Freedom or Escape from Freedom?

I need to write this in a bid to take this thing off my mind. Only few weeks back when, I was struggling with my B-school hunting, I was really living in a confused state of mind. Those sticky situations, when your life gives you a feeling of being a snake and ladders game, where, everything is centered around making right moves and the worst part is that the moves are out of your control. In those moments you look for some advice but, in my situation I think, that the only person I could look up to, in case if I needed someone was myself. I didn’t realize how and when, the idea of working in a call center (BPO is the more civilized term) crept into my usually logical and rational mind. I mean, how could I have justified all these years spent in an engineering college learning computers?

Today, I am really thankful to the almighty that somehow I decided to give it all a fresh try and got acceptance into one of the emerging B-Schools of country. Well, I was almost over with that lean patch until I decided to talk to my long lost friend and then, my nightmare chose to give me a revisit. Long ago in one of those enlightening seminars on career-education (If you are a graduate then you might have survived through a lot many of those) I learnt the difference between a job and a career. “A career is something where you can extend your personality to your workplace. Where, you can relate with each and everything that you do and that you need to do. And a job is something, where your workplace enforces its character on your personality. The guiding force is not your inner drive but, the various long term/short term goals of your organization.”

Well, the definition is crystal clear and anybody who has the working knowledge of English can comprehend it well but, does the real world behave like this? I guess that the reality is something different. Have we ever thought that why more and more people are taking a job rather than going for a career? What are those conditions which are forcing them or guiding them to take up a job which could neither satiate their intellectual spirits nor could guarantee a brighter tomorrow? I thought to pose these questions to my friend and I am trying to put her reply into words. She said “Raj! I am a victim of my own insecurities. Living alone in an alien world, no one to look up to when, you feel lost and tired, meeting the demands of demanding parents, pushing yourself to the extent your body and soul can endure and then falling prey to the lifestyle of the big cities. When I passed out I started preparing for the MBA but then, realized that it requires a hell lot of effort as well as a hell lot of money. My father was not in a position to finance my MBA education and banks do not oblige you for nothing. (True! they want strict documentation like covering the loan amount with insurance cover and your father signing the guarantee.) I started feeling insecure and questions like ‘what’ and ‘if’ started haunting me day in and day out. So, I started looking for a part time job and then one of my friends introduced me to this concept of working in a BPO that, how fun it is for her to work there and that she is getting paid handsomely. I went for an interview and got selected as a voice based agent.

One and half years have passed since then, and the only change I feel in myself is the way an unknown foreigner, in the middle of the night, pronounces my name. To pronounce it exactly in that way, I have to roll my tongue over the ‘R’. I have lost weight but, for a girl of my age that is something everybody wants. Well, I think one more thing has changed, what I saw as my freedom, I now envisage as “escape from freedom”. I mean I was free to chose a different job, and I was free to quit this job at anytime I wish, I was free to save enough for my initial days at B-School and I was again free to ask my father or any other member of my family to sign a bank guarantee for me. I was free to do all this but, I chose to become what, I am today and at every moment of my life I am trying to convince myself of how happy I am this way.”

Well, when I disconnected the call, I was getting mixed vibes about my reunion with this dear friend of mine, about how young people like us define freedom and how this whole definition is all about ‘Escape from freedom’.