Opinion | How the Army Helped Me Keep Dreaming 

I read somewhere that learning to read is learning to imprison yourself. On the surface, it sounds quite contradictory. Education, or literacy, usually liberates us. It gives us the ability to understand the world, to question it, and to make sense of it. We begin to see things through a rational lens. We learn to name things, understand things, and, sometimes, even challenge them. But think about it. Once you learn the letters of a particular language, you are imprisoned for life. You pass by a poster, and you know what it says. You see a book and you understand what it might be about. You look at a bottle and, without even trying, you read its name. Sometimes it happens unconsciously. Sometimes we actively want to read. But once the letters have entered your mind, they refuse to leave.

I experience this quite often in the Delhi Metro. I look around for the name of the station I am at, but I usually look for the English name because I cannot read Hindi. I know that there is another language right beside me, carrying the same information, but to me its letters remain closed doors. Someone else can look at those letters and immediately know where they are. I cannot. And that makes me think about how lightly we take this gift. We receive it from our parents, our schools, our teachers, and our universities. We learn to read and write so gradually that we forget there was ever a time when we could not. But there are people who never get to taste the glory of this intellectual prison. There are children for whom a book is not something lying on a shelf waiting to be opened. It is something they may never get to own. There are children who know what they want to become but do not have the means to even begin walking towards it.

This article, however, is not really about language or prisons. It is about what happens when education becomes a door that someone holds open for you. Because in today’s world, being uneducated can sometimes feel like being blind. Not because people without formal education lack intelligence, but because the world itself is increasingly written, coded, and explained through things that require education to access. Applications, forms, books, examinations, jobs, public information, technology, and even something as ordinary as knowing which metro station you are standing at.

We should not take the ability to read the world for granted. From where I come from, it is difficult to make people understand why girls deserve an education. But I think it is even harder to make girls understand why they need to dream. I have realized that even dreams need space to flourish. And when, with a lot of difficulty, some girls decide to dream big, money gets in the way. Money always gets in the way. No matter how many inspirational speeches we hear about not caring about money, poverty makes you care about it. When parents have to choose between sending their children to school and putting food on the table, they choose the latter. Not because they do not love education, but because hunger is immediate and a dream is not. Because of this, hundreds of children stop dreaming before they have even learned how to dream. Some do not even get the luxury of starting.

I was lucky.

I always dreamt big, probably bigger than I was allowed to. My family supported my dreams as much as they could. I went to school, then higher secondary school, then college. But I wanted more. I wanted to chase my dreams. The problem was that dreams require resources. In order to chase mine, I needed the right shoes, and nobody was going to buy them for me. Until one day, a friend told me to send an email to an Army official. I was hesitant. I did not want to make a spectacle of my poverty. I did not want to ask anyone for help. There is a strange shame attached to needing money, especially when all you want is the opportunity to work for yourself.

But I had dreams. So I sent the email, not expecting a reply. But it came and it came with open arms.

The Indian Army helped me continue my education in a way I will probably never be able to fully explain. I received financial assistance for my education, including my fees and hostel expenses. What stayed with me was not only the assistance itself but also the way it was offered to me. I was not made to feel like a charity case. They had read my articles. They had seen my work. They believed that I had something to offer and that supporting my education was an investment in that potential. That distinction mattered to me. There is something deeply dignifying about being helped without being made to feel small. And it makes me wonder how many people have been helped this way without anyone ever hearing about them.

The Indian Army’s educational initiatives in Jammu and Kashmir are much larger than my own story. Under Operation Sadbhavana, the Army has supported education through Army Goodwill Schools, educational infrastructure, national integration, and educational tours. Official records have described the initiative as including Army Goodwill Schools and educational tours for students from remote areas. The current Army Goodwill Schools network lists schools across Jammu, Kashmir, and Ladakh, including Army Goodwill Public School Pahalgam and Army Goodwill School Chountiwari in Machil.

But statistics, however important, cannot always tell you what education looks like when you see it happening in front of you. I remember visiting Roshan Mustaqbil in Kupwara. Roshan Mustaqbil, run by the Army’s Vajr Division at Zangli, is a youth empowerment center with classrooms, facilities for competitive-examination preparation, digital learning and computer labs, a library and reading room, and training opportunities. In 2025, reports said that more than 690 young people were enrolled there. But what I remember most is not the number. I remember the children. I remember seeing senior Army officers personally talking to them. They did not seem to be having one generic conversation with a room full of children. They knew what particular children were studying for. They asked questions. They encouraged them. They seemed to know their aspirations. That stayed with me.

