The choice of a profession
My grandson Shashank is in ClassXI ,going on to Class XII. This is the critical time when
children have to choose their profession. In our days the options were limited;
One naturally drifted towards a profession, either following the family
tradition or abiding by the wisdom of the elders. When it came to our children,
the youngsters had already started asserting themselves. We wanted them to
enter the civil service, but they were singularly unimpressed by their
experience of my life style. My daughter became an engineer MBA and my son a
cardiac surgeon.
Then came Bill Gates, Mark Zuckenburg and Steve Jabs
and being a school or college dropout became fashionable throughout the world.
In India, ‘Three Idiots’ represented the great divide. Parents became
apprehensive about imposing their career choices on their children; there was
always the implicit threat of suicide in the air.
Shashank at first plumped for commerce, then shifted
gear to history, then to international affairs. The latest bombshell he lobbed
at his parents was politics. When asked for a clarification he explained that
he did not mean good old “political science”, he wanted to join active
politics. My daughter almost fainted away.
Shashank was directed to discuss the matter with his
nanu (i.e. poor me). I had no intention of confronting youth power head on. I
only sought clarifications. When he said politics, what exactly did he mean?
Would he enter the rough and tumble of electoral politics, first in the municipal
ward, then graduating to higher positions of MLA, MP, Minister, Chief Minister
etc?
He was exceedingly mature for his age. His model was
Kanhaiya Kumar, the president of the Students] Union in Jawahar Lal Nehru University.He had studied his career graph
in depth. You had first to emerge as a student leader and then force the Govt.
to arrest you for sedition. This route appeared to be easy and replicable.
Kanhaiya’s recent career showed how a nonentity
could be catapulted overnight to the
status of a national celebrity, just because of a concentrated dose of
attention from the electronic and print media.
I must say that the young man had learnt his lessons
well .I wondered how he could be dissuaded from this calamitous course of
action .I reminded him of the special skills and background that successful
politicians had necessarily to boast of .
Kanhaiya Kumar hailed from a poor family of Bihar . Narinder Modi was a
Chaiwala’s son. Both spoke Hindi with great fluency ,with Modi having picked his
linguistic skills from his long stint as a R S S pracharak .
Did he not notice how Kanhaiya had been a fond
bed-fellow of undesirable elements like Maoist extremists and Kashmiri
separatists? Would Shashank fel comfortable with mouthing of anti-national
slogans of the kind shouted in the JNU
campus on 9th February?
Shashank would always be saddled by the overwhelming
burden of the patrician credentials of his parents and having been student of a
public school , his proficiency in the manipulation of the Hindi language was
nothing to boast of .
On top of it he would
have to locate his political career in the state of Karnataka of which he knew
very little . He would have to be a master of Kannad.
As our conversation proceeded, I could see that
Shashank’s initial enthusiasm for politics as a career had waned considerably
.Latest reports from Bengaluru indicate that Shashank might persuade himself to
take up something more classy like international affairs or inclusive politics as a subject of study .
For the
present, we are keeping our fingers crossed!
