How to dream

{\it DREAM: I am an egg. Here I sit, displayed neatly in a grid along
with my cronies, white shells gleaming. Buyers come, inspect the
shell, and smilingly I go into the bag of the first customer willing
to pay the market rate.}

How to choose an industry to join? It never ceases to surprise me how
little thought goes into this decision. How easy it is to go with the
flow, to sell oneself to the highest bidder! How little it matters who
we are, what our own personal dreams and aspirations might have been;
if we have a high GPA, we must try for Hindustan Lever! Is this
the behaviour of a graduate from an elite institution, one of India's
finest?

"If you don't know where you are going, you are not getting there,"
declares the title of a career-planning book. Living in a culture of
poverty, personal choice is a luxury we have long learned to live
without. Most decisions in our life were accidental; we got to know of
Tutorial X because uncle A recommended it so strongly, and had B's
cousin not showed up that fateful night perhaps I might have refreshed
my JEE and tried a change from Met into EE once more! All our lives we
are lulled into becoming spectators on the major decisions impacting
our lives. Keep all choices open, and go for the one that is the most
in demand - this seems to be the greatest hallmark of success. But the
one in greatest demand is often the one place that did not suit us,
and in one of the greatest tragedies of our age, we wind up joining a
department that we did not like, a firm we know little about, or now,
a career we have little interest in.

How can you make an informed decision? First we must consider the
object of this decision - yourself. Partly, our failure to decisively
affect our destinies is a failure to carefully look in the mirror.
Life is an endless stream of mirages - what we could have been, what
we were, what we are about to become. These are the dreams on which we
thrive, but from our earliest childhood we have seen so many of these
dreams extinguished that we do not have the confidence to dream any
more. But as elite graduates, among India's best, what prevents us
from dreaming? And dreams are important: "One man with a dream at
pleasure / Shall go forth and capture a crown / And three with a good
song's measure / Can trample a kingdom down." There is only one
criteria: it must be {\it your} dream, and not someone else's. Just
because everyone around you thinks of an IAS as a great career doesn't
mean {\it you} would do well in the IAS. On the other hand, if it is
IAS that you want to do, let no fool convince you that you will not be
able to clear it. This is the quality of powerful dreams. You clear
the decks, you burn the bridges, and you go all out or broke for your
dream. The thought that you may not succeed is impossible: at worst,
your goal will be transmuted into something similar, but something in
the right direction. The only way of building self-confidence is to
{\it try} again and again, until you {\it succeed}.

Of course the sooner you see all this, the better positioned you are
to achieve your dream. Call it your vision. How does one define it?
Just the same way one defines anything else: by hacking away at the
edges of the definition, by testing the various possibilities, and
emerging with the core.  Let us say, for argument's sake, that you
have decided to become an engineer. Is this a vision? Of course not -
how can a vision be this diffuse? What engineer, where, how long, and
then what? "What do you see?" Drona had asked the budding archers in
Mahabharata. "The bird," said Arjun. "And which part of the bird?" The
head. "What part of the head?" The forehead. "What part of the
forehead?" The centre. It is not easy but it {\it is} possible to
crystallize your personality, your upbringing, your identity all into
a single cohesive vision of what it is that you would wish to achieve
in life. It requires work. You must explore, investigate, gather
facts, talk to acquaintances, find out more. And you must do it {\it now},
and not later. By the time you wake up N years down the line, you
have already lost that many years! 

There is a role for accident in our lives. Of all the infinite actions
that are possible at any given event, we can choose but one. How can
we not be guided by serendipity? Nonetheless, we can help define the
boundaries of the search. We are free only to the extent that we can
guide our own destinies, and we owe it to ourselves to try. Once you
have made the decision, the infinite directions possible reduce to a
single direction, although you will soon discover an infinite
possibilities for exploring and developing this one direction.  But it
is now the {\it right} direction. Maybe as a child your father let you
sit on his lap while driving the treasured family car; maybe you have
a soft spot for automobiles. Your experiences at IIT have, for
arguments sake, whetted this fascination.  Perhaps you would like to
help design a car.  The first thing you must do is get {\it
information}. If your engineer uncle from Escorts lands up at your
cousin's wedding, corner him and talk to him at length. Visit the
company. Visit his friends. If your friends think you are obsessive
and anti-social, so be it. But you will find that most of the world is
more than willing to listen to you.  Scouring the business pages,
following up all the leads you get, poking around in your hometown,
you discover that no one designs cars in India, but that company X, or
let's say TELCO Pune, comes closest.  Also it fits your general notion
of not living in a really big, faceless city.

Now comes doubt. Why should TELCO take you? And if they didn't you
would land up with some godforsaken job, wouldn't you? And here is
Infosys, paying by the truckload, and taking people by the shipful.
Should you let this pass?  Let's go for the placement talk - what harm
is there anyhow.  It sounds reasonable and half the wing is going - so
let's go for the written test. Before you know it, the decisive moment
is crossed and you have sold yourself promiscuously to the first comer!

For the rest of your life, you idiot, you nincompoop, you XXX ... you
have become a software man, living in the huge faceless city of
Bombay, and fiddling with your car on the rare Sunday that you don't
have errands to run. And that is not me calling you names, that's {\it
you} of tomorrow throwing futile {\it galis} at the you of today!

{\it DREAM: I am an egg again. But what is this happening - this
yellow ooze - I am cracking up - my dream is turning into a hideous
nightmare - I am becoming an omlette, a mixup, a shapeless formless
jumble!} 

NEXT PART: How to achieve your dream