The Secret Life of Unfulfilled Dreams

by Parth Pandya

The stage is on fire. Not the literal kind of course. It has been set alight by the mesmerising performance of the music band. Their lead singer has the audience eating out of his hands. His strong, clear and melodious voice travels through the speakers to the one hundred thousand strong audience. They are chanting his name. They are in the midst of an evening they will not forget for the rest of their lives. And he isn’t just singing. He is playing the guitar too like a virtuoso. His tresses fly in the air as he shakes his head and plays riff after impossible riff. It is heaven. It is a dream.

(Well, it actually is.) The singer wakes up. The singer is me. The dream takes its roots from a slice of reality. I was in a band as a tabla player. When a performance would get over, it was the good boys – the keyboard player and the octopad player and the tabla player – who would be quietly packing up their instruments while the lead guitarist and the vocalist would have admirers swarming up to them. Having not learnt either how to sing or to play the guitar and possessing very moderate skill in playing the tabla, I decided to stay content with visions of that glory. While the dream itself has tempered down over the years because practicality has taken over, the part that I wish would really come true is that about the abundant hair.

We all have dreams. They fuel the effort we put in towards leading a fulfilling life. The whole point of dreams is for them to be unreasonable. ‘Stretch goals’, as they are referred to in corporate jargon. The arc of dreams goes from the impossible to the mildly possible as we seep into the regularity of our lives. Our entrenchment in the world of responsibility takes the edge away from the fantastic nature of dreams.

We bridge the gap between the fantastic and the plausible each day, to walk away with a sense of success. Not all of us are Sachin Tendulkar. He dreamt at the age of 11 to play for India. As a kid, I did the same. Who wouldn’t want to take on those pesky Aussies in their backyard and smash them all over the Sydney Cricket Ground? But by the time I reached my twenties and I found myself more adept at creating PowerPoint slides than hitting good bowlers for boundaries, I moderated my desire. I would now envision myself hitting the winning runs of the final ball of the finals in my local cricket league. A touch of pragmatism in the world of dreams never hurt.

I’ve had one such dream and it relates very much to the place you are reading this work. I grew up dreaming of being a successful writer: a picture of me with all my brooding intensity would be on the back cover of the book which would be stacked up in piles beside my table in the busiest bookstore in the city, where I’d be signing copies of my book. Sure, I had a knack for telling stories, but even in my limited peer group, there were others who were better. Life too had other plans and like so many people who did it every year, my life went in the rather prosaic field of engineering.

I didn’t let go of the dream though. I tempered it. I took to writing on my blog. That process of writing on my blog week after week, month after month, year after unflinching year helped me gain the belief that maybe my writing was worth more than I gave myself credit for.

I decided to expand my horizons. The first place I took my writing to was Spark. I realised that in my current station in life, the ability to produce quality work month after month which was critiqued and validated by editors who knew what they were doing, was fulfilment of a lesser dream. In the process, that dream became all the more endearing.

For me, writing has always been about a two-way conversation. I want people to read my work and be moved (or disappointed) by it. I want to hear if they found a poem moving or the ending of a short story surprising. Spark gave me that forum.

Since no one had filed an injunction against me for writing more, I took it as a sign to spread my wings further. That latent dream of an eight-year-old boy was brought to fruition −I published a book. I co-wrote a book called ‘r2idreams’ about the Indian immigrant dilemma on whether to stay or to go back to India.

The book came about despite having a very hectic job and two very hectic kids. I was driven by a sense that this story needed to be told and I was the one to tell it. Fulfilling the dream was not easy but it was fulfilled nonetheless. The story hit its mark with many readers and the reaction left me elated and vindicated.

For years, I had shelved the thought of doing anything big beyond my field of work because of what I had imagined to be the sheer difficulty of it all. My attempt at breaking through this chain of thought (pun intended) taught me otherwise.

I have two young kids who are not bound yet by the chains of pragmatism. They dream of going to the moon for a weekend picnic and being the number one tennis player in the world and of having the ability to time travel and having a magic pen that would write their homework for them. I cherish these without judgment and am careful not to discourage them. Who knows what will spark from these little aspirations blooming out of their imaginative minds?

I often find myself unwittingly becoming a motivational coach for my friends and family. I see people abandoning their pursuits, selling themselves short or abandoning their aspirations to merely sail through their lives. That deserted attempt at running a half marathon, that dream trip to Ladakh that has been put off, that painting that has been unfinished, that novel that has not been attempted. I am always on their case and I take great satisfaction in the few success stories I have been able to engender.

To me, the pursuit of my dreams has given a lot of fulfilment and if there’s one thing I want to tell others it is this: Find that unfulfilled dream of yours. Let it breathe. Let the dream live. Trust me, their secret lives have a lot to offer.

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