Can You Do What I Ask You To?

Preamble: It's a really simple thing to do. Probably. Just bear with me.

"CHASE YOUR DREAMS"
Probably the most cliche set of words I have heard. You'll probably agree with me on this, I guess. Especially if you are one of those sad, sorry people who have trodden, or are about to do so, on the overused, pothole-ridden road of Engineering and Medicine which leads to an equally barren, if not more so, destination. This country has, as a matter of fact, very successfully drilled the belief that these are the Only Roads to be taken to reach anywhere in life, into the heads of millions of Indian parents, who have, not quite surprisingly, borne witness to all the success stories of engineering and medicine students fail.

You don't have to be this damsel in distress sort of character that I have made you out to be, though. You can also choose to be a graduate, fresh out of an IIT or an NIT or a postgraduate student fresh out of an IIM. A very successful and absolutely not an atypical 'Sharmaji ka beta'. You have a million dreams that you want to take to completion. You have a thousand or so plans that could equally well end in a 'Happily Ever After'. You have become everything that your parents required you to be.

Or, in a completely different scenario, you are the black-sheep of the family. You have outdone your own records of shame multiple times by failing with even lower marks in every other subject, every single year. You do not have a foreseeable future and nothing's more embarrassing than that, especially since none of the kids in your class, right from the kindergarten to your college, has ever done this poorly. You were probably born hopeless and you are gonna die penniless. You are not gonna reach any heights in life, because you have failed to dream a better future for yourself.

If only classifying myriads of people, with unique aspirations, was this easy!

I am an undergrad student who is studying that same old boring Engineering, because I was never given the opportunity to think out-of-the-box. And even if I had been given that opportunity, I would never have had the nerve to go against those countless people who came to my house every other day or who called my parents equally frequently, with counsel about what is correct for me. Those countless people don't even know what I am studying in the college now. Which is exactly my point.

I stopped myself from going down the wormhole of my dreams. I wanted to pursue my dream of becoming a writer actively, by attending some reclusive college which teaches English literature, and probably has a dress code and drab, boring buildings. But atleast, I would've been studying something, not for the sake of making money someday in the future, but for the sake of the dreams that I once, childishly, swore to protect from prying elders. Now, I will never know how the universe on the other end of the wormhole looked like. I can only guess that it will be more fulfilling and a thousand times more gratifying than the one I am in right now.

But here I am, writing an amateur blog, hoping to catch an internship that is as far away from engineering as it can possibly get. But that also means something else. That I refuse to give up. Give up my dreams that I have treasured thus far. I don't know if this will take me anywhere. I don't even expect it to. All I am getting out of this is the feeling of having stood up to the mighty blow that the education system aims at us poor kids from the day we set foot into its beckoning buildings, which hopes to crush the dreams we didn't even build properly.

We all have a place in the design of the world. We are all meant to be somewhere. At all points of times, we are doing something or the other that has a huge impact on a parallel event or on an impending future event. We are triggers in our own ways. We just have to believe that every thing that we are going through, will just make us stronger. Every stone of our dreams, that we leave unturned will eventually make its way back to us. Or, we will eventually pick enough nerves to go hunting for our dreams. Either way, Our Dreams are always waiting to be fulfilled. We just have to believe that it's right around the corner, waiting for us. And if the time's not ripe yet, we are just being armoured for the fiery battle that awaits us, one that we need to win, to get to Out Dreams.

Can You Do What I Ask You To?
Never let go of Your Dreams...