To dream a little dream...

Ambitions. Dreams. Goals. Big words, chucked at us since childhood. "Live in the present" and "Enjoy the moments" are quotes you read about in literature but never applicable to modern society as we strive to sacrifice the present to ensure the  much dreamed of "future perfect".

When we were young, these dreams were fantastical, living off childhood fascinations. To be an astronaut, a maverick pilot, a top sportsman, a top-notch scientist who discovers the perfect time travelling invention and what not. There were quite a few in my class who were hell bent on making it to NASA. Needless to say, none of them even came close. Strangely, I had none. I never wanted to become any of these. Or maybe I wanted to become all of these. Either way I was too confused to have an opinion.

Then we grow up. Class 10, board exams. Everyone takes it seriously. A stepping stone to the glorious dream of a future it was after all. Again, I was bored, unsure of my priorities, I never took it seriously enough to do well. I could have done better, I'm sure of it. And yet I never regretted for a moment as all my friends flew off with 90%+ marks. I was too happy being confused. I didn't want NASA or IIT or anything like that. So why bother, I asked myself, and shut the door.

Then came the all important step of choosing a path. Science, Humanities or Commerce. What to take? Now here, there are three types of people.

1.The serious ones, the ones who top the class, have a career planned out and retirement plans in order. They know what to take and there is no two ways about it. They walk up stiffly to the admission cell, mark-sheet in hand, pride and determination, written on their faces and confidently state the stream of their choices and walk away, nose in the air, with an air of triumph. Step one of the beautiful dream, accomplished.

2.The ones who get average marks but walk about with an air of being cool and all knowing. Usually, the majority of these end up taking science because it seems like the cool thing to do and with the same argument, "It leaves all the fields open for the future."

3. Now this is where I and loads of others fall in. The confused idiots. We don't have a plan. We don't know what we'll do, or what we want to do. We know our strengths, true. Like I was always good in english. And I really loved the subject. But as fate would have it, most of category 3 people are friends with other confused category 3 people or category 2 people, who will convince you that humanities have no scope and that science is the way forward and leaves you with the option of switching later. That piece of bad advice, and the fact most of your friends are taking up science and you don't want to be left out, means, us confused duffers end up suffering another 2 years of Newton's opression and Bohr's tyranny. And still no career plan.

Class 11 and 12 are nothing short of a full scale assault on our limited faculties. Failing exams for fun, bunking classes, Endless tutions that are no real help and books that resemble in shape and size to a nuclear warhead. You grind through them somehow, facing crisis after crisis, at home, at school at tuitions, for the results. Teachers telling you how dumb you are, parents telling you how good you can do if you studied, principle telling you to skip a year and tuition teachers popping headache pills aplenty. And yet, by the time the boards come, all the category 2 and most of the category 3 people etch out a broad path on where they will be in 5 years and what they want to do. Focus is the key word that gets thrown about a lot. I was still as confused as ever. I breezed through the boards, I didn't even have the books for every subject. And as expected, didn't do as good as I could have done and yet again, not a hint of remorse as my friends passed me by. Deja vu!

But now the time had come to make a decision. I had to chose a stream, a course that I wanted to do and apply for colleges accordingly. I pondered over it a while, got nowhere, and ended up leaving it to chance. So while people around me were sitting for either engineering exams or medical or law etc, I applied and gave exams for engineering, military, english, mass communication and videography, economics, law and a railway exam. Whats the harm in keeping my options open eh? Needless to say, the results were as abysmal as my efforts. Still, I had options. Take up english or mass comm. and go ahead. It was obviously my strong subject. And yet again, the mass effect comes to play. As most of my high achieving friends took up engineering and the promises of a glorious future awaited them, I wasn't too keen to miss the bus. So again, I took another piece of bad advice and dropped a year to sit for the engineering exams again. And the year was well spent. Bunking classes at pathfinder and lounging away the days at Crossword reading anything that I liked or walking around, discovering the new sights and sounds of the city.

As expected, at the end of the year, it was back to square one. The results reflected my efforts and I ended up in a god-forsaken college studying a subject I had a minor to null aptitude in. Life was perfect. And so began my college life, studying engineering, "the dream of so many, and the adopted dreams of the rest". 3 semesters of underachieving done, we went to a seminar about future studies. I was given a form to fill and there it was asked to fill in the course of choice. It took me a good 30 minutes to figure out what to put there and at the end of it, I could only ruefully smile as I wrote out the words, "journalism". Life is a sarcastic joke.

Today on the bus, I'm told everyone has a plan, a dream, a motive, they may or may not achieve it, but they strive for it. And I nod my head. Its been more than 10 years since I was in the classroom with the guys who wanted to go to NASA and even after all this time, I have not a clue about what to do, where to be. Ambitions, dreams, goals. They are big words that I may never decipher. And yet, I couldn't care less.