The Decision Making
I was just about 13 or 14 years old boy growing up in Prague, Czechoslovakia when the realization came about what is actually happening around me. Such a realization was made possible mostly by the family environment and especially my father's daily routine of listening to the Western radio broadcasts in Czech and Slovak languages by BBC and Voice of America (VOA) several times a day usually starting with BBC morning broadcast at 7:30 to 7:15 AM at the breakfast table and ending up with one hour of VOA broadcast after dinner from 9:00 to 10:00 PM. This routine that I adopted from my dad made me aware of the realities in the world far more than most people around me, which set me clearly apart from them and made my life increasingly uncomfortable. click for more...
After the Basic Nine Year School (equivalent of Junior High School in the US) I left to study in the four year trade school - Industrial School of Electrical Engineering (equivalent of High School plus two years of College in the US), where my study performance was not too exciting, but I finished it with successful completion of the exit exam. The next stop was a job as an engineering technician in one of the big government owned enterprises (actually all the enterprises, factories and businesses were government owned at the time), where as being not a party member I had no real chance to engage in a promising career, but on the other side the conditions were not too bad; I earned a wage for the first time in my life and the work wasn't too hard either - in a culture of double face and constant cheating I was able to enjoy life with not too long shifts leaving my workplace quite often before my eight and a half hour work day was over. Since the successful career without the party membership wasn't the option at the time, I tried to seek the success at the university. The next year after I started my job I filled an application to become a student at Czech Technical University of Prague - Faculty of Electrical Engineering (
ČVUT). I felt that I excelled at the entrance exams and when I almost started celebrating my new status, I received a cold shower in the form of an official letter of refusal from a very strange reason that I didn't met requirements at the exam that I supposed I excelled in. Unfortunately, I wasn't fully aware of my family background and especially of the background of my father, who as a senior officer in the old Czechoslovak Army being fired and later imprisoned for not expressing allegiance to the new communist establishment and the brotherhood with the Soviet Union. I learned that during an encounter with the school administrator, who rudely threw me out of her office when I inquired why I wasn't accepted despite the success at the exam. One of the pillars of the communist regime was that the elite was supposed to be composed of the folks with correct descent, which meant having wrong parents (like a father of a wrong social class) was a definite stop for a career one would desire and it would not be normally possible to be accepted to study at any university.
