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

Ayodhya: Kingdom of Sorrows

T he Sarayu carried more tears than water. Ayodhya was a sad kingdom. Dasaratha was a good king. He upheld dharma – justice and morality – as best as he could. The citizens were apparently happy. Then, one day, it all changed. One person is enough to change the destiny of a whole kingdom. Who was that one person? Some say it was Kaikeyi, one of the three official wives of Dasaratha. Some others say it was Manthara, Kaikeyi’s chief maid. Manthara was a hunchback. She was the caretaker of Kaikeyi right from the latter’s childhood; foster mother, so to say, because Kaikeyi had no mother. The absence of maternal influence can distort a girl child’s personality. With a foster mother like Manthara, the distortion can be really bad. Manthara was cunning, selfish, and morally ambiguous. A severe physical deformity can make one worse than all that. Manthara was as devious and manipulative as a woman could be in a men’s world. Add to that all the jealousy and ambition that insecure peo...

Bharata: The Ascetic King

Bharata is disillusioned yet again. His brother, Rama the ideal man, Maryada Purushottam , is making yet another grotesque demand. Sita Devi has to prove her purity now, years after the Agni Pariksha she arranged for herself long ago in Lanka itself. Now, when she has been living for years far away from Rama with her two sons Luva and Kusha in the paternal care of no less a saint than Valmiki himself! What has happened to Rama? Bharata sits on the bank of the Sarayu with tears welling up in his eyes. Give me an answer, Sarayu, he said. Sarayu accepted Bharata’s tears too. She was used to absorbing tears. How many times has Rama come and sat upon this very same bank and wept too? Life is sorrow, Sarayu muttered to Bharata. Even if you are royal descendants of divinity itself. Rama had brought the children Luva and Kusha to Ayodhya on the day of the Ashvamedha Yagna which he was conducting in order to reaffirm his sovereignty and legitimacy over his kingdom. He didn’t know they w...

Liberated

Fiction - parable Vijay was familiar enough with soil and the stones it turns up to realise that he had struck something rare.   It was a tiny stone, a pitch black speck not larger than the tip of his little finger. It turned up from the intestine of the earth while Vijay was digging a pit for the biogas plant. Anand, the scientist from the village, got the stone analysed in his lab and assured, “It is a rare object.   A compound of carbonic acid and magnesium.” Anand and his fellow scientists believed that it must be a fragment of a meteoroid that hit the earth millions of years ago.   “Very rare indeed,” concluded the scientist. Now, it’s plain commonsense that something that’s very rare indeed must be very valuable too. All the more so if it came from the heavens. So Vijay got the village goldsmith to set it on a gold ring.   Vijay wore the ring proudly on his ring finger. Nobody, in the village, however bothered to pay any homage to Vijay’s...

Empuraan – Review

Revenge is an ancient theme in human narratives. Give a moral rationale for the revenge and make the antagonist look monstrously evil, then you have the material for a good work of art. Add to that some spices from contemporary politics and the recipe is quite right for a hit movie. This is what you get in the Malayalam movie, Empuraan , which is running full houses now despite the trenchant opposition to it from the emergent Hindutva forces in the state. First of all, I fail to understand why so much brouhaha was hollered by the Hindutvans [let me coin that word for sheer convenience] who managed to get some 3 minutes censored from the 3-hour movie. The movie doesn’t make any explicit mention of any of the existing Hindutva political parties or other organisations. On the other hand, Allahu Akbar is shouted menacingly by Islamic terrorists, albeit towards the end. True, the movie begins with an implicit reference to what happened in Gujarat in 2002 after the Godhra train burnin...

Empuraan and Ramayana

Maggie and I will be watching the Malayalam movie Empuraan tomorrow. The tickets are booked. The movie has created a lot of controversy in Kerala and the director has decided to impose no less than 17 censors on it himself. I want to watch it before the jingoistic scissors find its way to the movie. It is surprising that the people of Kerala took such exception to this movie when the same people had no problem with the utterly malicious and mendacious movie The Kerala Story (2023). [My post on that movie, which I didn’t watch, is here .] Empuraan is based partly on the Gujarat riots of 2002. The riots were real and the BJP’s role in it (Mr Modi’s, in fact) is well-known. So, Empuraan isn’t giving the audience any falsehood as The Kerala Story did. Moreover, The Kerala Story maligned the people of Kerala while Empuraan is about something that happened in the faraway Gujarat quite long ago. Why are the people of Kerala then upset with Empuraan ? Because it tells the truth, M...