Extremistanian, are you?

Disclaimer: This blog is inspired from my friends Samarth Garg, Divyaprakash Dubey and Gurpreet Singh. However, my analysis pertaining to economic support may not be applicable to them. ;) . Please visit site and blog link to know more about them.

Easy. Easy it is for us to dream and easier it is for us to crib.
Being a normal job-oriented graduate/post-graduate, most of us have friends who do this easy task. Cribbing about our (inhumanely non-rewarding and pathetically non-exciting) jobs and summoning the gods for miracle and turn us into Sachins and SRKs and Schumis. Wish we were them! Wish I had never pursued engineering and rather formed my own rock band! Oh, my passion is something different…

And why, you have icons supporting the same issue. Mr. Amir through his movies like ‘Taare Zameen Par’ and ‘3 idiots’ and recently Mr. Manjarekar through his ‘Shikshanachya..’ have tried to address the same issue. Why burden children with traditional fields and subjects of mathematics or science or history? Why not let them be musicians, painters and cricketers? Revolutionary, aren’t they!

Sure, we could, for all but two reasons.

A(Re). The level of economic activity supporting the child: Until recently, India was (and is still being) considered a third world economy. The basic aim of around 96% of the Indians has been to ensure a steady cash flow in the households so as to support the family. A quick glance at this and that article will give you an idea as to how crippled India is to pursue its so called ‘passion’. And we are blaming the education system that it is just an employee generating factory.

I support our education system. India needs a plain ‘job-factory’ kind of education system so that we could earn a respectable salary and feed our dependents. About passion, please, let us ask ourselves, do we have one?

B(Re). It’s an Extremistan environment: Referring to the concept of extremistan in the book ‘The Black Swan’, Nasim Nicholas Taleb (NNT) argues that fields like arts, sports, music belong to extremistan environment. An environment where pay-offs are huge and exciting, however, success probability is extremely low. E.g. one Sachin Tendulkar will have Ferraris and during his era 2000 Ranaji player would hang their shoes totally unknown. As opposed to that, mediocristan environments are one where distribution is quite even. Payoffs may not be higher but a decent chance of surviving. E.g. the reader of this blog. Point is, would you wanna throw your child in an extremistan environment where chances are he would end up as a failure in the eyes of society?

So, if economical support is critical and we are still lingering on the issues of passions, what is the solution? I can see two scenarios happening:

A(Sc). Be an Howard Roark or a Steve Job.
B(Sc). Pursue normal education. Be safe enough to support the critical liabilities. Invest enough that even if your income source shifts from mediocristan to extremistan environment, returns on your investments are good enough to take care of your liabilities. And set off for the chase. The chase of your life.

Obviously, in second scenario, there may be some passions you would never be able to chase. Something like, playing for nation. But you still could contribute by creating a funding source for aspiring players, may be by analysing and providing solution on how to improve the game’s social infrastructure and its rural reach. May be simply working for a PR firm that organises events to raise advertising funds for upcoming series of that game. Or anything similar!

So let us all stop cribbing about the facts and wait for our own moments of entering into extremistan environments, if at all. Salute to the three heroes (mentioned above) inching towards it!