Friday, November 4, 2011

Do What You Love or Love What You Do !!!

Society is changing. Irrespective of the family background, people are free to explore any kind of work they like. Leaving some exceptions, there was a time in Hindu society when mason's son can only take up masonry work and the son of a king can not do anything other than ruling the inherited empire, but now there is no such binding ! General education, economic growth and many such parameters has provided an opportunity to discard this well established employment based division of the society. Though, I don't think that the original intention of such system was to divide people. instead, I think it was very well thought of work allocation to bring order in the society but like many other things, ever changing human nature has eroded the real mean of this system over the period of time. Anyways I am not an anthropologist or an expert on the subject of socio-economic history of India so let the experts decide the original intention of this system.

But I do think that the absence of such system and the separation of social and professional status has created a chaos in the mind of newly liberated ordinary people.People feel proud of what they have achieved but they seldom feel very happy about what they are doing and I think that's the reason why we see so much frustration in the society. Our cops are frustrated (so many incident where cops beat innocent people)  government employees are frustrated (just go to any random government office and talk with any employee, you will defiantly have a fun ! ) and even people working in private sectors are frustrated (killing family members committing suicide). The issue of doing what we love arises only because there are so many avenues to choose from and as it is said grass is always greener on the other side of the ground.

Do What You Love or Love What You Do; simple, right ? Like me,you also must have heard from some self proclaimed wise man preaching something like "life is too sort do what you really love doing etc etc". But I feel major part of our society is still not ready for this kind of wisdom. Because no child in our country is born free of burden. The burden of being "successful". If you try to move away from the herd and do what you love, chances are very high that you won't become successful or at least you won't fit in the worldly definition of success.

Even today the career of a child is mostly decided by parents or by some relatives who thinks that they have moral responsibility to rescue poor child from the abyss of ignorance and will give their useless advice which, in reality, they themselves won't follow. and believe me, life will become hell if you have an elder brother or someone in the family who has done something in some subject and is earning decently You and your parents will feel pressure from whole universe to take up that subject and make it big "like" him or her. It matters very less what your idea of success is and it doesn't really matter how well you sing or how much you love playing keyboard and really want to learn more and grow in that line. It all becomes mere childhood hobby if your elder brother is MCA ! the sole goal of your life would be to get  into computer science and if you couldn't make it (which is a crime in itself and be prepared to face criticism even from those people who doesn't know the difference between computer repair guy and a software engineer) you can settle for an electronics science and will end up soldering circuit boards instead of playing keyboard!

In earlier times there was no choice but to learn and grow in the family occupation, people generally used to love what they do, work was just one part of the life and people worked to live but now the situation is changing, we are facing the problem of plenty, we forgot the real purpose of life. Work has completely over taken our lives and we basically now live to work.

Ending with one of my most favorite quote;.
“Find a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” – Confucius


-Parikshit Gohil

Thursday, November 3, 2011

Revolution - 2020 by Chetan Bhagat

I used to think Chaten Bhagat novels as a good week-end read, but Revolution - 2020 is very disappointing . I couldn't read it beyond 200 pages, it is so boring and so predictable. I seriously believe, Chetan should stop writing novels and directly start writing movie scripts so that we can see it in 2-3 hour and save ourselves of two three days of reading.