Ambition

Written over September 2010

A year ago, we were 'forced' to attend this seminar--I was in need of sleep, and impatient to go home. I don't remember its topic, but this one incident is burned in my memory. You see, he began with descriptions of his glittering career, how he travels all over the world for this and that, stays in luxury hotels, and has 'world recognition' (what ever that is). And then, he turned to his audience; how many of us would like a routine 9 to 5 job, come home for coffee with your 'wife'*, play with your kids, and sleep? 

I was extremely sleep deprived, then, and did not care to look around for others' response. I simply raised my hand, for my honest answer is 'yes', and assumed that everyone would do the same. Only, they didn't. It drew me quite a lot of stares**, it did, and, I dare say, quite startled the speaker--I don't believe he'd had a raised hand in his script--"would I really be satisfied with so little?" he asked me.

But... is it really so little? To rise with the sun, to cook breakfast and lunch, to fuss over, then send off your kids to school, to come home every evening to delighted chatter of children, to relax with a cup of tea (I'll learn to drink tea, one day) with your spouse, to cook dinner for your family, to eat together, to help the kids with their studies, to clean up, and sleep knowing that it was a day well spent, and with the promise that the next day will be equally good.

About a month ago, as I told all of this to Divya, it hit me that I was describing my mother. Every little bit of it. Seriously, 'tis amazing how I went about picturing this idyll, making it my own, and not realizing it was exactly what had seen everyday at home, in my mother, as I grew up.

Anyways, the whole point of these stories is that all my dreams for the future are of my home, and family. Work shall be a part of my identity, but all I want on that front is a job I like, and which pays well enough. No ambition at all, of rising to the top of the ladder. No working late hours, no trips around the world, no world fame.

Am I conforming to stereotypes that women belong at home? Am being 'unfeminist'? I do not believe so; I am not advocating this for every woman. I am not saying that women should not be ambitious.

That I am unambitious is my choice, as an individual, as Nitika. Not as a woman who lives in a men's world, not as a woman who is forced to do acknowledge that men are simply better when it comes to career, not because I cannot do it.

There are plenty of examples of women who have achieved so much, career-wise. As we are reminded every now and then by forwarded mails, newspaper editorials, and blog posts. Feel proud of women, they say. Women power, they scream. And you know what, I get irritated by them. For I am a step ahead of them. To me, it's natural that these women have achieved so much. They have not done it despite being women, they have not done it precisely because they are women. It is as simple as 'they can, and they have', just as all the men who could. (Here, I will admit that most of them have succeeded against odds. Have, somewhere during their rise, battled men, perhaps even women, who placed obstacles just because they are women.)

Women are as 'homo sapien' as men are, women have it in them to succeed as much as the men do, women are in every way equal to the men. Of course some of them succeeded. It is another matter that I believe I do not belong to this sparkling corporate world, that my identity is tied up more with home, than with work.

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* oh yes, he said wife, not spouse: am I to assume that his association of men with career is entirely too strong, that his entire talk was for the guys? That we girls are present only in the domestic scene of having coffee with our husbands, the scene he so carelessly dismissed?

**Hota Sir (head of the comp. science dept.), in particular, looked at me like I was crazy.