As someone who has had relatively open-minded and encouraging parents, my upbringing wasn’t perhaps as dull as it could have been. However, I would like to direct your attention to the word ‘relatively’. When it came to choosing a career in the humanities and especially in English Literature, there was significant disappointment if not opposition.
To my crushingly middle-class parents, pursuing a B. A. in English as opposed to a B. Tech. in any realm of engineering was a bad career choice. My father still thinks it is considering I only get a ‘stipend’ for doing my Ph. D. while some of my friends are earning 15-16 LPA. This will sound familiar to a lot of people who chose the path less travelled by and forewent engineering or those who haven’t yet hit those heights in their IT careers. (Yes, forwent is a real word! I didn’t know that either.)
In most cases, parents are working very hard to ensure what is best for their children. They tend to do everything in their power to do what they feel is the best for their children. The significant problem here is the working concept that parents are always right or, the even more popular, they have their children’s best interests at heart. This is absolutely, unequivocally, not true. Parents, like all human beings, are prone to influence, confusion and, most significantly, societal pressure. These are things that in most cases people can’t prevent. However, this is compounded by a considerable lack of knowledge.
Parents, at least in my experience both personally and professionally, show an overwhelming aversion to learning new things and are even more opposed to unlearning outmoded ideas and methods – which is partly responsible for the sudden resurgence of strict, conservative politics. This is why I say parents may not necessarily have their children’s best interests at heart. Often parents want to raise their children in their own image. They want to create people who understand their parents’ culture, work to improve their collective social position and continue to remain in the power of their parents.
On the face of it, all of this seems legitimate. Indeed, it is portrayed as such. Parents know best so they should raise their children as they see fit. While that is acceptable as a premise, we must ask, at what cost. Parental aspiration is often one of the main reasons behind the lack of improvement among students. They see the incredibly high expectations, realise they will never be good enough and decide it is better to just plateau. If no amount of hard work and improvement will be satisfactory, it is better to not work at all. Additionally, they realise that no matter what they do there is no space to pursue dreams. This is a direct result of subscribing to the system.
But what is this all-powerful system we speak of? Well, it was first put in place by the British to create employable servants who understood their culture. Therefore, it was necessary that at the core of the system was the concept of inferiority. It was crucial to the British imperial mission that every single student, especially Indians, who passed through this system, had inferiority drilled into them. This led to a structure where ‘position’ became a valuable currency. This created the system we are confronted with today.
In this system, there are rankings of schools and colleges. Students are separated by not how much they learned but by how many marks they got. Employees (of any sort) are forever chasing higher and higher paychecks and promotions. Employers are trying to finagle as much profit as they possibly can out of their businesses.
Those who aren’t doing all of this are looked down upon. The value of human life has been forgotten in the backwaters of successes and failures. Knowledge has been commodified and therefore subject to devaluing. Yet, sadly, flattery, toadying and crony culture are going as strong as ever – vulgar leftovers from the British Raj. Compound this with unemployment, undervaluing and unfilled vacancies and you’ve got a cocktail capable of giving you the most nauseating and anxiety-inducing of (colonial) hangovers.
This system has, in the guise of eliminating the caste system, replaced it with a (caste-based) class system where only a certain type of job is considered worth having. No one dreams of doing a job involving manual labour. From rag-picking to farming, all such occupations are looked down upon so much so that they are used as threats for unruly children. The jobs we are taught to aspire to are white-collar jobs that involve desks, computers and air conditioners. This is not because of the relative comfort of life but a prejudice against these so-called ‘dirty’ jobs. Clean collars and clean shoes are the way to go.
Financial ability and status perhaps play the most significant part in how parental aspiration manifests itself. For parents with huge financial muscles, money is the answer to everything. They are certain that if they throw enough money at their children’s careers, they will eventually be successful. These children at the same time are also certain that they will always have a parachute or, at the very least, a safety net. As we drop down the ladder, the propensity to throw money decreases and the desire for larger incomes increases. But towards the bottom of the ladder, hope slowly begins to decrease as opportunities become sparse and absolution so distant as to be forsaken.
Therefore, children, on every rung of this ladder, are devoid of options in some way or another. How they study and how far, what they choose as their profession, where they live their lives and most significantly how much they are allowed to dream are decided for them as soon as they are born. The system exists to divide and to repress. By subscribing to every aspect of it we are contributing to this division and repression. But what are parents to do, you might ask. The system is like that only.
This is where the issue of parenting comes in again, especially within the middle-class. Parental ego plays a big part in refusing to change things. Think about it: who are the people running this so-called system? Who are the guardians of it? Are they not all parents? Are they not all people belonging to the previous generation? The same parental ego works in another way. It worked for us, we did it, so why can’t our kids? This is an extreme fallacy – one I myself have been guilty of using with my students. However, modern society moves very fast. Sadly, scientific and technological progress is outpacing social progress.
Children who find themselves struggling with their parents’ unchanging demands inevitably become depressed – as I myself did. Many suffer from terrible mental health problems and trauma throughout their lives. Many, also, give up. “Every hour one student commits suicide in India, with about 28 such suicides reported every day, according to data compiled by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB). The NCRB data shows that 10,159 students died by suicide in 2018, an increase from 9,905 in 2017, and 9,478 in 2016.” (The Hindu) Every hour, one death.
Despite my idealism and romance, I do have a point. That is parents – middle-class parents; let’s face it, you are the biggest culprits – need to change their minds about doctor, doctor, engineer, engineer. The economy is shifting. There is saturation in the IT sector and doctors are having a terrible time of it at the moment, to say the least. This is, seemingly, common knowledge. Yet, most middle-class parents do not seem to be aware of it. They continue to obliviously exist in a fantasy world where a B.Tech or an MBBS makes you a millionaire. It is this that is making the ‘system’ function against you. By subscribing to entrenched prejudices towards alternative careers, you have unintentionally created a system that is inherently unfair. By believing that only a certain kind of job or a certain amount of money defines success, the system is by default geared to make you fail and constantly feel inferior; thus fulfilling the same conditions set out by Macaulay in 1835 – almost two centuries ago. We are now into our 75th year of independence. Surely it is time to unsubscribe from the British system of evaluation. They have.
There is only one way to solve this. We have to let go of the colonial aspiration of becoming babus. Life’s winners aren’t necessarily happy. Just look at all the Richard Corys of the world in both poem and song. Let us stop accepting that only white-collar jobs are worth having. Let us celebrate hard labour on the fields and on the roads. Let us stop undervaluing knowledge and glorifying education. Let us stop bickering over 20LPA and 25LPA. Let us stop saying that living is a competition. It most definitely is not. However, competition is not necessarily a bad thing. It always helps us improve. Let us make that the goal. Let us dream of getting better not ‘winning’. Every single step that every single individual takes towards self-improvement is a success. Let us say “No, Mr. Man, I will not subscribe to your definition of success.” Let us ignore all the Sharmajis, uncles and aunties and their swotty betas and betis. Who can do all this you ask? Parents, of course; they are the all-powerful, all-conquering superheroes we need to fight the evil villain of the ‘system’.
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