What did Shrek lose, And what would I?

Like any regular human, I have had dreams, problems, risks and some independent decisions to make. Some realistic goals, other few unrealistic standards I had set for myself and rest all were hallucinations.
At the age of 25, if I look back, there are few things I am happy about like being adamant to study further when my relatives ( no.. no.. not my parents, they are nice people), but my orthodox relatives who expected me to settle down at the idiotic age of 17. Yes!! thats true.

A moment I am proud of , when I rescued 7 puppies from a roadside gutter.Other things that I am too embarassed to admit, and I am not going to admit here also. :P

But the best part of all this has been, I never regret any moment, any decision ever taken. I trust myself to the extent, that what ever I did, there must have been, and there was a reason, judgement, instinct.

I had always wanted to study in a reputed college, a big brand name wala college. But after my graduation, my over-concerned relatives were dying to see me "happily-married" ( buhuhu hahahaa.. Devils!! )

So I grabbed the first opportunity that came by, and did masters from the same college. I just wanted to keep a door open, a Leo hates being tied down, and so do I. So luckily I got another period of 3 years, to live my life.

Just as a teenager forgets that he ever wanted to be a fighter pilot, and trades his motor controlled airplane for, lets say, a guitar and a adolescent gives up his dream to start a rock band and sells his guitar to buy a bike because now he wants to be a nomad types traveler.. The trading never stops. You give up one dream for other one, and then this one for the next one and in the end, you are left with something you dint even bother about in the first place.

After my final year, just as the crowd headed towards getting a job, even I landed in a decent paying job, a metro city, with my parents proud, and relatives still cribbing about my marriage and my age and all that "B-town-crap"

But wait, where did my dream go? What about that "big brand college"? How could I forget it? How dare I forget it?

Today, at the age of 25, if I look forward, I see 2 versions of me.
One is happily married and settled, the typcial "safe future" stuff. My parents would be happy for me, and my relatives would still be grumbling, may be they want to see a family tree growing (Bull Shit!!) and myself in all the halla-baloo with a regret in heart, what if I had tried, only if I had tried..

The other one is in a "big brand name wala" college, and may be a job at Google. (sigh!!) and need I say more? :D

But the truth lies somewhere in between. None of them can be true. Or may be one of them can turn out to be my fate. It all depends on which path I choose today. Failure does not frighten me, it never has. It just breaks my morale for sometime, disheartens me for a long time, but then who hasn't failed. Even I have. N number of times in life. So the failure isn't new to my tongue.

The scary part is regret. Realizing each and every day,the absence of courage, which led to something I hadn't wished for in the first place.That is something I cannot live with.

So why not try. At max I would fail. At max, I would land up in a job, which does not pay according to what I had dreamed of, but thats exactly what is happening now. So no worries.

When Shrek was pissed off disappointed with his life, he traded a day from his past, only to come back and realize what he had in present. So might I, but the journey would be worth.

So winding up in one of my favorite quotes I heard somewhere:

You got a dream... You gotta protect it. People can't do somethin' themselves, they wanna tell you you can't do it. If you want somethin', go get it. Period.