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Monday, April 5, 2010

Three idiots or We idiots?

Aamir Khan, RajKumar Hirani and VidhuVinod Chopra garnered all the praise and accolades for the hit movie of 2009 '3 Idiots'. A movie made with a lot of heart and as any other movie from Mr.Hirani a lot of melodrama and a genuine social message. Well the social message part is where i am getting into. Movie basically says one must follow his/her heart and set goals which would keep him happy forever rather than seeking goals set by your parents and the society in general. Also it takes a dig at our educational system where we create a lot of 'blind followers' where in we must create 'free thinkers'. Thats when i gave a hard thought on why the heck am I a Software Engineer. Where in i should have followed my heart to become a '????????' Well i have no idea what i could have become not that still i can't. Time for a flash back.

In my childhood i wanted to become a pilot as i used to look at my dad in Airforce uniform and felt very proud about it. Though i later realised he was a field officer and never flew a jet. Someday i heard my grandfather boasting about Rajiv Gandhi to his drinking mates. Being a pakka congresswaalah he spoke in great regards about our then Prime Minister. That year in my class i proclaimed 'I wanna be the PM of my country' in some 'What do you want to be ??(timepass session)' conducted by our Princepal. Years went by and my love to sports kept increasing by leaps and bounds which made me think 'i should be a football player like Baggio or a cricketer like Cairns'. I thought for a few months 'this is it' a few heroics at local matches made me think am the king at sports. But once i started playing at different places around school and district tournaments common sense prevailed. And a one on one discussion wit my good friend Ramakrishnan cleared my head. His analogy was that 'You need a lot of contacts and hold to excel in sports or you need genuine talent unluckily we dont have both and we cant risk our lives for a non-existing future'. We were just 16 or 17 but i was amazed by his incisive lecture. So then again here we go back to square one.

After being rejected by National Defense Academy i have no other options left other than becoming an Engineer. Luckily all my friends were good at Science and Maths so i kinda studied with them moreover i couldn't have asked for a better group of teachers who taught me in Class XI and XII. Somehow i scraped through engineering entrance and thought of engineering as a backup plan. After 1 more year i'll give another try to NDA or will prepare for  IAS (lol). But the moment i set foot on NSS College of Engineering i was owned by it. There are some places you fall in love with the moment you set foot there, well my college was that for me. And then i had to do something with my life after engineering. I was good at computers (not very good) and a bit more at writing. I gave a few tries to write a book on something but lack of ideas and drive purged that vision as well. So computers it is and here i am with leading software company of India.

Moral of my idiotic story and many others who dont belong to the '3 idiots' category is that though we see a 1000 options at various moments of our life we cannot help ourselves by not taking the easy escape route and its funny many call it 'fate'. To become a 3 idiot one needs a lot of attitude, courage, foresight and a bit of luck. Not to forget the risk of ending up empty handed after all this. But the route which we take is a safe play, minimal-risk-maximum-fortune-wala one. And above all it fits like a 'T' into our Middle Class existence. So to all the 'We' idiots please do not have qualms on what ever you do and who ever you are today. Bolo 'All iz Well'.

'Give me some sunshine
Give me some rain,
Give me another chance,
I wanna grow up once again..(yea!! probably to take the same turns yet again in life)

2 comments:

Dhanya Pranab said...

right said ur owner... no comments !!!! tho bolo..ALL IZZZ WELLL :)

Sreejit said...

You are right, probably I also feel so many times, that most of our ambitions or what do u want to be in your life, derives from parental and peer pressure as to what is the best. I remember most of my friends saying that they wanted to be a doctor or an engineer. Although when I was very small, I wanted to be a Police Inspector. :)

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