As someone who has seen the corporate world up close and very personal, for more than a decade, I am now a fan of frameworks. Visual representation of complex ideas is a great enabler for teams wanting to achieve common objectives, and as a Product Manager, it is one of my methods to manage stakeholder understanding and expectations. Many frameworks emerged as contributions from industry thought leaders, and they found applications in industries and scenarios way beyond what these authors would have initially expected. In this section I will make a humble attempt to describe one such framework. You may ask why. Well, I find it impossible not to put a structure to the trend that I introduced in my disclaimer in the first post of this series. But before we get to that, let me start by sharing a pet grouse I have had since my teenage years.
Our schooling years were full of instruction, but very little education. Instruction focuses on dissemination, while education should additionally also focus on dialogue and mentorship, for it to be truly effective. At the start of each academic year our school would provide us a pre-decided set of books and stationery, along with a ‘syllabus’, often broken down by month. In other words, the masters of the world (the entire machinery: from ministries to education boards, to academia, to administrators, to teachers and parents), decide that a particular age group should be ‘taught’ a set outline of topics, in a set way, to a set level of detail. In my faith and mother-tongue, there is no word for blasphemy. But this is one occasion when I don’t mind the other faiths having this concept, for I cannot find a better word than ‘blasphemous’ to describe what happens to kids every year as a cycle- when instruction is commodified, and every kid is bracketed under labels.
This absence of dialogue and mentorship has hurt the Y2K generation (kids in high school +/ 5 years of 2000 C.E.), more than the kids of today. My expectation is that these people, i.e. the Y2K generation, will find this series of posts the most useful. This is also the generation which will be under my curious gaze, and scrutiny, through the course of this discourse.
With the proliferation of learning and networking avenues in today’s digital age, many kids these days are making brave choices which were hitherto considered unconventional. This is unlike most from my Y2K generation, which reveled in predictability. Just take a moment, and count the number of folks you know of the following profile:
Of course, accounting for some deviations, I am ready to bet that you would know many who followed this life trajectory. It won’t at all surprise me if I am talking to one such person. I have been one such person.
10-15 years of being on an ‘assembly line’ will numb most people and wane their powers to think with the right perspective on most things. The direct consequence of this numbness can be seen in the volume of bad decisions we keep hearing about within our circle. People are unhappy in jobs, are often in bad relationships, tend to eat badly and gain weight, rage on roads while driving, lose touch with their close ones, stop pursuing their hobbies… the list is endless. Countless people have spent these years making seemingly safe choices as part of a herd and have either stopped setting the right goals for themselves, or are chasing fallacious goals even after many years of drifting. Internally, we don’t acknowledge the emotional attrition that comes with such purposeless mechanics, and keep living for weekend treats, and/ or for Instagram stories, while constantly being on a lookout for escape routes from our reality. Resultantly, life decisions of greater significance, like choosing who to spend your life with, are often done on a whim, and without much deliberation. To this cauldron pot, in which lives are getting cooked, since 2015-16, there has been a curious addition of a fresh ingredient, the Canadian PR.
The regimental assembly line, on which so many people have been spending their lives, has got an unexpected extension. Now, how many of us would have given the maple country a chance?
A significant number of ripened working professionals are willing to give up everything, after slogging for years, and are starting afresh in a country which is not even mentioned prominently in our school geography books, except for when Tundra climate is being discussed. This is a literal exodus, and it is going largely unnoticed by the mainstream. The challenges of living and working in an alien land, of adopting an alien climate, and of snapping strong ties and forging new ones, would be the subject of much of this series of posts. The quaintest thing, however, is how countless people are ready to embrace these challenges, even without knowing much about them. The lacuna between what notions most people create when they decide to immigrate, and what they encounter when they do immigrate, is huge. Can there be a better illustration of the failure of India’s education system? People with best of breed schooling are struggling to drive their lives towards the right outcomes, rather we are failing to decide the right outcomes for themselves. As kids we had significantly better-defined notions about what we wanted from our lives; way before we started looking for social proof and validation. I am ready to bet that in most cases our childhood desires persist, at least in some shape and form, even years after keeping them buried in a recess in some corner of our hearts. It is not a bad idea for some of us to close our eyes and go back to that time in school when we were uninhibited in voicing our true desires, in front of everyone, and more importantly, to ourselves.
A measure of how effective our education system is to start taking stock of how many kids were coached properly to identify their strengths, and to nurture and chase their dreams. People without dreams are the most likely to sway with the direction of the wind, and to ride its currents without any measure of control. The Canadian PR (or Australian, or Kiwi for that matter), are so much in vogue, because they are setting new dreams for the people who don’t set their own dreams with conviction. People are making PR applications with the hope that moving to a new world would help them escape from the rut they have ended up in, without realising that moving abroad after spending ~3 decades in your home country is an enormous decision and requires painstaking deliberation for it to be truly fulfilling. Unfortunately, most people are taking this call in a manner not to dissimilar from how they have been leading their lives since the past many years- by following the herd and being on the assembly line of success (or lack of).
Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) has a publication for new immigrants titled “Welcome to Canada” which covers a brief overview of the country’s geography, human rights, law and justice system, along with a few other topics. The information contained in the handbook, while useful at a superficial level, is too generic and filtered for anyone to truly appreciate the enormity of moving to a new country. On the contrary, it connotes immigration as a project, which can be completed by a series of defined steps, like finding a place to stay, finding a job, and getting acquainted with the healthcare and childcare systems of the land. Yes, the importance of these things cannot be discounted, they are foundational in nature, but looking at a complex process with a parochial lens commodifies human lives. The effort of this series of posts is to widen the lens and examine the toughest questions related to life as immigrants, the ones that go beyond the obvious.
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