Look beyond NEET
Sahil Sharifdin Bhat
‘She sat for NEET and failed. She sat for NEET again and failed again. When she failed for the fourth time, she felt that she was worthless and committed suicide. She was one of the three dozen students who committed suicide that day in India. Statistically speaking, three dozen students commit suicide daily in India. ‘
There is a quote attributed to one of the greatest scientists of the twentieth century, Albert Einstein that ‘everybody is a genius but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree , it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid ‘.
Rest assured, everyone in this world is looking for a happy life, everyone looks happy when seen at a distance and none is happy when observed nearby. The reason behind the universal unhappiness is the common greed. For instance a small man fixes a small goal in order to live happily.
Once he hits it, he feels that he has become a big man and fixes a big goal in order to live more happily. Next, he feels that he must become bigger than the people around him in order to live much more happily. Consequently, he dies an unhappy man.
You are after fake happiness and your happiness does not lie in the things you achieve or collect. It lies in the respect, praise or jealousy that you are able to generate among the people after achieving or collecting things. In other words, you will feel happy if you become a doctor and work at a village dispensary.
Nevertheless, you will feel like hell if your neighbour becomes a bigger doctor and works at a city hospital. Again I say, the happiness does not lie in the thing you have obtained. It lies in the idea that you are better than others and thus you command more respect in your society or you are able to inflict more pain on the people you dislike with the help of the thing you have obtained.
You are, as said above, after fake happiness. Your happiness is linked with the people around you. Their reactions increase or decrease your happiness. It is not the post of a medical doctor that matters to you. It is the reaction that you will receive after becoming a medical doctor that really matters to you.
Otherwise, life is very simple. You can live it happily not just by being a medical doctor but by being a lawyer, a businessman, a bank employee, a teacher, a soldier, an artist, a train driver or a chef also.
Studying and then becoming a medical doctor is not the whole of life . It is not the only way to live. On the contrary, it is a small part of life and there are tens and thousands of other ways to live.
According to a survey, there are only 5% to 6% people of India who have government jobs. What are the rest of the people doing? Are they begging in the streets? No. In fact, they also live. Some of them live much more happily than the most popular and most intelligent medical doctors of India. The point I am stressing on is that if you fail to crack NEET, you need not commit suicide or live all your life in depression. Maybe you are destined to be a professor at a university or a great writer or a scientist or a judge.
Maybe the creator loves you more and protects you from earning out of the illness of others. Maybe He does not want you to kill innocent people by prescribing them counterfeit drugs or inauthentic medicines available in tons in the market. Maybe you are not a fish, you are a falcon. Therefore, you must not see what you want to do in life. Rather, you must see what you are able to do in life. Some creatures have been created for crawling, some for swimming and some for flying but all creatures matter equally. Trust the greatest planner.
The only rich and happy person in the world is the one whose food and clothes fall from the sky and he needs not work to live an honourable life. All who need to work to live respectably experience happiness and pain alternately. No job in itself is completely joyful or painful.
However, when you know your job well and do it the way it is required to do, any tough looking job becomes a fountain of happiness. Gone are the days when a single family member would work and feed the entire family. You live now in a so called modern world and every person is thinking and of course working for himself. Nowadays, a family of five members will have five high paid jobs, five expensive cars and five separate bungalows but none of them will claim to be considerably happy, peaceful or healthy.
You will never see anyone truly happy in the world of competition where some move too fast and fall off the cliff and some move too slow and are trampled beneath the feet. The true happiness resides in the world of cooperation where people walk hand in hand like brothers and sisters and stand by one another in thick and thin and in ups and downs of life.
According to an estimate, almost two million students sit for NEET every year in India and the majority of them fail to crack it. Some of the failures keep attempting NEET for years till they get exhausted of education itself or succumb to permanent health problems or take their lives in frustration.
It is one of the biggest disasters that is allowed to occur annually by parents, teachers and the government of this nation. The students are programmed to think that the only worthy profession on the earth is that of doctors. All other professions are inferior and worth not adopting.
The schools add fuel to the fire by not offering alternative courses to medical science. The tuition centers follow suit. The student are left with no choice but to opt for medical science in order to crack NEET and try to become doctors. They invest their days and nights, their joys, the hard-earned money of their families and everything else to achieve their dream of becoming doctors.
When they fail in NEET, their world becomes dark and they take undesirable measures. Someone must educate them that a doctor’s job is not the only job and the highest paid job on the planet earth. They can do better in their lives with less money and less time by becoming data scientists, digital marketers, intellectual property lawyers, investment bankers, chartered accountants, commercial pilots, product marketing mangers, officers in army, navy or air force.
They can do wonders in Media and Journalism, Film and Television, Fashion Industry, Web designing and Web development, Foreign languages, Event Management, Tourism and Travel, Agriculture and numerous other areas.
A train is not made of a single coach neither is the world run by only doctors. In fact, who remembers doctors? Do you remember the doctors working in your area two hundred years before or a hundred years before or fifty years before? Absolutely not. It is leaders, writers, scientists, philosophers, poets, wrestlers, actors, sportspersons, saints, painters, musicians etc who survive their graves.
Please, don’t get me wrong. I don’t condemn or malign the profession of doctors. It is a beautiful profession. What I mean is that it is not the only profession as is inculcated in students. If anyone wants to become a doctor, I welcome him/her. In the same breath, I would say that there are better professions out there and students must think about them also. According to me, the best job is the one which requires minimum of our time but pays maximum wages.
You are human beings. You live temporarily in this temporary world. There have been people in the world before you and there will be people in the world after you are dead and gone. Get any job or adopt any profession that can satisfy your basic needs. All jobs are good to live a middle-class peaceful life. (If you want to satisfy your greed then you must endeavour to become a politician, actor, smuggler or businessman.) You must live like a traveller on the earth. When a path seems difficult for you, you must not kill yourself. Rather, you must think of an easier path.
When you knock a door and it does not open. You must not hurt yourself, rather, go and knock on another door. The earth is longer than the feet can walk. The sky is bigger than the eyes can see. Life is more beautiful than you think. The most popular or the wealthiest people in the world are least literate. The failure in the field of formal education does not mean the failure in life. One can live a wonderful life without ever having been to any school or college. There are more ways and more professions to live a happy life than you know. Let me conclude it with the inspirational words of Allama Dr Iqbal:
Sitaron Se Agay Jahan Aur Bhi Hain
Abhi Ishq Ke Imtihan Aur Bhi Hain
Agar Kho Gya Ek Nasheeman To Kya Gham
Maqamat-e-Aah-o-Faghan Aur Bhi Hain
Tu Shaheen Hai, Parwaz Hai Kaam Tera
Tere Samne Asman Aur Bhi Hain
(The author lives at Lethapora Pulwama. He is a lecturer of English language and literature)
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