I don't remember when I read my first fantasy novel. As far as my recollection goes, those distant days have gone into the dark mists of time and never wandered back. Hearing my father narrate the adventures of Mowgli, Baloo, Bagheera and of course Kaa is one of my earliest memories.
After that the worlds which I have been a part of are too many to list yet I will try to list a few :), Eragon Cycle all the way to 'Inheritance', Ameer Hamsa and Mahabharatha and its cohorts (of very questionable beliefs when I look back upon them), bits of Harry Potter and Percy Jackson, Magicians Series by Lev Grossman, Firefly, Avatar, Jumanji and recently HPMOR (Harry Potter and Methods of Rationality). It would be a great injustice to discount the works like 'Around the World in 80 days', 'Nautilus' , SHE and Ayesha , House MD ( :D) and numerous others of this league. Even though they're not called fantasy per se, they do transport you to a different world full of strange possibilities and probabilities and that is more than what you can say for many many things !
I'll confess another secret :) As soon as I read Eragon, I knew I was destined to ride dragons :D I kept on dreaming of the exhilaration I would feel when flying on top of a multi-ton, fire breathing mythical creature for quite a while. What it would feel like to be above all the hustle and bustle of life, with cold wind ripping on your face, going through the air like an arrow and having conversations with a dragon !! :) Not to mention the gratefulness of not being gobbled up in a single go. After I had grown up a bit and learned a bit about science and atheism and had a few discussions with my parents, I knew dragons were not real. Unlikely as it may sound, it didn't bother me that much. I guess I knew in the back of my mind that if such an awesome creature existed, then life would totally be pointless if they didn't show up at least once a day in a newspaper or TV channel.
I knew all these worlds were not real, but that didn't prevent me from exploring those in my head, again and again. I could conveniently be the hero, fighting dark creatures/men trying to take over the world and rescuing the pretty heroine(s?). Even though I don't do much of the latter these days :/ (How sad life gets as you grow up and realize that there are no dark wizards to fight and pretty heroines to rescue/fight alongside you !), I do spend a considerable amount of time in these worlds, looking at their possibilities and impossibilities and wondering of strange things like 'How would there be a creature that can breath fire and how would a fire breathing organ be like ?'. Sometimes I just go there to get out of reality a bit. Even though I see things through the lens of science now (I aspire to actually), these worlds have far more left to offer :), or so I would like to believe.
It was while traveling through these imaginary lands that I stumbled upon an idea about what was wrong with our world. This is of no surprise as we all do stumble across such questionable ideas all the time. Only this time, I'm foolish and perhaps feeling a bit braver to write it down.
We need to be heroes an heroines, point. I know all of us wanted to do something amazing when we were kids, whether it was riding a broom or going to Mars. One of the many tragedies of the life unfolds as we grow up ( My favorite if you ask me, is the aptly named Tragedy of Commons). Most of us don't get to live those dreams. Either practicality reaches us or discouragement reaches us. I've always wondered when I'm doing something like trudging through a thick forest of equations and cursing whatever I can think of and sometimes thinking 'This is too hard', whether the kid who wanted to do awesome things with numbers and wanted to find out how stuff worked and find ancient ruins would have flinched at these difficulties ?, would he have thought 'Man this is too hard, let's just do enough to get through before thinking of anything more ?'. Probably not.
Well life gives you lemons sometimes, however hard you try and you have to make lemonade, just to be sporting :) A lot of us do that too, we find new dreams, perhaps more, perhaps less magical, perhaps not as cool as being a dragon rider, but still worth doing and try to get to them. But there are people who have by unfortunate chance lost their dream. They've been pushed into a niche by the world, environment, its people and they themselves (well sometimes !) and have not many options.
They stop being their own heroes at that point. They becomes sidekicks or the masses that serve as foot stool and this is, without doubt, the biggest tragedy. Every kid, every living person deserves to be heroes and heroines in their own stories, even though that might mean different things. Everyone might not get to go to Mars or become a world renown artist, musician or scientist, but everyone will have their own stories, big and small. That's their Saga thats being written where they do what the heroine/hero would do.
Sometimes being a hero might be Standing up for yourself even though you're scared witless, sometime it might be standing by someone as they do their own heroic deed :) Each time you cut the traffic lines for your own convenience and each time you act unfairly or cut the queue, that precious dream dies a little bit. You might not notice it then, but each act that goes against what kind of person you thought you might become takes away a small part of your own worth as you yourself see, however hard you try to justify your choices. That small (sometimes very annoying!) noise in your head knows what you did and won't ever fail to point it out.
Just pause for a moment and think about it. If all the seven billion people of the world decided to be their own heroes, would there be anything worth doing that would not be withing our reach ? Would there be so much unhappiness around ? I am not naive enough to propose being your own hero is the solution to all the problems of the world, but it feels damn right and world would not fail to notice. So be your own hero !
After that the worlds which I have been a part of are too many to list yet I will try to list a few :), Eragon Cycle all the way to 'Inheritance', Ameer Hamsa and Mahabharatha and its cohorts (of very questionable beliefs when I look back upon them), bits of Harry Potter and Percy Jackson, Magicians Series by Lev Grossman, Firefly, Avatar, Jumanji and recently HPMOR (Harry Potter and Methods of Rationality). It would be a great injustice to discount the works like 'Around the World in 80 days', 'Nautilus' , SHE and Ayesha , House MD ( :D) and numerous others of this league. Even though they're not called fantasy per se, they do transport you to a different world full of strange possibilities and probabilities and that is more than what you can say for many many things !
I'll confess another secret :) As soon as I read Eragon, I knew I was destined to ride dragons :D I kept on dreaming of the exhilaration I would feel when flying on top of a multi-ton, fire breathing mythical creature for quite a while. What it would feel like to be above all the hustle and bustle of life, with cold wind ripping on your face, going through the air like an arrow and having conversations with a dragon !! :) Not to mention the gratefulness of not being gobbled up in a single go. After I had grown up a bit and learned a bit about science and atheism and had a few discussions with my parents, I knew dragons were not real. Unlikely as it may sound, it didn't bother me that much. I guess I knew in the back of my mind that if such an awesome creature existed, then life would totally be pointless if they didn't show up at least once a day in a newspaper or TV channel.
I knew all these worlds were not real, but that didn't prevent me from exploring those in my head, again and again. I could conveniently be the hero, fighting dark creatures/men trying to take over the world and rescuing the pretty heroine(s?). Even though I don't do much of the latter these days :/ (How sad life gets as you grow up and realize that there are no dark wizards to fight and pretty heroines to rescue/fight alongside you !), I do spend a considerable amount of time in these worlds, looking at their possibilities and impossibilities and wondering of strange things like 'How would there be a creature that can breath fire and how would a fire breathing organ be like ?'. Sometimes I just go there to get out of reality a bit. Even though I see things through the lens of science now (I aspire to actually), these worlds have far more left to offer :), or so I would like to believe.
It was while traveling through these imaginary lands that I stumbled upon an idea about what was wrong with our world. This is of no surprise as we all do stumble across such questionable ideas all the time. Only this time, I'm foolish and perhaps feeling a bit braver to write it down.
We need to be heroes an heroines, point. I know all of us wanted to do something amazing when we were kids, whether it was riding a broom or going to Mars. One of the many tragedies of the life unfolds as we grow up ( My favorite if you ask me, is the aptly named Tragedy of Commons). Most of us don't get to live those dreams. Either practicality reaches us or discouragement reaches us. I've always wondered when I'm doing something like trudging through a thick forest of equations and cursing whatever I can think of and sometimes thinking 'This is too hard', whether the kid who wanted to do awesome things with numbers and wanted to find out how stuff worked and find ancient ruins would have flinched at these difficulties ?, would he have thought 'Man this is too hard, let's just do enough to get through before thinking of anything more ?'. Probably not.
Well life gives you lemons sometimes, however hard you try and you have to make lemonade, just to be sporting :) A lot of us do that too, we find new dreams, perhaps more, perhaps less magical, perhaps not as cool as being a dragon rider, but still worth doing and try to get to them. But there are people who have by unfortunate chance lost their dream. They've been pushed into a niche by the world, environment, its people and they themselves (well sometimes !) and have not many options.
They stop being their own heroes at that point. They becomes sidekicks or the masses that serve as foot stool and this is, without doubt, the biggest tragedy. Every kid, every living person deserves to be heroes and heroines in their own stories, even though that might mean different things. Everyone might not get to go to Mars or become a world renown artist, musician or scientist, but everyone will have their own stories, big and small. That's their Saga thats being written where they do what the heroine/hero would do.
Sometimes being a hero might be Standing up for yourself even though you're scared witless, sometime it might be standing by someone as they do their own heroic deed :) Each time you cut the traffic lines for your own convenience and each time you act unfairly or cut the queue, that precious dream dies a little bit. You might not notice it then, but each act that goes against what kind of person you thought you might become takes away a small part of your own worth as you yourself see, however hard you try to justify your choices. That small (sometimes very annoying!) noise in your head knows what you did and won't ever fail to point it out.
Just pause for a moment and think about it. If all the seven billion people of the world decided to be their own heroes, would there be anything worth doing that would not be withing our reach ? Would there be so much unhappiness around ? I am not naive enough to propose being your own hero is the solution to all the problems of the world, but it feels damn right and world would not fail to notice. So be your own hero !
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