My First Ambition in life and how it was accepted at home

Adult Male voice: “Hey there Johnny …what do you wanna be when you grow up?”
Childs voice: “I wanna be a HUSTLER”!!!!!

Relax folks….neither am I Little Johnny nor have I fancied a career in criminology….this is an excerpt from a song which NEVER fails to make me laugh as it makes me remember all the things I wanted to be as I “grew up”!
At no point of time in my life had I ever imagined myself to work for a software company. This little episode brings out my first “real” ambition in life, the first of a long string which continues to grow as I sit here.

The earliest recollection of my wanting to be ANYTHING would go back to when I was around 4 when I announced to everyone that I wanted to become an elephant. That was at a birthday party where all us “chutkoos” were shepherded around a table and asked to say something for 2 minutes each…something on what we wanted to be when we grew up…a more adult version of that activity would involve only the fairer sex and would fetch answers like “I want to be like Audrey Hepburn” or the more clichéd ones like “Mother Teresa has always been my driving force in life…”…
The only difference between the two situations would be that when I said that I wanted to be an elephant, I really wanted to be one… (Let’s not kid ourselves… Anyone who takes part in a pageant is not going to be playing Florence Nightingale to the poor for the rest of her life…). The fact is that I was really fascinated (to the extent of infatuation) by those big creatures (still am) especially by the way they flap their ears. I always wanted to do that. I guess it would be no surprise if I say that one of my favorite films is a Walt Disney creation called DUMBO.
Anyway, this little incident caused a little uproar at the gathering and fetched me an encore from all the aunties but by the time the cake was cut, everyone had forgotten about it. Everyone but me and my distraught mother (who wasn’t please at my ambitions…NO SIR she wasn’t!!)
I guess this was the ONLY exception…the ONLY TIME when my mother has ever interrupted my dreams… After the party, we had a little mother to son one on one in the car(I was 4 years old mind you) where she tried to change my mind. She was a terror on the road that day and was making BTS bus drivers cringe in fear…..Her son, the same bloke she had carried around for 9 months wanted to become an elephant…..boy was she mad!

It was a well-prepared extempore (oxymoron?) wherein I was given an extensive insight on how mundane the beast’s life was. (“They only eat and sleep all day” said she with a disgusted look on her face…it sounded perfect but I didn’t mention it as she was visibly flustered)…After the speech, she asked me to think of something interesting, something which I could become without going a few rungs lower in the mammalian hierarchy……so I racked my brains and pondered for a long time(in those days, that period would range between 1 and 4 minutes depending on the distractions around) and I told her(after that “long time”) that I wanted to become the Commissioner of Police….
I don’t know if you folks have even seen how puris are made in the kitchen, but on very similar lines my mother, all of a sudden, bloated up with pride (all that she has lost at the party due to my “ambitious plans” and more)… the same lady who was doing everything short of man handling auto drivers on the road was all smiles and in a “that’s my son” mood…
As for me, I had steered out of the soup. Not only had my statement made my mommy happy, it got her off my back for a while and I would learn later, that it had earned me my favorite dessert that evening…besides, I really thought those “mee maw” lights on the Commisioners Police Car were really cool(the REAL reason for my choice)!!!