YOUTH COLUMN

To Tread the Untrodden Path

Meghna Achar

Every time I hear someone banter about being new, being DIFFERENT, a certain voice echoes in my mind – that of Anton Ego (voiced by Peter O’Toole), an animated character so flawlessly weaved into the quaint little story of the Oscar-winning Animated Feature film ‘Ratatouille’ – “There are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defence of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends.”

The ‘new’ certainly needs friends. Being or doing something different is somewhat like making yourself vulnerable to questions and criticism which can often compel the one with the different thoughts and actions to become flock-minded, that is, to tread the trodden.

Since two years or so, I’ve set my heart on taking up Arts as the stream through which I’d like to pursue my career. For anyone who is fresh from passing out of class 10, it’s rather common to be bombarded with a whole set of questions on what stream he or she has opted for, concerning higher education. And when it dawns on the inquirers, the fact that I’m going to set my foot on the so-called “no-scope” stream, most of them (not all, I must mention) make up their mind that I am a dunce student (which usually upsets me, because I am not one!)

As much as I admire all the doctors and engineers who are coming out of the esteemed and not so esteemed colleges and universities, I believe that there is just too many of them! It pains me to know that many of my friends have settled up for courses which they are uncomfortable in, just because of parental pressure.

So opting a different course in life – be it concerning education or any other choice you’ve got to make in life – is no crime! I genuinely believe in the words of the famed fashionista Coco Chanel—“In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different.”

I, like many who take up a different path, have made this choice because I want to and not because I’m being conditioned to do so. I’m not being different just for the sake of being different. I’m being different, because I don’t want to gamble with my happiness and satisfaction by taking up a course which I don’t have my interests set on.

I’d like to quote the very famous lines from the poem ‘The Road Not Taken’, very enchantingly penned down by the magnanimous English poet Robert Frost –

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, 

I took the one less travelled by, 

and that has made all the difference.”

And that shall hopefully make all the difference, indeed.