Achieving Childhood Dreams - Part 1

Due to internet the world has become a highly interconnected place. One of the examples of this is the forwarded mails that we get. When ever there is some good forwarded mail doing its rounds in internet savvy generation of ours we get multiple copies of the same mail. I get a copy of the same mail from my family group, school friends group, college friends group, room-mates group and office group of friends.

Recently I was forwarded a speech by Professor Randy Pausch (Professor in Carnegie Mellon University). This was a nice one on achieving our childhood dreams and empowering others to achieve theirs.

Link here (Note it is not mandatory to have seen this video to go ahead and reading this blog)

This made me look back on my childhood dreams. The first confusion was what is defined as childhood dream. So I decided on below 18years. Now again I had to split this period to below 9 years and above 9 years. This post is about my dreams below 9 years of age
Below 9 years all my dreams were very small and genuinely mine. Some I still remember are
1. To get the window seat in train while going to Kerala for summer vacation.
2. To buy half kg jilebi and half kg chocolate and eat it.
3. To buy a piano and tape recorder with my first salary.
4. To read every issue of champak, chacha chaudhary and Tinkle.
5. To sleep till noon.
6. To watch all Mohanlal and Amitabh’s action movies.

I achieved the 1st one every train journey without fail. The 5th one I achieved first when I was in school hostel and then on multiple times and still do that once in a while. But it never gave me a sense on accomplishment; it feels just like another day.
2nd, 3rd, 4th and 6th were the dreams that just got too old as I grew. All these were dreams that I no longer wanted to achieve when I was in a position to achieve them. As I grew up I lost my dominant love for sweet. Hot and sour food took over my dominant sweet tooth or at least matched up to it. By the time I reached high school I lost my interest in piano probably lost interest in learning or owning any musical instrument (Except for a brief time after watching Desperados when I wanted to learn Guitar). To read probably I did a lot but definitely by high school I was really intolerant to the kind of books I wanted to read before. The Sheldon, Archer, Blyton etc really caught on to me. On the 6th one, I started hating action movies. The Mohanlal or Amitabh kind of action movies were villains fly as the hero swings his hands were promoted to “pay me to watch” movies list. Movies with some good theme/story and comedy started to fill my favorite lists.

I believe Dreams too have a shelf life. It is not just important to have dreams but it is even more important to achieve those then and there. Probably everyone has some small dreams which they think they can achieve some other day. We always think “let this get completed then I will do that”, “Once I take care of things there I will do things here” etc. But when we are ready to achieve these small things we may no more want to do that small thing. As an example (although slightly unrelated), I have a lot of blogs noted down at different places as and when I feel. I always think I will post it once I have completed doing some other work and by the time I complete the work I would have lost the drive to complete and post what I had started.

Picture: from rediff movie review.