Your Friendly Philosopher & Guide

M Night Shyamalan is one of my favourite moviemakers. I am NOT proud about he having an Indian origin. Good that he was blessed with opportunity, freedom and money to explore his creativity in Hollywood to carve a name at his prime age. Had he been in India I am sure both his creativity and talent would have died running behind the trees and skimpy dresses shooting duets and item numbers respectively.

Well that isn’t the topic of this particular blog. It is about the last but one sentence mentioned in the ad, which says – ‘My Job is to find time to Dream!’

I have noticed that most successful people are those who have dreamt it big, and on top of that they are people who had the ‘time’ to dream. In life, if most of your time is spent in worrying about the next month’s house rent, the pending EMIs, the credit card payments, and the school fees - take my word you will die a mediocre.

So where do you find the ‘time’ to dream? The moment you start talking and exploring life on your own, you are put into play schools. And the journey of memorizing crappy outdated syllabus starts and ends at the age of 22, where the next big thing is life becomes finding a job. Wife walks in (walks out sometimes), children come out (and walk out eventually), you are shuttled (between relationships and companies), the corrupt government changes (every 5 years sometimes), and in the process your life is all over without even you realizing that you had the ability to dream!

By staying home women were blessed with opportunities to do nothing but to dream, while men took all the responsibilities to take care of them. But the government neither wanted the families to be happy, nor was interested in providing the kids an atmosphere to dream. They introduced subsidy in education for women, provided them reservation, and made them strive, struggle and work for money. So what happened in the process? The government enjoys collecting double the tax from the same household. So in a family 2 people work for the government for 7 days in a month so that some corrupt politician can have a steady growth in his Swiss bank account! If the government really cared about your kid – it should have eradicated dead syllabus, and given free education for children, whose parents (both) are working and paying tax honestly!

This disability to dream is no wonder the prime reason that India has not invented anything in the last 50 years or so. We don’t make it to the Oscars, we never win Gold medals, and still find pride in being called a developing country for the last 60 years. We launch few missiles once in a while, and do few nuclear tests in a couple of decades – and think we are developing. We forget that we aren’t developing because we have stopped being original, and because we have stopped dreaming!

Long long ago - Indians were the best dreamers. And we had given a different name to it – we called it insights. We allocated special time frame (between 3 am and 7 am) just to be silent, just to watch our minds, and just to dream – and we called it meditation. We implemented our dreams and came out with works that fascinates mankind till date – the Bhagwad Geeta, the Upanishads, Astrology, Ayurveda, Kama Sutra, and the list goes on….

So what has stopped us from dreaming? I think it is the present education system of memorizing things and running behind marks and numbers, which has put an end to our ability to dream or to think differently. I think I have done my job by providing enough time for my children to find time to dream. And what have you done? It isn’t a debate – you could win me through your logic and debating skills - it is a question you need to ask yourself! What have you done to make your children dream!