Skip to main content

The delights of mediocrity



I worked as a lecturer in English at an undergrad college in Shillong for a few years. Now the post is known by some bombastic appellation, I know. Professors are supposed to do a lot of things other than teaching, may be to justify their enormous pay packets. The teaching job is done only for a few hours in a week. The rest of the time is supposed to be utilised for research, writing scholarly papers, and speaking at as well as attending seminars.

The novel which I completed reading the other day – Less by Andrew Sean Greer – satirises these scholarly seminars organised by universities. The protagonist, Arthur Less who is a mediocre novelist, is invited to address one of these conferences. On reaching the university, which is in another country altogether, Less learns that hardly anyone in his audience understands his language. Moreover, the Head of the Department who has organised the seminar won’t be attending it. He organised it just for the sake of getting an opportunity to come to the city where there is a particular medical shop that sells medicines cheaper and he has to buy some Viagra pills. The conference turns out to be a huge farce.


I attended a lot of seminars while I was a humble lecturer (not a bombastic professor yet) in Shillong. Most of them meant nothing. Some of them were plainly absurd. Learned people would stand on the podium and speak for an hour or more about something like ‘The virginity of Thomas Hardy’s Tess when she stands on her scaffold’ or ‘Ovulation: a lap dancer’s secret weapon’. There would be tea and snacks or even lunch at the end of the speeches. The speakers and the audience all will get their certificates which will add weight to their CV portfolios.

The Head who invited Arthur Less to the conference knows the absurdity of it all. “You and me,” he tells a confused Less, “we’ve met geniuses. And we know we’re not like them, don’t we? What is it like to go on, knowing you are not a genius, knowing you are a mediocrity? I think it’s the worst kind of hell.”

Less thinks of himself as something between the genius and the mediocre. That’s of no use, however. That is a nowhere-land. Worse than hell? “Are we consigned to the flames?” The Head asks.

“No, I guess,” Less offers, “just to conferences like this one.”

Mediocrity can be hell if you refuse to belong to it as Arthur Less does. If you are not a genius, you are a mediocre person though that is not a very pleasant acknowledgement. Honestly, I find it hard to accept that I am just another mediocre person. But I know I’m no genius; I’m certain. Nowhere near it. But mediocre?! O my god! That’s terrible.

Is it? If I sit down under my mango tree (there’s no bodhi tree anywhere around here and the mango tree provides my “bower” where I sit occasionally with a friend and sip a drink or two in late evenings) and contemplate, I realise that the mediocre are a blessed lot not very unlike Bernard Shaw’s Alfred Doolittle.


If you are mediocre, you can have the cake and eat it too. Your god will dance to your tunes. Otherwise just shut him up, the god I mean, in a temple or a church and lock the doors except when you want him to wake up with his miracles and blessings. Your morality can be just a scarecrow waving a stick like an old schoolteacher at what you don’t like. You can swindle a whole nation and call it nationalism. And the nation will not only believe you but also lionise you as a hero.

It is easy to be mediocre. It is entertainment too. You need to practise a bit, that’s all.


Comments

  1. So those seminars are actually pointless? Interesting. :P

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Most of them. As a school teacher, I've attended more useful seminars.

      Delete
  2. I have heard many teachers say the same thing. There is less of teaching and more non-teaching activities. That books seems to be interesting. Should check that out.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's a Pulitzer winner. Not much by way of plot. But the character makes us think about the shallowness of our actions and thoughts.

      Delete
  3. Mediocrity is never a compliment. All the same, it is not only encouraged, promoted and rewarded but also celebrated in the Indian political and bureaucratic arenas. Geniuses are ridiculed and cut to size simultaneously. That's why we come across poor governance in our country.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Forget about geniuses, even dissenters are arrested and tortured or even done away with. The very scope for genuine heroism has been made to vanish from the country, thanks to the reign of downright mediocrity.

      Delete
  4. Interesting that someone thought of writing about it! :D

    ReplyDelete
  5. We all realise it at some point or the other... That only the mediocres are the ones who can have the cake and eat it too... Otherwise in that pursuit of being geniuses you may have the cake... But you either have no time to eat it in want of more... Or you are just not satisfied with what you have and leave it in pursuit of more... It's always a vicious circle!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Pursuit of the genius differs much from that of the mediocre and the latter's pursuits are lethal, i think. The genius is driven by genuine passion like arts, science, etc. The mediocre chases power, wealth, etc.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Taliban and India

Illustration by Copilot Designer Two things happened on 14 Oct 2025. One: India rolled out the red carpet for an Afghan delegation led by the Taliban Administration’s Foreign Minister. Two: a young man was forced to wash the feet of a Brahmin and drink that water. This happened in Madhya Pradesh, not too far from where the Taliban leaders were being given regal reception in tune with India’s philosophy of Atithi Devo Bhava (Guest is God). Afghanistan’s Taliban and India’s RSS (which shaped Modi’s thinking) have much in common. The former seeks to build a state based on its interpretation of Islamic law aiming for a society governed by strict religious codes. The RSS promotes Hindutva, the idea of India as primarily a Hindu nation, where Hindu values form the cultural and political foundation. Both fuse religious identity with national identity, marginalising those who don’t fit their vision of the nation. The man who was made to wash a Brahmin’s feet and drink that water in Madh...

Helpless Gods

Illustration by Gemini Six decades ago, Kerala’s beloved poet Vayalar Ramavarma sang about gods that don’t open their eyes, don’t know joy or sorrow, but are mere clay idols. The movie that carried the song was a hit in Kerala in the late 1960s. I was only seven when the movie was released. The impact of the song, like many others composed by the same poet, sank into me a little later as I grew up. Our gods are quite useless; they are little more than narcissists who demand fresh and fragrant flowers only to fling them when they wither. Six decades after Kerala’s poet questioned the potency of gods, the Chief Justice of India had a shoe flung at him by a lawyer for the same thing: questioning the worth of gods. The lawyer was demanding the replacement of a damaged idol of god Vishnu and the Chief Justice wondered why gods couldn’t take care of themselves since they are omnipotent. The lawyer flung his shoe at the Chief Justice to prove his devotion to a god. From Vayalar of 196...

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...