Are
you in the right profession?
Shakir
Lakhani
JUNE
11, 2019
You know that feeling you
get when you meet a very successful person and realise that you are in the
wrong profession? I know many people who gave up their chosen careers and
switched over to other fields, like that once-popular religious scholar and TV anchor
who used to be a doctor and is also a ruling party member of the National
Assembly. You come across many of them in government service. I once lived in a
rented house owned by a senior police officer who had graduated in civil
engineering. I have also met medical doctors and PhDs working in the Customs
and other government departments. I often used to tell my students to switch
over to lucrative jobs in other fields if their chosen profession was boring or
if they were not earning enough. One of my engineering students became a pilot,
another took up insurance, and a third spent two years getting a law degree and
ended up becoming a highly successful lawyer.
Like everyone else, there
have been occasions when I have wished I’d chosen some other occupation, like
politics. The first time this happened was when I came across a highly
successful beggar.
This happened about 50 years ago. We have an association of
families belonging to my ancestral hometown in India, and one day, we
discovered that among the 800 members, one was a blind beggar. He used to sit
on the footpath on Bunder Road, where the Plaza cinema used to be.
Our
association decided to fix a monthly stipend of Rs 300 for him. This may seem a
paltry amount to today’s youngsters but it meant a lot in those days, when the
price of beef was two rupees per kilo and you could get a haircut for a rupee.
I was asked to go to the beggar’s house and give him the money.
He lived in a dilapidated house in one of those
dirty slums on the outskirts of the city, just the kind of locality one would
expect a man like him to live in. But when I rang the bell and was invited to
enter, I was startled to see that the room was spic and span, not like a room
in a very poor man’s house. There was a big refrigerator as well as a TV set in
the corner. The room was fully carpeted. I didn’t get to see the other rooms, but
I could hear an air-conditioner whirring in the background. So I thought I had
come to the wrong place, and was convinced when a man walked into the large
room without a walking stick, and apparently not blind at all.
I asked him his name and realised that he was,
in fact, the man I had come to see. Hesitantly, I told him the purpose of my
visit, and when I told him about the monthly stipend from my association, he
laughed loudly. “You can keep the 300 rupees, sir; in fact, I’ll donate twice
that amount every month to your association.”
Over a cup of tea, he told me about himself. He
had been the son of a rich man, but had done badly in business and had to sell
the shop he had inherited. Not being educated, he decided to take up begging,
knowing that no relative or neighbour would recognise him due to his heavy
beard and large sunglasses, and because he never said a word the whole day, not
even thanking those who dropped coins and rupee notes in his cap placed in
front of him. Even though he now had enough money to buy a shop, he chose
instead to beg because it was so lucrative. His childless wife had left him
after he went bankrupt. He had not re-married and lived alone, with a couple of
servants who had no idea what he did for a living. He would get off the bus a
couple of streets away from his workplace, and put on his large sunglasses
before sitting down on the footpath.
I tried to persuade him to give up begging and
lead a more normal life, but he laughed again. “Everyone has to beg at one time
or another; don’t you have to beg of your superiors for your annual raise and
not to transfer you to a small town like Larkana or Chichawatni? Don’t our
politicians come to us begging for our votes? Doesn’t the government have to
beg for loans from other countries and the IMF? I know you aren’t earning more
than a thousand a month, you can sit on the opposite side of the road where I
sit, and you can earn five times that amount and retire before the age of 40.”
I left his house a sadder and a wiser man.
The writer is a freelancer
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