Following
is an extract from an article written by Mr. K. S. Ram.
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Prominent among
the urges that inspire and drive a person in life, is the urge to be somebody. It
is quite human, especially in the early stages of life to want to do something
to win laurels and admiration of all around. There’s a pitfall though – the very
process of becoming a somebody may subtly reduce you to a nobody.
American
poet Emily Dickinson, who lived in obscurity, has an interesting poem on this
theme. “I’m nobody!” she declares, with apparent pride.
“Who are
you?
Are you
nobody, too?”
Why should
anybody be happy about being a nobody? The poem explains:
“How dreary
to be somebody!
How public,
like a frog
To tell
your name the livelong day
To an
admiring bog!”
The word ‘bog’
is significant. When you become a somebody, you invite adulation: this then
begins to bog you down. The moment you think you have arrived, you begin to
stagnate, or worse, your downside begins. An endless list of writers, artists,
sportsmen, politicians…fit this pattern of personal history.
To sustain
your development in absolute terms, to become a true somebody, it is important
to remain a temporal nobody. Even if destiny makes you a temporal somebody, you
should be able to see yourself as merely an agent of a superior power; no more.
This requires an exercise of will. You have to constantly watch out and talk to
yourself morning and evening. Rahim, the Hindi poet, one of the jewels of
Akbar, was a pious (religious) man, always keen to help the needy. He
made no noise about it, but his fame kept spreading. When praised by people,
Rahim would shrink back in discomfort. He wrote a couplet on this.
“Denewala
aur hai, bhejat wo din-rain.
Log
bharam hum par kare, neeche howat nain”
“The giver
is someone else; He showers His gifts through day and night. People mistake and
extol (admire) me. My eyes, abashed, are lowered!”
In more
recent times Gandhiji, perhaps, is one who assiduously (diligently)
brushed aside adulation to remain a free ‘nobody’. At the Congress session when
he, the star of the session, stunned everybody by cleaning up the latrines, his
act was calculated to purge Congress workers of their false sense of status,
and so to return the movement of its down-to-earth roots. The point of guarding
against becoming a self-defeating somebody applies to the upbringing of
children as well. Doting (Devoted) parents often stunt the natural
growth of their children through excessive adulation. Commonplace acts and utterances
of the child are praised and quoted beyond reason. Talent that otherwise might
have flowered under proper training, is lauded to the extent of killing it.
John Stuart
Mill’s education and training began very early. At an age when many kids can
barely lisp a few word, he had learnt enough Greek and Latin to read the
classics in the original. Before he was five he had read more than what many
scholars normally read in their career. Did this make the child John feel
heady? No! Because, he tells us, his father (who was also his tutor) always
made him believe that there was nothing extra ordinary about his achievement:
that he was doing only what anybody is capable of doing. Mill was made to
believe that other boys of his age had, in fact, grossly underestimated their
capabilities and were wasting their years striving for too little.
The sequence
of somebody – nobody holds true, in a way, in respect of institutions and
nations as well. C Northcote Parkinson, enunciating one of his famous laws, has
tried to read the pattern in the case of great empires worldwide. He connects
the raising of imposing palaces to the beginning of the empire’s decline.
Beautiful....
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