Audacious Dreams

Team Indus, also known as Team Indus Lunar Code HHK– a start-up headed by Rahul Narayan – has moved from Lutyen’s Delhi to the Silicon Valley of India, Bengaluru. They are partnering with Antrix, the commercial wing of ISRO, to send a mission to the moon. The start-up intends to launch two lunar landers and rovers to the moon. The project has been termed Mission Moon.

The febrile and imaginative minds of Team Indus are driven by immense passion and robust minds attempting something out of the ordinary. When I shared this information on a WhatsApp group, the immediate responses were, “Wow, Amazing Indeed, Incredible, Intrepid move.”

People across the spectrum unanimously lauded this exigent dream, and the very idea and concept. Humans owe it to themselves that all dreams and ideas, however outlandish they may appear, be encouraged, for who knows what lies in the depths of our minds. We are unaware of what is indeed triggering our thought processes and resting in the womb of our imagination.

Let us for a moment revisit the audacious move, the dream, the idea and the thought process of the Prime Minister to demonetise high denomination currency. What was initially intended as an attempt to cleanse the economy of corruption, loot and plunder and combat terror, is morphing into an umbrella of financial inclusiveness.

The Reserve Bank of India was laden with the nightmare of handling 23 billion old previously held Rs500 and Rs1000 notes. Stacked together, it would have translated into five times the distance between the earth and the moon. Heaped over one another it would have assumed the gargantuan size of 300 times of Mount Everest. Mind boggling statistics indeed!

However, the ingenuity of man, his dream and passion implode in such challenging situations conjuring Mandrake-like magic.

Mayin Mohammad, Managing Director of Western Plywood Limited of Kannur, volunteered to shred the old currency and is in the process of manufacturing briquettes, paper weights, plywood hard books, plywood soft books, note pads and writing pads.

What are dreams really? Are they merely a string of thoughts, fantasies, perhaps ambitions and aspirations which humans nurture or do they signify something more?

Since time immemorial humans have dreamt. It has been a source of wonder, awe, or even shock. At several junctures of history, dreams were perceived to be messages from the Gods. It is also interpreted as indications of what the future heralds for humanity. Dreams are indicative of our mental and physical health and are pointers of events of the past, present and future. Dreams do change the course of history, as we are witnessing in India, at present.

As per the Occidental World, the study of dreams is termed Oneirology. This is derived from the Greek word Oneiros (Greek for dreams). This ancient civilization provided humanity with a tremendous repository of knowledge and body of work, ranging from Aristotle to Homer. It is intriguing and fascinating to think of how Zeus, the God of Skies communicated with Hypnos, the God of Sleep and his son Morpheus, the God of Dreams, messages to humanity.

Greek and Roman mythologies distinguish dreams as significant and insignificant. Hippocrates, universally accepted as the father of modern day medicine, accepted that some dreams were of divine origin and could prophesy events. There were innumerable dreams of the power of healing and cure. He endeavoured to examine the mental health of the dreamer. For example, he asserted that visualising bright stars was indicative of robust health, while dreaming about dim stars was indicative of pestilence.

Philosophers like Heraclitus and Aristotle examined the issue not from a metaphysical angle but from a rational plane – that dreams had a lot to do with the personal experiences of the subject. Aristotle was to postulate that the more tranquil the human mind is, the more the dreamer would learn. Carl Jung was to later develop on hallucinations of the mentally ill, illusions of ordinary individuals and dreams and fantasies which had a common origin. Jung was to state, “Human psyche as a possessing lawless wild beast nature which peers out of sleep.”

Maharishi Patanjali  in the Oriental World had succinctly postulated five kinds of dreams in his treatise, Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. The first kind arises out of cravings, unfulfilled or latent desires of humans which are yet to be fulfilled. For instance, during the day an individual may refuse to eat a hamburger, but may dream of devouring one. Next are dreams which release stress accumulated from our past actions and experiences. All that we have experienced in the past emerges in the form of dreams. Third is what is called intuitive dreams: these are indicative of what may happen in the future. These could also be termed futuristic dreams. The fourth kind of dreams is those which are a combination of all the three kinds of dreams. Finally, the fifth kind of dream is related to the space or places that human’s sleep. For instance, when a person is sleeping in Hyderabad, he would dream about the place, lingo or Hyderabadi biryani.

Audacious dreams are but an attempt to realise our true potential by thinking out of the box. The present aim of demonetisation will fructify using the tools of Aadhar, Unified Payment Interface (UPI) for smart phones, Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) for other mobile phones and micro ATMs along with Jan Dhan Accounts.

What began as the intuitive dream of one man has evolved into an audacious dream of another. Wisdom is when a person brushes aside the fourth kind of dream and is truly wakeful.

“All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night, in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.” – T. E. Lawrence.

-Taken from my second book ‘Make the Mind Mt.Kailasa’.