Of Dreams and Aspirations..

The books which I read at any point in time greatly influence me. If the book is captivating, I always think that parts of the book are written specially for me. It could be on any topic, but I always think that the author writes a certain portion of the book, keeping me in mind. I felt this about two books that I read recently and parts of it completely resonated with me.

The two books are both written by Preethi Nair – ‘Colour of Love’ and ‘One hundred Shades of White’, which I read in that order. ‘Colour of Love’ is about a second generation Indian living in London, who leads a double life, because of her parents’ expectations, dreams, and ambitions. She wants to be an artist but because her father would not let her, she studies to be a lawyer. She puts her dreams on hold and works as a lawyer making her parents immensely proud of her and her achievements. Eventually though, circumstances force her to give up her day job and she begins to live her dream. Yet, she is unable to tell her parents this and continues to live a lie by pretending to go to work everyday but all the while going to her studio to paint. Her parents only find out about her paintings when she wins a prestigious prize.

I liked the book a lot as I could identify with a big part of the book. Though my parents never pressurised me to top my class or get into an ivy-league school (in fact quite the contrary – my mother worked full-time all through her life, raised us three children and so she did not want her children to undergo the same trouble, in her own words), I have personally seen friends of mine go through this. A close friend of mine would be so upset if she did not score 100% in mathematics as she knew her parents would give her so much grief about the marks that she lost, not seeing at all the great marks that she did get. And this girl was not an average student – she was consistently among the top 2 in our class, yet it was not good enough for her parents. Nothing but coming first would ever make them happy. I have seen the enormous pressure that she was under all through her schooling and how she looked forward to going to a hostel so she could not have it as a constant reminder in her everyday life. I saw her change from a really studious, docile, shy girl to an extroverted, rebellious, outgoing girl who did not really do well in college, but was happy. And for me, that happiness was above all and what mattered the most.

Calculus himself was a victim of this parental pressure. He never did well in school, fluctuating between topping the class in subjects that he cared about (read Mathematics and Physics) in certain exams and barely managing to scrape through those very subjects at other times. I think he was not interested for the most part of his schooling life and since he is not one to do anything for the sake of doing it, he never bothered. Also he tells me that his parents focussed a lot of their efforts on his brother, who was consistently doing well and as a topper and never really cared about his education. Somewhere during his IX standard, he became genuinely interested in a few select subjects and there was no looking back. He got a very good rank in JEE for the IIT and was inclined to study Physics at Kanpur. His parents though were not too happy with his choice because he would easily have got admission into the more favoured Engineering course and so they talked him into taking it. He was not that interested in doing an Engineering degree since his passion was physics, yet he did an engineering degree because of parental pressure. Of course its another story that he eventually moved into Physics after doing an engineering degree, yet he always says that he should have just joined Physics straight after his XII, rather than taking the more circuitous route.

I would be heart-broken if I found out that my daughter lived a double life like the main character in Preethi Nair’s book. Though Calculus and I have both aspirations and dreams of our daughter going to Cambridge, we would never force her to do something which she wasn’t interested in. Inwardly, though I do harbour hopes and if I were completely honest with myself, I would be a tad bit disappointed if she did not do a professional course. I am probably prejudiced to a huge extent in this because of the way I have been brought up. More than anything though, I want to ingrain a love for reading, a passion for a field in which she can excel, expose her to the wonders of learning, enable her to develop an unshakeable conviction in herself and so much more. Probably I am over-dramatising events in my head when I expect things in my life to turn out in a manner similar to Preethi Nair’s book, yet I never under-estimate the fact that children pick up vibes from our thoughts, and actions and sometimes that will tell them a lot more than we bargained for. I just hope that she can live her dream and be in a profession that she loves.