We are a generation of career-oriented people. We switch companies, industries, jobs, and entire career paths. One professor I had during my MBA at IIM Bangalore once told me that this generation will see an average of three career switches per person, simply based on the longevity of companies in this day and age as well as the speed with which skills and technologies hit obsolescence. I trained as an engineer, worked in consulting, then went back to engineering, and am now working on a startup in the legal world. I’d say I’ve done my fair share of career switching. And I look at my mother, a chartered accountant, who has done the exact same thing for close to four decades now. She started her own practice right after she got her degree and has never looked back since. Her friends have stuck with companies for similarly large periods of time. And I wonder- was theirs a generation of mediocrity? Or maybe one of medium-sized aspirations?
As I mull over these thoughts, they go and invite their other thought friends. Thoughts often do this, don’t they- egg on other, unrelated thoughts to come bug the mind. I try and think back as to when these trends completely changed and why? I remember back in the late 90s when some of my older cousins were starting their first jobs, ‘MNC’ was the buzz acronym. Everyone wanted to work for a multinational corporation (as if corporations ever choose to be uni-national). India had opened its economy to foreign investments in the early nineties and by the middle of the decade, quite a few companies had made way into the country (1997 saw the highest foreign direct investment of the nineties, with around INR 55,000 crore approved in FDI and about a third of that actually realized.)
Alright, so we know that MNCs became the trend around that time, and the new millennium is fairly well explained, with India following global trends of a bias towards technology companies and then, eventually, the ‘startup’ phase. What remains is the baby boomer work trends. That generation in the Indian subcontinent, I feel, was very different from elsewhere. Slowly, a theory concocts. It has loopholes but, in my defense, I came up with it while playing FIFA.
My grandparents and their generation saw one of the bloodiest times in recent history. They saw the largest exodus of an entire population. Without going into the gore of it, which is rather well documented, I will say that a lot of families, especially in the northern part of India (and obviously Pakistan) lost a lot of their physical belongings at this time. When you’re migrating to save your life, you’re unlikely to carry a ton of gold. Moreover, most families moved with thoughts of returning someday to take care of financial affairs, selling off their houses and such, so it is fair to assume that they didn’t carry a lot of their wealth with them. (A family friend writes beautifully about the objects that people carried across the randomly constructed line in a heart-wrenching journal titled “Remnants of a Separation”. I highly recommend it.) This generation, after the dust of the war and the partition had settled, after their tired bones had unwillingly accepted new homes, realized that they were suddenly poor. I’m told that my nineteen-year-old maternal grandad had his personal rickshaw and chauffeur in Lahore before it became a different country. Moving to India, he worked as a sheet metal cutter in a dingy factory and got paid a grotesquely low salary. This generation of former princes that were now penniless in what they were told was their own country realized the importance of a stable job. This, I feel, was important in defining the Indian career psyche. They told their children (the baby boomers; my parents) to get a solid education, learn a trade, get a job therein, and work without complaining. This is exactly what my parents did. This is what a lot of their generation did- they found good jobs and stuck with them. It turns out their parents had been right, and these jobs did exactly what they were meant to. They gave out consistent, solid salaries. They helped build houses. They helped put kids (us) in good schools, and they made sure our inheritances were larger than those that our parents received.
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why we are the way we are. Our typewriter building grandparents made sure our parents got the education they needed and stuck with jobs that made them capable of buying computers. In turn, our parents worked hard so we could type away random articles on MacBooks and experiment with our careers. The knowledge that we don’t have to worry about buying a house or about saving for the next small family vacation really helps. I’ve had stints where I’ve been jobless because I got bored of my previous job and ‘was figuring out what I wanted to do next’. That period lasted almost a year and, while I had savings, I might not have lavishly travelled had I been born a generation before. Now, we seek meaning and impact and work-life balances in our jobs. Our parents sought stability. We are happy working for startups that might not stick around tomorrow. Our parents chose big companies and retired with them. The difference- the financial condition of the preceding generation, a war, the mighty British Empire, and the first MNC ever, the East India Company!
It’s funny how millions of people in a single generation can share a thought process and philosophy and collectively influence decisions of the next one. Perhaps our learning has been to stay away from screens and that’s what we’ll make sure our kids do. Or maybe, avoiding eating bats.
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