When dreams become nightmares

In every child, there is a dream, a dream to be somebody. Somebody important in life so that he/she feels like they have done something in life. Every boy/girl who plays with a doctor set or building set dreams of being a great doctor who will help sick people or of a great architect who builds stunning buildings that will leave a mark on mankind.

So what is happening? are people really happy just by satisfying their need for money? Or its just those some people who make it happen has real dreams? am not sure of the first question but for the second one, i know its not true. I know some people who had real dreams that turned to nightmares. I am not sure of all their stories but i know of few that happened around me and inside me.

So when do they start thinking it is ok to be a nobody or it is enough to be a just another doctor or just another engineer? When do they start to walk away from their dreams, away from their believes, towards a "normal" life where they fit in perfectly and earn enough to live a life that makes their families happy, and their dreams stay as dreams forever.Their dreams become nightmares and haunt them in the nights after a "normal" day of work. They haunt them in their mornings as ego and performance below average and hurt their evenings with family as frustrations and delayed work hours.

So many of us had dreams,  real ones that could help a whole bunch of people in some way or the other when we were kids, if not anybody else those dreams when realised could help the individual himself. It could make his life blissful and not boring and monotonous. He would still smile from his heart at 40 or 50. He would still look at his parents and could see pride in their eyes and not search for shame or inadequacy in their dialogues.

 Like i told you earlier, i cannot sum up every body's story in here but i can talk to you about those few i saw around me. The first check point is met by those who were sadly gifted by god and has a talent for art or literature. These are the people who dreamt of becoming an artist or a singer or a writer but somehow in the current society set up all these are secondary professions which are considered to be less glamorous or earns less compared to other. They are quietly turned into books by killing their talents and dreams.

Then there were dreams that forced them to study hard sipping coffee through cold mornings and believing studying is enough and everything else can wait. They are mostly average individuals for whom it takes a lot of effort to make a mark, with increased pressure from their parents and driven by their dreams they work hard clear some entrance in good score and get into some top notch colleges. This is the point where some dreams are broken where their avg brilliance (according to entrance scores and family members) is met with high dreams who tell them it is impossible to make it so high for you so just do what you can and be good at that. People accept that and move on studying the course they had to settle for or their parents could afford.

Some people manage to save some more and go ahead to do a course that will help them realise their dreams. Then comes college where teachers shows off their knowledge and awareness ( or lack of it) where you are first aware of your faulty education system. But somehow even if the individual manages to clear the college with good grades, then comes the pressure of campus selection (for engineers of course, like i told you, this is the story i am aware of) if  you did not get a campus selection, you are not good enough and obviously the brilliant ones or the hard workers who are capable of realising their dreams end up with more than one placement. Then comes the pressure part where you are forced to take up those jobs as it would help your family financially or for girls to get a good husband. The third point where dreams are crushed. If you manage to survive all these three points, you actually have a chance in realizing your dreams.

I don't know whom to blame for all this, parent who do not understand their children, the faulty education system, our current social set up, i am not sure. But one thing i know if you fall down in any one of these three check points, you actually fall into a groove, a groove in the system from which you can never get out or it would take nothing short of a miracle for you to actually get out of it.

I would like to recall our former president the well respected Dr. APJ Abdul kalam's words here "dreams are not what you see in sleep, it is the one thing that dosen't let you sleep" True sir, we are a generation that are haunted by our own dreams. But i do promise you one thing if i get a chance to protect somebody's dream or even fight for it i would definitely do it as i could not do justice to mine.

Dedicated to all my friends who lost their dreams and to those who realised it, am proud of all of you as i know if we did give up, it is just because we felt something else was more worth it.

God and me

"God" and me, we have lived 25 years together or not together. He lived inside me as a clear image of krishna from since i remember but later went on to the vibrant images shiva, godesses, etc.. but he did stay in there. When i was sad, i questioned him, when i was hurt, i blamed him, when i was desperate i begged to him. As time progressed, he was my way of explaining death, my way of understanding wrong decisions.

But at one point in my life, i realized he was no more my string of hope, but he was my rock. The rock behind which i hid my failures. I was at a loss. I could pray no more. I felt i knew too much to close my eyes and just say "oh god , please make this happen for me'. It was so easy to be a believer. But i still am not a non believer. I have just lost faith in closing my eyes and chanting daily.

I believe in the supreme power of the universe, i believe in working hard to make something happen, i believe in doing good for the people around me, i believe in honesty and truthfulness, but i have lost my blind faith in god. I lost him somewhere between my spiritual search and understanding the ways of universe.

I am afraid i have even lost faith in him to actually hope that my faith will be restored one day. So god walked out on me. But why? He didn't betray me, he never actually disappoint me in any way.

I believe in going to temples i believe in the positive vibes there, i believe in lighting the lamp in my home, i believe it purifies my home. But i lost faith in the images that were once my reason to survive everything that came my way.

So why did he actually leave me? or did i leave him? I remember thanking him for every road he made me take, for all those small things that actually contributed to making me who i am and to getting me to where i am. But there was always this question, now what? i think i saw god associated with my goals in life. I was closest to him when i knew i was nowhere near my dream and it will take some divine intervention to get there. Divine or not, i always got there. So then i thanked him. This went on till one day, i lost my dreams to reality. The fairy-tale ceased to exit. Life was beautiful but not magical. Beautiful was enough so magical was forgotten and so was my faith, without faith i never needed god.

But god did come back to me, when smile bloomed through misery, i saw his light, when success rose from suffering i saw his strength and when love bloomed, i felt his blessing. I realized i was looking for him in the wrong places, he was always there inside me, as a friend and a guide, as my support and ladder. Dear god, once more i would like to thank you for making my life so beautiful that i could feel you in every breath i take.

