India of My Dreams: The Dream That Started It All

 Hi… I am Ayaan.

And this is a story about a dream I had almost ten years ago.

 

Not the kind of dream you chase. The kind you have at night — vivid, detailed, so real that when you wake up you sit quietly for a while trying to hold on to it before it fades.

 

This one never faded.  In the dream, it was the 15th of August. Independence Day. The Prime Minister was addressing the nation — not with numbers and schemes. With something that felt like the beginning of something real.

 He said: We are going to start with the basics.

Roads.
He started with roads. Not just repaired roads — properly built roads. Contractors will be legally bound to maintain them for 10 to 15 years. If the road fails — the contractor pays from his own sanctioned amount. No excuses. No patching the same pothole every monsoon for twenty years.

 

And underneath those roads — planned channels. Every cable, every wire already accounted for in the design. No digging up fresh roads three months after they're laid because a telecom company decided today was a good day to work.

 

Then traffic. In my dream, breaking a signal got you a flat tyre. Immediate. Inconvenient. Impossible to bribe your way around. Consequences that actually landed.

 

And alongside those roads, trees. Both sides of every street. Green corridors running through the entire city. Maintained by agriculture graduates. Students who studied the land and were given no place to use that knowledge. Suddenly — employed. Purposeful. Two problems. One solution.

 

The traffic police, in my dream, were fit. Not as a vanity measure — as a standard. Grace periods given. Support offered. But the expectation clear.

 

Then education. No more lifetime loans for a degree. Made genuinely affordable. No new international schools extracting premium fees. Community inspection bodies. Real people visiting real schools, listening to students, acting on what they heard.

 

And corruption. Anyone caught delaying someone's work for personal gain — fined, removed, held accountable. Anyone who reported it? Protected completely. Identity sealed. And rewarded.

 

I woke up and sat quietly for a long time.

 

None of it was impossible. Every single thing in that dream has been done somewhere in the world. Roads that last. Cities that stay green. Education that doesn't bankrupt families. Accountability that actually works.

 

It's not a fantasy. It's a choice.

 

That dream is ten years old now. And I still remember every detail.

 

Which is why I named this series what I named it.

 

This is not a complaint column about everything wrong with India.

 

It's a love letter to the country this could be.

 

Every Friday — one dream. One problem. One honest conversation about what it could look like if we actually tried.

 

Welcome to India of My Dreams.

 

— Ayaan | One Day at a Time 🖤