Who Do You Want to Be?

One day, an uncle asked me, “Beta, who do you want to be like?”

I kept silent for a moment before answering. As a matter of fact I couldn’t answer. I wanted to tell him, “Uncle, haven’t you seen the Classmate advertisements? I want to be a first.” But my mother had once taught me, than to disrespect a person you should rather keep quite.

I had dismissed off the question and said, “I still haven’t decided uncle.”

The decision had been made long ago, actually.

Everyone is trying to become like someone else. In the place we reside, everyone is trying to become like someone. Everyone is trying to fulfill someone else’s dreams. If they want it or not has never been a question to ask. But everyone is chasing down the same road.

Ask a kid who plays cricket, he’d answer, “I want to become like Sachin.”

Ask a kid who loves football; he’d be naming Messi or Ronaldo, or some other footballer who is legendary.

A smart kid’s mother or father would brag and say, “My child will be like Einstein.”

For those who have not decided on a famous personality, they’d want to become like their parents. Like his mother, like her father.

Our world comprises at the moment, of over 7.25 billion people, and when everyone says ‘they are all individuals’, they are actually not. How can you be an individual when you are trying to mirror someone else?

Once in our lifetime, we should let go and try to become our own person. Forget about what the world says about life, about socialites, about everything else and just live. No, I don’t mean by breaking laws, committing murders and doing crimes. I mean by unbinding ourselves from ourselves.

The demons don’t reside outside, they reside within us. Our fears, our insecurities are the demons that we are afraid to see in the darkness of the night. I’m talking about letting go that darkness within, let go of what people will think about us and live.

Be a photographer, even if you wanted to be an engineer once upon a time.

Catch the moon in your writing, even if you wanted to be an astronaut once.

Teach kids in your room once, even if you wanted to become doctor once.

Become a travelling hippy once in your lifetime, even if you wanted to settle down and become a professor once.

Our dreams are bounded by none. We change, circumstances change, and what we want from life changes as well.

We can love someone whom we once hated. We can change our own metaphors for life too. I had read somewhere, ‘Let the atheist pray’. Yes, let the theist not pray for one day. Let her breathe that day. Let her break customs and live. Life will be worth it.

Let the atheist sit down, and pray. Let him, get a change to meditate.

When will we try to become our own person and not someone else? When will we stop caging yourselves in the pits of our hearts?

There is a chaos hidden in between every one of us.

I don’t want to become like my parents. They might be nice people, but I want to become myself. I want become a hippy, a dancer, a singer, a writer. I want to become a scholar; I want to become a doctor. I want to be someone who knows technology, yet who loves the rumbling of the dry leaves on the ground.

I want to become who I am destined to become. I might or might not need a push towards it, but I don’t want someone else to push me towards a direction that I don’t want to go on. I don’t want to go in a direction which becomes a labyrinth; someplace where I cannot return from.

I want to be a human.

I want to be myself.

Then why is it so hard to become me?