This Independence day, social media was flooded with “What Independence meant to you personally" posts. I ignored it, like many other thoughts that couldn’t find the space or time to find a way into my lost brain since the last two months I began my professional life. I am not sure of how the first few months of work life translates for any other fresher, but I personally, couldn’t be more lost. A couple of days would be fantastic, the next two would find me trying to make sense of whatever fantastic I’d found and the last two (yea, six days in a week, that could be an easy blame for my frustration) I’d try to compensate for the time I had wasted not finding any sense, only to realize that all of this was solely driven out of the pressure to please the important people. Meanwhile, (I thought) I was doing every possible supposedly right thing, skipping the late nights, being early to and staying late at office and doing all the shitty work I thought was shitty but also important to be done for the sake of it. It took me two months, or probably just a 15th August to understand how I was on the fastest track to becoming a perfect corporate slave. Thankfully, the Independence day hangover I was in, for a change, I did not work (read pretend to) post 10:15 a.m. today – also because people to please are going to be on a leave for the remaining week. I did everything that fell outside the “right” bracket, came back home not cribbing about work, spent a whole one hour oiling my hair and another one chewing every grain of rice at dinner, started a movie post 10 which I have no memory of doing the last time – bothering least about the next day or the next year and giving my lost self some time off to be the shameless useless one it needs to be at times. Being shamelessly useless gives one the guts to care less of failing and being useless another time, and that is letting yourself free from a lot of self created liabilities - call them the pressures of success or the shallow standards of the society. Let not too many words spoil the magic of what happened in the next few hours, Rejuvenation – this was my spring. At this late hour of night, I still have all the motivation to wake up early for work tomorrow despite the absence of people to please. Just the idea of not being answerable to someone could – and made so much of a difference – so much so that you would want to work even when you are not bound to – that I found what independence means to me after a carefree yet most productive day. Let us not work each day because we are hired, and let us be carefree enough to keep reminding us of the understated gift of freedom we have.
