Madhav Choudhary

Every morning, I take the same train from Andheri to Churchgate, squeezed between half-sleeping commuters and students murmuring formulas under their breath. I plug in my earphones, not for the music, but to dull the noise in my head. I'm in my final year of computer science at one of Mumbai’s top colleges. I just turned 22 last month. Everyone assumes the path ahead is already paved: finish university, move to the US or Europe, find a job at Google or some hot startup, and make my parents proud.

We’re not struggling financially. Far from it. My father runs an export business in India, and my mother was a classical dancer before she gave it up to raise us. But success isn’t optional in our house—it’s the baseline. My sister, three years older, works at a luxury law firm in Nariman Point. She drives a BMW and always looks put-together, but the last time I saw her smile genuinely was probably years ago, before she passed the bar. She once told me, in a rare moment of honesty, “You learn to live with the dullness.”

My younger brother, Rajiv, just started studying economics. He doesn’t talk much these days. He draws all the time—in the corners of notebooks, on the back of bills, even on napkins. But when he showed my parents a sketchbook once, they flipped through it in silence, then told him he was wasting time. They didn’t yell. That would have been easier. They just shook their heads and told him to focus.

I tried talking to him about it, but what can I say? I’m not following my passion either. Coding is fine—I’m good at it—but I don't dream in code. Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I just told my parents I wanted to try something else. Take a year off. Travel. Write. But I already know how that conversation would go. Respectable boys from respectable families don’t waste time.

It’s strange. We have all the freedom money can buy, yet none of the freedom to choose. Maybe one day that will change. Maybe it won’t. For now, I just keep moving, one train stop at a time.