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| Edited By: Yoshita Rao |Source: DNA |Updated: Sep 24, 2018, 12:21 PM IST
'Dream big', we're told as kids, 'you will land among the stars'. But every so often, the dreamers are left wide-eyed and empty-handed, and maybe with just enough hope that tomorrow may weave a better tale. With time, more and more people succumb to the realistic ways of the world.
It may be said that the vast majority of us don't fulfill our dreams before we die. If we look at our own friends' circle, how many of us have achieved our dreams? As the legendary musician John Lennon once sang in Beautiful Boy, "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans". Yet despite this rather morbid thought, all does not seem lost when we encounter the optimists, who may have lost out on their aspirations but haven't lost track of them yet.
Out in the bustling Saturday Bandra fish market, chaos is in the air with scrawny cats, loud crows and pestering flies that are circling the fresh catch. To add to the commotion there's a bargain hungry crowd, always looking for a steal. Atop the dirty, fish-water strewn counters are the ladies that rebut and counter propose every offer. In the middle of this pandemonium is one lady who dreamt of being a police officer.
"Police inspector nahi toh havaldar bhi ban jati (If not a police inspector I would've at least become a constable)," says 32-year-old Reshma Tilo, who fell short by a few inches of the 5 foot 1 inch minimum height requirement to qualify for the force. Tilo has been selling fish for three years on weekends and public holidays. "I come to help my mom sell fish because she has done a lot for us. It's also our culture, and what's the use of education if we don't take our culture forward?"
When her ambition to join the police force went kaput, she soon sought another way of serving people. Every other day of the week, Tilo volunteers at Aditi, an NGO that works with female sex workers. "For the past 10 years I've been working with people living with HIV. I've also worked with PSI (Population Services International) in the red light areas of Kamathipura." Tilo recalls what led to her new endeavour: "Once, as a child while playing Holi, I found a used condom. I thought it was a balloon so I picked it up and started filling water in it from a tap. But everyone started making fun of me, calling me crazy for playing with it. When I asked my elders about it I got whacked. At that time I was determined to know what they were keeping from me. And today, I distribute condoms everyday and teach people about HIV, AIDS and family planning. Mein condom ka istamal sikhati hoon (I teach them how to use condoms)."
So what if the police academy rejected her; she now hopes to work with cancer patients and she is already in pursuit of it. "I failed the ninth standard but now I'm completing graduation through Yashwantrao Chavan Open University," she says, adding that she studied psychology as a part of the course. She now wants to pursue a Masters in Social Work (MSW). "Whatever we want to do, life somehow gives us a link. Aur hum kuch bhi kar sakte hain, pa sakte hain (And we can do anything, achieve anything)," Tilo asserts.
A fan of Marathi literature, Dinesh Kadam loves reading Vishnu Vãman Shirwãdkar, aka Kusumãgraj, renowned for his works on freedom and justice. Inspired by his novels and poems, this 30-year-old Santacruz, Mumbai resident wanted to join the defence forces. "Growing up, I was also inspired by the movies on soldiers and army life," he says adding, "Kabhi kabhi zindagi mein joh aap plan karte ho, waisa hota nahi (Some things in life just don't pan out the way you want them to)."
Dashing through the busy streets of Mumbai today, Kadam, a rickshaw driver, recalls his childhood dream of being recruited by the army. "Normal lives are so dull – you eat, go to work and sleep, but the thought of standing at the border and defending the country used to give me a different rush."
However, Kadam couldn't push harder for his dreams because of familial duties. "I couldn't enroll in the NCC (National Cadet Corps) or IAF (Indian Armed Forces) because I couldn't wait back after college for extracurricular activities and my grades were low."
At the age of 17-18, Kadam began working as a delivery boy or counter boy at a food stall and would bring home Rs800 per month. Even while working several part-time jobs, he completed a Bachelors in Commerce from Chetana College in Mumbai and took up a job as a sales representative in the retail industry. "I leave home early in the morning as my shift timings are from 9:30 to 6:30. I come back by 8pm and then drive the rickshaw till midnight because my salary isn't a lot and I need two jobs to provide for my family," he says, adding that his weekends are spent driving the rickshaw.
