Ambition Tethered
1980
India was now a free country. The British had left, and what remained was up for grabs. And the countrymen did grab it, with both hands.
They had fought for freedom from foreign rule, but what they got was a different kind of tyranny, one that wore familiar faces and spoke familiar languages.
Only this time, they missed out one crucial factor; the rights of humans.
Men and women were by the numbers and there was no law, the colonisers as ruthless as they had been, the new India only was even more brutal. It valued one thing; money. Not life. Not justice. Money.
By 1980, the idealism of independence had curdled into something else entirely. Every workplace had an underbelly. Bribery and commissions were the norm. Morals and empathy were for evening conversations. Nothing else mattered but survival and profit. Human life was cheap, easy and expendable, convenient to waste if somebody didn’t comply.
Religion played a huge part in shaping the new country. Superstitions, although hampered over the years still governed the thinking. Gods and goddesses were by the number.
This was the India my father stepped into as a young man with a civil engineering diploma and dreams of building something that mattered.
My father had just completed his studies and been posted to his first job in the deep jungle, in a village called Parbhani. Fresh out of college. It was far from home, far from everything he knew. But he didn’t mind. He had worked since he was ten years old. He knew what hard work was. What he didn’t know yet was what compromise looked like.
He arrived with the kind of optimism only the young possess. He believed the world operated on principles, that if you worked hard, if you were honest, if you built things correctly, you would succeed. He believed in the details, the numbers, in the precision of engineering, in the satisfaction of doing something right.
With the desire to do great things, the world was up for grabs he thought.
He couldn’t have been more wrong.
Three weeks into the job, his manager called him into the office. The man had a large grin on his face, the kind that made my father uneasy even before anything was said.
“Here, this is your cut” said his manager shoving a package that looked like it had two stacks of money, wrapped in paper.
“What is this for?” my father inquired.
“Keep it and make sure you report twenty tons of cement instead of five” said the manager leaning back in his chair, still grinning.
“But we have used only four point eight tons” my father got back, his voice still shaky, he did not fully understand what was being asked of him. Or maybe he understood perfectly and didn’t want to believe it.
The manager’s grin barely faltered. He spoke slowly, as if explaining something to a child. “Do what you have been told to do and you will have a bright future here. A very bright future.”
Suddenly realising his throat was dry, my father took a gulp and said “What if I don’t want the money?” The smile on his manager’s face that stretched from ear to ear , now slowly started to shrink by each word.
And just as quickly, his manager snapped back “Then you will be buried here in this five-ton cement”
“Four point eight” he thought, not daring to bring his thoughts to his lips. But the thought was there, sharp and precise. Even now, even with a threat hanging over him, his mind defaulted to accuracy. To the truth. Of the numbers.
He understood then, he had a sword hanging over his head. His time here was limited. He had to leave that place. Ungodly he thought, he wanted to leave all this behind. No doing things right. Only compromising until you forgot what right even looked like.
He thought of his mother. He thought of his father, searching for meaning in a world that seemed to have none.
And he thought: This is not what I came here to do.
So he quit and left Parbhani without looking back. He didn’t know where he was going or what he would do next. All he knew was that he couldn’t stay in a place that required him to betray the only thing he had left: his sense of what was right.
People would call him naive. He thought. Impractical. Too rigid for the real world.
Maybe they were right.
But as he rode the train back home, watching the jungle give way to open fields, he felt something he hadn’t felt in weeks: relief. He had walked away from the money. From the compromise. From the slow erosion of what he believed in.
His ambitions bound now. He understood that. The world was not going to let him build the things he wanted to build, not the way he wanted to build them. The game was rigged, and he had refused to play.
But at least he could still look at himself in the mirror.
At least he could still count the cement accurately and know the number was true.