That thing called love

Now before you read ahead, let me warn u that this isn’t any romantic recollection of my moments with an imaginary girl friend of mine. This is something more important :P (as people put it), about the often heard, clichéd ‘do what u love funda’.

Now when did I first hear this – “Do what you love the most, rather than what the mob does”. Lemme recollect. Thanks to the conservative surroundings I grew up in, none told me all these till I reached my college. Till I finished my school people around me seemed surer than me and about themselves, about what I should do in my life. My tasks were limited to execution of those allocated to me – preparing for exams (whether u liked it or not), aim to top the class (I have never understood why, that I never have topped is a different issue altogether), the no. of hrs I studied, the no. of hrs I spent on cricket coaching, karate etc. etc – like that of a project engineer in an IT company. By virtue of being amongst the top 20 odd percent of the students who studied in my school, I found an even more number of people (my teachers and seniors) who were sure of what I should do in my life – which branch of study I should choose in 11th and what stream of graduation I should pursue. Never during these times did I ever think of what I really wanted to do, or bothered to find what I loved doing – the only thing I knew was falling in love was a social taboo (WARNING: Society here refers to those people who lived in the geography covered by Erstwhile Madras, now Chennai).

By way of a concept similar to the one proposed by Charles Darwin –the theory of natural elimination (at IIT-JEE), I landed up in a crazy engineering college near a zoo, at the outskirts of Chennai. There was only a compound separating the zoo and my college (physically), but in my four years in that college, I could not find what separated the living beings in my college from those in that zoo. That’s a different story altogether. Now without digressing let’s come to the issue at stake. As I had been trained to do for the 16 long years – to execute what was told, the 1st thing I did in the zoo, err the college was to approach my seniors and ask them for ‘career guidance’. It is interesting that this activity of career guidance neither has a mandatory qualification nor any fees. Like the 2nd law of thermodynamics (every spontaneous reaction increases entropy), every spontaneous action of yours increases the career guidance (advice) you get and hence the entropy. It was here for the first time, that one of my immediate seniors gave a long speech to a bunch of freshers (including me) to do what we love, and not to follow the mob. From then on it has become the taraka mantra of existence. Do what you love – became the one stop solution to all the problems a 17 yr old faced. If things went wrong, it was because, he has never liked doing it; it was forced upon him, and hence went wrong. If by chance, something went right, that was what he always loved to do.

It was then that I sat back and wondered what I loved to do the most. For those who have been criticizing my digression in this blog, it is this which I loved to do the most – to let my thoughts wander and be like one of those monkeys in the zoo. But painfully none accepted this as a career worth pursuing, not even my senior who had given me the taraka mantra. To my agony this has been the same thing everyone wanted to do. And it is now, when someone added, it is not just enough to do what you love, but it should either be unique or you should do it the best.

I lay at home in retrospection, thinking of the teen days when I dreamt of batting with my idol Rahul Dravid, hitting the winning six in a nail biting ODI; witnessing the Republic day parade with the President of India for having secured 4 merit cards in the board examinations (not to forget the total of 493/500 I aimed for in 10th std and ended up with a 460, now don’t ask me how I arrived at the 493, it’s here where the logic defies reality); having scored the JEE rank 1; a black belt in karate etc. etc. All of them had been achieved in my imaginations, visualizations and ruefully ended up being my hallucinations. But then, I had realized the ultimate truth – none of these were those that I really loved, and wanted from the bottom of my heart, so I hadn’t given my 100% and rightfully so.

I then took a fierce resolution to do only those I loved to do in my life, to follow my earnest desires, to discover what destiny had in store for me. Of course, I dint have the option to do a penance in the Himalayas, but I painstakingly did one thing very close to my heart – I stopped studying for exams. Somewhere along these 4 years at engineering, I felt I wanted to pursue body building. I was actually in love with it and was doing it well. But again the same people (those who knew better than me on what I wanted, those who for some reason seemed inexistent for sometime) surfaced and advised me against the same. I wanted to write, but the same people found it an unfeasible option. All I could do was to choose between an MS and an MBA and a job. What an amazing way to implement the learning I have had – ‘to do what you love’. I didn’t like taking up a job, nor did I want to pursue an MS, so by the theory of natural elimination I chose to do the MBA. Darwin chose to be my side this time, given the limited choices. I was sitting at the MBA interviews answering with immense confidence that an MBA was what I always wanted to do, justifying with facts and the matching skill sets I claimed to possess; that amazed even me of all the people. What was even more dazzling was they bought it and offered me an admission into the hallowed portals of one of the most prestigious and supposedly one of the top B schools of the country.

The next stage of life was slightly better than the one I had at the zoo. But what remained in common was my search for what I loved to do the most. Thankfully I was able to spend more time in the gym, in the absence of my people around me (I had shifted to a different city). What flabbergasted me even more was the same people who were so sure of what I wanted, have now decided that I have grown up to decide things on my own. Now come on, this is totally unfair. All these 21 years they have got me to a point, where I dint know how I landed and have left me alone, for they don’t know the path further. It had left me in a position where I had to understand my journey so far, to discover what lay ahead, adding to the burden I already have –my quest for what I loved to do the most.

Things haven’t changed much at this stage too. My seniors (again they are in the picture, with advice unlimited, unsolicited) advised me to find the right industry, the right company and more importantly the right job profile. It is amazing that whenever I had to take a logical decision with my left brain, my right brain invariably functions faster and arrives at a completely illogical decision, rightly (read wrongly) justified. I was sitting for the job interviews justifying why I was most suited for the job description that lay ahead of me. Now comes the brilliant part. The 2nd law of thermodynamics, with every high salary offered, the randomness increases. I become suitable for any job description in the offering. Amazing isn’t it. It is then, when the ‘experienced’ batch mates of mine ask me to give more importance to the job profile, and a low salary didn’t matter to start with. As a sincere but incomplete listener I took up a job satisfying a part of the advice offered – and no cookies for guessing this – low salary of courseJ.

Having chosen the right job, now you know what I am doing here sitting overtime at my office desk – continuing my quest to find what I love doing the most. And now I have arrived at the answer. Just as how job satisfaction is a myth, finding the right girl to marry is a myth, I am now supremely confident that finding what one loves to do the most is also a myth. How do I know this? You gotto trust me on this. Think it as a piece of wisdom you would get when you do penance for a 10,000 years. In fact, Roger Federer just acknowleged this fact sday, when he won the record 15th Grand Slam, and the entire world was watching it with total awe. Did you hear him say -"It's not one of those things you dream as a child", it just happens, trust me. What happens in ones life happens by a series of incidents (read accidents) for which nobody is responsible. But who cares for logic, my quest for that thing called love continues…