An Encounter!

After a long gap it feels a bit jittery to sit & write another blog to be stacked on to my own blogging domain. Well all these days have not been easy on my part as quite a few things have happened in this period & a few other things didn’t happen. Of course the pujas punctuated this stretch of time & again I really can’t rank these pujas among the top few of my life. So what is this blog all about? Actually it is yet to be decided & maybe I’ll get a topic very soon………

In a nutshell this is how confused I’m these days. Sandwiched between my internal ‘social & mental’ problems & a certain other materialistic hiccups . In the last few days I have put on the thinking cap more often than not but sadly, could find no answers to my questions. However there’s absolutely no use writing about them.

Let’s talk about something that really struck me some days back! How often do we come across people who get into a work believing that it is the right choice for them & finally end up hating that same job like hell.
(No wonder my mind is filled up with more of such thoughts these days)
Not everyone is as unfortunate though, as they enjoy whatever they do. Some may believe that it’s a result of poor choice but I feel that there is still scope, for generation of interest in anything that we do, but that’s not an issue here anyway. So let’s get to the point. Recently my Kinetic Honda developed a few problems & so I had to take it to the garage where I had to sit for about 3 hours while it was being repaired. Meanwhile I also happened to overhear a discussion among 3 of the mechanics, all of whom were probably of my age group.

They started their talk about a new entrant into the garage. A lanky, fair, rustic looking guy of about 13-14 years. I was told that this boy was leaving school to join this garage as a helper & I also inferred that he was really interested in this job. His teacher(possibly of his village school) had come to leave him here & believe it or not this chap looked reasonably happy, at least in my teens I would never had fancied myself working in a garage in spite of the fact that I may have had hated studies more than this fellow. May be our little teenager was looking for some quick money or maybe he felt the girls in his village were too cold, working in a Kinetic Honda workshop would certainly help his cause!

Whatever the reason, he was going to join & these 3 ‘to be’ seniors of his were not in a mood to welcome him. Rather they seemed very skeptical about him as they felt the hands which are used to hold pens & notebooks would not be adroit enough to hold the wrench & hammer. Their skepticism appeared justified to an extent as it was quite evident that this naïve kid didn’t know much about the hardships of the job he was going to take up.

The senior most of these 3 started to talk how he came into this line. As per him he was forced by his family elders to do a lot of jobs which were not of his interest. He had to do cycling for 20-30 kms everyday to take things to different places for his father. Needless to say that no young boy of his age would have enjoyed such boring tasks. So he completed his matriculation & ran away from his home. After that he came to Bhubaneswar & after some struggle joined this place & enjoyed his job thoroughly, so much so that even when his father found him out & beat the pulp out of him, he was stubborn enough to stay here & defy his father. He continued his job well & never looked back. All this was his story which he recalled with a grin in his face, but it soon faded off as he concluded, “…….and now when I want to go back to see my family members, my mother, my siblings & all, I can’t go back, the workload doesn’t permit me anymore”. What an irony, I thought. As per this man, his dream life comprised of a monthly salary of 6-7 thousands with the freedom to visit his home more frequently than he could do here. ‘Modest’, I felt.

Another of the 3 then began his story. He had not been as passionate as his colleague and his story was the opposite. He was forced into this job by his parents to earn money for the family. As a kid he hated this job & to work as a helper to the senior mechanics never suited him. Working like a donkey all day with no credit to ur name hardly gives you any satisfaction. So he also fled but just in the opposite direction as that of his senior friend. He said he used to run home time & again only to be thrown back into this hell, till he realized that this was his destiny & accepted his fate. He appeared to be stronger now & didn’t even have any modest dream, at least he didn’t reveal them.

Both of them tried to include me into their discussion as they realized that I was interested in it but I preferred keeping quiet about myself. Actually what would I have said, that I’ve got a job worth over 2lakhs pa & am still worried with my plight in the job market & want to do an MBA to get a job better than this & more of crap.
The real time discussion was an absolutely blunt one, boring for many. But it had really made a deep impact within me. Not that I have not known people of this kind earlier, but this encounter left me in a strange state of mind. At the end of the day it taught me some lessons. 1>happiness is highly relative 2>life is full of tempting mirages, the game is in avoiding them. And most importantly :- 3> Living is not a big thing, learning to live is.