These narratives have started working on the collective as well as individual consciousness and have come to define our times. So abbreviations like #YOLO are commonplace. Statements like whats life without doing something crazy, or achieving something really big or leaving a big legacy or making yourself heard loud and clear (irrespective of the quality of your opinion), have become the new normal. And to make this happen, the outlandish, the bizarre, the freakish, the crass, become purveyors of influence and symbols of our times. Symbolism takes over substance. And in the process, everyone whos not visible enough becomes part of the vast majority of people leading uneventful lives, many of them questioning themselves as to how it all went so wrong?
This is where the confusion about mediocrity being equated with being moderate begins.
The Kardashians. Rakhi Sawant. Karni Sena. Sambhaji Brigade. Donald Trump. Nirav Modi. Kanhaiya Kumar. Jignesh Mevani. Vijay Mallya. Folks from the far right or the far left, conservative or liberal, have all overshadowed many a moderate soul and have occupied majority of the media narrative, be it social media, television, and to an extent, even print.
Does one really judge a teacher by how visible he or she was in your school or what she did for your understanding of a subject and helped shape your worldview?
Is being moderate equal to being mediocre? To answer this question one must ask oneself: How does one measure contribution? Within a family, friend circle, neighbourhood, school, organisation, governance, or even global politics.
Does one really judge a teacher by how visible he or she was in your school or what she did for your understanding of a subject and helped shape your worldview? Do you bank on your most visible friend with the maximum number of followers or do you bank on someone who has been there when you needed him, and has gone beyond his remit to help you when you needed it the most? Did the boss, who was most popular in the company you worked at, impact you more than the quiet one who encouraged you to take ownership and knew when to withdraw and when to front? Whose opinion do you really value?
Think hard about that last question, and the answer, more often than not will be the understated guy in your group of friends. The quiet sibling. The supportive mother. In the army, the boss who leads by example and from the front rather than the one who pulls his rank is the person who is regarded as a leader.
In corporate India, some of the most visible CEOs and promoters have turned out to the biggest duds. Need I name Mallya? Turns out, it is the boring, predictable Warren Buffet, whose ambition is to get average returns on equity over an extended period (read five decades), is the most consistent. He has stayed in the same house for four decades and stayed married to the same wife for an equal duration.
Is being moderate equal to being mediocre?
Whose value system are you most likely to look up to? A moderate like Gandhi or an extremist like Hitler? (Even though Gandhi was both visible and a moderate, a rarity in todays time.)
Another example of changing times is the lack of premium we now place on consistency. The mercurial person who throws in shades of brilliance but mostly doesnt follow through on her ideas, is still considered worthy of our veneration. The consistent, understated leader, who plods and pushes his team from the shadows, is a disappearing breed in the modern-day narrative.
We need to look no further than the state of world politics today. An Angela Merkel gets re-elected multiple times only in super-modern, and should I say understated, Germany. Several other nations today have one leader or the other at the helm, be it Recep Tayyip Erdo?an, Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, Rodrigo Duterte, Shinzo Abe, or our very own Narendra Modi.
History will truly judge what impact these folks have had, but until then, well perhaps have to live with the hype.
The question is, how can we prevent the complete disappearance of the moderate individual or opinion from our discourse? Its not just for own sanity weve lived long enough with some form of madness. Our children, though, could do with some moderate role models.
This article has been previously published on Arre.