Ambedkar, Gandhi and the story of why it matters where you start

A troubling trend of glamorizing ' early quits' is gaining momentum. A Google search will throw up a plethora of blogs on how empowering it is to quit your day job. Those blogs will subtly remind you that the author is a so-and-so from IIT or NIT. Just as your eyebrows perk up, will follow the next sentence: worked in Mckinsey, Goldman, or other such hallowed enterprise. Now you are mighty impressed. Hey, hold on! Did you miss that the person was a Managing director or a company co-founder? He gave it all up to lead a mundane life. Now, a small tear escapes your eyes as if you were likening them to Buddha or Gandhi. The rest of the fleeting essay concerns renunciation. One can't help but make a virtue out of giving up the Outlook mailbox. Of course, who can slip the virtue signal about letting go of a payslip?


Here is where Gandhi and Ambedkar appear. Gandhi was an upper-caste Baniya whose family consisted of uber-rich merchants. His father was a prime minister of Porbandar in British India. Gandhi went to England in 1888 to study law in London because his father wished to see him as a barrister! After earning all the possible dopamine hits in the early days of life and tasting the good life up close, Gandhi returns to India at the overripened age of 45. Ambedkar is a whole different story. In his early years, education was as alien to Ambedkar as poverty was to Gandhi. It was in Ambedkar's destiny to be poor, irrelevant, and forgotten.  


Gandhi's shedding clothes was not revolutionary, but Ambedkar wearing a three-piece suit was. He made it against the odds. He wanted the world to know that he made it and made it big! If Ambedkar had shed clothes...   


Well, when I was at London Business School (of course, I am name-dropping!), a professor provocatively stated that we study so hard only to end up living an everyday, boring, unremarkable life. I wholly missed the point while my meritorious classmates were seemingly affected (OK, I made a back door entry, a mere exchange student). My life struggle was aspiring to live an everyday life in a suit and having an ordinary, well-paid 9-6 job. I refuse to see the grand purpose of waking up into nothingness, cooking your meals, lying in the sun, and pondering over life. I dread an empty calendar. It was my lifelong ambition to take the red-eye flight!  

We are the quintessential Ambedkar, not in our wisdom but in our academic (non) starting points! It is pretty extraordinary that we are now living ordinary, everyday lives. I remain impressed by my unremarkable, busy life. I am Ambedkar; I am not shedding my clothes anytime soon.   

    

      

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