The Road Not Taken..

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

What has been the aim of life of most people in my generation? There was a well-defined path in the career front paved by people who were older and we had to take the same. The reasons being:

    1) It lead to a safe life style, a proven one with less chances to falter.

    2) We were unaware of any other path or had very less knowledge to boldly venture into        one.

    3) Our parents were afraid that if we do not take the used path, we may end screwing up        our lives.

    4) Parents did not have the time or money to support our dreams.
    5) Parents were unsure of how a job like musician or writer or instrumentalist could help          make a living. 

    What has our path been (at least to most of us)? We had to score high in our Higher Secondary Board exams as well as any and every entrance exam that made us eligible to join a Engineering course. Then choose a specialization of our liking (in Engineering, of course) if we had the privilege to do so (this is influenced by many factors like dream of our parents, cut-off marks we got, whatever course is available after all quota reservation, etc., ) or go with the one we were able to select at the counselling session. Score 70% and above in all Engineering papers so that we were eligible to sit for campus recruitment, fail in one or two aptitude tests, practice hard and crack the third one, clear interviews and wait eagerly for our names to be announced by the company HR in the selected list. 

    Many of you must be remembering how elated we felt at that moment, name getting called out in the selected list!! Woah, as if the whole world is under our feet! :D

    Join our first jobs with great excitement, work hard in training sessions, harder in the project we are assigned to, earn the goodwill of manager, start trying for an on-site opportunity and get one (this depends on many factors as well, let's not dig deep), work double the time we worked off-shore, get frustrated, switch companies, get a PR and citizenship of whichever country we work in, buy property, get married, indebted, think that we have got settled and be happy as if we have achieved everything in life just because "that" anna or akka did the same. 

    That had been our benchmark for at least a decade.

    Oh yea, there are ones who realized mid-way, "Oops, this was not what I wanted to do with my life" and started pursuing their passion - but this, at least in my generation, is a very less percentage, though this is on the increase - thanks to social networking, internet and ubiquitous computing.

    And there are others who want to pursue their passion but cannot really do so as they are afraid of losing monthly income, they are so indebted that they cannot afford to lose job even for a month!! 

    And there are also the ones who think that they were born to live the way described above and be happy and content with it - I respect you guys and would love to be like you, just that there is a problem with this heck of a mind of mine.. :)

    Looking back, I wonder what did I want to do with my life when I was 10, 12 and 15 years old and what I am doing now - My path has definitely got deviated from dreams of becoming a teacher, writer and architect to what I am today because of one of the reasons listed above. I am unable to get back to my dreams mid-way as I belong to the category of indebted.. 

However, there is still hope. I can still support someone who wants to live their dream - that someone will be my child. Yes, we can definitely support our next generation to live their dream life and help them realize and unleash their potential to the maximum possible extent. I am happy to see that kids of today do not have the "Following" mentality, they are more original and independent. With access to a whole world of information and contacts at the click of a mouse, the current generation possess what it takes to realize it's dreams and also make a living out of it. 

I would like to quote here my uncle's daughter Malini Venkatraman. She is a budding writer. Her imagination and creativity at the age of 8 is very mature. The flow of thought in her stories and the language amazes me. She is an example of how talented our next generation is. Her parents are very supportive of her and would still support her when she wants to take up writing or arts for a career. I am sure, this will happen with many kids of our generation. 

The next generation will have no regrets about the road they were unable to take because there will be none. 

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
     I took the one less traveled by,
     And that has made all the difference.