By Rupam Gogoi:
This one is not meant to be inspirational. Neither is it meant to be detrimental, nor to give anyone a lesson on how or why to follow your dreams. At the end of the write up, this one is just a statement that says, “where you want to go, you should go.”
I am one of those star profiles you will find all around. By star I mean the kind of profiles which parents nag their sons for not having, or the kind of profiles which speak heights of success at every points they touch. I have the very stereotyped engineering plus an MBA in my stride, and since that does not alone suffice to make one a star profile these days, I am also one of those guys who has the distinction of doing everything right in his career and life, from interviews to getting the best of the jobs to starring in every exam out there to being at the heights of popularity in the cool college crowds (courtesy my extra curricular abilities) and so on.
I am also deemed to be rolling in luxuries because more often than not I used to have more money that I could spend than I needed to. In short the stereotyped star profile. Am I being pretentious and self indulgent? Well, not exactly. This is just how the perception of each and every part of your society gets stuck when it comes to you. Coming to ground reality:
– I have been skipping breakfasts for the last couple of days. A stomach trouble you say? Well not exactly. It’s just that the 50 bucks breakfast budget leaves me with nothing to pay for my commute to office for the next day.
– Terribly hungry today, I had to make do with a smaller portion of something even though my mind and the stomach was thinking something else, so that I could work my way through the next day, until I receive my pay.
– I struggle through each day thinking how can I make this work or will the future even have me in its wake.
The only reason I am having all the effects that a star profile is not expected to have is because I didn’t behave as the star profile was supposed to. I took the path less traveled by and did it pretty young too. Leaving aside a big fat pay and a bigger job profile in months, I jumped into the minnows of the industry, into the zone of start-ups and that is because with my own ideas of changing the ways of the world and in a move towards the same, moving into working with a start-up was just the next logical step for me.
Sadly, it was illogical for the world around and that’s precisely why the above mentioned repercussions.
But does that mean I should leave what I am doing and turn back to the more comfortable path more often traveled by? Nothing wrong with that path, because every path has its own merits but should I leave aside where I want to go, just because the speed breakers and since this is India, the potholes of the less traveled paths are more?
Well for me at least, it’s never ever!
I definitely have the thoughts of going back to the comforts every evening I come back from a hard day. But only to the point when I lie down to close my eyes to the day. Because once I do so, I again have the vision of where I want to go, and that again sets the path for crossing another day with my dreams.
This is the reason I am still on track to where I want to go. But this is also the point where most of the different strokes get lost, because while we dream of a vision, the speed breakers of the path more often than not get rid of the difference we wanted to create at the time we close our eyes to the day’s tired bruises and bumps.
At the end, as I started off, I have no lessons to give nor anything defining to say that will have you create the difference in what you dream of. It’s just that I have decided that, where I want to go, I will go because when I keep at it, I come to realize that no matter how much of a hardship I might be facing today, it would be less than the hardship I will face when I will let go of where I wanted to go, which would ultimately imply that the difference that I dreamed to create will never come to the fore, the problem I intended to make a difference to will never have been attempted to be solved.
Conclusively, this was not meant to be an advice (heck I have not accomplished anything till date, so I hardly qualify to be an advisor). This was also not meant to be a learning from my experiences routine (my experiences are still not that good to learn from). This was just one of the youth you will find all around trying to say that I have decided, where I want to go, I will go. It’s just up-to you to decide on the same and keep your journey on the path less traveled by on track. Your being on track might just solve something bigger for the society and step up life today towards the future instead of just living the days towards the future.
Therefore, where you want to go, you should go because that might be the journey which made all the difference when we move from today to tomorrow.