dreamland...

Just finished listening to Randy Pausch's last lecture and am in a trance of my own.A professor at Carnegie Mellon University with pancreatic cancer and only a few months to live..gave one of the best lectures I have ever heard..about childhood dreams :-) (couldn't help that smile coz pretty much thruout the lecture I have been smiling only to realize how long it's really been since I stopped to notice that am smiling!) and as it always happens with me..this got me into a wondering and wandering mode....asking myself...what were my childhood dreams?
I wanted to be a teacher..as far back as I can remember..when I was only 6 years old..in a fancy dress competition of my school, I dressed up as my favorite teacher(Mrs. Karmakar-I never told her and wonder whether she would ever read this!) wearing false glasses(just the frame and with no glass) and proudly walking with others in the fancy parade.I didn't win but that sure did leave some impression somewhere in my mind when years later I voluntarily chose to be in the academics shunning the lure of the wall-street-type corporate world. And as I write this, I remember my childhood dream all over again..something I had so totally forgotten in the pursuit of more short term objectives and goals and in the mad rush of the last 20 years!!
Do we all have childhood dreams? I bet we do coz as kids we have so much more imagination and such pollution free, simple minds that ANYTHING seems possible. But how often do we really remember what those dreams were, what they meant to us then and how close we are now to fulfilling them, if at all?
And I also realized, even childhood dreams are so much a function of one's own surroundings which in turn get influenced by the whole cultural-social-national-familial gamut of attributes that at times when you sit with a bunch of girls from different countries and hence diverse backgrounds, you realize what a wide range of dreams there can be even amongst kids!
It's all so much a function of where we belong, what kind of set up we are used to and what values are being instilled in us. And it's so much fun to take a stock of things after so many years have passed! As I was growing up and watching more television and traveling more to different cities with my parents who loved traveling, I developed this enormous liking for fashion and 'good life' (of course when I understood what it even meant!) and a love for going to new places and meeting new people. Wherever we would go, I would end up talking to strangers and making friends with them and then after we came back home, would eat up my mom's head about how I so wanted to keep in touch with all my travel-friends! And the fashion and party thing really got me hooked on to it and with it brought a whole new dimension in my dreams..I not only wanted to become a model(and hence appear on the TV of course!) but also wanted to enjoy life--whatever that meant at a young age! and I also wanted to write..I would read these short stories in Bengali and immediately visualize myself writing as well and other people reading whatever I write! The very thought of it was such an adrenaline rush!
And when I look back..it feels good to realize that luckily I had dreams which are not very difficult to accomplish..nothing like being in a space ship or being a national sports player!!!
But my point here is...do we really follow our childhood dreams as we move on with our mundane lives crossing one hurdle after the other, earning one degree after the other and moving from one city to another? Or is it that somewhere in the hectic competitive maddening race to reach 'somewhere' almost on a daily basis, we forget what we actually loved doing when we were kids? How many of us are right now doing things or are close to doing things we wanted to do as kids? I sincerely hope the answer is most of us..coz if it's not, then there's high chance we are spending hours and days living a life we never wanted to but we end up sleeping at night saying it's all a function of destiny!
Well..maybe it is..but maybe sometime if we try we also have the power and the capacity to change our destinies if we really believe in something. Maybe the dreams we had as kids or even as we were growing up, are made of stuff we really feel passionately about and enjoy even thinking about them and maybe what we are doing now is so far removed from it-could be circumstantial pressures, could be so many different reasons but I am sure it's never too late and that it surely is worth giving those things a sincere shot coz after all we do have just one life! And yeah..we would always have demands of others to fulfill...parents,spouses,kids,relatives,friends,bosses yada yada yada..and there would be endless forces trying to pull us away from what we really want to do (coz they would seem impossible now or silly or even absurd to achieve) but maybe that's we love and at the end of the day..we have the right to do something for our own sake too and the heck we deserve it!
When was the last time we had a dream to do something or be someone and when was the last time we wanted to achieve it and went for it?
As I take stock of what my dreams were and where I stand today...I realize the even better part of it...the wonderful journey and the feeling that I am getting an inch closer to fulfilling some dream of mine and that is what counts to me as I go to bed and that is what I want to tell everyone who is reading this...to dream and feel happy about it and maybe even try to accomplish a part of it..and as I write this..I fondly remember a good friend of mine who only today told me to just stop for a while, slow down,take a break and drift away into my favorite dreamland...I did that and trust me friends, it's all so worth it:-)