Is there a long dark tunnel ahead???

While studying for Agricultural Engineering in a remote south Indian village I always wondered whether the education I am getting is any good? Whether it is going to fetch me a decent job or am I always going to face the misery of an underprivileged, unromantic and stressful life? I was 19 when i got into this college about 2000 miles from my Native home in another North Indian village. I had already tasted failure in my attempts to get into the Indian army or into the coveted Indian Institute of Technology and was under immense peer pressure almost feeling like a duffer with a dark future ahead..... pacifying myself with some poetic lines i remembered from school "success is counted sweetest by those who never succeed. to comprehend a nectar requires a sorest need."and wondering every moment about what future has in waiting for me! So about more than a year later I was in this college, learning engineering and still wondering about what future has for me!! Future seemed bleak as the profession I was to get into was not particularly remunerative!! Most of the students and teacher in my college were "not-so optimistic"and always cursed luck... I always wondered, "is there a long dark tunnel ahead??" From being born into a farming family in the distant corner of India, I had the notion of this darkness i refer to as living on less than $2 a day, having a shattered morale and most dreadfully, having to live in the wilderness, unknown, unsung for... like the flies and the mosquitoes and the dogs and the cattle!!!! Certainly I was living in pessimism? was I alone?? no... more than half the people around me felt the same.. and this made me somewhat confidant.. for the fear of me being alone vanished gradually.... for the first time in my life I was seeing myself as a part of a group and not apart from it, singled out or cornered.....

A significant cause of my pessimistic attitude was the fact that i came from the hinterlands and was born into an economically challanged family...... but then more than half on India's billiion strong people live in the hinterlands... in villages with muddy roads lit karosene oil lamps... and a vast majority of this "Rural Population" are economically challanged!! Gosh!! I represent the majority of India!! Do I? Perhaps no! By birth, I was the member of a religious subclass of Indian soceity that had for ages considered the knowledge as their only strength.. the subclass which was once considered the custodians of Hindu faith.. the most learned preists and saints..... who later conspired successfully to keep all the knowledge to themselves and restrained the membeship to their subclass exclusively for their offsprings resulting in religious disenchantment within the oppressed classes and paving the doors for new religious alternatives that made India so diverse, divided and wounded...... The point is, I was born in a social subclass that valued knowledge and thereby saw the need for education.... The difference this made to my life was huge.... by the time I was in 7th grade, half of my colleagues from the village school were already helping their fathers and gradfather plogh, seed and harvest.... and by the time I was in 10th grade, many of these colleagues were woking as agricultural labourers.... I never had to do such things becuase my family owned some land producing enough to feed us throughout the year.... I was better off economically and otherwise than more than half of my class in village school.... yet when i came out of the hinterland into the mainstream .. i felt cahllanged, afraid... and insecure... what about people who were not even as lucky as me!! They were and some of them are even now going through that "long dark tunnel" i was so afraid of in college!!

Its been more than three years since i visited the village i was born into.... the last time i went, there still was no proper road.. no electricity.. no hospital.... no secondary school!! The population had dwindled... most of the people my age had left village, attracted by the glamour of India's shining metros, fed up of their miserable lives or simply because a neighbor or their uncle or their cousin was making some serious money in one of these cities.

There are those who never see the light at the end of this "long dark tunnel" and those who see the light but never come back to share the story with those in the tunnel, to inspire them and to lead them the way out....

Do I aspire to go back to my origins and help people get along better?? 100%

Do I have the courage and capability to do it?? 100%

Will I ever try?? 80%

Will I ever succeed?? x%

x being an unknown factor way beyond my individual control.... but the most decisive one....