Photo: YouTube

These days I’m seeing trends in social media putting status like I am fond of my thousand dreams (malai ti mera hajar sapanaharuko maya lagera aauchha ). Sounds dramatic but somehow I find these words appealing and truthful. We all have a dream, every kind of dreams, some accomplished dreams, some partly fulfilled, some yet need to get wings to fly and some of them even die with the ideas. But these are the dreams. You would probably mention in your classroom notes out of the boredom during a lecture, written above the books or written behind the covers and now you discover them after ages when you leaf pages. Among these dreams, some were imprinted on the mind like pictures. They do not need to be written in any journals, they directly pop up to the heart. And you hope one day your time would come (apna time aayega)

Last week, theatre hit a cinema - Gully boy, which talks about a dream, that dream which one can see when awake, that dream which does not give you sleep... I think people call it passion, but I prefer to call it a dream. This celluloid was captivating and enables to move you inwardly without your consent to chase the protagonist Murad’s (Ranveer Singh) dream. Cinema is the voice which often talks to us directly, and Gully Boy talks to me. While I watching the film, I felt Murad not only chased his dreams. But it invoked my voice “Why could I not push hard? Why did I not chase it like him?”

I think they are really blessed who know what to do right from their early childhood. I’m not one of those. I always juggled my numerous interest one after the other.  The patience to justify the dreams was certainly out of question. Still, I pity those dreams that yearned wings to fly. I actually did not give up on them. They were always there in my mind. But achieving them was a herculean task.

I read about successful people who achieved in their lives. I enjoyed it and also wanted to achieve. That too with ease. My sister once said, “Maybe you like the end result, not the process. You don’t enjoy the process.” Sadly, she was right.

Back to the cinema, Murad expresses his anger, suppression, injustices through poems and meets his mentor MC Sher (Sidhhant Chaturbedi), a rapper who acts like the lion and shared the same values like Murad. Actually, through MC Sher, Murad gets the voice to sing his own song.

At this moment, I would like to pause and observe Murad, a gully boy, who grew up in the slum. Murad was always fierce with his dad, who brought in a second wife, not older than Murad. I have watched other films of Ranveer Singh and observed him off-screen. He is a very energetic person. But Murad is different. The character was way inconfident from what real life Ranveer is. Where was the confidence? It opens gradually as the story moves forward. On the other hand, MC Sher strides into the stage and performs like a lion in his first screen appearance.

Both MC Sher and Murad have broken family tie ups. Their childhood is spent in destitute and struggles to live a standard life. MC Sher develops himself as an indifferent personality while Murad simply gets carried away with people’s passing judgments.  Murad realizes and shatters all the voices which points his weakness and flourishes as a beautiful poem.

After the film, I contemplate myself, what is it that prevents us to achieve our dreams. Interestingly, dreams always come up linking with the city. Be it Kathmandu aka Haku Kale’s Gidhhako Shahar or New York, the land of opportunity, people come to these cities with their passions, or ‘desires’ as they are often called. In Bollywood, generally ‘Godfather’ is the right medium to fulfill dreams. In Gully Boy, MC Sher is godfather to Murad. However I never had a talented MC Sher in my life. Hence, dedication and devotion were my mentors.

Once, I shared my dilemma to my friend. I wished to do everything- writing stories, publishing articles in the newspaper, becoming an eloquent English speaker, a prolific English writer, making documentaries, traveling across Europe, being famous and wealthy, directing short films (this one is the latest), running a YouTube page/ a channel blah.. blah.. blah...She suggested me to focus only on things which I could achieve for real. She was right. But here I was, always on cloud nine.

Those were my dreams. Neither did I want to give up on it, nor could I live up to it. And when I saw someone else living my dreams, I felt miserable. Once I wrote a poem, ‘O Passerby’ out of sheer jealousy. But now, having seen the film, I recalled my dreams one by one. It compels me to act, not to stay idle and also not to be jealous. I come up with ideas. I may have a thousand dreams, but they are all queued up, yet to be fulfilled. I will suck up on them, one by one. Like in the Zoya Akhtar-directed Gully boy, a film loosely based on the lives of Indian rappers Naezy and Divine, as they sucked up on their own dreams…