How does it feel to be entrapped in a time bubble and live someone else's life? To sit in a cubicle in a posh building, trying hard to create an IT program and remembering that it has been a long time since you wrote a poem. How does it feel to wear that tag around your neck which has become your identity now, an identity which you did not want; That card opens a door for you in office. But you wonder, is this the door that you wanted to walk into? You walk along with your colleagues at 5 PM for tea and cigarette downstairs and discuss how hard the life has been and how overburdened you are. Suddenly you get a call from your boss, you stamp out the cigarette with your boot and rush to the stairs, thinking of an excuse, why you took 20 minutes long tea break today. You wanted to pursue arts but it does not pay. Writers are accused of obscenity for showing their prominent ribs popping out of their empty stomach. Poets are loathed for their inability to feed their children. Dramatists are just ignored conveniently, as long as they don't come up with a drum in a posh colony.
You work for 9 long hours, attend calls late at night, prepare reports on weekends, just to get that salary SMS on last day of the month. Living in a city is expensive - house rents rob you off, water you have to buy, dust you have to inhale. You struggle, not to achieve greatness but to survive. You work hard, not for the achievements, but to retain your job; the job you loathe. When you were growing up, you did not dream of this. You wanted to touch the sky, roam around the world and lie with a rabbit in a green valley somewhere far. When you became an adult, you fly to sell a shampoo contract to a client in a suit, travel 3 hours a day from home to office and like cute rabbits pics on random pages on Facebook. Oh yes, Facebook - a great respite. It is like alcohol, it helps you forget the present and takes you to a different world.
Here you can make and manage your different identity, a different avatar. You write some cool stuff and some people like your posts, you count the reactions and please yourself. You browse through various pages filled with random memes, jokes, and videos. You like random unrelated, imaginative posts, try to be creative in comments and wait for people to like your posts and comments back. But for how long? Soon you feel this is not real. This is not how you can survive. You can't live like an ostrich, burying your head in the sand, because the world is scary.
You had dreams, where are those? You promised yourself, seeing in the mirror that you won't let the world dictate terms, you will be the master of your soul. Then why did you sell your soul for a weekend pizza? Why did you exchange your pen with a bottle of coke? Why could you not resist the temptation of following the herd? Was it too hard to follow your passion and what you are doing now is easy? Weekend escapes to nearby hill stations are enough for you to hide the shame of giving up? Those numbers in your bank accounts are real, they let you pay the bills, but were your dreams fake? Why does the guy sitting next to you always excel at work and you always struggle? He likes it, he loves coding, he will always be ahead of you. At best you can copy what he does and show up 9 hours a day, but can you be as good as him? Nope, monkeys can't swim and fishes can't climb. A raindrop can fall into the sea and disappear for eternity or fall into a sea shell and transforms itself into a shiny pearl. Where do you want to land up? Oh! you have another excuse, a man is different than his job.
So is a man really different than what he does for 70% of his day but he is what he does in 3 hours in his closet? Whom are you fooling? Why don't you have the guts to admit that you are a coward. You are too scared to test yourself to know how good you are at what you dream of to be doing? Aren't you again at it? Like you could not look into the eyes of that girl you truly loved, and tell her how much you loved her because you were too scared of rejection.
How convenient it is to dream and do nothing about it. How easy it is to say to people around you that you could have become great because you had a family to look after. How effortless it is to blame the society for your spineless life. No matter how many times you see "Pursuit of Happyness" or listen to Steve Jobs' Stanford Commencement speech, that is not going to change the fact that you lost the game of life. You will still live your life like Rose's fiancee in Titanic, who dishonorably sits in the lifeboat meant for women and children, looking away, perfectly knowing that the ship steward is looking at him. Yes, people will let you go away with this act of shame of yours, they will let you live, eat and survive but please don't expect respect from them.
There are people in this world who don't know what to do with this life, they are stuck, don't know where to go. What would they not give to feel as intensely about something as you do about your passion. But you, you know, you feel and still do nothing about it, that is unpardonable. It is like not cashing the lottery ticket because you are too scared of an eventful life and can't handle the change.
Remember that story, where a disciple asked his guru what he wanted to do in life? The guru answered, "Think of life as an assignment. When a king sends his spy to a distant country to extract the information, and send it back to his homeland, that spy lives in that foreign country for years. He marries there, has children, takes up a job. He is free to do whatever he chooses to, but if he does not send information to the king, does not fulfill that purpose, which the king sent him for, then the king will not be pleased with him and his whole visit becomes futile. Similarly you came into this world, you can do whatever you feel like, you can spend time with friends, watch TV, play sports but don't do that one thing which you know that you are supposed to do, then how can your creator be happy with you."
Yes, the threat is real, failures are imminent and scary as the hell this journey could be. But you will live a life worth living, will have a story worth telling and most important of all, will be able to look yourself in the mirror. Sell your stuff and keep your soul. It is better to excel at what you love and die of hunger than to struggle at what you loathe and pay for liposuction. It is still not too late, you still have the chance to preserve what is sacred in this vulgar world: Dreams. You have to fight for it. You owe it to yourself. Take that leap now! Be a man for God's sake!