RUN OR STAY?

So naïve of me to have thought I escaped the rat race when I made my career choice. But I guess there really is no escaping it. I really like academic competition. But I hate having to impress someone, and forever trying to up others in order to land a job. Placement time is the time you really forget why you originally chose to do what you are doing. Everyone around you is in a frenzy – preparing, discussing, plotting – all of that, to land a job. Just any job. And doing all that not knowing why exactly you want the job. Is it the money? Not to everyone, its not. For most, it is just something. All those lofty ideals you started out with just fly out of the window, as you are caught up in all the paranoia around you.  

This is such a bad year to graduate. With so few options, the paranoia is sharpened, and so is the competition. And when you tell your mother you are just disgusted with this whole concept of running the race with everyone else, trying hard to sell yourself and trying to seem just a notch better than the others, she thinks you have no aspirations. And you know that you have already disappointed her enough with your choice of career, and your almost-absolutely disregarding attitude towards money. She has deemed you a lost case. So you know, there is a sense of guilt. There are little ways by which you can appease her – at least appearing for all the placement tests, for instance.

 

I wish there was a way by which you can lead life on your own terms, without having to conform, without having to do things others are doing. I know there is. I wish you didn’t have to buckle to pressure and try to conform. I wish I could just travel and write, (and make money, for Amma’s sake). I wish I could choose to do what I want to do, and be good at it. I wish I could just not write a CV, extolling my achievements and trying to seem like the perfect candidate for the job. But I do have to write a CV – but the least I can do, is not sound pompous, which I think I have managed. 

 

But as I sit here looking at my CV, wondering if it comes across as a little TOO lacklustre, despite the presence of some achievements and strengths I know I possess, I feel like there is someone standing apart from this rat race, in the stands, and laughing at me. I want to be that person.

 

Running away is not always cowardly. Sometimes, it is the most courageous thing to do.  

 

 

Update: I have been placed. And I sort of get to travel and write.

THE PSYCHE OF A HYPOCHONDRIAC

The worst thing a doc can do to you is to show you pictures of your own insides. After a painful 20 minute examination of my retina, that involved the flashing of a light with the power of a 100 candels (or whatever), the vitro-retinal-jvhoehrbielk specialist subject me to images of my own eye to tell me that there was some degeneration that needs a laser surgery to be set right. (It was then that I realized that my only vanity, in reality looked so yeww, not unlike that little bloodshot glob stored in some preservative fluid in some gory movie I saw ages ago, that I wouldn’t believe was an eye  – the pictures in the Class 8 science textbook notwithstanding; those weren’t pictures of MY eye. What was I thinking? Concentric rings in luminous browns and blacks, an artistic masterpiece?) I half suspect that the degeneration was in fact caused by that damned light he flashed in my eyes, causing me to see these psychedelic images of my own nerve ends floating about in the foreground wherever I looked.

 

Anyway, point is I need one surgery, to correct my retina, to make sure it doesn’t develop a hole and allow the vitreous gel to flow into the hole to cause retina detachment and eventually, blindness, and then another, to correct my grossly large back-of-the-eye, caused by chronic myopia, all in the space of a month, that also has on its agenda, numerous visits to the tailor, (induced by) 2 weddings to attend, a million outings, possibly the start of my post graduate course preceded by orientation, Dasavathaaram (for the first time, and consequent times), (all of which result in) loads of excitement and emotional upheavals (Yes, I cry at weddings and at movies, jump with joy when I meet my extended family, get all fiercely passionate when I start doing something new, gush when my clothes are right, louwe with all my heart and exaggerate a great deal.) No way do I want these “procedures” to try and spoil ANY of this for me, no.

 

Added to this, Manni chooses today to tell me about an episode of “Dr. Sun News” she caught, that had the visiting worldly wise doc telling someone on the phone that eating ice caused a great deal of acidity to begin with, that would eventually end in inability to digest anything, and hence chronic loose motions. Worse, she had to tell Amma all of this, before the phone was passed on to me with a See?-I-told-you-so look. The second I put down the phone, Amma resumes her diatribe about my carelessness, about how ugly I look, my spotty skin, my sparse mane, and about how youth is on my side and salvaging what little I do have.  Now, so much medical advice in a day does not make me exasperated, it instead conjures up these images in my mind’s eye – a maaneram Dalmatian-human cross, with cat whiskers stuck to its scalp with an adhesive about as potent as post office gondhu and a bright fluorescent orange eye patch over its right eye, walking into class on her first day of college, dreading loose bowels. And these stupid, damned green-blue-red-orange nerve endings in the foreground! Go away! Shoo!