Friday

"Friday" a term that rates nothing less than "jannat" in a normal middle east tortured employee's life. But for a bored house wife who does not have much to look forward to, it would have been just another day. But no, the clutches of a friday is so long you actually cannot escape.

A week day for me begins with a usual fight between my inner "yin and yang" well yin wants me to get up from my bed, go out and run while yang tells me you don't have anything to do today so you can sleep till noon that way, you will be bored for lesser hours, i believe all of us know who will win that fight on most of the days. But since sleeping till noon and skipping meals followed by sleepless nights was actually creating health problems, i decided to let yin win for some days. 

So a day when yin wins usually go about like this, i get up, i look out of my window, see the wide roads and compare them with the road in front of my house back in thrissur and wonder if it is two lane or single lane and i sigh, then i look at the people dressed smartly heading out to their offices, i think about my non existent career, i sigh, so after so many sighs like this i move on to treadmill (or go out on days i can drag out myself) and i run. I run thinking about every negative point in my life, i sigh even more ( see this is exactly what yang tells me, sleep and save yourself all this trouble). Then a couple of phone calls, books and meals, my day ends. Then i again go to my window look at the traffic and wonder where all these people are going, imagine some dad's coming back and mom's cooking in my head and i go back to sleep. 

So what can possibly change on a friday in such a boring routine? It begins right in the morning when i look out of my window, nobody is rushing off to work, all are sleeping because it is a holiday, then i go out to run, nobody else is out there running or walking, all are sleeping because it is a holiday. Then i come back and i am sad because i have not seen any freaking human being since i woke up. And that kicks off my friday depression. 

The next torture of friday begins when i figure out, i cannot make any phone calls today because either people are sleeping or they have better things to do. So i am not only deprived of seeing another human being but also hearing a human voice. I move to my regular job site and puff!!!! empty, not even house maid requirement adds come up on friday and i realise i am probably the only one browsing net on a weekend morning. Then i open fb, it is either people celebrating weekends (in middle east) or people gearing up for weekend (back home) and i realize i don't have a week to have a weekend. 

So i reach the height of Friday depression by that and i read read and read more so as to escape the world outside the book i am reading. So by night, i end up with no food in kitchen and no strength to actually get up and cook. Oh yes, you got it right, i order home delivery (the only part of my friday routine i actually like :) ). I eat i look out of my window and see the friday night traffic blocks and i wonder where all these people are going, i magine people having fun with their friends and family taking a break from their monotonous life and i go back to bed. So there goes my weekend routine. I am actually proud to say that i have a week and i have a weekend now.  May be boring but it is mine :).

Why do i read ?

I know, a question is not a good title but this is exactly the thought that forced me to write this. When i say thought, i do not mean my thought. I know why i read or at-least i know why i can't stop reading but the title in question was voiced by many people around me.

Before i start answering i should tell you where i heard this for the first time. It was one of those elaborate two month summer holidays in grand ma's home where i spend it with books, dreams and talking to myself. Please don't think i had a terrible childhood reading this, trust me it was a great one (thanks to the world books opened for me). So in one of those event less days when i feasted on books ignoring basics like eating, taking bath etc, my mom asked me this. why do u read so much? Of course i was not old enough to challenge her asking for an alternative nor i was i farsighted to see she was just the first in a long line. But i did think why do i read? and the little me could only understand one thing i love stories and since books have so many of them, i read.

But later on, when i realized reading was a hobby that was getting lost in this generation, i started to wonder how did i start reading? My first memories of reading were of my grand mother, sitting on the big wooden chair in the front of our house, tilting her angle to meet sun and reading with large spectacles that covered half her face. When i first remember her reading old malayalam novels rented from a library of a parallel college near our house, (i used to get books for her from there). Then i saw my dad reading in the evenings after work. He rented from his office library. As time went on both these people gave me books which they thought were suitable for me. And slowly reading became a habit. Later on, my granny's reading reduced to magazines and later only to news papers but mine grew, i used to talk to her about all those different books i read when i could and to my dad, i used to buy books for him whenever i could. So that is how i started reading. Thanks to my achan and amuma. :)

So when time went on, my parents n grand parents influence on me reduced considerably. I became one of those rebellious teenagers stuck to tv (computer came later on and internet came further late). But again books never left me. I borrowed from friends and relatives as english books were totally absent in my home and i read malayalam books from my two old sources. So every time a vacation approached, i would run around here and there to find enough material to cover the holidays.

Then i reached my college days and it was from there i actually got the idea of buying books. But then i realized as a normal middle class girl from a government college i cannot actually afford to buy enough books to satisfy my thirst to read. But in college i found more people who actually liked reading and were nice enough to share it with me.so i had enough books at that stage of my life. Later on i found this place in the road side in our little town i found my treasure  There were these vendors who sold pirated copies of books at a cheaper rate. And yes from then on, i really started buying books to read.

Life went on, i kept reading through my success, through my depressions, through my loneliness, in the middle of our gang discussion, i kept reading and books evolved from a story teller to a companion to a friend and later on to become my soul mate. I became a college student employee wife, daughter in law, house wife and my reading evolved from comics to fiction to literature, biography , philosophy and so on.

Reading is like breathing for me, when i am away from a book i feel nervous. Even in the loneliest of the phases of life a book has given me company and told me don't worry i am there for you. When i was in doubt, a book gave me answers, when i thought less of myself, books told me i am worth more.

So my dear friends, at this point, i would like to request all of you to introduce your children to books. Of all the things you give them, of all the values you teach them, this will be the best gift and best morale that will guide them through life. I would like to thank my grandma and my dad for doing this for me and all those street vendors who actually made it possible for me to read.

മഴ

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