We, the people.

Seems like the job resumes and eligibility criteria in India have changed in recent days.
Nowadays there are just two columns in one's resume. One, the name, and the second asking how the candidate is eligible and the second one always has the same answer "My father/mother/ancestor has been in this profession and was successful".

Does that entitle you to become eligible for the same profession? I am afraid, looks like it is true.
How else can you answer the hundreds of movies dumped on us every Friday just because the children of earlier actors want to start their acting career. How long has it been since we saw a new actor without a movie background?

This phenomena, I observe, is not really movie-specific. It has spread its wings in all directions and all professions. Guess, who the latest politician on the block is? Wasn't he/she the son/daughter of an earlier minister? Who was the magician you saw the other day trying to break an earlier record? Wasn't he trying to break the record set by his own father, who was a magician himself? And who won the recent Booker Prize? By the way, wasn't her mother a Booker prize nominee herself?

So, here we have a pattern. No wonder, children are always inspired by their parents and tend to develop interest in the same field as their parents, but as we observe, this is evolving into a more common trend than usual.

But wait, does anybody remember a similar thing read in a history class in school. What was it called? Yeah, the society in ancient India divided people based on the occupation. Families had a single occupation and all members of the family, irrespective of their choice, had to practice the same occupation. Lets leave the merits and demerits of such a system, but somehow with Independent India, this system was out and the "free" system came in. But after 60 years are we actually going in the original direction?

How many doctors today are children of doctors? How many engineers are children of engineers? Painters, singers, musicians, actors, politicians, sportsmen, pick the field and we have a parent and child famous there. Seems like we are reaching where we actually started.

Is this called what we know as "History repeats itself"?

Reasons may vary but I feel, we are going there. Though, earlier, the social status of a person depended on the kind of occupation he did, the only change with the current trend, I see is, the social status of a person now is based on the amount of public attention he gets. Remember the marriage that got covered for a whole week by the press? Was it because the children were famous or the parents? No offence meant!

One can argue, this is uncommon with "we, software engineers" ;-) Aren't we trend-setters :-). On a serious note, I guess we have to wait for one more generation for an argument like that. Lets see how many s/w engineers in 2050 are offspring of s/w engineers :-)

As usual, lets end with a question... Are the children any better than what their parents were?