To Feel Special

Jim was special. He was his father’s son.

His father was a famous industrialist. He was very industrious. He believed in true human capabilities, the kind of philosophy that the Western world was built on.

Jim was special. Everybody told him so. Funny thing was he never felt special. He never felt like he had the ability to work miracles. His expectation was that if wise people around him thought he was special, he must really have some special powers to make things happen. For a long time, he kept asking this question to himself. He tried to magically obtain good grades at school, which never came. He tried to solve social problems, which were never solved. The more he took on these challenges, the more he was convinced that he was not special.

But he was special. The fact was that the people around him were too myopic to understand his talents.

What Jim needed was experience. He needed to go out into the world and see it through his own eyes, hear it through his own ears and feel it through his own touch. It seemed to him that being ‘special’ was the curse that was holding him back from showing how special he really was. For a long time he wasn’t able to do anything about it. He didn’t have the means. After all, he soon found out that to start something, one needed to not only invest energy, but also resources, and more often than not, a lot of it was needed. He realised very early that the very myopic individuals surrounding him also held the key to his freedom. But how does one speak a language one does not know? The more he thought about it, the more he felt isolated from the rest. He prayed and wished that there would be someone who would sympathise with him. He prayed for just one door to open, just one glimmer of hope, an opportunity, and he would do anything, and spend all his energy and God-given talent to secure his position in the world on his own, away from the glare of the out-of-focus bifocal glasses.

He tried relentlessly. He failed several times during his trials. It was like his own version of Gandhi’s ‘The Story of My Experiments with Truth’.

Everywhere he went, he was met with the same fate. He was met with strangeness and insincerity. He did not understand either, nor could he fathom why he, who was of such pure heart, was being met by only the dark forces. But he was just such a believer in the capabilities of human beings to do good, and his own specialness, that his enthusiasm knew no bounds.

Jim enjoyed writing. But then who didn’t? He thought he didn’t need to be the best writer in the world, as long as his writing abilities were being recognised, and he was able to make a living, writing. He just knew that he wanted to write, but the world thought he was no good.

Jim was in a soup. On one hand he wanted to write, and he was good at it. He won accolades at school for writing, a talent he thought that came to him as naturally as the song of the skylark. Yet, he could write only certain things, and that severely limited his writing abilities. He was talented, but it seemed like he only had half of everything, half a coin, half an apple, half a life and so on. He wished very hard to have the whole thing. But no miracle would help him get that. He must work hard for it, and learn from experience.

This did not deter him. He was gifted with the talent of not accepting failure. He often thought it was because of all the affection he was showered when he was young, which was taken right away by the bifocal lens people. He himself developed a dystopic view of the world where everything that he thought had to be right, because he thought he meant no harm to anybody by it. But he still felt special. It was as if the feeling was ingrained in his brain.

Then the expected happened, and failed in all his endeavours. But, very unexpectedly, he was able to succeed in doing something that he never set out to achieve in the first place. He went abroad. He thought this was his opportunity, albeit not exactly in the way that he would have liked, but it was nevertheless a sign that his prayers were being answered.

He had to use this opportunity to achieve what he always wanted to achieve. But how? He had no idea how. The new country was not kind to him.

The dream of the paperback novel soon shattered into a cultural shock from which he was left devastated, and extremely frail. For a long time, he imagined it to be the end. It had to be the end of the road. It was as far as the canon could fire. It was the burnout, he believed.

Poor Jim did not know that he was just going through a terrible phase of learning. It was such an intense phase of learning that it often left him bewildered and uprooted. It made him feel like the weight of decades of esoteric learning had to be unloaded. He felt like all that learning was no more than a burden to him as he tried to cope with new rules and attitudes. He had to unload all that he learnt like a dump truck unloads itself in the end. If only his mind were like that hydraulic pump that tilted the back so that all the trash would easily slide off the edge.

The mind is like an etching. If you are Michelangelo, the etching will be a masterpiece. But for the rest of mankind, it is just a lump of gibberish, often a random work of the forces of nature, giving a beautiful formation of crystals on one side, while making it hard, rough and barren on the other. To grow crystals on the hard and rocky part because the direction of wind has changed is as difficult as trying to grow roses out of a bed of concrete.

Throwing out the old and embracing the new, as advertised by a lot of agencies was not appearing to be especially easy for Jim. Then he had his vision of himself too. He often gave up, and resigned himself as a failure. He thought that man had no right of forcing irrational dreams on innocent children, in the hope that some of them would flourish. What would happen to the rest? Are human beings really like cash crops, to be planted with the same ideas and fed with the same fertilisers? Are human beings really not human beings, contrary to what was being portrayed – that each individual human being is important and precious? Jim grappling with the contradictions of nature. He was really being pushed in the wrong direction. The wind that used to be on his back, was now on his face, making it dry and scaly, and giving it a terribly pale appearance.

Like Narcissus when he reached his demise, he did not feel special anymore. He only felt hatred for all those people in his childhood who had lied to him. All his experiments failed. All his hypotheses turned out wrong. All his good faith turned cold. All he acquired was wisdom and experience, and an extreme cynicism towards all kinds of ambitious philosophical goals for the human race and the individual.

All he felt was a shedding of a cloak, like the butterfly when it emerges from its pupa before flying off towards the Sun. He did not know where his flight would take him, or whether he would ever return to where he started from or just glide away into unknown space. He was, what they called in those paperback novels, ‘free’. He doubted it though, but now he knew one thing that he never understood before. He knew that the path of any man was like the flow of a river. Over its lifetime, it changed its course uncountable times, but in the end always met with the sea.