Enam Lone
Sometime back, I remember having had a chance to watch this renowned counsellor from India speak at IMPA. She had a distinct charm in her ideas regarding how we should choose the appropriate career for ourselves that should be based on our individual talents, availability of resources and prospective capital.
She spoke of the methods of properly cultivating and exploiting the different entrepreneurial opportunities that Kashmir presents to its inhabitants, at such a length that I felt she was more Kashmiri than us.
She talked of the unique geographical and agricultural wonders that we had, and of how we could employ these things to our advantage and to bypass our ever-growing unemployment rate, and thus excel. Her words were sheer logic. She talked absolute sense!
But as of today, if you go out and gauge the common mood among students seeking a particular career, you will be astonished to witness the large chunk of them who evidently took up the wrong course of future. There are those toiling hard to secure a place ‘exclusively’ in a medical college or an engineering college, when many of them could do much better in fields that suit them more, if only they had the proper counselling to recognize their abilities at the right time.
Most of the times, this ‘choice’ is more of a ‘familial dream’ thrust upon the poor student to be realized, than just a misjudgment on his/her part. They don’t seem to have a choice in this regard. For them, all other professions are made to look obsolete.
They are made to believe that only a doctor can make the family worthy of respect and status, and bring it great fortunes somehow. As such, when they fail to make an entry into this only ‘sacred’ service, their world is obviously shattered. They apparently earn disrespect of the society and wrath of their loved ones. And in the process, their actual abilities are bruised, at times beyond repair. As they say, “As a child my family’s menu consisted of two choices: take it or leave it.” Analogously, we are presented with two choices: be a doctor or be nothing.
I, personally, have met so many people, close friends as well as acquaintances, who surprise me with in-depth knowledge of subjects that they couldn’t pursue. Subjects that suited them perfectly well. Instead they somehow went on to pick up a profession that clearly misfits their talent. There is this one friend of mine who knows a doctor’s equivalent of human biology, physiology, anatomy and all that, and even medicine.
But just for some vague reasons he ended up studying engineering. And you can find countless similar examples out there.
It is this ‘misjudgment’ that is robbing our society of diversified and overall development. This bias towards a particular career is creating rifts and making our nation imbalanced. It is here that we lag behind the developed and fast developing nations of the world.
They effectively recognize, respect and nurture every single talent, however different. But Kashmiris are still obsessed with a select few professions, thus putting the societal balance in jeopardy.
Unfortunately, we lack proper facilities and counsellors here to assist us in choosing the right career. To add to the misery, immature parenting turns out to be the major cause of this issue. Parents, being a child’s best friends and counsellors, need to understand their ward’s capabilities and encourage them to make their own choices, at least when it comes to choosing a suitable career. Cracking CETs and PMTs is not the only good things left there. Everyone has a different forte and there is an urgent need to entertain this truth, and look out for a relevant genre that is guaranteed to reward one with excellence.
Let us not have any more misfits!
An engineer by profession, the author interests in literature and can be contacted at: www.facebook.com/the.lonely.sojourn
