What is greatness?

A great person has within him the experiences of the entire history of humanity. And something more. His 'growth' into an adult symbolizes the assimilation of these experiences, most unconsciously, into his being. The curious on-looker only has to study his various gestures - his thoughts, his body language, his anxiety, his pain, his hand-movements and his joy, since these different things interpret and display this history in a new light - the light through which his particular genius shines through. This rare particularity and specificity is nothing but what one thoughtlessly calls 'individuality'.
Achieving individuality is a rare thing, and is certainly not an easy task. It is not all pleasure and happiness. The great individual has to live and die many times, since only in doing so can he rehearse the history of humanity inside and outside of him. He has to survive multiple bruises, go on lonely cruises, and learn not to expect other people to comprehend him. He has to accept disappointment as a part of greatness. This is tough to do, since being human (read 'naive') he instinctively expects more than 100% from others all the time, since this is what he gives to them in all his engagements. But he has to see that human beings are not created equal, and the creator-god has squinted eyes. He has to learn to see that his contemporaries do not understand him since they are dependent on him to show them the way. (Achtung: "The tendency to let oneself be debased, robbed, lied to, and exploited could be the shame of a god among men"). It is as if even his common contemporaries 'recognize' who he is and what his destiny is! The present gets its meaning only through a creative reinterpretation of the past - this is the greatest lesson he learns from his friends, family and other strangers.
Individuality and greatness is achieved only when the person not only learns life's tragic lessons, but has that extra energy in him to appear at the other end of the tunnel with an unbruised limb and multiple wings. Even though a part of his being is as old as the mountains, there is another part of his being that is beautifully preserved and fresh, breathing the life of the present and the future. Like the meeting point of autumn and spring he comes to the scene to create his art, and also the appreciators of his art!
But this is not easy. The world, his contemporaries, will resist him as they come to disbelieve their own instincts about life. And this is the greatest challenge for greatness. For now, it has to learn not only how to create, but also to preserve itself in the face of the toughest resistance. This is when greatness stares at abysmal madness, and it needs this madness to do this double job of creating and preserving. Few survive this test for a long time, and in failing this test they become part of history, however only to point themselves towards a future greatness, towards the individuals to come...

Great passage

"Independence is an issue that concerns very few people:- it is a prerogative of the strong. And even when somebody has every right to be independent, if he attempts such a thing without having to do so, he proves that he is probably not only strong, but brave to the point of madness. He enters a labyrinth, he multiplies by a thousand the dangers already inherent in the very act of living, not the least of which is the fact that no one with eyes will see how and where he gets lost and lonely and is torn limb from limb by some cave-Minotaur of conscience. And assuming a man like this is destroyed, it is an event so far from human comprehension that people do not feel it or feel for him:- and he cannot go back again! He cannot go back to their pity again! - -"

- NIETZSCHE

Willkommen in Deutschland!!

Arrived in Frankfurt in a plane, where every 50-plus oldie - on their way to visit their software son/daughter - believed that every road leads to Chicago. After demystifying their presuppositions, I arrived in Vaterland. Stood in the line for immigration clearance. Then came my turn:-

Me: Hello
Officer (looks at my passport, and says with German English): What do you done here?
Me: What?
Officer: What have you do here?
Me: I am here to attend a language course.
Officer: What language?
Me: German..
Officer (with a surprised, gleeful smile): Verstehen Sie Deutsch?
Me (with a fake German accent): Ja, ein bisschen.
Officer: Wo studieren Sie?
Me: Im Freiburg, bei Goethe-Institut.
Officer: Haben Sie eine Zurueckkarte?
I showed him the return ticket.
Officer: 27th Juli, Eh? He stamps my passport, and says "Willkommen"
As I go past him, I hear him asking his officer-pal next to him, "Wer is besser, Goethe oder Schiller?"

What if....?

1. What if people in this world whimsically made decisions in their lives based on numbers? No, I am not talking about some astrological excursion, but something more naive, more un-rational. For instance, what if your girlfriend breaks up with you because she does not like your new phone number? For some idiosyncratic reason she does not like the pattern of 7s and 2s in your number. You say 7182477122, and she hangs up the phone and never sees you again. Again imagine you are flying into town, and you tell your folks the flight number 521 and they decide not to pick you up from the airport. Wouldn't that be fun? But we do not do that. Why not? Is there a reason? It is almost as if your girlfriend and your folks tell themselves, "What his phone number is or what his flight number is is pure chance. He does not have any control over that. He is just "given" these numbers." Is that right? They decide to forgive and overlook these small things. The boundaries of legitimacy and justification humanity seeks are not drawn on this landscape. Not yet, at least. These boundaries only come later, and little further down the line -- for instance, if after giving your girlfriend your phone no., you tell her not to call after 10 pm since you would be busy with other things, she would, quite justifiably, dump you. Where the boundaries are drawn is a matter of convention. But is it arbitrary? Can the whole of humanity easily will to change these boundaries simply because they want something different? Or is there a compulsion, a necessity, to this convention? Whatever it is, there is a lot of "covering up" that we do before we come to our sense of justice and normality. If we had covered up starting from a different point, we would have had a different set of conventions, a different dance to dance.

2. Imagine a world where academic people, researchers, do not depend on grants and scholarships to conduct their research and make their livelihood. What if only filthy rich people got into academia? Then, no one could pressurize them to finish their dissertation or book in a couple of years. They would have the required financial independence to prolong their projects until the project comes to its own fruition. The thoughts would come to them, and not viceversa. They would incorporate all the boredom, the deviations, the alterations of their moods, their natural growth into their works. This financial independence, more importantly, would give them freedom from the political status quo, the norms of bureaucracy, including the norms of scholarship. Perhaps then the quality of the works coming out of our academic institutions would also be a lot higher. Money is indeed underrated.

3. What if none of our languages had the active voice, and we conversed only with passive voice? We might not be better off, but perhaps we would've checked a lot of uncalled-for aggression in us.

Pet Peeve

I cannot stand someone insulting my intelligence. This happens especially when the other person tries to deceive me. I am not implying that it is impossible to deceive me, but only that when something is uncovered as deception, it no longer continues to be one. The deception itself or the intent behind it is not something totally bad by itself. I am no such purist. In fact, an immaculate deception has always intrigued my fancy. But the audacity or the stupidity to think that I will not figure out that I am being deceived hurts my intelligence. (I experienced this recently when grading papers of students (and I have also experienced this time and again dealing with different people). One Lisa thought that I could not differentiate between a Kant and a Lisa!)
Sometimes, I get the feeling that the deceiver knows that I know that I am being deceived. But then he tries to play this inarticulate game with me. He goes along with the deception, hoping that I will suppress this knowledge for some unknown reason against my own better sense. As if with a wink of an eye he can seduce me into his world, and then leave me stumped in the real world! In such cases, it is really a plea which says either that "Come on! You know how things are, you know how it is.. just pretend that you do not know what I am doing." Or that, "Come on... you have deceived and lied in the past too... you understand the need!" Sure I do, but I was the deceiver then! And I did not get caught!