As I headed towards the senior classes and the end of my schooling, a lot of pressure came on me from all circles for getting into a pro- fessional course. It was a time when getting into a professional course was made out to be the best and the only goal of a student's life. Everybody would try to pull you and direct you into different directions and usually successfully too. I wanted to do so many things in my life. Picking up one or dedicating my entire life to one
seemed like a bad idea most of the time. One could aim to become a doctor or an engineer or join the army as an offi cer. Other careers meant more years of study and an uncertain future. A career in the corporate world wasn’t a common choice then and getting a job wasn’t easy. Suddenly I found myself faced with so much pressure to decide the goal of my life and make a career choice that I wanted to break free.
As a child I had got used to making my choices to suit other people’s expectations from me, the good child that I wanted to be. This pressure really got to me. It made me make choices I did not want to make. In fact it was others who were making the choices for me. When the choices were being made by others all factors were not being taken into consideration. It was I who was better aware of my interests and abilities. Others were not. Having been a sportsman I had had to deal with successes and failures in the past. I knew for sure that success was improbable if not impossible with such an unclear vision. I wanted to do things with defi niteness and certainty but no one was letting me do that. It was also a time when I had started thinking about ‘life’ and there were so many things to think about and so much to do. It was an analytical approach that had made me improve my performance in sports and other academic and non-academic fi elds. I started adopting an analytic approach to life too. However, I did not have enough time. With the school-fi nal board exams approaching, there was a sense of urgency to choose a career path.
Answers were needed and there weren’t any. I was at a point in time when I could look back at life and also look forward to it. It was one of the most crucial thresholds in my life, not only in terms of career choices but also regarding personal choices I would be required to make. I wanted to grow as a person. I wanted to get away from home and face the real world. Like most others of my age, I also wanted to do something meaningful with my life. But would I be able to?
Above all, I didn’t even know what I wanted with my life. I had gone through my schooling, or rather my schooling had taken me through it very spontaneously; and now the time, situation and people were throwing options at me with a sense of extreme urgency. They were not giving me the time to think. Yes, as a child, I had dreamt of being a teacher, an army offi cer, a doctor, an engineer and an umpteen number of other things but they were dreams with a dreamy, laid- back mindset. I enjoyed day-dreaming about what all I would do in each case. But here I was now, in the real world, with an urgent need to choose one option and dedicate my life to it.
During those times, to become a doctor or an engineer was con- sidered to be the best career option and almost every child would be forced in that direction. Now everybody cannot become an engineer or a doctor but no one seemed to understand that. And the comedy of errors was when you were expected to try for both. It all boiled down to the pressure of the expectations, the need for acceptance and appreciation, your own dreams of life and the tension arising out of the need to be able to take the right decision. It was the toughest of times for me.
As per my mindset, I wanted to do everything and anything only with perfect defi niteness. I did not like uncertainty. It was not like ‘I want to become something and let me try and see if I can become that’. It was like ‘If I want to become something, I would become that come what may. But I was sure being a doctor wasn’t what I wanted at that point of time in my life. I was studying botany, zoology and chemistry to become a doctor; something I actually didn’t want to do. I was not being able to pay attention to mathematics which I had taken because of pressure, since it was considered an important subject. Decisions taken then were not out of my free will but under pressure or as a compromise. As a result, I was in a complete mess.
Mathematics had been my personal success story. As a child who was considered dumb, my being good in mathematics was proof to me that I wasn’t dumb. However, not getting infl uenced by others in taking decisions was something I hadn’t learnt at all. I needed acceptance and that meant compromises. The result for the fi nal year of schooling (and the national, centrally conducted board exam) came out. I had scored a dismal 54% in medical-related subjects and I had failed in mathematics. The last and fi nal exams of my schooling, and there I was—a failure. In a moment, the world that I had been creating brick by brick, moment by moment, step by step, came crashing down. I had failed when and where success was needed the most. I, the dumb child, had fi nally, as expected, proved dumb. It seemed like a situation of no recovery. I knew I was not dumb. I could do anything that anyone else could but with such a failure in my hand, who would believe me now?
It was a dark, morose and silent evening as I sat alone on the steps of my house looking at the road ahead going and turning around the corner and the open ground in front. At seventeen, I was at the end of nowhere. I had been brought back to square one. Would I give up? There was no way one could better a board exam result in the fi nal year. After contemplating for a long while with closed eyes, I decided that I would not let anything come in between me and what I wanted to do with my life. I had committed a mistake by not taking my own decisions at this crucial phase of my life. My career, the choice of my subjects, should have been my decision. At that minute, I decided it would be so from now on. This was a time I had to keep my utmost calm, focus and patience if at all I wanted to come out of this situ- ation. It was sports that had taught me to be calm and focused in toughest times. I went in and wore my running shoes and went for a long run into the night.