After your blood test your CV is the most telling document on how you have lived your life.
You have been starring at it for ten minutes now and even the cursor seems reluctant to blink. It’s all there, bad decisions, regrets, denials, stress injuries and battle scars, all there in black and white. Neatly tucked into two pages.
But it seems like a lot. And not in the least because you want to save paper. But you feel two pages is too pompous for the train wreck you call a career.
Freshers are all over the place with their 4 objectives, 6 strength areas and 11 hobbies. No one really cares coz as a fresher you are a commodity. But with age comes clarity. This clarity can either be liberating in the infinite possibilities free will presents or debilitating in the inevitable mediocrity most of us statistically end up in.
You have managed to find yourself in the middle of these two extremes once again. Juggling ambition and realism is a loosing battle. The least you can do is be benign about it.
So you start throwing all the excess baggage overboard. Some of it is quite embarrassing; high school competition certificates and ‘basic computer skills’ need to RIP with the 90s. Fluency in secondary and regional languages is redundant in the 140 character world. And hobbies…Where do you even start with those condolences? You have only really gone hiking once and even that trip was cut short after you sprained your ankle at the base camp itself. Your guitar strings broke from rust. And you hate driving so much that you prefer commuting in cattle class over haggling for parking spots. It’s down to sketching, reading and blogs now. And even these hobbies are on life support.
And they always will be till you keep calling them hobbies. Always looked down upon as guilty pleasures. As an artist the desire to perform always exceeds the desire to get paid. For some reason, businessmen do not suffer from such afflictions. Or may be you are looking at the world upside down. You have to give it to your present and future employers though, they made making money their hobby. And now their visiting card is itself their CV. Till you can do the same, one page is enough to sell your slavery.
– Punit Pania
