Saw 'Wake up Sid' a couple of days back. An admirable hindi movie by Ayan Mukherji. In case you haven't seen it yet, I would highly recommend it. It's a story of a man’s dynamic journey into self realization. About this man who has just given his final exams in college, and is pretty aimless in life. The beauty of it all is that he is totally unapologetic about it. He meets a girl and she asks what does he do and he replies 'Baap ke paise kharchta hoon!' (I spend my dad's money) and then she asks what do you plan to do going ahead and he goes 'Baap ke paise karchonga' (I will spend my dad's money). Father has a hugely successful business and he wants the protagonist to start working there but he finds it really boring. The movie unfolds to show his love for photography and with some help from his lady friend, he gets into that line of business professionally.
Now I'm not saying that living off your parents while you lame away your time is good or that he would have achieved all this so soon had his father and his friend not pushed him so much; but ultimately the bottom line is that he ended up doing something that he loves and not enter into something just to please others or to fulfill the expectations set on him by his family and friends. If a person decides that he is the happiest doing nothing very significant in life but is living within his own means, then I feel that the world should leave him alone.
In India, so many people enter the software industry, ever since the late 90s, just because it pays well and there are jobs in it. If you pick a hundred software engineers in India at random, and ask their opinion, almost eighty would say that would rather do something else, if they find something that is equally rewarding financially. And that is why working closely with so many in my eight years of professional life; I've come across so many people who are highly inefficient and actually bad at what they are doing. It has a lot to do with the economic conditions of the country too so I can't blame them entirely. In US, I've noticed that in general the people in IT are technically sounder. Probably because the general living standard of people is not bad for the ones who don't go to college and directly go to work. So, the people who do go for higher studies are the ones who actually love the field.
But the point is that so many of us lead a life doing something because we were pushed into it. And it is not only a case in ones professional life but also in every sphere of living. Another European movie I saw had this line that has stuck in my mind… 'You can change, don’t be content to merely survive... you must demand to live in a better world; not just dream about it!'
The society is very quick to judge what is wrong or right. We have a lot of pre-conceived notions about almost everything. Our moral-o-meter is set so rigidly on certain believes hammered into us since childhood that it takes a lot to break out of that boundary. People drift through a relationship for years just because it would bring bad name to their family. I agree that you need to work on a relationship but not give up happiness and joy of life forever for some social barriers.
Whatever you do, you can never please everyone. Something good for one person might be a totally prohibited for another. Say, like eating non-vegetarian. But that doesn't make eating non-vegetarian food is a bad thing. It is a belief and there is no right or wrong about it. So, we as a society need to learn to set the cords of socially acceptable behavior a little loose and as individuals we have to stand up. We need to stop judging and start acting. Stop judging others for what they are doing and categorizing people into slots, and acting towards our own happiness. We need to find those areas, fields and activities that interest us and bring us joy and stop following everything that the world thinks is good for us.
As a friend very aptly put it, 'Happy songs are composed with major chords, and sad songs are composed with minor chords, but minor chords can also make someone happy. It perhaps takes some maturity to understand this'.
