Dreams and Focus

All counselors, teachers, personality development speakers emphasize that in order to achieve your goal, you should have a dream and focus on that dream. Our ex President Dr. Abdul Kalam always talks of dreaming big whenever he is in the company of youth and children. He is pained to tell that lack of confidence amongst youth was increasingly becoming a hindrance to make their dream a reality. Going back in time, these words were never heard from anyone during my childhood days. The word ‘Focus’ was confined to photography and we only used to day dream. But now when I look back, I find that my own day dreaming has great bearing on my life today.

While talking about my dreams, I have to go back to my childhood days. When I was in school, I got fascinated towards colorful children magazines. I developed interest in writing. Initially it started with writing comments on article under the columns ‘Letters’ and slowly switched to writing stories for children in a magazine style on a note book with sketches and dummy advertisements!  Then came a phase when my stories started getting published in the same very magazines, I used to patronize. As the age progressed I started writing filmy style stories because of filmy influence on me. It was only during college days that my writing skills in Hindi got stabilized and choose to write satires which are being continued even now.

Now it can be told that I had a dream of becoming film script writer and film director. Being a film buff, often I used to day dream about my stories being filmed and how I shall be directing the various scenes, how shall be the background score etc. Once in college, I even got hold of an application from Pune Film Institute for admission but I could never gather the courage to ask permission from my parents lest they get annoyed. In other words, as Dr. Kalam says, I had no confidence to get their consent. Like any other youth of those times, there were only two options left before me- either to pursue science or arts course. No body talked about technical or other professional courses. I chose Science, did post graduation but landed on to a Bank job.

But all said and done, the dream remained in my heart and mind. What if I could not become a script writer, I am happy with the thought that because of those dreams, I am able to script write articles, satires, political comments etc and am able to continue this passion. The idea of my writing this article is to reaffirm my faith that focused dreams do play a vital role in personal life. Keep dreaming about what you want to achieve in your life, be focused and sooner or later, those dreams are going to turn in to reality. To substantiate, I have another personal experience to share.

At the fag end of my career when I took retirement from service in 2001, I had a dream of things to do after retirement. I had a dream of visiting all my schools, colleges and houses wherever I studied/stayed right from class 1 up to post graduation level spread across 9 places in Madhya Pradesh. This idea, this dream and the urge kept ringing in my mind over the next 7 years. It was only in 2008 that finally I could give shape to my dream and embarked upon the dream journey down the memory lane which ultimately secured me a certificate and place in ‘Limca book of Record’ 2009 edition  and ‘ India book of Record’ 2010 edition.

(To read my complete travelogue please go to the  following link- http://srayyangar.blogspot.com/2009/03/journey-down-memory-lane.html )

To conclude, with my own experiences as above, I strongly feel that ‘If there is will, there is a way’. Dreams do influence your life and help you in achieving your goals. Will, determination and focus can turn those dreams into reality some day. So keep dreaming without loosing heart and never say good bye to your dreams.