“The savage bows down to idols of wood and stone, the civilized man to idols of flesh and blood.”
-George Bernard Shaw
“Who do you want to be like when you grow up?”
I am sure this is a question we all have faced sometime or the other during childhood, adolescence and maybe even later! This is especially true for culture that is so soaked in customs, traditions and cherished institutions of thought like India. We treasure our community ties with an ardent fervour and are always looking to align our thought process with a proven and established set of ideas, to avoid failure and gain some sort of abstract validation.
I’ve always struggled with this question from time immemorial, and till date have not been able to come up with even a remotely satisfying answer. But then the voice (among the many) in my head asks, “Is an answer necessary?”
I mean its okay to admire people, ideas, institutions etc and all but then is it necessary to idolize them? Why is there this need to deity-fy everything and everyone? Whether its a sport team or an actor, an artist or an author, a company or a public institution? Is anything so beyond the realm of admiration and respect that it has to be a higher platform for us to truly appreciate its unique-ness? I can only speak for myself and I feel that its a just fail-safe mechanism we have ingrained in our systems to feel some sort of pseudo-security and feel validated for any rudimentary spark of original thought we may have. I for one have always looked up to several people (prominent as well as people you meet day to day), institutions, schools of thoughts etc but have (and probably will never) be able to single it down to one human being (no matter how acclaimed) or one single idea (no matter how widely accepted and recommended). It’s an amalgamation of a plural ideas. I guess that’s just a choice we make and there is really no ONE right way to look at this (as it is with almost every argument of this nature.)
What I feel is that we tend to take comfort in PROVEN ideas, people and institutions because we are afraid put our necks out and risk hitting the curb. We take shelter in other’s views because we are too scared to go out on a limb and try a novel approach just because it has not been tried by anyone before. We tend to underestimate the power and reach of Individual Action and overestimate the effectiveness of traditional methods and ideas. I don’t agree for most things Obama stands for but I agree with him when says,
"In America we have this strong bias toward individual action. You know, we idolize the John Wayne hero who comes in to correct things with both guns blazing. But individual actions, individual dreams, are not sufficient. We must unite in collective action, build collective institutions and organizations."
Blind idol (idle) worship risks more because we lose out on precious new inputs we could’ve otherwise generated. This is all in the grey and as I said earlier there can be no ONE singular answer. My apprehensions about the whole system of Idols/ Heroes/ Paragons, is more to do the fact they are seeped in the past rather than the present. I don’t understand why people fear new ideas. Personally I’m more afraid of old ones. I guess it makes me a hypocrite because in the end I also favour one school of thought over the other. But then, aren’t we all?
P.S. I’ve changed the look of the blog, among other things. Regular (if any!) and even occasional readers are most welcome to provide feedback!
