EMI Careers - A short Story

Just check: Is your passion guiding your career?

Or, is it the EMI that is donning the role?

By: Guru Prasad Makam

I come from a middle-class background. My father was a primary school teacher in a village, and my mother was one of the best homemakers I have ever known.

I still remember the celebrations when I got a brand new pencil. The largest luxury was to get a “Hero pen”, and it became a companion for life. I used to keep it under my pillow and sleep. We treasured every little thing, because we got only little. The earnings of a schoolteacher kept us happy and we were getting great joy in small things. However, we were seeking more and more of these material things.

I have qualified myself as an engineer from one of the best colleges in the world. Life was tough, but the journey was enjoyable. As I drove my Toyota car with my formal dress on, I fondly recollect the joys of the Hero pen. The Hero pen is having is having a mantle in my car even today. As I grew up both in age and career, the urge to get those material things always grew.

I am just going on and on, but let me break the monologue and introduce myself. My name is Porus. I work as an engineer in a multinational corporation and have moved my base to Bangalore. I have all material comforts; my little angels study in one of the best schools. I fondly recollect the wonderful moments in my life, the time when I purchased my first apartment, the luxury car, the second piece of property as an investment, a car for my wife. We got all the luxuries and necessities of life.

We got every single thing we desired. The Hero pen was replaced by Mont Blanc, the Maruti car was replaced by the Toyota, a villa replaced the two bedroom apartment, and the driver seat now has a chauffeur. Life moved beautifully and every material comfort was available. On the hindsight some of these replacements were also evils of corporate peers. Being simple is not simple.

As I drove, my thoughts moved to my workplace. It was a good company and a satisfying job. I have been doing this for the past ten years. Once I felt that things getting a little tough in the workplace, and this small difficulty had slowly developed into pressure and then it turned out that the work was almost unbearable.

I was not enjoying my work. The culture, the deadlines, politics and everything was getting on my nerves. Coupled with all these, the new demon of recession was haunting all the senior managers. The salary and job cuts were imminent. Last week two of my senior colleagues were shown the pink route. Insecurity threatened a peaceful life.

At my age of 40, I could not move to another job. Middle-aged men like me were not welcome in most of today's companies. The job market for senior people was becoming increasingly difficult and that too in the times of economic climate change.

There was a brainstorming session five years ago. A couple of my friends and I conceived an idea of floating a venture. I was quite exited to move into my own shoes and become an entrepreneur. We had almost made the decision, and then came my company's offer to head one of our Western operations. The pill was too sweet not to swallow. I dropped my venture and moved ahead. However, the joy of planning to set up my own entity, determining the business development strategy, the work culture, was all etched in my heart. I enjoyed these small moments more than any other time in my career of over a decade.

I called those two friends, and understood that they too were in the same path of their careers. We decided to meet again and think from square one. We knew there were challenges in a new venture, cash flows being the most important of them. We did have passion, we had run companies, and we had made millions of dollars as profits for our company. We realized our salaries were just a minuscule percentage of the huge profits we churned out for our companies. However minuscule, these salaries were very huge for me, as it ran my home.

I did a rough calculation of my cash flow, and realized I did not need more than 40,000 Indian rupees to run a comfortable life. Even thought my salary has reached the six digit mark ages ago, I always had a cash crunch. There was hardly any investment to fall back upon. My only investment was the property and material world. The material world ranged from laptops to iphones, to cars, and all the machinery which would make hand movement impractical. I had a treadmill to make me run, and a gym to make me exercise. Everything was automated.

Then came the glaring term “EMI” in my life. Fondly called equated monthly installments by financial wizards, it’s created in different forms of sweets for customers like me. The EMI had a large role in my life. Most of my earning was going towards the EMIs. I actually did not need a large amount of money to make a lovely life, but all my money was channelized in the form of EMIs.

I had made intelligent schemes and was locked up for the next 15 years in home loans, car loans, personal loans. The concept was simple. I just had to have 15% of the value of the asset I wanted, and then 85% was gifted to me by the EMI scheme.

AS I rode in the mid of the road in life, I had to make a choice. It was choice of my career. A career which I loved and I desired. I had the knowledge, the business acumen and everything needed to be a superb entrepreneur, but there was one guy stopping me from doing what I wanted to do. His name is Equated monthly Installment and fondly called, EMI.

Was EMI ruling my career or my desires and aspirations ruling it?

I am not advocating that we should not take loans; loans are the integral part of business. Debt funding is a partner in progress. Companies cannot be run without debts. The question that arises is, do debts run companies? Debts are there to assist me and not to rule me. I do love material things and there are no qualms about it, but it should not hinder my career.