job, love, life

Somehow it seems that people seem to not understand the importance of slowing down and learning something definite. people go to college and learn by rote, and at the end wonder that they don't know anything substantial. One of the most important , and to my eyes the most unconvincing, reason given is that the the job just earns money and life is in reality something totally different. How we can afford to treat the job, where a person is going to spend most of his waking hours, with so much disdain, jus' has me beat.
It seems to me that learning is a process that begins when we accept and fall in love with a certain ideology, a idea, or simply a notion. The educational courses just show us what we are capable of- Different doors in a corridor...each leading into a different world...each world engaging...fascinating...filled with ideas and capable of more ideas begging to be discovered....each more vibrant than the rest. It must be this way...the alternative seems to be rather insipid and quite frankly seemed too boring to even contemplate upon...
Also i have noticed that too many people see a job just as a necessary evil to exist. without that higher purpose we attach to the other things in life. How this attitude comes about is something i simply do not understand. Having said so, i pity the people who take life this way.
A few weeks ago, i was speaking to my friend, and he was of the opinion that people do that because of need, as in people need to take care of their family and hence have to go in for a job that they don't like. So there must be something wrong in my opinion after all. the very fact that i am writing on this topic seems to me the contradicting nature of the subject involved, with an unconscious realisation of an opposing stand on the issue without my concious moral or ethical acceptance. that is something else to contemplate on.
Dec 12, 2008: I am completing this draft after nearly 10 months. A lot of things have changed since then, the BSE sensex have dropped to 9000 mark. Companies are well on their way to optimised companies, which is a 'managerial' term meaning people have been fired left, right and center. However, apart from this, i have thought these things out more seriously.

The events of the past few months have only convinced me that i was right and the rest, wrong. Before i used to say that one needs to take one's choice of profession less frivolously, now i say that anything lesser than total commitment and love for your profession bordering on obsession will destroy you.

"Work is worship" said the elders and they are right, as always. We had stopped worshipping our work, and as a result, we find ourselves in a world of chaos. 

In my field, the IT industry, we indians have forgotten that to be in the game, we need to constantly update ourselves...in other words, as Henry Ford so eloquently put it, we need to be in a state of continual ferment. What is true for making cars also holds true for IT, or any other industry.

From a long time, at least from the past 3 years, we have seen Social Networks, Online Communities, Blogs and other what-have-yous. but all these are just old inventions re-invented. When was the last time we saw something radically different on the net? Not anytime in the recent past.

Look at the post 2nd world war period, that was the real boom time. Inventions, Discoveries - the whole industry was on overdrive. New ways were found to do old things, and in most of the cases, the old things themselves were replaced. Looking at the general profile of the inventors then, we cometo know that these people maynot have been educated conventionally, but took the time to educate themselves. there was time for the education to sink in, and for refinement to occur. 

In hinduism, we have a concept called the 'kaal-chakra' , meaning time-circle. The circle has turned, and though people are not dying of war, the effects of the current recession are the same as that of war. Its time. Let the innovations begin.