My Generation of Unambitious Women

“I am so unambitious,” my senior from MDI Gurgaon, whom I have known from the past 5 years said this to me last night over a phone-call. She is one of the smartest women I know, someone who has navigated through multiple job roles to land a senior brand manager role- something she really enjoyed doing. In short, I know people from the same college who would kill to take a role like that.

But she is not happy doing what she is doing, and I understand the same being the reason behind her usage of the word unambitious for herself.

This is not the first time I have heard women use this word. My senior colleague at the workplace would often say the same thing for her. And then the same words did come from another senior I know, and then from a friend, and finally from my own mouth. These are women from colleges like IMT Ghaziabad, IIM B, IIM C. The names of the colleges are important because it is no mean feat to traverse the journey to reach such colleges – study for CAT, appear for CAT, get top notch scores, sparkle at a group discussion and be confident in the personal interview.

Then is it really possible for an unambitious woman to reach where they are currently?

There’s one thing common between all of us. We all come from middle-class families, were amazing at school, and are still amazing at our respective jobs. We all are women people dare not compete with. We are all women who have had a good career on paper, bold personalities and we don’t ever give up. So this is a bunch of most passionate and talented women I know. And yet we have come to a point in life to go through mid-life crisis enough to call ourselves unambitious.

If I look back at myself there were things I wanted to study further after appearing for my class 12^th. I wanted to be a cryptographer or a fashion designer- both starkly different areas but with one commonality that I had not shown any visible signs of becoming successful someday on any of them. I was curious about these subjects but almost no information.

Naturally, the doors of engineering opened for me which I resisted till the point I had no choice but to give in to study at the regional college. (My parents literally said I’d not be given admission to any other college or stream of study but this). It was in the second year of college that I decided I wanted to do an MBA. Walking into a room full of CXOs and delivering a presentation was the idea I had in my mind which I imagined to be enjoyable and something I’m good at. I should have dreamt bigger but that was all I could think of when I was 18. I took up an internship at IIFT to start with.

I fondly remember the day of my college placements when I was certain I’d choose an IT job over a government job because it would lead me to live a life in a metro city, acquaint myself with a corporate job and help me prepare for life after an MBA. I was the only woman in the batch to turn up for placements in formal shirts and trousers while the other females wore the uniform of salwar kameez as directed by the authorities, because I knew my goals were different and I was not afraid to show up for them. You don't wear salwar kameez in an MBA college or in a job so why would you wear them just for the interview and just because it was the uniform? Of course, I made it through all the rounds and finally got the job offer too.

Fast forward to today and I am doing exactly what I imagined I would – having done my MBA and now giving presentations to CXOs. Turns out- the few minutes of presentation is preceded by hours of brainstorming and revisions.

Jokes apart, I did love my job until it got too monotonous. I can only call myself lucky to be where I am. My peers would feel lucky if a CXO even says their name and here the CEO never missed a chance to praise my work or pull my leg over something. But I was still unhappy, and I was still someone who didn’t want to be a CEO or a CXO anymore, someone who had no iota of ambition left within.

My sister calls it the after-effects of achieving something too soon. Maybe I’d be happier if I climbed up the ladders in a slower pace, she’d say. 

I can’t say that because whatever I am going through, it’s the same as many others. Ambitions khatam si ho gayi hai is what we often say to each other, yet we would do every job diligently and passionately. We would put all our heart in whatever project we took. Yet we call ourselves unambitious just because we do not know the goal ahead.

We are all a little lost. We can no longer visualize the journey ahead. And although, we call it lack of ambition, I just see it as a lack of direction or the beginning of redirection

Tomorrow if we put our mind into some goal, I am sure these group of amazing women, including myself, would achieve it no matter what. But we no longer know our goals because the goals we planned to achieve and did achieve failed to make us feel as happy as we thought we would be. We thought the salary would be enough until we saw medical bills that can empty the deepest pockets. We thought designations and promotions would be enough until we realized life’s not a competition. A higher hike doesn’t make one happier, a better sounding designation doesn’t matter beyond that 2 seconds of its appearance in your introduction. There’s no award for receiving a faster promotion. 

In short, the light at the end of the tunnel was bright, but the tunnel never ended. We basked in the light and then continued moving forward wondering when will the next light appear. Tiny streaks of light pour in through some cracks on the tunnel walls, but the tunnel never ends.

The rat race never ends. Every hike seems too little. Life seems to be a series of never ending job roles and weekly dosage of being oblivious towards the same.

I tried so hard to live a balanced life of work, physical exercise, spiritual growth and pursuing my hobbies, I still could feel something missing.

I can’t put a finger on what exactly makes me unhappy, but something does. Something that tells me this is not who I am or who I want to be. Maybe I did want to be this in the distant past but not anymore.

Do I have an answer to who I want to be? The only answer, as good as an excuse, I, like my other friends, can give is that I am just no longer ambitious.

Rather my ambitions are no longer my source of happiness. I realize that inner happiness occurs despite of external conditions. That I could choose to be happy as a janitor as much as a CEO. Happiness is a choice we make. But I already made my choice.

So, I have now started operating from thinking what kind of life I want to live in, and what kind of life I want to create for myself and these beautiful set of women, trying so hard to put up a smile and go to work every day.

I have no idea where this thinking would take me, but I promise I am creating something beautiful.