What is your ambition?

As you look down upon your past, your school life, there was always a question that teachers used to ask you every year - "What is your ambition ?"  Everyone would have had different ambitions, and they would have varied from time to time.My ambitions changed during my childhood with each year.I had wanted to be a traffic policeman during my kindergarden, then I wanted to be a dancer when I was in fourth grade, and when I was 10 years old, I had wanted to be a scientist and I was proud to answer the "ambition" question and went around saying that I would discover medicines to the most deadly diseases in the world.

As I marched into my late teenage years, my mind seemed blank, nor were the ambition questions popping up from the teachers or relatives.The questions that were posed to me was "CBSE or State board? , Science or commerce? " When I passed my twelfth standard, I realized that I had no particular ambition ! Though I wanted to enter into film making or acting, I had no guts to take up visual management, or some other film making courses. I did not want to take a risk. I had become a typical middle- class minded guy who flocks along with the herd of goats and grazes the "greener" fields. During my initial years of college - the words,Computer science and America went hand in hand, and my ambition was to study IT and go to the US, following the foot steps of my cousins who had supposedly gone to the best place on earth.

But the problem was quite simple- I had no interest in IT . Yet, I became a IT graduate overcoming all the odds which included loads of arrears that I had accumulated over the years. Luckily, I got a job through a campus interview in a software company even before I had got my degree. I had got it after some or little hardwork. I had not been eligible for some top companies, due to my history of arrears and it had hurt me enough, though not on a personal level but I feared the talks that a "jobless" naveen has to hear. The way it was hyped by people, it would seem like getting a job in a top company was like getting a first class ticket to heaven in the best airlines.

I am a successful(?) software engineer now, and my ambition is - well, I don't have one now and I don't have much interest in IT either. I am still young and I can give up the IT career to take up another alternate career but I lack the confidence in my skills and I simply,cannot afford to do it now. I am not alone, and there would be lakhs of such disinterested software engineers in our country. Just because a software engineer gets high bucks as an average starting salary, a career in IT should not be choosen or rather made to be chosen.

I don't have the answers, but I have the questions. The questions of a mind which has always been afraid of taking the plunge into the fields it had loved, and had became one among the huge cattle herd of software engineers.