How Can There Be a True Calling?

[From an interaction with alumni at IIT Delhi, 2026. Carrying on from the CGPA discussion, the moderator asks about the relationships that come with the race, and how students can loosen its grip and find fulfilment.]

Questioner: And on top of it then the relationships. When you’re saying, you know, because of the high CGPA, you are eligible for a kiss or a romantic relationship, and then those who have these relationships do not know how to choose. You know, I have A, I have B, and you know, how to make a choice, and is that relationship gonna last or is that exclusive or is that totally, you know, like the sense of possessiveness and therefore is it exclusive?

So this then becomes the second, if I can say, set of thoughts that are impinging along with that CGPA identity and that creates this kind of a turbulence sometimes and sometime maybe a source of pride and happiness. But then given that it is not always constant, you know, the risk of losing out a friend or a romantic partner or losing out the CGPA because something happened in a course and all that. That sense of self connected with that number or with being able to flaunt a certain kind of a relationship is in some way taking away the opportunity of, in your words, love, or in my words, you know, the sense of happiness, fulfilment, satisfaction. So what could you guide students to kind of look at in a way that they can at least loosen the grip of all this and begin to discover some way of experiencing love and happiness?

Acharya Prashant: First of all, I’ll not want to address them as students because they’ll remain students for what? 4, 8, 10 years maximum of their lives. But before they were students at this campus, they were students elsewhere. You enter IIT typically at, you know, what? 17, 18 years of age. So you were a student for a decade and a half before you came here. And after these four years, there are 40 more years to your life, hopefully. You graduate at 21 or 22 from a BTech programme, so you’ll be living at least till 60. And this is a continuum. Those four years in the middle cannot be seen as a separate block. So the variable is a continuous one. What they’re doing here is simply a continuity from what they were doing when they were in class 8, class 10, class 12.

And what they’ll be doing after the campus would be a continuation of what they have been doing in the campus. The problem is, the situation is, because the moment I say problem sounds like an allegation. The situation is we do not know who we are and what to do, whether we are in class six or in semester six, or in the sixth decade of our life. We just don’t know. Here we do not know why we woke up one day and found ourselves in mechanical engineering. No, that was only because, you know, you got a few questions right or a few of them wrong, and both of these can be like fairly probabilistic.

Or somebody says, you know, “Why am I in the computer science department? I love physics instead. Why couldn’t I go for a programme in physics?” That is because when you were in class 8th or 10th, and when you had to pick up a pair of jeans, even that used to happen with mama’s consent, and the same thing happened on the day of the counselling. It doesn’t matter because you have a top 100 rank, so you’ll have to belong to the CSE department. Same thing is going to happen when you are 30 or 35. Now everybody got money invested and everybody has gathered some kind of corpus, so everybody is buying a house, so I have to buy the right house at the right address.

The person doesn’t change. He was accumulating stuff to display to others in class 6th, in class 10th. In class 10th, you can’t accumulate money, so you are accumulating the board percentage. Here you can accumulate a lot more. So for example, this is rendezvous. A lot of people would be accumulating certificates because they look good on the CV. Then you’ll be accumulating money, 30 or 35. Some might even accumulate kids. Some have a penchant for accumulating all kinds of degrees. So they’ll say BTech, then two masters, then five PhDs, and the fellow can speak 18 languages. Accumulators. And why do we need to accumulate so much? Because we do not know what we want.

When you do not know what you want, you have to want everything.

And this everything that you collect takes away your life, takes away your time, your energy without the vacuum, the void ever being healed, ever being understood.

Questioner: Said differently, having a sense of fulfilment or satisfaction or happiness?

