Catch your dreams before they slip away

Nidhi Dalmia at Sorbonne 1972

“Catch your dreams before they slip away,’ sang The Rolling Stones.

 I always wanted to write. When my closest school friend asked me what I planned to be when I grew up. He prefaced his question by saying it is clear what you will do when you grow up, but what will I do?  I came from a family of Industrialists. He took it for granted that that is what I would do. I said a writer.

He had thick shoulders. ‘A boxer.  You have the physique, and you are excellent,’ I said. But he didn’t think so. I too was wrong he turned out to be a successful restaurateur in Melbourne, Australia.

I also wanted to describe the hope and idealism of the 60’s that I and many others thought would never end, the coming of age and growing up in the late 60’s. How the themes conveyed were universal and how music interspersed with everyday life in those times.

I wanted to write about the universality of human emotions and feelings and even more so of human experience: about the brotherhood of all men and attempts at categorization a distortion of the continuum.

To tell a tale about how love and obligation compartmentalise people, making them choose between love and duty, between the head and the heart, between one’s social contract and what one wants. The individual choices one has to make with profound consequences

To portray a deeply felt love story, as different as any personal experience can be.