Pujit Aggarwal Redivivus - Endless Path

 

  My formal education finished me over a quarter of a century ago. The vortex of work sucked me in, propelling me into a spiral of apprenticeship, learning on the job, and a punitive regimen of tasks that had to be completed within the specified time allotted to each.

  You were not allowed to wrap it up and deliver the package in a hurry. Your supervisor brooked no crease or crinkle on the wrapper. If so, you went back to the drawing board to rehearse the operation meticulously so as to meet the irreducible criteria set down by Quality Control. Only then were you were handed in an absorbent napkin to wipe the beads of sweat that bedewed your brow. Learn to earn the guerdon.

  Your productivity, even in the short run, does not go unrewarded. Besides monetary and material incentives, your seniors proffer you something that immeasurably exceeds the importance of money and status. It is appreciation and empowerment with enough leeway to realize your potential.

  “Become what you are!” exhorted Nietzsche to young aspirants. If you are a redwood, become a redwood. Become an eagle or a hummingbird if you have the latency. Size does not matter. The smooth pebble in the riverbed is related to the mountain towering over numerous peaks along the range of which it is an integral part.

  Nietzsche’s exhortation implies a critique of the mainstream education that manufactures assembly line products like graduates, post-graduates, PhDs, and countless specialists. The society actively colludes with the system by scaring up a huge portal of the employment market. Every product down the assembly line remains squeezed in the strait jacket of what they have made you: doctor, engineer, professor, manager, etc.

  No wonder most toppers from universities end up as officers or executives, holding lucrative positions. They remain faithfully married to the mother called Security. They have finished their education and bask in the self-limiting luminosity of stability. The mistress of enterprise, experiment, actualization, adventure, new departures, invention, discovery, even risk—remains alien to them.

  Education is an endless path. You keep treading it till you drop. Entrepreneurs, mavericks, autodidacts, freaks, and standalones are outliers. They never cease to traipse along the track, despite all the hazards, failure, and its creativity.

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