“Catch your dreams before they slip away,’ sang The Rolling Stones.
Time is much shorter than one thinks. Act on your dreams, don’t let them remain just dreams. There is no guarantee that they will be realised, but to act is in your hands. If you act and don’t succeed, you will have the satisfaction of having acted. If you don’t chase your dreams, you will have regrets.
“I always wanted to write. When my closest school friend asked me what I planned to be when I grew up. He prefaced his question by saying it is clear what you will do when you grow up, but what will I do? I came from a family of industrialists. He took it for granted that that is what I would do. I said a writer,” says Nidhi Dalmia, Author of Books Afternoon and Harp and Entrepreneur.
Dalmia adds, “He had thick shoulders. ‘A boxer. You have the physique, and you are excellent,’ I said. But he didn’t think so. I too was wrong he turned out to be a successful restaurateur in Melbourne, Australia.”
He also describes the hope and idealism of the 60’s that he and many others thought would never end, the coming of age and growing up in the late 60’s. How the themes conveyed were universal and how music interspersed with everyday life in those times.
“I wanted to write about the universality of human emotions and feelings and even more so of human experience: about the brotherhood of all men and attempts at categorization a distortion of the continuum,” writes Dalmia.
To tell a tale about how love and obligation compartmentalise people, making them choose between love and duty, between the head and the heart, between one’s social contract and what one wants. The individual choices one has to make with profound consequences
To portray a deeply felt love story, as different as any personal experience can be.
Sometimes dreams present themselves as opportunities, chances. One has to recognise it, seize it. Carpe Diem. They are nothing but one’s dreams.
“Example: Which young man doesn’t dream about young girls. The chance to meet someone interesting presents itself without warning and for an instant. Once when I was a student at the Sorbonne, I was 23, unhitched, on a blue spring evening in Paris, a young very pretty French girl suddenly asked me in French, On the street as I came out of a university office, after an errand, if I had a light. She asked where I was from. I said India. She said she had been there and walked away. I should have continued the conversation but by the time I thought about it, she was gone,” shares Dalmia.
Dalmia opines, “Another example of a similar happening was at the Air India office in Paris. This time it was an Indian girl behind the counter. The office was closing, they were waiting to shoo me out. I was leaving the next morning. She looked interesting, vivacious. I could have asked her to continue the conversation over a coffee. But I didn’t.”
Some of the best relationship we form, start with chance encounters.
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