As kids, at some point of time, all of us have written essays on what we want to be. I preferred to write doctor, it fetched easy marks. ( In my Hindi paper in ICSE, I wrote politician , just to be different). At my age, the question becomes a bit important, simply because it is no more a question for an essay, it is a question for life. I don't think I ever had an answer, or will ever have one. Life can never be the pursuit of a profession. It wasn't supposed to be. Life cannot be settled. Life cannot be about one goal. It needs a drive that is eternally elusive. Wealth, wine, women, fame, glory, or more ambiguously, satisfaction. Men through ages have lusted for these, and never had enough. This drives life.
Money is too lowly to be a stated obsession. Fame makes you 'somebody else's ' man, you are no longer yourself. Glory is subjective. Satisfaction is for saints, and they are no longer born. (Wine and women are side topics , another day maybe :) ). All these drives have an inherent evilness. And yet they appeal. (Verrappan had money,Rakhi Sawant is famous, Sibu Soren is a adivasi icon, and , perhaps, Aasaram Bapu is a satisfied man). An idealist will rejects all these. And he is not wrong in doing so. I strongly believe there is space for idealist in this world ( probably slowly turning into a vacuum). His ideals are his drive, again elusive. All of us compromise, no matter what.
At a personal level, I wander from being an idealist to sanctimonious to self-character assassin. I like to think of myself as incorruptible when it comes to money. My heart cringes when I see little kids serving as workers or begging, but have never done anything about it, apart from asking about their non-existent schooling. And right through, I have had a power fetish, which is not wrong, as I see it. We dont live to plant trees, meditate, and feed poor; our lives ought to have a materialistic passion.
In the end, what matters is not what we want, but what we become. There is no authority to decide good and bad, everything is right, if it is right to you. One must have a sense of righteousness, even if flawed, for they dictate who we become. Our quest for what we want to become doesn't have an answer. It lets us know who we are. Its a journey through everything good and bad in us, a discovery of ourselves.
