By Om Tat sat,
Congratulations and sympathies are in order to the nearly five lakh students who have come out of the tunnel of their school life. As a close observer for the last decade, I can understand the torturous hell you have been through. Increasingly, you lost your free time and even submitted your Saturdays to coaching and tuition classes. Your mornings and evenings were no different than your school hours. You started going to school in the wee hour of the morning and left school after 6 p.m., if you were lucky. But, hey, be grateful that you got to wear tie and skirt with track suits for schools, or even get donned in professional blazers. Observers could easily have been fooled into thinking that you must have been prodigious CEO’s of your own business empires.
Many of you even fainted in class during those 12 hours spent in school day in and day out for the past few years. Some of you have developed severe malnutrition and illnesses due to all the junk food you sustained yourself with. All that is over! Whether D+ or whatever, you are through that hell created for you by the Nepal’s education system of your own beloved government. The government cared so much about you that it made sure none of you failed and did not take any unpleasant step that would embarrass the system.
Now you feel like being on top of your own personal Everest. Breathe in deep and exhale slowly.
Take your time. Enjoy the rare exhilaration!
Your life is about to enter into another tunnel that will be not be much different in substance, but at least, you will not be prisoners of your schools for two more years, when you actually complete your high school. In reality SLC (school leaving certificate) is meaningless. Maybe only India still has this outdated metric system.
I can safely predict what you will choose, since your school has neither given you counseling for career choices, nor is it the stage where you need to choose your career. You have not been prepared for life.
That is the fact.
Hence you are gloriously inept to decide what to study. Not to panic though. Society has already set that in concrete for your benefit. You will get into science program if you are the toppers. If that does not work out for you, then of course, business schools will be your next option. If you cannot get into any of them, then you will settle for the humanities program, cursing your luck.
No need to feel sorry, though. Science and management students have it made. So have you the artsy fellows.
Nepal is a country in a reverse psychosis. Top is bottom and bottom is the top here. So, all those students seeking to make something of your life, destiny has played a trick on you. If you are forced to be Arts major, thank your lucky stars. You have been the chosen one to redesign your country and change your community. You will be studying about topics that have broader significance and more importance in everyone’s life. Think of it as you are learning to be social engineering, uplifting the masses, leading the nation and being the hope for millions of Nepalese, who are desperately seeking a ray of hope in the dark cloud of ignorance.
So, feel free to attend morning classes and toil in a job for the rest of the day. Brace yourself, for a taste of real life. You will be learning to support yourself, especially now that your needs have sky rocketed compared to the previous generation youth. You need to have some money in your pocket for dates and mobile talk time, so you will be looking to earn money already. Good thing that your school prepared you to slog all through the day. Keep at it fellows. If you do, you can be journalists, social activists, traditional superstition busters, and life-changers for silent masses. You truly can be the light.
Best Wishes!
The writer is a graduate of Arizona State University in Political Science. He is working as a social activist and motivational speaker for students across Nepal since 2007.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necesarily reflect the official policy or position of Nepalisite.
