidly saying “see how talented kids have become these days!” unknowingly killing the talent that might actually be in their own yard…unknowingly making us lose out another Sachin Tendulkar, Lata Mangeshkar, Yash Johar, Prabhudeva, A R Rehman and the like. We are a greater than 1 Billion population reserve, how can we still be so bankrupt in our ideas? How can we still be so modern in adopting a lifestyle and yet be caught up in the age old unbelievably orthodox preconceived notions?

And the real part comes in the time of results.Those relatives who couldn’t have cared less for the entire year are suddenly the first interrogators for the child. If a child gets good marks, he is treated for a few days like “the best son/daughter” to again get into the next stage of this vicious cycle. However, heavens forbid,if the child gets a comparatively lower grade (these days I am astounded to see even 90% not considered that well by so many people!), then there would be discussions ” Wo Sharmaji ka ladka hai…aapne dekha…97% leke aaya!”, “Arey wo Gokhale ki ladki bhi toh 98% laayi hai!” and then the child would come into the picture “Aur in mahashay ko dekho, bas khel kud se fursat mile tab padhai karenge na!, Jab dekho video game khelne baith jaate hai, ya Computer pe lage rehte hain, ya cricket khelne chale jaate hain! Seekho kuch in se, apni life nahi toh kaise banaoge?”. The 16 year old, not even an adult as yet, goes through probably the worse trauma of his life and either kills his personality (mostly his hobbies, thereby his true identity, all set to become another rat in the big Indian rat race) or, in an overwhelmingly large no of cases these days, himself!

The cycle repeats and the process slowly starts filtering out over the years in various stages (XII, UG, PG, Civil services…) the “creme da la creme” of the country based mostly on aptitude/biology/mugging power! If you are in it, Great! you were the perfect Indian kid to have been born and the other 99.8 % children..if only you could study a bit more! “Hum toh pehle he kehte the, beta padhlo, par tum sunte he kaha the,ab bhugto!” So what does the child belonging to the 99.8%, who surprisingly, is now a 25 year old adult, do with his life?

I heard the following from a famous foreign personality in an interview – ” If i were to give a question with two choices A and B to the entire world population, 99% of the Indians would give the choice B – the correct choice on paper! which is great in theory, but almost everyone of them will miss out to think of a “choice C” – the unsaid, innovative and out of the box option! Indians are trained to be highly efficient workers,which is a great thing to do, but a billion strong nation should also bear the responsibility to cater innovators/inventors/artisans to this world too!”

Why is it that with such demographic dividend we are not in a position to produce 11 world level playing footballers?, Why is it that most patents/research publications still don’t feature students from IIT/IIM when their counterparts in Harward/MIT etc. could replicate this at an amazingly frequent succession? The problem is, that an Indian kid, in most of the cases, doesn’t live a life of his own! His life is a reflection of what his parents/relatives/neighbors think only to result in a total chaos and cluelessness when his time to make his choices have long gone! No matter how hard he may try to live up to their expectations, he would fail and then would expect his kid to do what he couldn’t in the same never ending cycle… So that brings me to the title…”Whose life is it anyway?”

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