The Dreamers of Dreams

The other day I walked past a poster on one of the roads that read “Every morning in a jungle a gazelle wakes up and it knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will get killed. Every morning in the same jungle a lion wakes up and it knows that it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It does not matter whether you are the lion or gazelle when the sun comes up in the morning you better start running…” It didn’t mean much in the first glance but as I walked along, it somehow did strike me a while later. I walked back and read it again.

Innocent, yeah it was; pointing with all the might towards the competitive and mundane world, the regular monotonous world that we live in. Healthy or not, it just is. Legitimate or not, it thrives on.

Barely surviving from succumbing to the pressures of everyday life, feverish career and the frenzied world, we live our new today just as we did our old yesterday. There are just too many things to handle. Just too many things to juggle around.

Ask me and I will tell you about a couple of years that I had myself. Aged just 16, I had to undergo the two so-called “very important” years of a student life. Preparing a whole two years for the IIT-JEE and AIEEE examinations that would guarantee us admission to the prestigious engineering institutes of the country, I would step out of my house in the early hours of 8:00 AM and return back home only after 9:00 PM. More than 13 hours of classroom teachings and then come back home and practise harder for the remaining hours. It was the same case with most of my friends and I can safely assume to be the case with a million other engineering aspirants across the country.

To be frank, these are probably the two worst years in any student’s life who is aspiring to be an engineer in India. Sometimes it might be very easy to argue that this training, this competition is the one that pushes us to put in that little extra effort to gain success, to realize our ambitions. But after combating such a schedule and such pressures, is it worth it?

Well, this might just be the tip of an iceberg, one such in the vast expanse of ice. What remains, a world out there. Your world very much different from my own. There are many choices outside the four walls. It’s just the matter of choosing one. The bigger picture is never realized. We just want to keep running on the same roads looking constantly at who is behind our heels. We never realize that in order to find that new ocean we have to leave the old shore back. We still think twice before chasing dreams. If you were a vivid watcher of TV series “Prison Break”, you will definitely remember these words “We are the captives of our identity, living in the prisons of our own creation”, apt words indeed.

But human beings that we are- a lot of things go unquestioned, a lot of questions go unanswered, few words go unsaid and few said words go unheard. But still we dream. We dream of a life that is very much alive.

Category : Articles, Life, My Thoughts
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