By Mohul Raj Singh:
Rome was not built in a day.
My mother would tell this to me every time I gave up on Mathematics when I couldn’t solve an algebra problem in 6th standard. My History teacher would say it when I couldn’t reproduce the exact answer in exam what she had made the class write. When I failed to understand the concept of Bernoulli’s equation, my tutor would talk of Rome. My CAT instructor, who doesn’t even know where Rome is, would say it every time I complained of how tough it is to get into an IIM.
And every time they say this, I wonder that the people who had built Rome fortunately didn’t have access to Facebook. Twitter was just the sound of a bird. No missed calls of friends who are eagerly waiting to screw your case for not attending their Birthday parties. No emotional messages from their love interests who think that every time you didn’t pick up their call you were about to break up. They didn’t not have to worry about their grades; they didn’t have to crack CAT. There were no distractions and so, these lucky people, could easily concentrate and the result as we all see is beautiful Rome.
Wait….if technology is a distraction then what about the benefits of staying connected that comes along with it. Think of all those successful school projects which would have been disasters without Google to help you out. Those English answers which would have been big grammatical tragedies had there been no access to Wikipedia. Orkut,I remember, was the best teenage hangout for everyone who was born in early nintees. It had witnessed every thing from the mushiest love proposals to the cattiest cat fights, from the feet sweeping photos to the most explicit comments. But then it was also held responsible for the falling grades and increasing weights.
Was it or that’s what our parents had thought? Or that’s what we wanted them to think so that we could easily get away by putting the blame on an innocent machine and harmless networking sites? I don’t know but what I know is that there is one thing that our parents don’t understand (there are many but I shall focus just on one) we belong to this generation. We know what we want, we know the destination, and we have aspirations and not immature dreams. We may not know the route but we are always eager to find it. We love being with people. We love to experience it by ourselves than to borrow it from them. This youth brigade is not scared of falling because it knows how to get up and find its way.
‘We know what we want from life’ is our key mantra. We knew it when we spend hours and hours on Orkut. We know it even now. Probably for me chatting with some one was more important at that point of time and I was not unconscious about it. But that doesn’t mean that I cared less about my grades or my career was less important to me. Notice, this is the internal dynamics of a young mind. It’s young but not naïve. Orkut was never a waste but a recreational activity and therefore utilization of time.
So for people, who think that technology is a distraction for us, think again. We youngsters might call it a distraction when we don’t want to be blamed for lazing around but we know in our hearts that it has never been and can never be. It brings us closer to our work, to new ideas, to friends.
If we know how to prioritize, we have mastered the art of depriortizing and it has and will continue to help us forever. Life moves on like this. Perfection can’t be attained and we don’t even try because we believe that there is something more important than perfection and that is personal happiness. If we talk on phone it’s because it makes us happy, if we don’t attend a call because of being busy in making a presentation it’s because the outcomes of the presentation give us more happiness.
I won’t call this behavior selfish. It’s a fast running world and we can’t help it. Does that mean studying for CAT makes me happy? No not really but IIM will. While you sit down and think about what makes you happy, I would try to work out the algebra equation once again…You know why because
Rome was not built in a day.