Forgotten Dreams

Forgotten Dreams

I'm looking forward to the first work-week of the year. After all the distractions of the holiday season and the grim end to the year, it is good to be able get things going again.

I prefer workdays in KL because the traffic pattern is more predictable and the malls and suburbs are very quiet during working hours. It'll be a hectic January for me, with some business travel expected. Despite the gloom over Christmas and New Year, I've been working consistently throughout.

The coming year will be filled with fresh challenges and hopefully new possibilities will also open up for me. Last year on this day, I woke up in the morning and walked to the Gambir station in Jakarta to purchase my train ticket for my trip to Yogjakarta and later paid homage to Chairil Anwar in front his bust at the Monas Park.

No such sentimentality this year. I have moved on to the next phase in my life: I'm not very sure what it is, but there's a lot for me to do and even more for me to learn. The first book I read last year was Pramoedya Ananta Toer's It's Not an All Night Fair (Bukan Pasar Malam). But driven by necessity, I've been reading a lot of work-related technical books since then. Hopefully this year I'll be able to find some time and space to indulge in some pleasure reading.

What should be on my reading list this year? There are so many good writers whom I have not read. There are a lot of books which will be quite fun to reread again, even thought it is a bit of a luxury to do so.

When I was a kid, I was so enthralled by the biography of Michelangelo by Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy, that I subsequently read it again a few more times. Maybe someday I'll read it again and perhaps be able to capture back the forgotten dreams of a child...