Because sometimes the difference between a child who dreams and a child who gives up is simply someone asking, “What do you want to become?”

Roshan Mustaqbil also has a library and reading space, along with computer facilities and opportunities for competitive-exam preparation. For someone from a place where access to books and preparation material cannot always be taken for granted, a room full of books is not a small thing. It is a room full of possible futures. And perhaps that is what a library really is; it’s a place where you can temporarily become someone else, a doctor reading about medicine, a civil servant preparing for an examination, or, like me, a writer discovering that someone, somewhere, has already put into words the thing she has been feeling all her life. A child who has never left her village reading about a city she might one day visit. I think about this whenever I remember my own childhood and the things I wanted.

I also think about a trip I made to Machil with my friend. Machil is one of those places where geography itself can become an obstacle to education. The Army Goodwill School at Chountiwari was established specifically to provide educational opportunities to children living in the remote border areas of Machil under the Army’s Sadbhavana initiative. The school has since expanded its educational and extracurricular offerings, including computer education, robotics, public speaking, sports, and personality development.

My friend told me about the children there and the opportunities they were receiving. What struck me was her description of them travelling outside Kashmir, going on educational trips, and seeing parts of the country that many children from such remote areas might never otherwise get the opportunity to see. The importance of that cannot be measured simply by counting how many kilometers they travelled. A child who has never imagined leaving her village suddenly gets to see another city. A child who has only heard about certain professions gets to visit institutions where people actually practice them.

The Indian Army has, in fact, organized National Integration Tours for students from border districts, including recent tours that took students from Rajouri and Poonch to places such as Pune, Nashik, and educational institutions, including the National Defence Academy, AFMC, and universities.

I once spoke to a friend who had studied at Army Goodwill Public School, Pahalgam. He spoke about his school with the kind of affection people usually reserve for places that have shaped them. He told me about the discipline, the opportunities, the facilities, and the attention given to students. At some point, our conversation turned to food, and I jokingly complained about my university hostel mess. He told me about the care that went into planning meals at his school. I remember being amused when he said that dietary considerations were taken seriously and that professionals were involved in planning the menu.

I later found the school’s published menu, and it did indeed show a detailed weekly meal plan, including breakfast, lunch, evening snacks, and dinner, with provisions for fruit, milk, and different vegetarian and non-vegetarian meals. It sounds like a small thing, but I have come to realize that education is also made up of these small things, like a decent meal, a library, a computer, a teacher who remembers your name, an officer who asks what examination you are preparing for, a school trip, and someone who tells you that the thing you want to become is not ridiculous.

The Army Goodwill Public School in Pahalgam describes its own approach as combining academics with sports, arts, co-curricular activities, technology, and personality development. And the network of Army Goodwill Schools continues to operate across remote parts of Jammu, Kashmir, and Ladakh. I do not think education should ever be reduced to numbers, buildings, or examination results.

Education is also about enlarging the imagination. Perhaps that is why I keep returning to that strange sentence I began with: learning to read is learning to imprison yourself. Because it is true, in a way. Once you learn to read, you can never again walk past the world innocently. And once you can read the world, you begin to ask questions about it. That is where the real freedom begins.

I think about the girl somewhere in a remote corner of Kashmir who has not yet been given the opportunity to enter this strange prison of letters. Perhaps she wants to become a doctor. Perhaps she wants to write. Perhaps she does not yet know what she wants to become because nobody has ever asked her. All she needs is a book and a school and someone to tell her that her dream is possible. Perhaps she needs someone to pay the fee.

I was once that girl who needed someone to make the first step possible. Someone did. And that has made all the difference.

That is why, when I think about education now, I do not think only about classrooms. I think about all the people who make education possible, sometimes loudly and sometimes silently. I know what it feels like to receive that kind of help. I also know that I am only one story. There must be thousands more. And perhaps the most important question is not how many people have been helped, or how many schools have been built, or how many books sit inside a library. Perhaps it is this: How many children who once thought they had no future are now able to imagine one?

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