That’s what I call a vocation…

A very annoying question which each one of us has to answer when asked back in school/college is about choosing a vocation. Right from your friends, parents to your teachers to relatives to all sorts of your parent’s friends seem to be asking just this. It goes on until one day we can’t take it any more. We want to tell them to stop. But then we were only kids or may be some unwise teenagers and were meant to give answers like, “Doctor, Engineer, scientist, or an IAS Officer. Actor, writer, choreographer, model, stylist, fashion designer all this was unheard of. People choosing such fields were termed as duffers and academically not sound.
As a child I used to write short stories, when the other kids my age were busy playing hopscotch or chasing butterflies or learning to skate I was picking up Nancy Drew, Enid Blyton series, Sherlock Holmes, Malgudi Days and reading them. Not that I have not done all those fancy things kids do but was somehow more inclined towards books and I always knew I had a penchant towards writing and the realization never came until few years ago. But it’s better late than never. The first real compliment came my way when I was eleven years old and was in sixth grade and my English teacher read my essay in front of the whole class saying, “Here, we have a future writer among us”. And I remember gaping, blushing and cherishing it forever after that. And that’s how it remained for a very long time. I think it didn’t even occur to me till very recently that I could do that seriously.
I remember it was a fun game for us as kids, when we were constantly asked by our friends and we asked them in return. I remember my kid sister saying, ‘mommy’ when asked what would she like to become and we all laughed our heads off and instantly she knew something was wrong.
Whatever, kids today are better informed about different profession and most of them know very early-on what they want to become or do when they grow up. I took twenty-five years to realize what I enjoy doing the most. And may be one of these days I’ll have a column of my own in a leading news paper or I might publish a book, it doesn’t matter, as long as I am doing what I love doing and that’s what I call a vocation.