TO CONFORM OR NOT TO CONFORM- DAT IS THE QUESTION…

The other day I had a thought. I was surprised at myself about the way I had fallen in the ‘oh so dreaded’ trap of conformity. Had I been in college, the realization that I was like everyone else would have given me nightmares. I still found the idea a little confounding but being like everyone else didn’t seem that bad afterall. Talk of conformity!

So what’s conformity afterall?
Well, it’s something like taking up courses just because it will land you up in a career; having a girlfriend, boyfriend just so that you could marry them; frowning or smiling keeping the regular social conduct in mind and in short, becoming like your parents with every passing day.

And then she spoke to me.

“When you're young, your whole life is about the pursuit of fun. Then, you grow up and learn to be cautious. You could break a bone or a heart. You look before you leap and sometimes you don't leap at all because there's not always someone there to catch you. And in life, there's no safety net. When did it stop being fun and start being scary?”

It’s Carrie Bradshaw if you don’t already know. And if you don’t know Carrie Bradshaw you obviously won’t understand why ‘conformity’ is so dreadful for me. But saying this I feel like I am defeating my own purpose. Carrie Bradshaw is a part of the popular culture and wasn’t following movie stars a thing of the passé? (I say ‘movie’ because calling Sex and the City ‘just a T.V show’ is an insult) In my defense this is an exception. And more importantly that’s not the point!

So what is it about B-schools that can transform you from a seditious maverick to a conforming moron? To begin with, they tell you on your very first day stuff like ‘you have to “market” yourself’. Fair enough. That’s what you can expect to be taught at a B-school. But now comes the near tragic turn. In order to “market” yourself or whatever you need to conform to the norms. Its funny, isn’t it? Trying to be different so that people buy your idea and at the same time being compliant for the fear of being rejected?


I can sense that I am being a little irrelevant and trust me, it is a comforting thought! It reminds me of the time and place where ‘irrelevance per se was a subjective thing. I wonder if I will ever be able to go back to those times. I wonder if others my age feel the same. I wonder if ‘conformity’ bothers others as much as it does to me. I wonder if I’ll ever be able to write an “apology” to my life just like Updike did it some 36 years ago…

“…We thought one war as moral as the next,Believed that life was tragic and absurd,And were absurdly cheerful on that basis.We loved John Donne and Hopkins, Yeats and Pound,Medieval history was rather swank,Psychology was in the mind; abstractThings grabbed us where we lived; the only lifeWorth living was the private life, and—last,Worst scandal in this characterization—We did not know we were a generation.”