Hi, I am Ram Sharma, an engineering graduate. I have often been confronted with questions regarding my future, what i want to be, my ambitions, my goals.. frankly speaking, these questions intimidate me, put me in a dilemma. I may be a free man in a free society but I am not a free thinker or not even supposed to be one. Freedom is my birthright, or so, as it is said. But i am bound to think within certain norms and rules which are pre-set, which by default is applied to every human being living in my soceity. Sometimes I shudder to think that maybe, I am not even bound to think this way, maybe it has always been there in my mind. After all i am a part of this soceity, i have my roots deep in it. I have spent a large part of my life enslaved to one thing or the other, to expectations that i never understood, to beliefs that were not mine, to ways that were never meant to be mine.
So, what defines me as a free man?
Since my childhood i have fought to make freedom my most precious asset. I fought with the ideals imposed upon me by people. I fought with other boys at school, who detested my existence in their society and made me the butt of their cruel jokes. Only after much blood had flowed from my nose and theirs, after afternoons hiding my scars from my mother, did I manage to show them my resilience without bursting into tears.I took up tutions for primary school students, to support my zest for playing the guitar and to be free from that old line in family blackmail, "You have to learn this and this, music is irrational and not productive". I fought without success, for the girl i was in love with; who left me because she felt i was an eccentric with ideas that differed from her way of thinking..and that I had no future.
I fought the hostility of my professors, as i wanted to do an innovative project, rather than sticking to the norm of selecting a project done by a previous year student. I fought to find courage to stand up against the system which was meant to slaughter the students.
I fought for my right to leave the 9 to 5 job that i had got as a memento for four years in engineering. I fought because that was not what i wanted from my life. And while i was fighting, i heard people giving speeches about freedom, defining its meaning. People who were themselves slaves of a life that they had not chosen, but somebody had else had convinced them that it was best for them and chosen it for them. People who depended on others to take decisions for them, their marriage, their job, their car, their house. They did not have the courage to do what they felt, what they wanted to do because they feared it would bring a drastic change in their lives, which would upset what they had grown upto.
I am free now and i always was. Of course, freedom for me has meant hurting people who are precious to me. But freedom is the thing i prize most in the world.When i see people,i see fear in them..they dont live,they just exist..they dont ask a question because it is not supposed to ask.In short their actions are a result of some one else's aspirations and expectations;their originality has been tampered with.When they die, they die regretting that they could be someone else. Despite the pain that that i have borne inorder to win my freedom, i dont regret the scars, i bear them as medals on my life. And today my petition for loan is sanctioned for my own organisation, which realises potential and new ideas and completes the projects; something very close to me. If we can dream of something, we can create something, if we can create a free world, people will live in it…and that is the essence of my life.
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