Going against the stream: a success story

It was a rather uncommon auto ride.  Not just because the automan didn't take me for a ride and gave, to my surprise, a smooth ride, avoiding the shorter but congested Five Route and taking the longer Mahatma Gandhi Road instead.  What made the journey refreshingly rare was that it unfolded a worldview so uncommon to find in an autorickshaw driver.  Rarer still, he expressed it in enviable English.

What could be his name?  Prasad?  Joseph?  Ismail?  I don't know.  I never asked him.  Considering that he spoke Urdu, let me call him Ismail.  Well, Ismail is a graduate.  When he took his BCom degree from a reputable college in Vijayawada ten years ago, he didn't apply for a white-collar job, as most of his classmates did.  "For one thing, I didn't have the money to buy even an application form.  For another, I had contempt for white-collar jobs which, I feel even now, are good enough only for unenterprising middle or lower middle class people who have some property and so are complacent.  I was lower than the lower middle and enterprising.  So, I decided on a blue-collar job – I took the wheel."

"Behind the wheel" for ten years now, Ismail is well away.  He owns an auto and is buying another very soon.  His net income is Rs 600 a day, and he is working hard to achieve an ambitious target – seven lakh rupees by 2010 by which time he will be 35 years old.  "It's make-or-break time for me.  If you don't make your mark by 35, you can never!" he asserted.

"How did you learn to speak such good English?"  I asked him.  "It's a gift, Madam", he said raising his hand heavenward, "with not much effort on my part.  I can speak six languages – English, Telugu, Hindi, Urdu, Tamil and Kannada.  And I have a smattering of Malayalam."

As I got off, I remembered what Oscar Wilde said about success:  "Success is a science.  If you have the conditions, you get the result."  Ismail had some of the primary conditions: motivation, determination and self-confidence.  Together they urged him to take the road less travelled.  That, in the poet's words, has made "all the difference".