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.

PS. Written for Indispire Edition 332: Are/Aren't we condoning mediocrity by celebrating it? There’s nothing wrong in being average unless we remain content with the status quo and refuse to try getting better! And it gets worse when mediocrity eclipses meritocracy. Do you agree? #ChallengeMediocrity