Crisis of Existence: Chapter 2

Having said whatever I said in Crisis of Existence, the bitter truth of life however remains that economic stability and sustenance is to a great extent – if not to entire extent – the ultimate benchmark of success for the times we live in. Till the moment you do not ensure stable cash inflow from the activity that you prefer doing, it mostly is a passion and not a profession. To understand the fact better, try showing your wallet to your parents, narrating to them how happy you actually are after having made that small amount of money out of blogging. 

Sad, but the ultimate truth here is that till the time you are not good enough to make considerable money out of your aspirations they are absolutely of no good for the people who you need to prove yourself to. And hence you are obvious to face immense friction from them when you perform irregularly in your present position which no matter how much insignificant you consider to be. Say for instance, if you fail to score an ‘A’ in the upcoming test next week, it absolutely makes no sense to the world around you that you want to be a film maker and hence you did not score well. The world actually is least interested in hearing from you that you could not ensure an admission into a prestigious school to complete your basic academic education because you have been aspiring to be a photographer and have been dreaming all the time of shooting in exotic Himalayan destinations.

I do not wish to deny here the existence of N number of painters, photographers, filmmakers etc who have done exceptionally well in their trades while bypassing the basic academic curriculum. But I would at the same breathe like to put forward the point that formal educational curriculum helps furnish your personality and ensure greater success in whatever field you choose to pursue. Leaving aside all others and taking up your own example do you not realize how a different person you are today at the end of your graduate school? Looking back to your past don’t you realize that you would have been so much primitive as a person had you not walked this extra mile to take up this curriculum which you now consider as absolutely worthless? Had you not been exposed about poverty in India in your Social Study’s text book, would you still be able to unearth the otherwise hidden contradictions in the society and then represent them through your lens? The point that I wish to make here is that your aspirations to be in an alternate world do not necessarily justify your disregard and contempt for the world where you presently are. Walking through to live up your dreams is good but, jumping to them is somewhat less suggested.

Does overlooking your current state, skipping your classes, missing your lab works and roaming around on streets clicking photographs make you a photographer good enough to earn bread? Does following 100 food bloggers on Instagram and wanting to be one actually make you one good enough to be able to sustain it as an independent profession? The answer here is a disturbing No. To live up to your dreams you need skills. Skills which you accumulate through courage, patience, dedication and effort! It needs courage and an extant of patience that sees no end to hold on to dreams. In a world where parents, siblings, cousins, friends all in tandem want you to be ‘successful’ but seem to contradict you in the very meaning of ‘success’, all you have of your own are your dreams and aspirations. The are therefore special and you need to make efforts and wait for the opportune time to live them up. 

In the following part of this chapter and in the next chapter I shall make an attempt to lay down some of the strategies that I personally pursue most of the time. Although not a-pair-of- shoe-fitting-all kind of strategy I hope my experiences would be of some relevance in providing essential entry points and in turn facilitate the readers in forming newer range of strategies for themselves.

1.       

1. Noting them Down

Ideas can and have ruled the world since humans appeared for the first time on the face of this planet. You are a murderer equally as the society is every time you let your ideas die. It is heart wrenching to realize the quantum of ideas and dreams that are murdered each single day. 

Do you remember how much you wanted to be a software engineer (or something else) in your seventh standard because being one seemed to be so rewarding those days? You would carefully weave stories around your dream and form a delicate web of wonderful things fitting yourself at the centre. Do you then remember how ruthlessly you killed and walked over that dream of yours just because you wanted to be a doctor by the end of your 10^th? You never even for a moment sympathized for this dream of yours when you eventually gave up Mathematics for Biology in your 11^th. You went on killing dreams at every stage of your life. Didn’t you? Now that you badly want to be a photographer after having killed your previous dream of becoming someone else, do you realize how ruthlessly you will crush this pristine idea of yours very soon, because then you might want to be someone else?

The best way to escape the horrendous crime of butchering your dreams and ideas in this world of becoming and un-becoming is to note them down. Each idea of yours that gets overwritten is actually worth living for and hence calls for some engagement of your soul. Next Monday when you wake up aspiring to be a YouTuber but are in a real hurry to submit your biology project in class, make sure to scribble it down in a small diary. That day at school while making sketches at the back of your notebook when you aspire to be a calligrapher make sure to note that too before you want to be a food blogger by the evening while watching Fox Traveler over diner. At the end of two years from now when you flip the pages backward and find some pattern in what all you wanted to be all this time I am sure you will be pretty much close to what you actually want to be.

The essence of this small diary of yours is that on the pages of it you can be yourself. You can be a pilot, a farmer, a designer, a choreographer and what not! Most importantly no one judges you on its pages and you do not necessarily need to prove yourself each time you make an entry. If not for anything else make this diary just to name it something as cool as “Reflections of Myself”.

Thanks for coming back.

Next Chapter Due on Friday.