Dreams

When was the last time you dreamt of something and really achieved it ?

I was watching the McLibel case on TV last night. Two people from UK fighting against McDonalds , a gigantic corp. Here's an excerpt from the article ...

The verdict was devastating for McDonald's. The judge ruled that they 'exploit children' with their advertising, produce 'misleading' advertising, are 'culpably responsible' for cruelty to animals, are 'antipathetic' to unionisation and pay their workers low wages.

They showed how detemined these two people were to bring down the corp. and how they just refused to give up, against all odds ... for two and a half years ! Undoubtedly the longest trial ever.

After the case was over, they went off to Europe and fought against McDonalds there ! Since europian human rights laws are taken very seriously, they won there too. McDonalds had good reason to fear, and so did the other junk food corps.

What was most interesting was the way these two people handled it all along. Both of them lived in single room apartments, filled with documents, posters of protest, signboards etc etc. Yet they were very efficient at what they were getting at.

The last time I dreamt of something and got it was the flight till middlesbrough from India. I've always loved airplanes. And the jets noise, the G forces during take off and landing give me the kicks. Its been a year since I've been working as an embedded systems engineer, and the novelty of spending cash on general stuff was wearing off, until I could pay for my own trip and household bills. I could take pride in that, it only hurt when I had to shell out for those damn LIC bills. That was not in my plan :p Its these pleasures that keep me driven.

But this is so small as compared to what people do to feel good inside themselves. I crave for that sense of achievement that a team feels when they crack a nasty bug, or come up with an ingenious solution to a problem. I've been in these situations and theres no feeling like it.
However, most of it has happened at my work place, which is good I guess, coz it means I'm enjoying what I do. But I havent done anything or participated in anything that has made a difference on a large scale ...yet. I can only imagine what the engineers at google must feel when they realise millions of people use their search engine out of choice just because its the fastest most accurate thing of its kind, or even what the guys who contribute to the open source world, especially linux kernels and find their code running servers in massive corporations.