Career Choices

  

 

The handicapped feeling of having to choose only one option form the hundreds available is what I define as this process of choosing a career. To be very honest it is a process of rejection rather than a process of selection because you do not select one option rather you reject all the other ones. But in India it gets even worst since choosing a career here is altogether a different story.

All our life decisions we make as Indians are all sadly dependent on the society by one way or the other. Factors like family pressure, orthodoxism, backwardness in thinking process all contribute to choosing careers having no relation to personal interest. And you know what disgusts me the most is that back here in India we have one more factor which is worst of them all - Gender. Being a girl in India also restricts your career choices other than the various injustice that already persist. It makes me pretty frustrated to hear that there are still many parts in India where being a girl cuts off more than half of your total career choices. This is how ridiculously orthodox and backward we Indians can get. No wonder we still are in the category of developing countries.

Coming back to the topic when I had to choose a career luckily I had choices in hand, how much ever limited but I did. As a 15 year old technically choices like RJs and DJs were more fascinating as career choices but then reality hit us hard and it was down to some orthodox choices for most of us. These choices that they show us during that time of choosing a career is just to show us that if you were born in some other foreign country maybe you could have thought of becoming all of that but then congratulations you're a Indian and we have restricted career options. Choose arts become a lawyer, chose commerce become a CA and choose science become a doctor or engineer was all I was given to choose from and lets be honest this applies to most of us. All said and done the career choice for me is done, sadly enough but yes its done and now I have a negligible chances to make a change since here in India it takes real guts to do that. Not because one is afraid to change but one is more concerned about society thinking of that person to be a loser that he was not able to do something he chose earlier. This is called the "log kya kahege" concept in India wherein you care more about society's thoughts on something than your own ones. Incredible India!

The part that makes me sad about this process is that it very rarely gives you satisfaction in the end. Its either frustration of choosing the wrong thing or the faith that the chosen thing gets them to the right destination. Many of us set up arbitrary targets in our heads such that in the next five to ten years where we picture ourselves. That rather is your destination but what about the path you chose. Setting up targets is cool but such distant targets that takes years to achieve is something I never do. I prefer smaller and more realistic targets everyday which I'm  sure that if I put in adequate efforts I can achieve. I have something in mind that is my distant target and in order to achieve a distant target one need to progress everyday a little. Merely thinking about the goals won't make them achievable. I've chosen a career in engineering for instance but my more preferred career option is something else. I do not go about telling everyone about it but only my close friends. Telling your close people about your distant goals helps a lot since they help you out at times to boost your morale and self belief pushing you towards your distant goal a step at a time and simultaneously take care of that your current condition does not worsen while the distant goals are being achieved.

So in hopes that someday this backwardness in society leaves my beautiful country and people put a foot forward and embrace unorthodox career options I'd like to move ahead and make sure we all make up careers less influenced by society but more by our personal interests so that we love what we do and do what we love. :D