All the world, and all it offers,

Fueling every heart with desire,

For every time they catch my eye,

Every desire is set on fire.

From things that last forever,

Or a year, or two, or three.

From things that you probably hate,

Or things that will die with me.

To a child, a toy; To a man, a wheel,

To a woman, a diamond ring.

No matter who we are,

Each of us has a material song to sing.

Like a candy dipped in poison or poison in a candy,

It can come into your head like a worm.

You know you don't need it, yet you want it and you don't,

With desire in our minds, we squirm.

All the world, and all it offers,

To each his own, it will be,

For every time it catches your eye,

It's a material world you'll see!

We set out on this journey - a long, monotonous one...most often than not, not knowing where we'd go and what we'd do. This one's specially for those of us who move away from a place we call home most of our lives and suddenly find ourselves transported to another land... to be called home again!

Never realised things would change so drastically.. one day you are on your own land, free to BE! The next day you need papers to establish the fact that you are physically present on a foreign land... though you are so clearly visible to the eye, unlike ethereal entities! We summon courage and moral support from all near and dear, to take a step away from home to set up a new life, and gain meaning and direction to what goals we have. Travel across the seas... to another place, and technically speaking another time too.

Its not an easy task, and no I'm not talking about all the documentation and zillions of papers you will find piling up in your file when you are preparing to travel... I'm talking about all the emotional and mental upheavals one goes through. And suddenly, you are there... The place where many only dream of going to.. Abroad!!

You get seasoned to the new ways and culture and language. Be it 10, 20 or 30 years since you left home, you still long for that warm smile your mother gave you when you got your first job. You still yearn to drive up to that old building that was once the house you lived in, though you have a home in which you had your children and now their families thrive. Where is home?

You get torn apart, this world and that... this life and that... And one fine day you decide to take another step .. this time backwards. Back home.

Walking up the lane towards your home, you feel like a complete stranger with people's eyes poring through your very skin.. asking you.. Who are you? You force a smile and greet them telling your name, and that you lived here.. years ago. Memories suddenly seemed washed away from their faces... Obviously, this was another generation .. the one you missed living with.

Tons of photographs of you in places abroad propped in the best of frames embellish the walls... as if waiting to be garlanded. Where is home.....?

I sat on the dentist's examination chair staring at the wall ahead of me as if there were some sort of an imaginary television playing a blockbuster movie...but my ears were listening to the sounds of drills, chisels and other equipment that only a dentist's office could boast of...apart from a carpenter's, perhaps! 

A lady walked up to me with a large paper bib and clipped it on me as she prepped up both me and the equipment that my dentist would use to perform the procedure that I had been there for. I watched her manicured hands moving effortlessly all over the place as she placed all the tools in appropriate positions. She seemed to me to be in her late thirties. Neatly dressed, short curly hair that stayed perfectly sprayed in place, make-up so neat that you would know she spends time to take care of herself. She looked me in the eye, her soft hazel pupils telling me she had done this ever so many times before, and said, "I will take an X-ray now" as she pushed some weird looking thing into my mouth. In less than a moment she went out of the room and was back again and said in the same matter-of-fact tone she had earlier - "The doctor will see your X-ray and start the procedure" in a heavily accented voice - an accent that I still am unable to place. French, may be, considering her dressing sense and flawless figure. But, her words did seem slurry and incomprehensible in places so I really do not know. I acknowledged with a nod as she walked away.

The dentist walked in and started his work. I lay there staring now, at the roof, for a change, trying to count the number of squares the false ceiling had. The local anaesthesia and all the tools that found their way in and out of my mouth had me drooling without control. Only ...there was no food in sight. So, that moment my dentist said, "Suction"...and that lady who prepped me walked back in. She forced down the suction tube into my mouth and cleared up all the saliva to allow the dentist to work and walked away again. He dabbed and pounded and drilled. Again in a few moments, "Suction" and there she was, Ms. Hazel-eyes. This went on a couple of times and I decided to re-christen her from Ms. Hazel-eyes to Ms. Suction. Or was the earlier name better? I really could not help but think about her role in the doctor's office. Had she once dreamt that one day she would be summoned by the word, 'suction'? I imagined her as a child. A little girl with unruly locks, running green grasslands in her pastel pink frock in the beautiful spring mornings of Italy. Oh, sorry France. Ah, wherever!

But, you get what I am saying? There should have been some moment in her life when she stumbled on something that she would want to crave to doing all her life. And today, from the look of it, she seemed very happy with what she was doing. I portrayed her in a different light, so you and me would see her as doing something so uneventful. But for her, she was an accomplished nurse at a dentist's office, who knew what to do and more importantly when to do it. She would have at some time in her life chanced on this dream that she would be a nurse and she achieved it. And, when I began to see her at every subsequent appointment my respect for her grew more and more.

I believe it is the same with all of us. We come across this one moment in our life when we know what we have to do and we dream about becoming 'someone'. Some of us grab on to those clues life throws at us and go all out to reach our goals ...while some of us get a wee bit unlucky and miss out on them. But there is always a moment in every persons life when you know what you want... the moment you chance on a dream!