Why did Acharya Prashant Ji leave his Corporate and Bureaucratic career? || Acharya Prashant (2019)

Questioner: Why did Acharya Prashant Ji leave his Corporate and Bureaucratic career?

Acharya Prashant: We are a flux. We are changing constantly and that is life. Heraclitus, the great Greek philosopher said, “You don’t step into the same river twice.”

Man is like a river – flowing constantly, changing constantly; flowing towards the sea, the ocean, to dissolve there, disappear there.

The one who is fifteen years old and preparing for IIT-JEE, has one kind of thought in mind. He is a child who is conditioned by the situation at home, by the fact that he was born in a family of bureaucrats, by the fact he thinks that the only way to live a meaningful life, the only way to contribute is through the government machinery.

And he thinks that if you want to be an IAS then you first must be an IITian because he saw that the IITians were making it through the IAS top rankers’ list. So he says, “It is alright to reach IAS via IIT.” That’s why he prepared for IIT.

And then the time changes. The teenager is no more a teenager. In the process of preparation itself, he sees what is meant by a centralized government, what is the truth of bureaucracy and he does get selected. He spends a couple of months in the training academy. He sees how things operate there and sees that wherever there is centralized government, there would be a lack of freedom.