Errors and Lessons

I have on occasion described my life as a series of blunders. The mistakes taught me the inevitable lessons too. Perhaps, what makes life really meaningful, if not particularly charming, are the lessons we learn from our own mistakes. The errors and the subsequent learnings indicate that we have been on a quest of our own instead of blindly embracing given truths.

“The biggest mistake of my life was joining St Edmund’s as a lecturer,” as I write in my forthcoming memoirs, Autumn Shadows. “Shame was the ultimate gift I received from St Edmund’s, the ultimate recompense of the narcissist.” Narcissism is a grave sin unless you know how to piggyback on it to conquer peaks of success. I was a born loser for whom success was a tantalising mirage. The Principal, staff and students of Edmund’s caught hold of the shame of the loser in me, shook it out and held it up for the whole world to see. Then I became less than the shame.

The world will love narcissists provided they know how to be winners. Otherwise they are doomed. In one of the poems I wrote in those days, I described myself as a clown on the trapeze. The first half of the poem went thus:

Each faltering step, each fall of mine,

Makes you burst out into laughter:

Because I am the clown in the pack

Because the motley is my birthmark.

Each swing of leotards on trapezes

Sighs in comic relief in the tail of my coat:

Because the show must go on

Because the Master is watching it.

The Master remained beyond my visibility like the Orwellian Big Brother or the authority in Kafka’s worlds. The Big Brother finally succeeded in decimating my narcissistic ego, and me too in the process. I left the place in shame. I have never been able to cleanse myself of that inheritance from St Edmund’s College, Shillong.

The lessons I learnt from that shame have served me well in later life, however. It taught me modesty and reticence [except in writing]. It taught me the importance of silence in many places. I learnt to efface my soul so much so that the comic relief is my abiding consolation now. That comic relief is one of the greatest lessons I learnt, the best gift of my Edmundian blunder.

PS. Written for Indispire Edition 242: