348: Of shifting Role models and Dry Days

Of Shifting Role Models and Dry Days !

I wonder if amoebas ask each other this question ‘who is your role model’? I guess not. It is a unique human affliction and I would suspect a little resistant to cure.
The idea of a role model is an enticing one. A template simplifies the task. It is arduous to live a life worthy enough to become a role model for others; it is easier to follow a trail already made. 

There are clear categories of role models one would encounter if one would do a pop quiz. Close relatives are common – parents, grandparents et al. If you are the corporate types then famous personalities from the corporate are the usual suspects viz Steve Jobs and his ilk is common find today just as Jack Welsh was common a decade back. Those who have a sense of history are a bit more eclectic in their choices – Gandhi, Martin Luther King and their tribe are usual suspects. I have not encountered too many scientists in this list so far, despite their huge and real contributions in the march of human progress, which is a telling commentary on how much is this game filled with hollow semantics and how useless it eventually is. How many time have you heard people say Newton is my role model or Darwin, or Heisenberg for that matter! (Let me google who is Heisenberg!)

There are many things wrong with the idea of role model. Let me begin with the term itself. The person is a worthy enough model for a ‘role’, which makes it by definition restrictive. The person is worthy of being emulated only in a given role – may be disastrous in many other roles that he or she plays. The trouble begins when we make the whole package worth adopting as a role model instead of only the one that is worthy of being so. The trouble assumes menacing proportions when this is done with poor awareness and limited application of thought. There is no nuance in the idea of a role model. 

One has role models usually during youth. After a certain age and experience, we have seen too much life to fall for the notion of role models and if we still do, then we have an altogether different problem to solve. 

Role models are also created as fables. Storytelling and continuous retelling creates a myth around personalities. It might be believed by millions but it is still a myth. At least the impeccability around it, the invincibility surrounding it and the permanence inherently propagated through it, is certainly a myth. 

Role models fray with time and circumstances. Two examples come to my mind. Today is 2nd October and my FB wall is good place to witness the not so subtle process of delegitimizing the one role model we have believed in for decades. Suddenly Mahatma Gandhi is portrayed as persona non grata by many if not all, something that was almost unthinkable even a decade back. The process is fascinating because more than the person in question, it betrays the fragility of the concept of role models. Sometimes shifts of power will ensure that, and sometimes the shift of fortunes will force us to reduce the stature of the erstwhile role models. I wonder if anyone will be calling Jack Welsh his role model if we survey today given the sorry state GE is in. 

These are the glamorous examples. Our own lives are filled with the remains of fallen heroes. Scan the timelines of your memories and there will be examples galore – a parent who eventually turned out to be a normal human being, an elder sibling who as susceptible to human frailties as you, a boss who beneath the veneer of sagacity and capability was as prone to insecurities as anyone else, so on and so forth. They are fallen not because what made them role models in the first place was an error. This grand notion of role model, the all-encompassing, perfection seeking template of slotting them as creatures of perfection in all that they say and all that they do, was unfair to them and foolish on our part. We the believers of the role models are doomed twice over – first when we hoisted them to the pedestal and second when they fell from grace. They remained where they were all along but moved up and down only in our own eyes. The crime, just as beauty, was in the eyes of the beholder. 

I wonder if amoebas ask each other ‘so who is your role model’. Thank God amoebas do not have names and characters and so at best they would answer – ‘..no one in particular, just another amoeba’. 

To whomever it may concern: If we change the imagery of 2nd October from Gandhi Jayanti to Lal Bahadur Shastri Jayanti, will it also mean it will no longer be a dry day??

Guru