Kadam is now on the lookout for weekend MBA courses, but he is hopeful that his dream to join the armed forces will someday be fulfilled by his one-year-old baby. "I will ensure my child grows up to join the army, navy or air force," he asserts.
In many ways, Kana Saha is the doting mother, who cheers from the sidelines and extends a motherly touch to her only daughter. She also roams the streets of Kolkata, chasing hardened criminals and making arrests as swiftly as she can. But there is yet another side that Saha hides beneath her tough police officer exterior. "When I was young, I wanted to be a teacher. I worked towards that dream, taking multiple classes at Rabindra Bharati University in Kolkata, taking simultaneous courses in BEd, and a Masters course as well in a night school for adult education training," the 51-year-old begins.
Teaching middle school students was her passion for the longest time, yet when it was time to choose a profession, she chose the first government job that came along. "I wanted to start earning and being independent. When I got a call from the Kolkata Police and after passing subsequent rounds of physical training tests and interviews, I was asked to join."
Another reason for not waiting on teaching opportunities, she explains, was that there was no School Service Commission board for teachers at the time and so there was no guarantee of getting a job as quickly.
Saha, who joined as an Assistant Sub-Inspector in 1990, took 20 years to be promoted to Sub-Inspector. She is now posted in Posta, which falls under the Central Division of the Kolkata Police. "We were, maybe, 100 of us (ladies) in the Kolkata Police force," says Saha, adding, "Promotions were slow for my group due to a lot of internal complications."
A chance to pursue her teaching dream resurfaced after her daughter was born. "I got a job in Bilaspur, Chhattisgarh, to teach in the railway school. While my husband had no problems with this, my brother advised me to stay. After all, I had a job in Kolkata and it seemed like a risk to break up my family just because I wanted to teach," she concludes.
For 62-year-old Goa resident Socorro Gomes, who has worked all over the world, this is only his second time waiting tables in a Goan hotel, along Candolim beach, his first being a hotel in Porvorim.
Waiting tables wasn't so much his dream job as being an automobile engineer was. "I used to repair cycles when I was young. People gave me dismantled parts and I would assemble it for them, but I never worked in a garage," he says.
All set to do an automobile engineering diploma course from a college in Vellore right after the SSC, Gomes' life took an unfortunate turn. "My father expired in '75 and after that we had a lot of financial problems. So I couldn't go ahead with this course and had to find a job real quick," says Gomes.
To make a fast buck, Gomes started his career in Mumbai's Taj Hotel as a waiter at the age of 16, where he worked for three years. "Then I went to Dubai and Muscat and was a bartender in the Gulf for 18 years. After that I got a job on cruise ships," says Gomes adding, "My first ship was on a world tour and I'm blessed to have seen so many places."
Today, Gomes' feeble, quivering hands are not capable of going back to his automotive ways. But even after all these years of working, he has no intention of giving up. "I resigned but came back to waiting tables thinking, what to do at home?"
"For small town folks like me, it's all about escaping from there and making an identity of your own," says 36-year-old Ankur Kesarwani, who hails from Pratapgarh in Uttar Pradesh. With an engineering degree in hand, he then completed an MBA from Symbiosis University, Pune. His justification for choosing two different fields is, "When I was 17-18, I didn't know what I wanted. And when I finally figured it out, it was too late."
A big time movie buff, Kesarwani has a corpus of over 2,000 films in different languages – Hindi, English, French, Spanish, Iranian, and Korean movies, which are his personal favourite. All watched with the help of subtitles.
"There was a time when I would make it a point to watch one movie a day," he adds.
It was during his MBA days when Kesarwani hit upon the idea of recreating Indian short films for a global audience, and making a repository of movie reviews in various languages. "English is spoken by only 11 per cent of the world's population. We are left with 89 per cent that speak in other languages to cater to," he asserts. Though he was involved in coding for the website and collating content in 2010-11, Kesarwani's ageing parents asked him to return home to take over the family business of retailing jewellery. "For at least 10 years I was trying to get my dream to come true," he laments, adding, "But we got stuck on Phase One itself."
Today, Kesarwani sits behind his jewellery counter in Pratapgarh, morose yet humorously dissing his job, "I have the brain of a computer engineer and the knowledge of an MBA. My friends believed in me and said I would come up with a good product. But here I sit selling gold rings, necklaces and chains, while bargaining with customers for a better deal," he giggles.
