Success in non-mainstream careers

Making the right career choices doesn’t just affect your own future. When a whole generation does so, it’s a dangerous trend. Fighting to change that is Bengaluru-based entrepreneur Mala Mary Martina, whose book I Love Mondays aims to help inspire Indian youth to take up educational and career choices, for a better nation. The idea for the book, she says, came to her when she had just attained a bachelor’s degree in engineering, but chose not to pursue it as a career. “I didn’t want to just take up any job, I knew I wanted to give back to my country,” she says, adding, “Over the past 7 years, I’ve worked with a lot of youngsters in rural India. And in my engagement with them, I’ve understood that everyone seems to be studying engineering for some reason. When you ask them what they really want to do, it’s something apart from engineering.”

The 28-year-old adds that in her own life, she’s had to convince her parents about taking up a career as non-mainstream as hers: “My folks didn’t talk to me for a year, and I still don’t think they really know what I did until my Ted Talk came out! It’s not like they hated me, but it’s just that they didn’t understand, that’s all.”

In her book, Mala’s spoken to 45 people from various people — including Grammy winning music director A.R. Rahman — about how they’ve found success in careers that not many people think of pursuing. “In the next five-six years if these kids make the wrong career choices, we’ll have to live in fear that we’re walking into a clinic because we don’t know if the doctor even wanted to be a doctor in the first place,” Mala explains.

When asked about Rahman’s contribution to the book, Mala says, “All through, when he was talking about music as a career I learned two things — one, music is education, and two, music education helps build a nation. But everybody I’ve in the book came down one point: if we had something like this to do in school, maybe it would have been easier for us to do what we’re doing now.”