It had never dawned on me that daydreaming could be so gratifying and uplifting. Obviously, it’s more so when one’s daydreaming relates to one’s country and its future.

While a mischievous echo inside me keeps on gnawing at me, like a worm inside a fruit, that ‘this is just rubbish, too far-fetched and too tall an expectation’, the place I am at currently and the environment around is just bolstering my daydreaming.

Seated at the balcony of a house offering a breathtaking view at the Atlantic Ocean in west France, I observe all around with a keenest interest: the road just below the balcony, the adjacent golf terrain, the beach and the Atlantic Ocean rushing incessantly towards the shores with giant waves. Some are playing golf, sunbathing, some savouring sea fruits with wine and some driving at the fullest, as if they were going to miss their train, as the French sense of humour would jokingly and mockingly put it!

It rains a lot in West France. ‘If there is something we in Bretagne (West France) desperately look forward to, it’s the sun!’, thus opines a friend . I pensively nod my head and say to myself, ‘but the sun is not enough, we in Nepal have 300 sunny days a year! Yet, we have a dark Nepal…heading as of now towards a darker ocean full of the waves of poverty, hatred, bickering, communal violence, kidnapping - so on and so forth.

I switch back to my daydreaming, which is all about Nepal and only Nepal. A richer and cleaner country has perhaps hoodwinked me into daydreaming but it has by no means lured me into the thoughts of living here permanently. My daydreaming, therefore, has nothing to do with a rich country, France or other, but with a Nepal dreamed by an average Nepali: a Nepal at least slightly richer, cleaner, safer, a bit more educated, a tad more organized, and most important, absolutely at peace! Helas! In today’s Nepal, even these ‘minimum’ expectations imply a daydream, a pipe dream, a weird and impossible idea…

Seated at the balcony of a French bungalow, amid peace, prosperity and cleanliness, I am now face to face with a couple of news portals on Nepal. They all seem unanimous to snap at me, ‘will you now stop daydreaming, you fool? I will, however, continue to daydream…secretly — be it in France, in Nepal or else where!