Memories and Dreams

We all know the meaning of these two words – memories and dreams. The first one talks about the past and the second one is about the future. Our life is filled with memories and dreams. Dreams when realized would become memories sometime later. Every individual lives with lots of memories in his/her life and people have the tendency to always compare their”present” with memories to see where they stand. Often we would compare how we were happy during our school/college days, enjoyed every moment of our life being with friends and family to the current state of our life where we push ourselves to extremes to earn and live a “decent” life. We also have our dreams of achieving better things in life, have a goal set for ourselves and work towards that. Dreams are the ones that drive our life and give meaning to our existence and often dreams gets converted in to hope – hope that things would be fine some day.

Well I am not here to talk about memories and dreams as every one knows about it. But I was just wondering if we can extend this concept to a wider angle and apply it at a society level. Just as an individual, each and every society lives with memories and dreams as societies are nothing but collection of individuals. Let us consider a society which has lots of memories. If a society has lots of memories than dreams then what it basically does is relate things that are happening now to the past. Yeah, we can always say India was flourishing in the 14th century and there were lesser crimes and people were living happily. And then came the French and Brits who ruled us for couple of centuries and took away a lot of wealth. These are the memories we have about our country. But these are just memories. What do we get out of this? Often when we think of the memories and compare ourselves we tend go back. We do not think about the future which is basically dreaming about living better in days to come. We say “I am earning the salary which my dad earned at the time of his retirement”. Well,one can get satisfied with the change that has happened, this should not stop him/her dreaming about earning 10 times more than this and living happier. No one is going to forget about 9/11 in centuries to come. It is going to stay in memories for ever. But that should not stop the advancements in air travel which is making world smaller and smaller every day. Who is going to forget Hiroshima bombings, SARS outbreak, Gujarat earthquake, Indonesia earthquake? But who will not stop from using safe nuclear energy for generating electricity, more international travels for businesses, build earthquake resistant homes, develop tsunami sensing stations?

Memories are good in the sense that we can benchmark ourselves on where we stand today. But dreams would lay foundation for the future. I feel a society would not develop if it lives on with memories of past. Rather it should have dreams of future. It should dream about better lifestyle, better values, better culture, better generations to come. Imagine a society which has lots of dreams. People right from the one who is running the government to the one who elects the government has dreams about the future. It is even ok to dream about oneself. Be selfish. Dream for yourself. But dream ethically. Dream within the laws of land. Dream for the betterment of a society. One can dream of flying high. It depends whether you want to fly a Boeing in to a 110 floor high building or fly the deep in to the space and run a marathon at zero gravity. When every person in a society dreams and dreams get aligned together, dreams become vision, vision becomes a reality. And do we stop there? No…We need to dream more…

My point is not against having memories of past. But we should have more dreams than memories. For India, which is going through a major economical and social change, more dreams and dreamers are required for a better nation tomorrow and thereby better lives for all of us. Ours should be a society where dreams outnumber memories.

Let’s dream more and do more.

I dream of India being a land of dream comes true, not just a land of dreams.