Fare Thee Well
Quitting my job wasn‟t very well received by my family in general, the common consensus being me kicking away a job that paid me well and that too in Delhi where the ecosystem was more nourishing, they expressed their annoyance and disagreement quite well but thankfully my mother saw beyond that and helped me do what I
wanted. Once back in Kashmir, I could do two things. Either
pursue higher education for a shot at a better job or just look for a job with just a bachelor's degree in hand. I had to give another round of exams for the former, I was okay with it, but they wouldn‟t be for another 3-4 months. So I set out to look for a job in the meanwhile, I couldn‟t just sit at home this whole time after some
grinding and interviews I came to a conclusion, I didn‟t want to be doing this anymore. Work for someone else, sit behind a screen all day long and to what extent? It wasn‟t making a difference, it‟s not what I had
wished for, and either way no matter the qualification I would be an office goer who works a job 7 hours a day, 6 days a week. I felt trapped, this mindset wouldn‟t sit well with my parents who already didn‟t like me
leaving a job, but this concern was secondary. I wanted to be doing something that would make a difference and I had something in mind. A project that had some scope
of going long ways and it could be self sustainable. After a week or two, I proposed this plan to my father. Not the “I can‟t work a meaningless job anymore” but this project idea while we sat down to eat one evening. My mum was there and my sister, my brother didn‟t come down to eat dinner that night. This was the first time ever in my life I was having
such a conversation in my life with him, for that time I could see in his eyes that I had grown up, my words
my whole vocabulary was different from what they were used to 5 years ago. He didn‟t have much to say
about it, but he listened very keenly. We finished dinner, thinking he didn‟t have anything to say about it or he just though it plain stupid I was about to take my leave, when he said
“This can work” And that‟s all I needed to hear.
In the morning, my father and I left to talk with some of his contacts to further discuss this proposition at
hand. It went well, most of them presented some genuine critiques that would have totally caught me
off guard but not my father, he knew the plan better than I. That meant a lot. After many meetings over a
course of months, we finalized our whole module and set out to actually do it. It all looked good, everything
looks good on paper, now what was left was the execution part, materializing things and convincing
people, this was the hard part.
This project of mine was costing us an unwieldy amount of money and I could feel my siblings being distraught.
“Why are you doing this?”
“Why can‟t you just get a job?”
It can be soul wrenching when the people closest to you say things of such scale, but you need to keep your head straight, wear blinders like a pony and only forwards at the road ahead, drown out everything on
the sides. I tried to cut down expenses as much as I could, this
project required me to travel a lot and meet up with people all across India. I would use the train instead
of flying out, spend the nights on bus stations rather than hotels.
The people I had to meet were hard to get a hold of. They‟d reschedule our meetings at the last minute or
just plainly refuse to meet in the first place. It was frustrating but I couldn‟t afford a no, so I‟d wait out
for days on outside of their office hoping to catch them in their car as they left or entered. It didn‟t always
work, most of the times they would ask me to leave, although there were some who would listen. And so on. I kept going and I'm still going with no
intentions to stop. It started with a little idea in the back of my head that had developed during waiting foran interview. It turned my whole world around and now I was working on it and it was shaping a life of its own and hopefully one day, it would provide for many people. At every stage of my life I was certain about a lot of things and as time progressed, that certainty seemed to blunt against the ever changing tides of the hour. We don‟t always feel the same about something, you can today feel very strongly about a particular thing today and only tomorrow it will mean very little to you. We judge things and have opinions that are influenced
by how much we know at that time, it isn‟t written in stone. It takes a strong will to be adamant about your
decisions and live with them for the rest of your life, but it takes an even stronger resolve to make amendments to your prior belief and set course on a new journey
even if it means taking many steps in the opposite direction.
The whole process of what you set to achieve shouldn‟t keep you from doing it if the end result is to your
preference. We learn every day, we grow every day, nothing ever really comes to an end. There will always be that something that‟ll make sure you do not stop and that to me is the beauty of life.
Uncertainty.
Excerpt from the book Hard Dreams by young Kashmiri writer Owais Shafi
