Nov 20, 2012

As a staunch resistor of “How to…” books, I was surprised to find myself picking a book “The Last Lecture” by Randy Pausch. I am a bit of a smug entity, thinking that I know what has to be done with life and how to live life well. Ergo, these “how to…” books are not needed. However, as any half-decent philosopher or wise person will tell you, my assessment could be more out of ignorance than wisdom. 

Anyways, moving on to “The Last Lecture”, this has been written by Randy Pausch, who used to be a computer science prof at Carnegie Mellon university. After Randy was diagnosed as having pancreatic cancer and given 4mths to 4 yrs to live, he and his wife re-engineered their whole lives to make it easier for the Pausch survivors to live after the event – his wife and 3 kids (5,4,2 yrs old). The book focuses on “really achieving your childhood dreams”. Pausch had some interesting dreams  – flying in zero gravity, meeting Captain Kirk, winning a stuffed toy at a fair, contributing to the World Encyclopaedia book – and the Lecture tells on how he successfully achieved all those dreams in his lifetime. None of this has to do with his cancer – he achieved those dreams well before he was diagnosed.

I liked the concept of “childhood dreams”. Though when I spoke with a few friends and family members, I realised that having grown up in a developing country (pre-1990), our set of dreams itself was limited a bit. The newer generation (born 1990 onwards) should be more ambitious, aggressive, aware and dare I say, even more avaricious in building their set of dreams.

Some of the dreams which I think I had in childhood were to :

• Be the star player in the Indian cricket team and achieve the impossible of hitting a century through fours and sixes
• Living in a beach-facing house / apartment
• Living on the 80^th floor of a building
• Being remembered as a man who made a difference to society (of course I have para-phrased this dream after growing up. I think the childhood version might have been “Become famous”).

It’s good that, thanks to Randy Pausch, I have at least collated my set of some of my childhood dreams. Needless to say, I haven’t met any of them so far. Need to focus my efforts and intent more to get on track for achieving these now. Of course, I shall be unable to be a Chris Gayle now, but shall replace that one with some other aspirational dream now…

PS – the book by Pausch is good, not awesome. Has a bit of Rajesh Khanna’s Anand in it, though Randy being a comp science prof, is much more grounded and hence no dialogues like “Jahanpanah, zindagi aur maut uparwaale ke haath mein hai…”. The key message is to live life fully, do the things you always wanted to, and not to wait for any milestone before you start your journey of achieving your childhood dreams.