Many years ago, when I graduated with high honors, I was a rising star with a bright future and good job offers in hand.
Living in a foreign country for a family boy like me was too much. It was directly post September 11th. Discrimination was at its peak and a crying mother at the airport didn’t help either. I wanted to go back to Iran. Khatami was in power and Iran was a better place after a long time. Plus I would get to be with a family that supported me and loved me so much.
Everybody, including my family members advised against it. You won’t be able to live in Iran, people are different, You will be off your career track and you won’t be able to make it back on the saddle again should you choose to go back , and so and so forth were the arguments.
I was thinking, I can serve my country as little and limited as I can too. It was, in my head, the perfect choice.
So it began, I went to Iran, started to work on national water projects, and for a brief period I was happy.
I moved forth and back the four remote corners of that land, enjoyed the experience of delivering to the people who needed delivery. I worked and toiled away.
Then life in modern Iran kicked in. Cut a story short, from the most private and intimate experience of mankind, that is marriage, to conducting the simplest of transactions in that society, not a single person I met treated me with ethics and honesty.
Few years than road when the joy of service could not be replaced with agony of social bankruptcy of the Iranian society, I decided that I can’t take it anymore. I had to go out. Divorced, conned and bittered, and a CV full of unconventional names of places that I have worked in, I left Iran, the land of my forefathers. I used to hate it when I had to leave Iran for a business trip. This time however, to my eternal dismay, I was happy to be at the transit lounge of IKA airport. I gambled years of my prime and I have lost. Time to start all over again.
As we speak, although I have qualifications as good as any of my international peers, I find it that I have to work an equal amount of work I spent in Iran, if not more, to regain the lost years and adopt myself to the professional life abroad. Plus the elevated discriminatory environment of the current world towards Iranians doesn’t help either.
I don’t regret giving my homeland a benefit of the doubt; neither do I regret my experiences there. It was part of life and I had to go through it.
The only regret I have is that my beloved homeland has become a dream destroying factory. Why does it expel its sons and daughters from her bosom in trend that has been repeating itseld over and overagain thorugh the history? I’m not making a political statement; the social implications of modern Iran are much more serious than we all tend to think. It will bring the country to a verge of social collapse sooner rather than later. If the suitable action is taken today, it will take at least two generations to make amends.
I just hope that when the action is finally taken, it’s not too late.
