Confessions of an Ignoramus

People make career choices based on what they want. I made career choices based on what I did not want. The tenth standard exams were over and I had to choose which academic stream I would join. There is a reason why it is called a stream. It is hard to swim against the current.The first big choice I had to make was when I had the tenth grade exams. The school sent a letter to my parents telling that they had to assist me in making this very important choice. I knew that such an important decision should not be left to the family. My father would instinctively choose a subject that I would struggle in. In this case he would surely ask me to opt for a career in Science.He said, “It provides intellectual challenge.”When you have as little intellectual wealth as I do, it is best left unchallenged.I knew that Science was beyond my ken. I noticed my cousins would compete with each other to assemble all kinds of complicated looking bridges from the same “Meccano” set that I struggled to make rectangles with. Those are not the kind of gifts one should be straddling an impressionable lad with. I was convinced that the cause of Science was better served by my choosing not to serve.The choice was between studying Arts or Commerce.  I agonized about choosing one versus the other. I was not too bad at drawing. I had once seen a painting by Salvador Dali in the newspaper. It was called Persistence of Memory. It was famous because it was so very “hallucinatory and hyper-realistic” gushed the article about what was Dali’s most iconic painting. “The soft watches are an unconscious symbol of the relativity of space and time, a Surrealist meditation on the collapse of our notions of a fixed cosmic order”. When someone says stuff like this about a painting, you can make out that the fellow has not understood even one pixel of the painting.In case you have not seen it, let me make it easy and describe it for you. The painting is about a watch face that has been painted drawn on a roti that someone has left to hang on the branches of a tree to dry. There are other discarded watches painted around the tree. I found a photo of Dali's work. See what I mean? It is easy to get misled.Art seemed easy, I could do just what I pleased and mistakes seemed to be celebrated with adulation – three essential ingredients of a successful career choice. Persistence of Memory by Dali was proof that Art was to be my calling. So I went to the office of my school principal and told him how Dali had influenced my career choice.“I think there is some misunderstanding. You are talking about Art. You possibly mean Commercial Art. What we offer in this school is Arts. That is shorthand for Liberal Arts. You have to study Geography, History and English. Is that what you want to?I shook my head. That clearly was a narrow miss. I could not dream of studying anything, leave alone studying History and Geography. I was so glad I had not submitted my choice in writing to the office. I excused myself and looked for a pen. The form had three options to choose from Science, Arts and Commerce. I had struck out Science when I had filled the form at home. In school, after the meeting with the Principal, I struck Arts out from the form and handed it back to him.I had opted for Commerce. This was foreign territory. In my family, these decisions were made based on gender. The boys were always expected to study Science. The girls had all opted for Arts. Commerce was clearly the road less travelled. Our family had its fill of doctors and engineers. There were quite a few Professors, a few lawyers and their ilk. There was no evidence of anyone with a degree in Commerce who could tell me what this subject was all about.I went through the list of books I was to buy. What would it be like to study a subject whose hand I had grabbed in desperation? I looked for signs of life. It was all in a language that was unfamiliar. There was a fat book about Book Keeping. Had I joined a subject that was meant to churn out Librarians? What else could they teach in Book Keeping? Maybe it was about keeping the big books away from small books or the tall ones to the left of the shelf. The book seemed a little too fat though. I smiled to myself. While my friends would slave away at Math or Physics or even History, I would study all the easy stuff. I couldn’t believe my luck. Why had no one in my family studied Commerce? They could have had it easy, like I was going to.I opened the first few pages of the textbook on Book Keeping. This seemed dangerously close to Math – a subject that nightmares were made of. It was intellectual challenge personified. It was too late. I was stuck. For the next two years, I looked forward to school with the same anticipation the condemned have for the hangman.That night, I slept like a baby. Got up every hour and cried into my pillow.---------Read My blog on Times of India <click here>