Tempted by Campus Placements? || Acharya Prashant, at IIT-Delhi (2022)
Questioner (Q): Pranam Acharya Ji, my question is regarding global warming. As you have talked in various videos that the root cause of global warming is nothing but more and more consumption. So, when we come to our final year, various companies come for placement opportunities, they offer us a lot of money and they pick up the best minds. Some of the people who don’t want to be part of this game, who want to, you know, work with the clean environment and don’t want to be part of this, they feel kind of, sometimes helpless because the enemy is getting bigger and bigger. It’s very hard for us.
Most of the time, we just go with the flow and most people think that’s okay. My question is: how we should hold ourselves so that we don’t get distracted from doing what is right, instead of just going with the flow?
Sir, my second question is, since being technical students, we don’t really get to know about Vedanta and Upanishads. How we can promote like ideologies that Vedanta teaches us?
Acharya Prashant (AP): You see, yes companies come to the campus, and they offer you fat cheques, and most of these companies are indeed involved in stuff that only exacerbates climate change, that’s true. There might be one odd exception, but mostly, the kind of goods and services most big corporations are providing are only worsening the state of climate change. So, you say you know that, and yet you feel a lot of pressure to go with the flow.
The pressure is not from the flow, the pressure is from our very old basic physical tendencies. Even the little kid is greedy. You may have fat offers here that make you shiver in your legs, but you go to another student, probably from an ordinary campus and if they are getting an ordinary offer, then that offer means much the same thing to them as your offers mean to you. It’s not that the package is so large that it has overwhelmed you.
