School was ordinarily a blissful state of mind until of course the report cards were send home. My dad would ask me “who is the topper in that subject?”, “and this one?”, “and this…?”, “ why can’t u even score 90% while the topper can score 95…”… I don’t know what happened to that poor guy (let us call him X to preserve anonymity) who was at the bottom of the class… what would his dad have told him?
He normally used to be around the 50-70 range (when normally the topper would be in the 90-100 range). It would have been difficult for him to have that quantum leap to catch up with the topper, unless he did some Business Process Reengineering… (but I guess he was too young for that kind of complex and abstract thoughts). So our X plods on through school barely managing to scrape into the next level, having developed a rhino hide from his dad’s charades rendering him impervious to the empty threats of his school teachers… while let us say I manage to put in that little extra effort (also called sacrifice) by squeezing time from my leisure activities into that bottomless pit called study time and somehow manage to close in on the topper by the time I finish school…
Now that hardwork really seemed to have paid off because I finished my engineering and am now a zombie software engineer earning enough money to give back to the government through the other routes of paying tax (after exhausting my income tax limit), with movie halls, restaurants, bike shops, music systems, cablewallas, booze and so on… the guy called X on the other hand, went to study in some college that not many had heard of and into a course that even fewer had heard of… he comes out and starts a creative agency, handling advertising and media planning for big corporates… intellectually challenged everyday as he has to have a plan to earn everyday, he is not a zombie, has better ways of staying energized and motivated than by just paying tax… and his paycheck is normally proportional to the amount of work he does. Now, there are a few zombies that are not completely zombified and so they tend to look at people like X and have mixed feelings – ranging from raving jealousy to unconditional sympathy depending if you are in the early stages of zombiehood or really advanced into it.
It is not just the money I am cribbing about here… it is something more. Let us say that there are people who enjoy what they are doing and people who don’t. It is not just about the money making part… it is something that they feel good that they are doing what they want to do, just because they want to do it.
It is a general observation that everyone is born with some sort of differentiating factor that is slightly more intangible than the finger-print-pattern or the dna. For a lack of better word let us call it “talent”… most people have the privilege of discovering it during their short lifetime, but a vast majority in this category tend to ignore it or play-down these urges to exhibit their natural skills… (now skills is a different meaning in which it can be acquired through years of practice, hence the word natural here). The tendency normally arises from what is normally the peer pressure or even sheer pressure… blame it on parents, teachers, society, friends, media, money, Gandhi, Hitler, tobacco, alcohol, GOD, destiny, Disney… wotever… the fact remains that playing it down has helped it become a vestigial organ like the appendix, which when can take it no longer causes the greatest pain when leaving you…
Sometime back I saw an ad with the caption “the doctor who killed the photographer”… just because the guy went on to become a doc by giving up on his passion for photography, it does not mean that he is a bad doc or a quack. He is a good one, but he probably lacks the zeal in his work… maybe he comes home irritated at having to do something that he does not want to do… or maybe he feels that he is not able to do something that he wants to do… or maybe just a little nagging thought that he keeps feeling that he would have been happier as a photographer…
There are a lot of success stories that I have seen among my friends… almost all that have come about with a great deal of sacrifice, with just a handful that took the path shown by their heart… there was this passionate cricket captain who could score centuries and bowl faster than anyone with deadly aim with dreams of making it to the Indian team… but he had to give it all up for a traditional parents wished engineering and MS abroad… then there is this athlete who wanted to make it to the Olympics, but was made to sit in the same year twice because his teacher felt he was not ready to move yet unless he focused on his studies too… then there was this guitar player who would call himself a rock-star… now everyone else calls him a doctor… then this singer, who is now a highly paid banker, just because her dad was one… then there was this guy amazing at dramatics, but who cares… he now sells soap and the only dramatics he can ever practice is to tell the ugly housewife, how much she would glow like aishwarya rai with a straight and honest face… not even the son of the engineering college director was spared of the software bug – he who could actually make ARR awe at the ability with which he could reproduce his magical music… and I can just go on… most of them in the software business as that is the booming sector for the Indian economy right now… maybe they are all true Indians, putting the nation before the self…
Maybe I should have worked myself in the opposite direction to catch up with the guy at the bottom of the class… maybe I should have ignored my parent’s ambitions for me… maybe I should have stubbornly refused the amazing salary offered to me upon my graduation… but maybe I am not in a bad situation after all… the world probably needs my skills more than my talent… maybe my skills would give me a better standard of living that my talent can only give in my dreams… maybe my brain is right and my heart is being stupid…
The generalization here is not that mediocre performers normally end up being the greatest achievers… statistics do tend to prove that, and more and more such kind of misfits are proving the society wrong…if it hadn’t been for them we would not be having stuff from windows to relativity theories… there are some high achievers who do make it big… the point here is how many of these high achievers tend to fall prey to social pressures to do what others expect them to do or just follow the herd… they should realize that it pays to unbelong and these mavericks are the actual change makers…
To all who have missed the train of opportunity and are lost in the own quagmire of disappointment at what they have become… there maybe justifiable reasons to what has happened and probably have no regrets… maybe just that small itch that we can scratch away… or hire some one to scratch it away…
