An open letter to His Excellency, LG J&K, on the crisis of employment

An open letter to His Excellency, LG J&K, on the crisis of employment

I am addressing His Excellency with the hope that he will not ignore what I have to say. I have a question, sir: are service rules confined to paper only, as countless government employs are working against service rules; I see them – anchors, news readers with All India Radio, station Srinagar/ DDK Srinagar, teaching in coaching centers as tutors, doing private practice, and in so many other jobs, where countless unemployed youth could have been – those unemployed who we see day in and day out; committing suicide, becoming victim of depression, or getting consumed in self-destructive elements.
The thought of bringing this to the notice of His Excellency didn’t come suddenly; rather, it happened after encountering countless qualified men doing odd jobs. Two days back, I met a tyre-technician who had a post-graduation in economics, and a couple of weeks before, a cucumber seller with a master’s in History. However, the story doesn’t stop here, I want His Excellency to be all ears – I started my teaching career in 2013, as a young energetic man in his early 20’s, who had a pocketful of dreams to accomplish. Sir, a passionate soul like me doesn’t fall prey to critics or malicious utterances that people hurl at me; but, an encounter with a tea-maker one day broke me not only emotionally but also made pieces of my dreams and aspirations; like happened with Icarus, it melted my wings, leaving me like a bird with broken wings; as the tea-maker who would have been of my age was an MSc in Zoology. From the moment I came to know about his qualification, I would hesitate to ask him to bring a cup of tea to my table. Sir, they say, “work is worship and rest is rust.” However, I have immeasurable times questioned myself: was his work really worship?
After the incident, I pulled up my socks again and motivated myself with quotes like, “Hard work pays”; “One should never lose hope”; “Quitters never win and winners never quit.” But, they all turned into a mirage, as almost 9 years later I visited the same place where I found the same but now worn-out MSc in Zoology making the same cup of tea. Subsequently, a barrage of questions kept nagging me and troubled me to the extent that I wanted to ask him the state of a man who must have worked his fingers to the bone to earn a degree like MSc and whose family would have been not only exuberant on the completion of his MSc but also dreaming to see him as what they call “settled”. Sir, when a highly qualified man sells tea, can we call him settled?
I wanted to ask him, what is his opinion about education? And what he thinks about his future? But I preferred to remain dumb – I thought it better to act strange, as if I did not know him, since a great writer ‘Saki’ has written: “A king that is conquered must see strange looks, so bitter a thing is the heart of a man.”
Sir, in a place where an illiterate or a Class 8 fail is approved as an A1 contractor, there a highly educated person is bound to be his employee. Where laws and service rules become abstract like philosophy, there it is natural to see an economist as a tyre-technician as, a Zoologist as a tea maker, and a historian as a cucumber seller.
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