Dream On

I see a lot of dreams. Not that I wish and hope for all of them to come true, but yea, it does give me immense joy in just pretending that the dream is going to come true after a long hard day at office like today. Suddenly, I am in a different world, like I used to be in when my Dad used to tell me how Ganesha got an elephant’s head. Sitting wide eyed and in rapt attention, I would hang on to each and every word of the tale, even though I was listening to it for the nth time.
I was a naughty kid. Mom swears that I was naughtier than my neighbour’s young son whom I consider the reincarnation of the devil herself (prove me that it’s a He), and my Dad’s silent assent gives me no option but to believe her. But thank God I was, else my parents would have never told me so many fables and stories to keep me away from mischief on hot Sunday afternoons and cold winter nights, and I would have never developed the habit of reading.
The first book I was read from was a Bengali translation of Jim Corbett’s Man-eaters of Kumaon. Listening with my knees to my chin, I would soon be on top of a tree, lying on one of the branches and keeping a watch on the little goat tied to the tree as bait. I would keep my ears open for the calls of the hyena that would indicate the tiger’s presence, and I would shake with excitement as I saw the Royal Bengal female approach slowly with the gait that did justice to the first part of its name.
Many such “read out from” books and folklore later, I got my first story book, a hard bound edition of Russian fables that had amazing shiny pages and expressive drawings. I learnt about witches and their brooms, the infamous Baba Yaga and saw my first picture of a nude woman (The Russians were quite liberal even then you see, no censorship even in children books. No wonder they went on to have channels like TB6 and RenTV).
I can go on and on about how my bookshelf then started filling up with Enid Blyton, Frederick Forsyth, McLean, Hailey, Mario Puzo, James Clavell, Grisham, Dostoevsky, Rushdie, Coelho and quite a few other august names, Drucker being the latest.
These books have been my friends, my companions during hot and dusty afternoon when I was forced to stay in, or during nights when sleep was hard to come by. And during the times when sleep did decide to pay a visit, I would be lost in a dream world, rubbing shoulders with the very characters of my novels, or being just a silent spectator to them, ala R.K Laxman’s common man.
So today, as I stand at the crossroads of life, when I am being given a lesson on the practicalities of life, when I am starting to realize that the pot at the end of the rainbow might actually be a shit-pot and that nothing might be forever no matter how hard you try, that you may be misunderstood by the very same people you trusted your life with, and that the harsh reality of life teaches you that you are actually alone in all this commotion, I remember the characters from my books and my dreams, and a draw strength from them. The same characters also tell me to keep on dreaming, because a chapter might end, but the story continues. And thus I dream on of a perfect tomorrow. Ending this post with this quote from Dead Poet’s Society:

I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life! To put to rest all that was not life. And not when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.