When dreams come true

When dreams come true

Dreams come true.
That is an attribute of dreams.
It is a fact that if there is a fire burning brightly inside,
it will draw all the support required to make that dream come true.
If you then plan right and work as per plan,
dreams come true even faster.
In the last few days I have received a number
of letters from young people who have done
well in their twelfth standard exams and hope
to join a professional course;
some who are fresh graduates who have landed dream jobs,
whether with IT companies or as fine art teacher
in a public school.
Whatever the content,
the mood is always one of exhilaration.
It made me smile, reading the letters.

And then I wondered:
Are the young prepared
for the work of stoking and nurturing
of the fire that burns brightly today?
Are they aware of the temptations that can take them
so far from their dreams that they do not remember

what set them on that course in the first place?

Do our classes in history prepare them?

Do our sessions in 'value education' prepare them?

Do our discussions in literature prepare them?

History is the only subject taught that is relevant to life.
Yet, it is taught so badly and made so removed from
their lives that students wonder why it is taught at all.
I am reminded of a song in Hindi, translated reads,
"Porus fought Alexander, so pray,
what has that to do with me?"

We can use history to understand how life works.
Dreams are really values.
To dream of joining the medical or the teaching profession,
at any rank,
is to state that you want to serve.
To dream of being an engineer is to state that
you want to make living easy; to dream of using
computers is to find ways to take away the drudge
so that more time is spent in creative processes.
For each profession, for each walk of life,
we can make a similar statement.
Making the statement is simple;
living by it is more difficult.
The challenge is not in securing a medical seat;
the challenge is in being a caring doctor.

Contrast this with Balgangadhar Tilak.
He founded a school because he believed that
education was [and is] the answer to India's ills.
Many years later the teachers in his school wanted
a raise in pay.
Tilak offered fifty rupees a month,
a princely sum in those days.
The teachers wanted seventy; their argument was that it
would lend them a status. After many rounds of discussions
Tilak agreed to pay the sum and he made the arrangements for it.
Then he resigned from his own school.
And for that we can thank God,
or his attention shifted to India as a country.
He equated education and freedom
— for him one did not exist without the other.
So in solitary confinement in a jail in the then Burma,
he wrote the Gitarahasya. It was a book that inspired
the Marathas to work towards an independent India.
He returned from Burma to be called 'Lokmanya'
not just the Marathas but by all Indians.
He took the concept of education to a new plane;
that was his life statement.

Everyone knows the story of Ashoka.
When he was most victorious,
life offered a road less taken and he chose to follow that path.
The latter part of his life was his new 'avatar'.
(Today the word avatar has such a vulgar connotation.
It is used in conjunction with Britney Spears — OMG.
Our youth are taught by gossip columns that
coming into a new life consists of changing the
hairstyle or the husband.) Ashoka perhaps paced
the war tent all night weighing his life as it was;
perhaps he saw only mindless repetition of patterns.
They did not appeal to him anymore.
He decided to turn right around and he did.
Life was new again.
He is really Ashoka the great because
he saw the chance that life was offering and took it.
Very rarely do people recognise the chances that are offered by life.

How often we read about the stand a person takes.
Refusing knighthood because he was
aghast by an event — that is what made Tagore.
To willingly and firmly refuse recognition and
fame is possible only when life statement is clear to oneself.
Dignity and divinity of man were Tagore's guiding words.
When he stood by his life statement,
Life took him on.
From being the poet Rabindranath
he went on to become Gurudev.

Long ago, after the first heart transplant,
Dr Christian Barnard was touring India.
He was interviewed on the DoorDarshan.
He was praised for his pioneering work.
It would have been so simple to soak in all those praises.
But his profession was to care for people and
Dr Bernard took caring to new heights when he
genuinely and gently acknowledged the support
and work of his team; care here was for the
mental and emotional well being of his team.

We need to teach history as value education
at its most complex and simple form.
Each of the actions cited above would
have been construed as a wrong move by the world at large.
But the results were contrary.
If only we could teach children such secrets as a science of life!

To come back to the point, dreams are values.
The source of the dream may be an experience,
a book, an event or a role model. It runs its course.
The first is to qualify and then work in the field.
The end is to pass on the knowledge and experience
to the next generation so that they start where you leave off.

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