Monday Recess
I hailed a rickshaw and he was kind enough to wait while I was on the phone. I mouthed my destination and we were off. With my call over and in the middle of my thoughts, I barely heard him speak. I heard him again after I leaned forward. “I need you to help me with something,” he said in Hindi. I started thinking maybe this would be about the route, directions etc. However, it was not.
“My son has gotten 74%,” he said “and I need to know what he should do now.”
I really wanted to have a good chuckle, but he was watching me in the mirror so I refrained. For a second I considered informing him that he was asking a dropout what his son (who by the way received 25% more, than the person who the question was posed at) should be doing with his future but soon realized that that would be a longer conversation.
I replied that he should pursue whatever he feels happy doing. “He wants to take science and go on to be an engineer, and I too am happy with his choice” he replied and went on to elaborate how he was confident that he would surely get into a good college it was the tuition fees which were in the region of a lakh of rupees that was the worrying bit.
In the mean time, I was wondering why he would ask me this. Was it because he saw me coming out from a serious looking building and or from my short phone conversation earlier. Why would he ask a person like me a serious question that would pertain to his son’s future? A person who on this given day was wearing jeans and a t-shirt with the words “All stressed up and nowhere to go” printed on it and under which was a grumpy looking Garfield holding a baseball bat. Very clearly I was of no use to him. The truth would have to be that he just wanted to unload his mind a little bit and to his misfortune, he found a dropout. He dropped me off in front of the office and I wished him and his son all the best.
“The trouble with being educated is that it takes a long time; it uses up the better part of your life and when you are finished, what you know is that you would have benefited more by going into banking.” ~ Philip K. Dick