Mediocrity in Our Midst: A Lament

Mediocrity in Our Midst: A Lament

Mediocrity is our besetting national sin apart from being a deep personal character flaw. It is called by varied names myopia, apathy, complacence etc. We settled for the passable because the others also seem to do just the same. If we are accidentally called a genius it is because we are just a shade better. We know not what genius means for we have long buried it out of fear.  We design shoddy products and services, even displaying plans as performance and end up singing paeans to our intent, cleverly disguising mediocrity as accomplishment. We don’t even expect good quality and forget what it means. We prepare our children not for competition; forget globalisation, but just to keep the nose just an inch above the water mark; which is how to be a tiny stone in the ocean of mediocrity till it is engulfed and smothered just the same. Excellence is such a facile word for the mediocre; they would not wince to even a wee pang of doubt whether they are honest about their claim; a conscience long dead. Their justification is that we love local standards that set the benchmark values by the appalling ubiquity of the mediocre. What is more is that they like the emperor know that they bear no clothes and hope no one notices the complicity. The story of one person and institution is the story of every institution and person; I fail to see why it does not make us indignant to the destruction of immense possibilities as criminal waste. I say this with no malice and with the full acceptance that i belong to that same breed of the great unwashed mediocrity that fails to inspire and only talks about excellence.

Upon Entering a Gym for the First Time at 50!

Upon Entering a Gym for the First Time at 50!

I find that i write to seek solace when my mind seeks to salve its wounded self when it has nothing better to think. This week's piece is on my going to a gym which despite its quotidian reality has been a significant change in my lifestyle and work. I now look forward to its continuance and I am now enthusiastically evangelical about its benefits like a new convert preaching to the already converted!

I was told that 40 was the new twenties, and i wondered whether at 50 i was really 30 as i held myself in disbelief that i was old (enough) and much beyond the average life expectancy in the first half of the last century in India. People including those close to my age have been for a while calling me uncle or chacha (it is soon going to be nana and dada) and i dismiss it off as a displeasurable greeting.  Not that i have any illusions about my youthfulness or senescence whatever people attribute to my greying and much bald head and whiskers. At 50 i know my destiny but not the Truth and can still not follow my heart without wrongdoing. Having been single i have not had the pleasure of counting the years by ones children’s growth and their declarations of having ‘grown up’ regardless of what their parents thought. Their desire to grow up coupled with their ignorance of not knowing what it means to be grown up is heartbreaking. Being cerebral was merely an excuse to justify that i had paid little heed to my emaciated body and it conveniently reinforced stupid stereotypes of being a nerdy professor quite like Prof Calculus. I wore loose and oversized kurtas that made me look quite like a scarecrow outfitted on a hanger billowing in the wind and weighing about 48 kilos (mostly in my head ;-)) even into my late thirties. I was as a child barely allowed to play and would have fitted the Hollywood stereotype of a geeky Jewish boy who could recite the Torah whole and little else. I was good at no sport and wondered why people made such a fuss about it. To the way I was brought up, for a long while i believed that i am my head and that my body a mere appendage to keep that head afloat and in locomotion. I remember the nightmares that plagued me as a child when i would cry terrified like Calvin (and Hobbes) at seeing a spiky head of a demon which was only a ball covered with needles and limbs growing out of it, living beneath my bed. That probably was my own self image.  So with that self image i breezed into my fiftieth birthday and wondered at my impending mortality as a single man fated to sickness and in isolation to be noticed in my absence only when noses crinkle in disgust at the stench.