Reality Check

I started the weekend with a fairly lively discussion on childhood aspirations. I was probably four when one of my uncles returned from US with a whole bunch of toy guns for me. This led to a frenzy of sorts where my good friend D and I decided to become gangsters. However, this was also the time when one of my dad's friends owned a bus service and gifted me and D a set of crisp bus tickets. The two of us were thus plagued with equally strong desires of being a bus conductor. At one point we combined the dreams and decided to be bus conductors who would also rob the passengers. We spent a considerable amount of time over the weekends - robbing D's father (who was the only other participant in this game) and also selling him bus tickets. Ah! Good old days. The whole incident makes me feel like doing a reality check to see how close I am to any of my other childhood ambitions:

1. Rickshaw Driver - As a hefty kid I admired the fact that the rickshaw drivers had amazing muscles to pull the lever & get the engine rolling. I always wanted to join the community as an option to later be well built - hmm!

2. Pilot - I was talking to a friend born & brought up in US some time back on what the most common childhood fantasy of children in the US is and she mentioned it is probably to be astronauts - well in India it has to be a pilot and moi was no exception.

3. Cricketer - actually on second thoughts I think every Indian kid wants to be a cricketer as well. Thankfully for me I figured out pretty soon that my chances of being a rickshaw driver were brighter than being a cricketer and this ambition was given a back seat.

4. Superhero - I wanted to be a superhero but was aware of the fact that I don’t have superhero abilities. So I spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out a way to get around this limitation. I came to the conclusion that I'll carry lots of body powder that I'll release to create a temporary distraction and since I would be wearing glasses, I could just disappear then. It was a perfect plan till the prototype made the floors of my house slippery; causing my mom ample stress and that was the end of Powderman.

Well, it's not difficult to see that these dreams haven't been realized. They obviously appear childish but what scares me is the thought of me sitting twenty years down the line and jotting down my current dreams and arriving at similar conclusions about them - hmmmmm!

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You know you are ...... not thinking right when you take out the packet of sugar, put it next to your cereal bowl and get completely confused as to what you are doing; then wait for a while and put the sugar packet back in the microwave !!!