Jaygovind Sahu

Pro­fes­sion­al­ism

It has just been a month I joined this com­pany and the first impor­tant thing I learned was that the asso­ciates can never men­tion the name of their com­pany any­where in their per­sonal pro­files. Don’t know up to what extent peo­ple fol­low such rules, but I am try­ing my bit to be a pro­fes­sional .

If you have ever heard that being pro­fes­sional can make you go through a lot of com­pro­mises with your life, you have got the fact. You just sell 50% of your per­sonal life, your per­sonal ambi­tions and your tal­ent (if you believe you have any) every month and get your salary.

After 12 years with friends in hos­tel I got eight months to live with­out friends and with­out work. No one can under­stand what that feels like except my friends who were expe­ri­enc­ing the same level of uncer­tainty. It sur­prises peo­ple when I say that I am weak in the spe­cialised stream I com­pleted my B. Tech. degree in. Log­i­cally, yes, it should sur­prise peo­ple who know how good a stu­dent I had been in my school. Prac­ti­cally, it is always what you can see in me, or at least ask my friends.  I would have loved to work in a orga­ni­za­tion where peo­ple believe in cre­at­ing things, play­ing with colours and exper­i­ment­ing with new ideas. But, luck takes it all because luck gives it to peo­ple who are lucky enough. I had tried my luck in Mum­bai but as I had expected, I had to finally go with the flow where I had no con­trol. Those eight months taught me a lot of things about life. The bot­tom line is when peo­ple go through dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tions, they must remind them­selves what they can do, even if they don’t get a chance to do any­thing. Oth­er­wise they will get shattered.

After we (me and my friends from col­lege) got the join­ing date, we were very happy because we all were going to meet each other after so many days and exe­cute the plans which were sup­posed to be exe­cuted half a year back. We got here and on the very first day we got the look of a pro­fes­sional within our­selves. But I still don’t under­stand why the hell they wear a neck-tie (please don’t com­ment if your answer has any word like ‘pro­fes­sion­al­ism’)!! We are more in school than office and so we are more stu­dents than employ­ees but what it needs to fetch you a salary is ‘how pro­fes­sional you are’.  Noth­ing surely does mat­ter, acco­mo­da­tion, food­ing, bed­ding, trav­el­ling, learn­ing or any­thing else, if at the end of the day you can sit with your friends, crack mean­ing­less jokes, share the weird­est expe­ri­ences and laugh out loudly with­out any rea­son. What if they plan to take even these things away from you to teach what pro­fes­sion­al­ism means?!