Acharya Prashant: Yes. Yes. When the nature of the loneliness is not understood, then every object in the universe becomes a prospect for fulfilment. I do not know what ails me here, so maybe this can fulfil me, this, this, this. And especially if four or five from here come up and say, “You know, this one, if you can accomplish this, then you have arrived.” So I’ll pay any price for this. Two years of my life, a lot of slogging, nine point eight CGPA. Ordinary. So I have to then move on to the next thing. Next thing. And next thing is the roses, the flowers, you know, youth. And then the next thing, and then the next thing. And mercifully, life ends sixty, eighty. At some point you will fall and this really crazy cycle will come to an end. You are not doing anything special in the campus. You’re just doing what the common man out there in his forties or fifties is doing. This is a rehearsal. This is a preparation.

We are items on the conveyor belt. And the conveyor belt didn’t start when you landed in the campus. It started when you were born.

Questioner: So are you, in a way, implying that there is no choice really? There is automaticity of events one after another, which are driven by sometimes parents’ judgment, sometimes role model judgment, sometimes our own attraction to things that look good. And then would you then suggest that if there is something like a true calling, is there a way to discover it early enough so that you do not stay on the conveyor belt and you choose a direction that is your own?

Acharya Prashant: But I feel as ordinary mortals, it doesn’t behoove us to talk of true calling, true vocation, true relationship, truth of any kind because we are steeped in the false. We are people committed to the false. Maintaining our commitment to the false, we want to talk of, you know, my true friend, my true well-wisher, my true teacher, my true calling, my heartfelt love. It doesn’t, it doesn’t suit us. It’s so unbefitting. We don’t want to go into all that which is false, hollow. Absolutely a pretence. We don’t want to inquire into that. Commitment is the word. We are committed to falseness and then proceeding from that core of falseness, we want to talk of the truth as if truth is another mug and another sip. How can there be true calling?

All the concepts that I am carrying are unexamined ones. I never bother to check whether there is any truth in my definition of life, in my definition of success. We keep using these words daily as individuals, as grown-up people. Life, success, career, money, love, entrepreneurship, expansion, marriage, settlement, politics, nationalism, country, development, progress. Oh, the West is far more advanced. Advancement. We keep uttering these words, and all these words are at the core of our being. We eat these words. We live by them. They occur in our dreams. They are everything to us, huh? My love, my life, my truth, my happiness, my parents, my responsibilities, and this is my core. Take these ten, fifteen words, and they are what together constitute the core of the common man, and this core itself is false.

False because it has been assumed to be true because we have never, never examined it. There is this assumption that just because everybody worships success, everybody runs after happiness, therefore success has to be something true. Therefore, happiness has to be a worthy ideal. Comfort is a big thing. You know, he has arrived. He is a super achiever. And these are words that we use so frequently, but unfortunately, so casually. So this falseness is the core of the common individual.

From this false core, sir, please tell me, how can I talk of the true calling? How can I talk of true love? How can I talk of true happiness? How can I talk of fulfilment, true fulfilment?

When the seeker itself is false, how can the sought object be true? When the traveller itself is false, how can the destination be true?

So instead of talking of any kind of truth, I would prefer to talk of what is nearer to us, because truth by definition is somewhere out there. You know? I’ll achieve true happiness when I land in the US and become a citizen and maybe one day have trillion dollars or maybe contest the elections and become somebody. So that’s away, far away, someday. Instead of talking of that which is there far away someday, why not talk of that which is here, intimate, right now, which is your notion, which is your concept, which is your belief, and a belief that most of us have accepted either in fear or in ignorance. Because everybody believes in this, so I too have to believe in this. I must succeed CGPA. I must be respected if not just accepted. I must have love.

What do you know of love? As young people, that word matters so much to you and you put in energy, thought, and what do you know of love? What do you mean by love? What is love? Marriage. So many of you would be settling down in the coming years. What do you mean by settling down? We don’t know. And this not knowing, this darkness, this ignorance is what forms our core. This core is so dark, and from that dark core, I want to talk of light. Sir, what is true light? No, please don’t talk of that. Let’s talk of falseness. Let’s talk of darkness. Let’s not talk of light. And that’s scary.