N. Raghuraman’s column – Children’s career depends on how parents project their profession. N. Raghuraman’s Column: Children’s career depends on how parents project their profession

N. Raghuraman, Management Guru

Please allow me to be your guide to these two places. I would choose the first place, the Gomti Book Festival in Lucknow which concluded this Sunday and the second place, a visit to your own hometown, where there used to be small grocery shops decades ago.

1. The main attraction at the Gomti Book Festival were self-help books, written to provide strategies to solve personal problems, stay positive or motivated and deal with anxiety, depression and low self-esteem. Organized by the National Book Trust this year, the nine-day festival transformed the traditional concept of a book fair into a vibrant, multi-faceted extravaganza.

A large number of people took books from here like ‘Ikigai’, ‘Atomic Habits’, motivational quotes that help them think positively and even Yuval Harari’s ‘Sapiens’ and ‘Nexus’ , which tells about the origin of mankind and their development.

2. We all have gone to our village, which we call our hometown. There used to be many small grocery shops there and our parents and the owners of those shops knew each other. If you are visiting your village after two or three decades, you will be lucky if you find the same shop and its same old and weak owner, sitting in the corner of the shop looking at some papers.

And you would be very lucky if you find his son also standing in front of the shop. I say this because last month the All India Consumer Products Distributors Association—which represents 1.3 crore kirana stores and more than 1 crore of which are located in tier-2 and smaller cities—announced that Quik Due to the rapid growth of commerce, about 2 lakh grocery stores have closed their business last year.

Now my question to you is what does this tell us? A kirana store owner—who still runs one such shop and switches on the fan only when a customer arrives—said that this generation does not want to work hard like us and looks for jobs that have an air-conditioned environment. . They are running towards big cities.

I disagree with him on this point. He used to go to the shop before his son got up and went to school, because the shop had to open at 8 or 9 in the morning. He used to come home late after closing the shop. He never considered himself a parent and did not spend time with his son.

He always used to say that earning money in this world is difficult and running a grocery store is not easy. This was the time when his son promised himself that he would never take over his father’s business. Over the past three decades, they have never tried to transform their traditional business into a vibrant, multi-faceted retail store like the book festival mentioned above.

And they expect a modern child – their son – to take up their business, where he is not even allowed to turn on the fan when needed. They did not present their stores as businesses that offered freedom, self-respect and opportunities to grow into larger or multiple outlets.

Nor did he insist on proper education. He always said, “You have to sit at the shop only.” So the son decided to go to a nearby city and become a food delivery boy and earn a salary there, because there he met different people, saw a better life and experienced the vibrancy.

The bottom line is that Ask yourself, are you properly projecting your family business or career to the next generation? Because talking about them positively is a decisive factor in motivating your children to follow your footsteps.