Pedestal

We Indians love pedestals. And we waste no time in putting our revered figures there. After all what more can we do to honour the great people who were born among us than to put them on a highest position, make them into demigods and sing paeans to revere them?

Pedestals for us are meant for every great person. Our definition of great personality doesn't extend merely to some figure in the recent or distant past who did something which we don't remember or did too much to remember. Anyone can be great. It could be the cute leading star of a romantic no brainer or the anorexic plastic faced beauty pageant winner or the winner of a reality show or a talent hunt show, a politician who gives away freebies, an actor who is known for his supposed acting, a starlet whose talent lies in shaking her booty to third rate songs, a businessman who signifies extravagance and so on. In a culture as great as us, greatness is freely available.

The western civilization is surely decadent. They have absolutely no respect for their great personalities. Thats why they always bring them to the level of mere mortals, scrutinize their life and work and never ever blindly believe what has been officially told to them for generations. And they have th audacity to think that they can surpass them. We sane people can never have such an attitude, not in a million years.

After all, we are cradle of civilization and culture and we have to prove that time and again. One of the ways is by deifying great people. And its important we do it because it makes life very convenient for us.

Putting a great person on pedestal saves us a lot of troubles. We are saved the trouble of rising above our petty mindedness and puny mentality. As the person in question has been idolized and made into a divine figure, we certainly can't hope to emulate him/her or walk in his/her path to achieve what s/he strived for, as how can we, mere mortals, even dream of even being a fraction of what our idols were? We can forget about it and very well continue our corrupt and third rate ways which make life so much comfortable for us.

Putting great people on pedestals also saves us from feeling guilty. We as a great society always ensure to make life a nightmare for anyone who thinks of rising above the mundane and pettiness and dedicates his or her life to it. By deifying such people after death, we always think that we have atoned for making them miserable in their lifetimes.

Deification of great personalities also saves us the trouble of doing what the moral less west does :- Emulating them , keeping their ideals alive and making tomorrow better than today.

We can never undetake such wasteful exercises. So we deitify the great personalities, thereby mythifying their existence, placing them to stratospheric heights which we are sure we can never acheive in multiple lifetimes and making them into superhumans and gods. That makes the task of being puny and mediocre so very easy.

Another field where our genius lies is portrayal of revered figures in a way that suits us and popularising only the part of their life which we can easily adapt to.

Therefore, inspite of being an able statesman and a valiant warrior, Lord Krishna is portrayed nothing more than a bejewelled lover boy who spends all his time cavorting with village belles. Its not convenient for us to depict him with a sudarshan chakra but its so cute to put a flute on his lips. Its too tedious for us to picture him preaching the Bhagwad Geeta to Arjun but so very nice to see him as a butter stealing toddler.

Lord Raam and Lord Hanuman are too inconvenient for us to be portrayed as fierce and ruthless warriors. They must be portrayed as boy faced pleasant looking entities who smile at us through portraits, heavily adorned with ornaments and having the appearance of being hardly able of hurting a fly.

So, as a society, we have escaped the burden of achievement of greatness and improvement by putting the greats on a pedestal and convenient deification as per our whims and fancies.

Once we do that, life becomes very easy.We are then free to surrender our souls and brains to the pursuit of the profane and trivial, emulate our chosen role models to make our lives as pointless as theirs, elect the leaders who give us freebies and reservations, raise our children with a display mindset and to teach them to lie and cheat for the sake of a few bucks as we have been doing and in the end continue our tradition of being a little people and making the place we live in a spittoon for us and just about anyone in the world.

It also leaves us free to do another thing: Keep on harping how rich and varied our culture is and how we have the best brains in the world. Proofs of course are not required. The statues of our idols and great personalities alone bear testimony to this fact.


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