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The latest Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) tells us that 25 percent of youth aged between 15 and 29 belong to the NEET category—Not Employed, Educated, or in Training. The manner in which this section of our country navigates social mobility, marriage market, status, and belonging are worth exploring.
Below is an imagined letter from a professionally accomplished youth to his friend who has not been able to reap the fruits of education:
It pierces my heart when you call yourself less educated and deem those with more degrees worthier of love and respect than you are. Yet, my heart draws more to you than to those with better educational credentials, because your heart is cultivated, and your soul is refined. You know how to deem a human being first and foremost as someone with a throbbing heart and a feeling soul.
Action alone signifies life. We must act to evolve, be alive, and create meaning. However, you do not have to endlessly strive to shore up your identity. Often, we try to outperform others, not because of a moral duty to excel, but to feel secure.
However, such security is untenable. This is the travesty of modern education, which has become a tool for conferring prestige. Education is not only seen in degrees. It is also seen in the degree to which we have figured out our identity and come to peace with it, not by stagnating but by having an unshakeable belief in one’s capacity to be dynamic and instrumental.
Wallowing in self-pity is a choice because one unconsciously starts enjoying it. Be there for yourself, for if you have not looked deeply into yourself, others will come and define you.
What I wish to impress upon you is that the status-conferring and role-assigning power of modern education, with its standardised testing, uniform grading, and curriculum, is not an invariable characteristic of the human condition. Whatever the mode and means of production is at any given point, the ultimate value is created when we labour, and in the process of doing something worthwhile, we become worthy and validated unto oneself.
If it is self-belief that is desired, then unto self-one must return. Worth and respect cannot be given in alms; it is first felt in oneself and then commanded externally.
Backing yourself is a skill you would want to acquire because some will misconstrue your angst as an inferiority complex.
Wisdom is in learning to submit and bearing gracefully whatever life deals us, albeit agentially.
I know you plan to institute welfare for orphans and deprived students. These are worthy acts, and being selfless, they will confer dignity and consummate ease, not only privilege, but also repair the heart and soul. You light up every room you enter and heal every soul you touch. You are easy to forget any slights and loath to wish diminution upon anyone. Never the one to oppress others after doing them favours, you embody the faith that life is not a zero-sum game, where one’s man loss becomes another’s gain; life is about submitting to the expectation that this time it will be fair and discerning between what to hold onto and what to let go. This is to me a hallmark of real education, something which is lifelong and not restricted to vocational, institutionalised instruction.
(Obaid Farooqui is a research scholar in the Department of Sociology, University of Hyderabad. He frequently writes mystical poems and memoirs in private and is planning to come up with a blog of his own. This is an opinion piece, and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)