In colloquial term as used in India, a “vocation” is any job one does to earn a living. Colloquially the term carries a meaning that puts such jobs at a lower hierarchy than what is normally referred to as a “profession”. The latter implies a more institutionalized, therefore better organized and compensated. A vocation in this sense is a job generally belonging to the unorganized or a semi-organised sector and its practitioners are people who did not make it to the organized sector of professions.
In spiritual terms, the gravity the two commands on a scale of importance is just the opposite. Here a vocation is a spiritual calling and therefore much more than a profession or a job meant to earn a living. Vocation in this sense implies a love for an occupation for the spiritual value it has or the contribution it is deemed to make towards the betterment of society, people or humanity as such.
In Christendom for instance, priesthood is considered a vocation. It further implies the practitioner’s interest is not in worldly benefits but in the enlightenment it brings to the larger society. From this vantage, a vocation can be any profession, but one which a practitioner enters with a sense of duty and mission. This can be a school teacher’s job, a nurse, a politician, doctor, a journalist… in fact any profession.
Sadly, the pride that once came in saying “my job is not just a profession, but also a vocation”, is now more or less dead. A job’s worth now has come to be measured only in terms of the material benefits it brings, and under the circumstance, in an arrested economy like Manipur, only government jobs have come to be considered worthwhile professions, the rest are mere jobs. It is this “the rest” which have come to be classified as “vocations”.
In an economically sterile land that has little tax revenue to realise and have come to be renowned for corruption, even amongst government jobs the ones most envied are those that command abundant perks in the shape of tips and bribes. It must however be said that if the economic resources of the place is poor, this is not so in terms of linguistic depth and richness. Corrupt practices in the officialdom therefore have come to be given a degree of acceptability by numerous nuanced idioms and phrases. One of them, and a very irritating one for many, goes: thabaktubu khitang kanaribro? (Is the job being of any benefit?), khut chotlibro? (Does it make your hand wet? meaning is the job able to feed you well – alluding to the fact that you wash your hands before and after eating). The crassest of these idioms is, koilash-ta sun punbaga manare in which a government employee complains of a bad posting as being akin to a cattle tied on a grassless black-topped road.
This digression into the resourceful linguistic camouflages of lucratively corrupt world of the officialdom in Manipur is meant to provide a contrast to some commendable Central government policy encouraged under its new education policy. One of these was the introduction of vocational studies in colleges in partnership with those familiar with various non-governmental industrial enterprises. Unfortunately, this Central scheme titled Rashtriya Uchchatar Shiksha Abhiyan, RUSA. Unfortunately, this initiatively too has become frozen ever since the COVID-19 pandemic.
This notwithstanding, for any project such as this to be a grand success, the government also has to seek to dismantle the traditional divide between the colloquial understanding of “vocation” and “profession”, and bring parity between the two. “Vocation” should not be considered as only an option for people who have been excluded out of the race for “profession”, but an alternative available to all young graduates mastering the knowledge of the world. In fact, the aspiration ultimately should be for all “professions” to become “vocations”, so that people opt only for those jobs their hearts take to.
It is indeed vital for Manipur to change its attitude to work and achievement. The Bhagavat Gita’s timeless message that work is worship, must be revived amongst our population. This message has been interpreted as existentialist and to that extent atheistic as well, for it implies that life’s meaning is confined to this world and it is as great as one gives it. One’s vocation also becomes the tool for doing this. Life’s achievement too comes to be defined only by the creative and constructive addition one is able to give back to the society through one’s vocation. Let this culture make a return in Manipur. The engineer, architect, teacher, blacksmith, tailor, journalist… let all begin to see their jobs as their life’s calling, and see achievement in terms of actualising what their jobs set them out to achieve, and be no longer about unearned money. This is the only path for the society to rise and leave its future generation with hope.
Editor, Imphal Review of Arts and Politics and author
