Cross Roads?

These days I rarely get to think of anything other than the happenings and work @ office. And should say that I’ve met an Oasis on my recent visit to my grand father’s place. A get-together of all our cousins and relatives after I entered the software world is not just a dream after all. Many things came across in our discussions and conversations but the most significant one, I think was ‘the cross roads’ (that is what I would like to call the endless series of group discussions and debates on my cousin’s after 10th academic career).
My friends from Andhra would be quite aware of such a drama happening at home, if taking biology stream was your choice, more so if you do not fall under any of the reserved sections. It seriously is amazing to see the knowledge people retain on the career-oriented stuff amid their addiction to the TV serials that take the audience to the new heights of nonsense each day (while, doing a plastic surgery to change the character artists stopped shocking me of late, a recent brain transplant stunt to retain a character’s memory after it is dead, left me bewildered. What is interesting is, they do it at the ease of changing the hard disc of my PC, and the audience still finds it convincing :O).

This poor chap had taken 2 valiant decisions, 1. Wanting to be a doctor while the rest of Andhra is engineers 2. Announcing his decision and staying open for an opinion (This blog of-course is not a poll asking for what would be better for his career). Though in his case it is highly visible (at-least to me) that he is being pressurized to live others’ life, many a times there is a subtle pressure on all of us from the family/friends/society from taking the path we wanted to when we are on cross roads (be it career, hobbies, love and anything that is important to YOU). The irony is that the people who make these brick walls are the people who care for us, who are afraid that we may not succeed or that we are being hasty, immature et al.

Deep down I had an urge to support this chap, tell him that it is okie to follow what your inner voice tells you (this inner voice stuff, I read in one of the self help books recently. Its not my own!! ). But I had no answer to the thousands of questions that hushed me up when I tried to tell him that it is sensible for him to follow his heart. The best one I would say is the example one of ’em quoted about a not very bright distant relative of mine getting settled in a s/w company where as another bright (again) distant relative of mine still struggling to complete his MD/MPhil in medicine. I have no answers to any of these but for sure the concept of ‘proof by example’ is awful in practice.

When I think about all this a little later I started making complete sense of Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch saying in his last lecture that “these brick walls are there for a reason. They're not there to keep us out. They are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something”.
After all a diamond is another piece of coal that did well under pressure. I pray to god that I see another diamond being made of my cousin.