Yesterday, couple of college graduates asked me to fill in a survey. They wanted to know if I would allow my child to follow football as a professional sport or some other sport as a career option or would I force him to cramp up lessons and get high grades – 99% and above so that he can become CA or an Engineer from IIT or an MBA from IIM.
This made me think about what would I do? Would I allow him to pursue sports as a career or not? To me, it was not a simple answer – even though my heart said I will- my mind was saying it would depend – If he is one among the top 5% people in that sport, I may agree, otherwise I think I will force him to study hard.
Why is this? Why would I not allow my children to do what they want? When I look around, I see that living a normal life is very expensive today. One needs to earn at least rupees 40-50K per month. You may think I am exaggerating but just count – Rent -10K, Food – 5K, Clothes & accessories – 5K (to keep up with the peer pressure), Medical expense – 5K, children Education 5K,Retirement savings – 10K, Taxes – 3K and then God only can save you if you have an education and housing loan – add another 30K for this. These expenses are growing at 10% annually.
Any professional sport or hobby has room only for very few professionals; say about 100 in each sport at a maximum. In this scenario, am I wrong when I say that I may not allow my children to follow what they want unless they are excellent at whatever they want to be?
The next question is how would I know as long as I have not given them an opportunity to pursue what they want? Frankly speaking as a common man, I feel that’s a huge risk and I am not ready to take that risk. First, the cost of sending your child to a football, tennis academy or singing class – is a huge amount about 2K per month. Secondly, the probability of success is as low as 5% (since my child has to be among the top 5%), added to this there is a risk of getting low grades in schools, as more time is spent in sports, the whole proposition looks scary.
Considering a scenario like this can somebody blame me for what I think? Just imagine, if this is the scenario for some people like me (an educated MBA earning 6 digit annual income) what would be the situation of a common man like an auto driver, clerk, bus driver or a laborer in a village?
Can I be blamed for this pessimistic thinking? I don’t think so. As long as we don’t change our system and give preference for a balanced learning, as long as we continue hire people based on their grades in 10th, 12th, CA, MBA etc, as long as we have no provision for pension for a sports person, as long as we don’t have an academy where children can come and learn sports free of cost, as long as we exploit people by making them work for peanuts like Rs. 100/- per day etc.., we will have people like me who would consider sports and other hobbies “a luxury”.
We will continue to go and watch movies like Chak De India and see our teams winning only on screen and applaud for that, while our football teams would continue to fail to even qualify for Olympics……
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