Reflections on Career Choices and Success

When I meet friends from IIT and we exchange news about what we are doing, many ask, “How come you are working in a school?” There is an atmosphere about this question. “You must be a freak. Something strange here. Must be one of those idealistic types.” One can be treated with deference or looked down upon with condescension, depending on whether the person feels that you are doing a noble job, or you are a failure. I will use this opportunity to approach this question from several angles.

First, why is it strange that one who has studied B.Tech. should be working in a school? Is it stranger than selling soap or shampoo or working for a bank or marketing a soft drink after B.Tech. in aeronautics, or electronics, or mechanical engineering ? Or is the question just another way of asking, “How come you are doing this when you can be making much more money etc. ?” Well, if that’s truly the question, I’d like to ask if the highest priority of a B.Tech graduate is to make the fastest buck in the shortest time? Smuggling, drug-trafficking, protection rackets obviously will outstrip most corporate professions. Or, are safety, and respectability additional matters of consideration?

25 years ago when I completed B.Tech. tuition fees at IIT were Rs. 200/- per year, and hostel rent, Rs. 100/- per year. I remember calculating that the amounts paid by all students were insufficient even to pay the gardeners at IIT. Obviously planners thought it of great importance to build engineering capability within the nation and the country spent great sums of money on the effort. This means that taxes, including those from the sale of essential commodities like rice, dal, and sugar, went into financing our education. As P.C. Alexander once poignantly put it, “The poorest in this country subsidize the education of the well-to-do.”

And education at the IIT spins students abroad to universities and to making as much money as possible selling aerated drinks, or soaps, or perfume, and sometimes working as engineers in the country. The best education the nation can offer, heavily subsidized by the poor, is bartered for personal wealth, power, status. But of course, the models of success we chased then are no different from those being pursued today- only the numbers are 30-40 times longer and success and status so easily reachable.

In the pursuit of success and money, many IIT graduates have built careers, but what other calls? Have there been any, beckoning, pointing to our individual special avocations, dreams and deeper intelligence? Or have these glimmerings died premature deaths in nascency under the hard heels of money calculations and growing fears of not being recognized , not being successful? To be instrumental in ecological devastation, to pump coloured chemical water(read cool drinks) from one end of the nation(world) to another can be called creative and successful under the bright light of success- in the sterile boardrooms.

The models of success we see leave little room for the heart and even less for intuition. One of the greatest gifts I have received, is the absence of external pressure to prove myself. This directly connected to a degree from IIT. The avenues of acquiring wealth and status appear very dry and colourless, more particularly so as my understanding of poverty, environmental degradation, ethics and sustainability has grown. Everyone knows that smoking is harmful and to make money out of it must be unethical. This would not stop a narcotics dealer from exploiting the situation. Nor does it stop tobacco giants who camouflage, stall legislation and with every device keep the game legal and respectable.

Our society is strange. Teaching in a college is acceptable. Many of my batch (if I remember right, 110 out of 220 in 1972) went to universities abroad to teach and study. This is the “ normal” course But to find one of the pack working in a school seems to be purposeless. Our society is strange. School teachers rarely choose their vocations. It is the last resort in a society where money and status are primary. But society is content with this. No wonder generation after generation goes tumbling after monetary success with ever increasing hunger, paying lip service to ideals, values, originality integrity etc.

I have worked as a research scientist, a consulting engineer, an independent consultant and now for the past ten years in the area of education. Looking back I recollect 3 definite events - all three clear intimations of endings. These events were significant because while things ended, there was no clear beginning that showed itself. I experienced the ending of my work as a research scientist and consultant. With the endings there was no clear sense of anything else beginning. This evolved out of letting go . There was a great temptation to hold on to a replacement, but not exchanging one thing for another offered a great deal of energy. Looking at human society, I see two strong pulls - one, to continue an extension of the past, the other, to break from it. All of us tend to reach a point when the exercise of continuing what one has been doing is soul sapping and dreary notwithstanding the security. The best reasons to continue, to exchange, etc. are economic straps with which we bind ourselves easily, tightly and helplessly. Good education must permit one the deep psychological freedom to sensitively look at all that is happening around us. Good education must create the mind and heart to be able to take in unflinchingly all that is before us and inside us. And last, good education must permit one to respond wholeheartedly, wholesomely and with depth. I cannot see good education as the purchase at the lowest price, the position, degree/ status to make large sums of money.

The new trend is to somehow make people aware of true costs and change close to that. I can confidently say that determining the costs is one thing, producing educated human beings is quite another. It will ease pangs of conscience if future generations have to pay more for an IIT education.(conscience , however, has little to do with decisions). But paying more for education will only spur the urge to earn the money back and even more viciously hold one choiceless. True choice seems to lie beyond discovery of needs and wants. Once there is a blurring of needs and wants, once we accept the absolute subjectivity of needs and luxuries, then we are forced to straitjacket any further exploration. To quote David Orr:- “More of the same kind of education that enabled us to industrialise the earth can only make things worse. This needs to be stated strongly to underscore the fact that the environmental crisis is not primarily the work of the ignorant and uneducated; rather, it is that of so-called well educated people who, in Gary Snyder’s words “make unimaginably large sums of money, people impeccably groomed, excellently educated at the best universities -male and female alike—eating fine foods and reading classy literature, while orchestrating the investment and legislation that ruin the world” These are people with college and university degrees who have been educated to think that human dominion over nature is our rightful destiny. I am not making an argument against education but rather an argument for the kind of education that prepares people for lives and livelihoods suited to a planet with a biosphere that operates by the laws of ecology and thermodynamics………

“The value of an education cited most often by its vendors is that it increases the graduate’s upward mobility and lifetime earnings. Accordingly, we aim to prepare the young for what guidance counsellors call “careers.” We rarely mention what used to be described as “calling.” In a larger perspective, this is foolish. Students ought to be encouraged first to find their calling: that particular thing for which they have a deep passion and which they would like to do above all else. A calling is about the person one wants to make oneself. A career is a coldly calculated plan to achieve security and have a bit of “fun” that turns out, more often than not, to be deeply unsatisfying, whatever the pay. A calling is not the product of calculation but of an inner conversation about what really matters in life and what difference one really wants to make in the world. A calling starts as a hunch. It is risky. It operates more by inspiration than by premeditation. A career is a test of one’s IQ; a calling not only tests for intelligence but for one’s wisdom, character, loyalty and moral stamina as well. A person can always find a career in a calling, but it is far more difficult later in life to find a calling in a career. Once a person opts for safety, the die is cast. A career is, finally, a failure of imagination and a sign that one believes the world to be poor in possibilities.

“We ought to encourage our children to find their calling in good and necessary work. The best and necessary work for our age involves in a thousand ways the recalibration of humanity’s values, institutions, behaviours, and expectations with those of the Earth. This is the task of the education in our time.”

In the words of E.F. Schumacher, “ Education which fails to clarify our central convictions is mere training or indulgence. For it is our central convictions that are in disorder, and , as long as the present anti-metaphysical temper persists, the disorder will grow worse Education, far from ranking as [our] greatest resource, will then be an agent of destruction……..”

Can educational institutions take their mandate of intellectual adventure seriously enough to truly question the existing mores, values and paradigms of society? This means not endorsing all societal values and aspirations meekly, however lucrative.

G. Gautama
August 1997