Citizen’s Corner: Dodge such counsellors!
By Tanya Verma
There is always an age where all your surety about your purpose to do in life disappears. You get confused and then there is an added anxiety which mixes up with tension.
At this point in life, everyone assumes that the answer shall lie with ‘someone’ and that you must search for this ‘someone’. Now, I have been experiencing the same.
The tension boils down to what I should choose for my career. The answer every single person knows lies within me, but for eternal peace (which does not exist), I must go to that particular person about whom I just stated. Now this person according to my confusion which has now since been added with anxiety has changed into tension and should be ideally an educational counsellor.
All through our life we have been told that counsellors, specifically those who are part of the educational sector, are sensible and give you pieces of advice without discrimination.
But I would like to reiterate that things that should exist ideally, are not reality.
The educational counsellor is sitting in front of me giving me advice. He tells me all very unrelatable or maybe trying to relate stories of the epic ‘Mahabharata‘ to justify how MBA is the only option that exists in the field of business for me. And I would like to mention that when I told him about doing a Masters’s degree in a certain discipline and not doing MBA, he had a very good answer that it is at par with MBA.
But Sir why were you waiting for me to give options to me only? So I already knew the answers to my life and wanted to take advice from the head of such a reputable institute. Since he was so incompetent that he had just random philosophical Gyaan and stories of Mahabharata to offer.
Till here I was kind of okay with his behaviour but then what he said afterwards literally shook me, I had doubts not for my future but for his. He gave me a very subtle explanation of how until I am at my father’s house I have my choices but after marriage, since I am a girl, my momentum to study shall slow and I will have to go with the whims and fancies of my in-laws – saas and sasoor. That I will have to go with the choices of my husband also and thus my choices will be dependent on other people’s wishes.
Very politely I tried to change the topic, but he was very adamant. “Shaadi to ek din karna hi hai” (you have to marry one day). He literally threw the gibberish out of his mouth at the end and things that made me believe why India is still a developing country. Though very subtly, I dodged his views by terming his ideas as misogynistic views but the greater misogyny inside him ignored my words.
I have been brought up in a very open environment where there has been no discrimination done towards me of any kind, especially in terms of gender and how girls are at-last marriage materials only. The Netflix series “The Indian Matchmaking” though very discriminatory definitely showed the reality that exists.
The last few days have been great for my self-motivation because I have realised that in the country where I live, I have to face a lot of people with an imbalanced minds. Though the greater fault lies in the conditions he might be brought up so pity from my side. And girls the creature of God and the best of the kind should always dodge these men and counsellors like a successful basketball player.
*The writer completed her graduation from St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata.
