Its also parental and social pressure. All the best trying to explain the people around you, that you are joining ISRO and not some company like Wipro, TCS or Infosys. You will receive a nice lecture and may be have a angry fight session with your dad. In overall's you yourself will be tired after a few days when you watch some one doing far less meaningful, important or difficult work taking back big pay checks, driving a luxury car, and living in a >1cr flat. And then of course your marriage, wife, kids and expectations from them and all that.
Its truly sad that these people are paid so badly. Infrastructure and entire thing is so dismal, my heart aches that things of this importance are treated this way in our country.
I'm sure every Indian teenager wanting to do some meaningful job has faced this situation. I had a tough time convincing my parents I was about to leave a call center job in a big MNC to write embedded software at a small unknown firm. The situation deteriorated so badly my parents threatened they would fall very seriously ill if I didn't do as they say. Finally I had to relent to working at a big software giant.
People say fight the society. But you can only fight a few battles in life. Career is already a tough battle, fighting society to achieve to work something meaningful is waste of time and energy.
We still haven't changed. There are people who even have doubt's if projects like these are necessary. A safe job, a good pension to take care of, male children, jewellery, good deal of real estate and social pride is all we value in our society.
Mars project? Well who cares about that?