ON WORK, SERVICE, AND LIFE…

Most of the waking hours of an average human life are spent delivering a vocation of our choice and often not our choice. Life in the 21st century has been one long tryst with habitual monotony. We fall into the patterns that society has built around us and move through the grooves and the much-walked pathways of others, as they seem to be the only clearing in the forest. As we wander through those terrains, life is still structured in ways we have no control over as many a quotidian task has been thrust upon us, as if we have no choice.

- Rajesh Nair

It starts with the race at schools in the very portal of education we enter for the first time. The curriculum has decided that we need a dose of multiple subjects, languages, and the know-how of the world and the machinery of the world. We are also led to basic skills of reading and learning – and serendipitously we also learn to ‘think’. While we mostly read similar texts at that age, our circumstances, family, relatives, teachers, and friends shape what we become, and what we broadly call ‘values’. It is true that our sense of ‘right and wrong’ and what is acceptable is formed in the crucible of our minds at that early stage. Our aspirations find foundation and our personalities are sculpted out of the events and the turns of life!

Then we move to the phase where we chase a vocation. Whether we work, we run businesses, we teach others – we are often delivering a service that is of some value to the society at large and specifically in the organizational constructs that we belong to. We use the education that we obtained in our primary institutions and make good of it. Those less fortunate seek outlets where they can deliver services that did not require the rigmarole of structured learning and adjust to working as a ‘pair of hands’. Society reminds us to build groups, abide by social structures of family and marriage and we become married to a schedule of life that has been largely dictated by what we see around us and what we have to ‘abide’ by.