Dream to have a dream....

I am one of those guys (don't know whether anyone else of my kind exist or not) who never had an ambition or a realistic dream. Its not that I don't dream but I see dreams as more of a medium to live those moments which are otherwise not possible. So contrary to what achievers believe in i.e. Dream is something that won't let you sleep but my dreams are something for which I need not sleep as I mostly day dream but they are definitly not something that will make me sleepless.So I think they are more of a wish than a dream.
When I was growing I never used to give the question "What you want to be when you grow up ?" much a thought. Ok I used to think that I will become an engineer not because I was fascinated with the kind of work they do because I really din't know what they do :) but it was more because of two reasons, one was that I used to think that Guys become engineer and Girls become doctor (don't know what gave birth to this statement) and secondly till 10th Biology for me was all about drawing things , and that was one part of my homework that my Didibhai used to do for me and I knew if I will pursue medical then someday I will have to do all the drwaing myself :p and that was impossible. The only thing I could draw was Amoeba because it does not have a definite shape so I had the liberty of drawing anything and then fill it with dots (used to love the sound of everyone banging the pencil on the paper repeatedly at the time of exams). Primarily I wanted to serve people and as I am believer of the fact that you need not be in defense forces to serve your country, I thought I will try to make people's life easier by being an Engineer.So since I got a good score in 10th, I opted for Non-Med.
I used to think that it will be fun to study PCM and I will learn a lot of things but the first day I joined my new school DPS, I found people being mad about getting into IIT (I din't knew what the heck it was, don't be surprised I din't know YMCA was an engineering college in Faridabad till the time I had to opt for a college). By the time I joined (July as result was out in June only), I found people have already done half of their syllabus in the promotional classes or in the coaching classes they have joined. Most of them have learned the various concepts that I was going to study. But to my surprise most of them knew the concepts but I guess none knew why we are studying it, whats the use of it, why are we learning differentiation, where will we use integration in our day to day life , what disaster will happen if we don't know about the organic chemistry etc. But I think I din't get the time to react or ask all these because if I had then I would have been left way behind so I just dropped my head and went ahead with all this. The two subjects for which I had a liking was Physics and Maths and Chemistry was left to the interest of the teacher who was teaching, if he could develop interest then I will learn otherwise I will take it as a routine.
Contrary to what most people believe, seeing my high marks, that I am a bookworm but I am not. This is one truth that only my mom knows because she only knows that till the day I completed my college she had to constantly force me to open them and study. I am more of a student who used to study on the last day before exam. Every time just before the exam I used to pray to God that please help me finish all this syllabus and I promise that I will study quite early next time but that next time never came. I feel I grasp things quickly thats why just by reading the books once I used to answer most of the questions and thus used to score goodmarks without studying for hours.
Coming back to my school, so since I was never fascinated myself to go for the IITs and it was more of Bhed chal (blindly following somebody) so I was never into it, so despite clearing the screening and I knew I could never break into IITs as I never put any effort for it, never studied hard, never did the sample papers, never did numerical problems and it would have been a miracle if I had. Ok I was disappointed even cried when the results were out. Somehow I studied well for the objectives exams and got really good rank in whichever paper I gave seriously and landed myself an opportunity to study in the NITs but later opted for my state cum local college YMCA.
The story at YMCA was no different. I don't know why I really opted for Electronics (and if you are working in an IT industry then you will know that ultimately it hardly matters what was your branch). Ok may be I was fascinated with something more core engineering than something which is mere a language.So Electronics was something which a good scorer who wants to do core engineering will opt for than Mechanical or Electrical just like Non-Medical to Commerce or Arts until you are really fascinated with the other options.
After opting for Electronics , I had to make another choice Electronics Engineering(Communications) or Electronics & Control. Ok Communications sounded more interesting and this is what tradition says higher ranker opted for. So here I was, in the EE group. Throughout the first 3 years, I went through the routines without challenging myself once or doing something that will challenge my potential and or give me a sense of an achievement. Then came the 6 semester when we had to get ourself a training for the next semester and the first option we had was HCL and seeing the tradition, I thought I will have to make it,so I prepared but somehow again felt that I could have done much better and as I never thought that I worked really hard for it so I will say it was luck that I got into it when some of my brilliant friends couldn't.
While studying Electronics I used to think that my work in VLSI will involve working with transistors, gates, ICs or other electronics and used to think that while doing that work I will be more interested in studying them as only studying them was not that fascinating.
During my training, I was aksed what in VLSI will you prefer and since they were looking for some one who has knowledge of C/C++ ,and since I matched that criteria I was alotted a team whose work was in hardware but at System level. So no actual transistors, ICs or diodes for me.
When I used to be in college , I used to think which is the one company for which I will like to work and the name that used to come to mind was STMicroelectronics because it was the only company that had electronics in its name ..lol..jokes apart because it was quite an elusive company for people from my college and I had a feeling that it was more into VLSI then any other company in the NCR. Currently I am in ST and before I came here, my batchmates and collegemates had already made it one of the realities for all my college people. So won't say it was a dream come true because long before I stopped thinking about it.
Adding to the irony of my life, the day I got the Engineering degree in my hand, I had a strong feeling that I should have opted for Medical as that would have been more close to serving people. That day all the fears of drawing things went out of the box and there was an urge to cure people of their miseries and even thought of enquiring about doing higher secondary again in Medical stream so that I could be a doctor.
My stay at HCL again can't be termed as something of a dream come true but it was indeed one of the best learning experience of my life. Just after joining HCL, I was presented with the opportunity to work for an onshore client, right here in Noida and for that I had to appear for an interview. Now here I got an oportunity to prove myself because I have heard about a lot of people who appeared for the same n got rejected. So worked hard (again not harder) and cleared that. There at Coware I did something which I won't say was totally related to my education or something I wanted to do because I din't know what I wanted to do but I really found it interesting. As I got to design and develop IPs, simulate hardwares and explore architectures of SoCs etc.
So after working for HCL for almost 2 years, I decided to move ahead, not because I had to do something with my life or had to fulfil some dream, it was just because I had to.
Right now I am working in ST, knowing I am doing something related to hardware something similar to what I was doing earlier at HCL/CoWare but still that dream is not there. The thing that I will want to do, the thing that will keep me busy, keep me awake or will make me fall sleep because of hard work I put up the whole day, the thing on doing which I will be elated , the thing which will make me pat my back myself on accomplishing that, which I will say I achieved....the Dream that will be a real dream for me ..........