Slaves of Dreams

" If you can dream - and not make your dreams your master
If you can think - and make your thoughts your aim"

Such were poetic words of Rudyard Kipling in his complicated yet thoughtful words in 'If'. The first line taught us to dream but not succumb to the idyllic nature of our dreams. We should never become the slaves of our dreams because dreams are just dreams without efforts to realise them. Dreams are fact in their own perfect world but in the world of reality it becomes fictitious or even worse it is an impossible thing to begin with. Every faith commands its believers to take actions to achieve one's dreams. Without concrete and tangible actions then dreams will remain what they are - an action plan waiting to be implemented. We can have the perfect plan without any infirmities but such plans will be saddled with deformities when we fail to act positively upon them.

Living in dreams causes us of being guilty of inaction and such inaction will bring us down to the misery of the reality - that we are just dreaming. In our dreams we could be the Master of the Universe, the King of all kings but when we wake up, we are mere mortals who are weak in almost every aspect. We can defeat the mightiest of all monster but in reality we could even surrender to the minutes of all creations.

Such mundane and often being the core of any politicians urging the people to wake up and strive towards achieving the reality should never be discounted. We have experienced various impeccable plans laid down by renowned experts but those plans failed miserably due to lack of affirmative actions. The evidences are abundant - look at our pathetic football squads. They have the best if not among the best facilities but again and again, time after time we crumbled on the feet of unknown minnows like Myanmar, the Philippines and many others who are considerably backward if we compared to our so called first class facilities. Once we were looked upon by Asian giants in the likes of Japan and South Korea but now we are relegated of being their admirers instead. We are still stuck in our idyllic and unending dreams of ours by qualifying to the 1980 Olympic. That's the word 'qualifying' and not the eventual champion.

We claim to be successful when we produce our first national cars back in 1985, we started the heinous boasting by comparing ourselves to the leaders of the world's automotive industries. Yet, our cars fail to command any respectable credence in those countries. The best we have achieved so far was when our Protons were used as U.K's patrol vehicles and yet until recently our ministers were proudly parading imported cars for their fleet of official cars.

Malaysians are forced to buy our locally made cars because of the prices of imported cars are being jacked up due to unreasonable import duties while prices of made in Malaysia cars are being subsidised so that they can maintain their affordability. Although, we are moving towards liberalisation of trade but still imported cars are being unreasonably tagged with outrageous duties causing them to remain as the 'untouchables' by many. Many of us have to console ourselves with quality-doubtful local cars.

Now, it is prudent for the government and us to make our dreams as our slaves rather than becoming the servants of our 'unreal' dreams!

Like to dream, lots of 'delicious' dreams.