A lost cause?

Imagine yourself running a marathon. You have practiced and trained hard for a very long time to give your best and come out as a winner in this. You have run half the distance and have built a comfortable lead over the others. You turn back to see some of them catching up on you and no others in your sight. The only thing that separates you and the finish line is your will. Would you finish the race or just stand still there and give up all of a sudden?

No, I am not talking about an actual running marathon here but, the 15-20 years that an individual spends in a quest to gain knowledge and use that as a tool to lead the rest of his life. In a way, all those years that we spend to get ourselves educated, beginning from a kindergarten to a degree college is nothing short of a marathon in its own way. From my perspective everybody who runs marathon is a winner. Yes, the person who finishes first might end up with some tangible reward but then, it takes sheer determination and an iron will to complete what you have started, doesn’t matter if you’re the last person to finish it.

But the society has a different point of view. No, you just cannot finish last in this race of getting yourself educated. Here everybody has to be at the top, no more and no less. This pressure has driven some of those participants to quit what they’ve started. Quitting a race is fine to some extent, one can always say that they will do better next time. But quitting everything by killing themselves (read suicide) is definitely not the way to go.

Unfortunately, there has been an alarming rise in the number of such cases among many students in today’s society. When I say students, it is inclusive of an 8th standard kid to 8th semester professional. They all succumb to the pressure of not living up to the expectations of the people around them. The students are forced to believe that only a good percentage in school opens up an opportunity to get into a good college and a good percentage of marks there will give them a chance to get a good degree and there by a good job with a handsome pay and a beautiful wife with a couple of kids.

Many a times people don’t understand the consequences of pushing someone too far. Be it a parent, a relative or someone around, pushing an individual too far to perform better every single time might not always work in their favor. It might also have a negative impact on the individual. More often than not the pressure of not delivering will get to them and how they deal with that differs from one person to another. While some might cope up with that pressure, some others would be forced to take the extreme step, which is really saddening.

The trend of getting a good degree and landing a good job with big fat pay check has convinced the students that there is nothing else in the entire world that they are allowed to do after college and over time if they don’t succeed in their attempt at this ridiculous notion of the society they are forced to think that it is the end of their world and eventually they take the life out of themselves. And with that, all those years of hard work, the amount of time and money spent and relationships built will all be of no meaning.

Whether it is the fault of the individual or that of the society is always debatable. But, I hope to see a day where people understand that being successful and minting money is not the sole purpose of education and that there are so many paths that one can choose to pursue their career depending on their choice and also to respect that choice made by an individual and support them rather than criticizing them for not being like their neighbor’s son or daughter.

P.S: No offense intended. This post is not directed at any particular individual. Those of you who feel against this article have my apologies.

More to come. Keep watching this space:)

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