The Hindu Business Line : Career sense on campuses

THE CAMPUS RECRUITMENT season is in full swing. The wheel having gone full circle, it is boom-time in jobs and salaries yet again. The best and the brightest graduates would as ever be ensnared by dollar-linked pay cheques. Prized will be the jobs that best exploit the sharp-witted, mathematically-oriented Indian mind — in consultancy, financial services and betting on the market. Doubtless, the perceived value of the coveted degree from the Indian Institute of Technology or of the diploma from the Indian Institute of Management will rise further. Competition for seats in these prestigious institutions will intensify, fuelled by parental ambition and youthful dreams. Few will remember now either the heavy state subsidies involved in thus educating India's brightest minds or the ironical IIM fees controversy that raged till recently. At leading business schools certainly the majority of the class will earn first year salaries that will handsomely exceed the total cost of their education.

The muddled thinking about the ends and means of higher education does not end there. The students themselves are ill advised, and often entirely imitative, in their career choices. They appear to profit from neither sensitive introspection nor the experience of seniors. When one is 23, chasing the mirage of instant gratification is attractive even if it eventually leads to frustration and absence of any joy. For most the impact of a punishing schedule and hectic travel begins to tell within the first decade; the personal costs, in health, in family life, and relationships become familiar sources of silent sorrow. The luxury and perquisites of life in the fast-lane pall even sooner. Free access to gyms and health clubs is fine, but who can make the time to enjoy them anyway? Many realise that the best of facilities comprising round-the-clock entertainment, rest and food, are golden shackles; yet, the gold does dazzle the mind's eye.

A less widely understood fact is that the academically bright students are not always the emotionally well-adjusted or balanced personalities needed to manage organisations. Many would have made a far more natural fit in research, teaching or writing. Indeed later in life they long for the alluring calm of the groves of academe; often, it is too late. Not many have balancing interests, hobbies, or lasting friendships. Relentless competition for relative grading, at least in part, sees to that. Chained to the chair and the laptop, they run the risk of RSI (repetitive stress injury) not so much to their wrists — which physicians acknowledge — but to their souls, to use an old-fashioned word.

Meanwhile,resurgent India offers an unprecedented variety of opportunities. For journalists, architects, administrators, teachers, social activists, media people, artists, painters and singers if they would only strive to find out what they really excel at and pursue it for life. To glorify a few specialisations that appear to offer corporate nirvana is to lose that all-important sense of vocation, or swadharma which alone might lift one's life from the "quiet desperation" that the mass of humanity seems destined to.

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