MISTAKEN HEROES AND THE GET RICH QUICK SYNDROME

A society is often defined by its heroes. People admire them, fans worship them, writers eulogize them, bards and poets immortalize them and they are presented larger than life so that the younger generation can be inspired by them and aspire to be like them. This has been so historically and so we had a generation being inspired by Netaji Subhash Bose, Bhagat Singh and Chandra Shekhar Azad. This led to our independence! Then our requirements changed and the independent but horribly poor nation needed to be self reliant in food and come out of the PL 480 stigma. This era produced Prof. M.S. Swaminathan and Dr. Varghese Kurian, the father of green and white revolution respectively. Meanwhile we had a road bump – the Indo-China war and the hurt and disgraced nation needed heroes like Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw, Marshal of the Air Arjun Singh and Param Veer Chakra Abdul Hameed to tide us over the setback and establish our military supremacy. Then came the era of Captain Rakesh Sharma who when asked by Smt Indira Gandhi how India looked from outer space said those historic words “Saare jahan se accha!” and set us in the scientific path of space research. Our generation and the generation before that had clear concept of heroism and that did not clash with what we read in our schools about heroes like Shivaji, Maharana Pratap and Gandhi. Values were important but material worth was not even mentioned. Then things changed.

Angry heroes appeared on the silver screen and real life who were prepared to do anything to earn a lot of money to take revenge against the traditional exploiters. Anti heroes like Haji Mastan was immortalized on the silver screen and his rise was justified! The real world too had many such anti heroes like Ketan Parekh and Harshad Mehta, who became trail blazers, and though eventually the good triumphed over the bad, people like them were never short of admirers! They introduced the ‘get rich soon syndrome’ and were the new heroes.

Today things have progressed further and the society and the social media are making heroes out of not so deserving persons. In the age of 24 X 7 news channel and competing TRPs whoever sells valuable prime time news becomes a hero! When an Indrani Mukherjee or an Afzal Guru gets so much media attention, the impressionable youth cannot be blamed for mistaking them as heroes and heroines. We do not talk about the jawans who die in the inhospitable terrains of Siachin, we do not write about the policemen who are burnt in Malda, but we make a hero out petty pseudo-students and would be politicians…..that is the irony of the day! Think how much airtime was given to the martyr Hemant Karkare and how much of news deluge was there for the terrorist Kasab and you will realize that though unwittingly, but the wrong guy is being presented as a hero.

There is another totally different dimension to this problem of mistaken heroes and is especially acute among young people, especially the youth in today’s inter-connected, hyperventilating world. The social media today has taken the peer comparison game to whole new levels. Stories of starting from modest background, struggling against all odds and eventually becoming triumphant do not inspire anyone in today’s world. It is not respect, not bravery, not effort, not talent but money which has become the only currency of triumph and the only criteria of success. A poor school teacher, who shapes the destiny of the nation, because he has remained poor since ages, is not a role model for the youth. However, his rich cousin with a fancy coaching centre in the city, churning out unemployable degree holders has many admirers. Easy money and quick gratification has seeped into our psyche and today we are admiring money and not talents. Parents want their children to become Sachin Tendulkar not because he is the God of cricket but because he is very rich!

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Our children want to get out of university with superb grades, breeze through that necessary evil that is internship or apprenticeship and land a plum job in a prestigious organization. Do I have to mention the expansive home, the ritziest car, trips to exotic destinations abroad and excellent in-laws – that is, if one decide to drop the badge of ‘sexy, bad playboy’ or ‘high octane, classy, choosy, upwardly mobile lady’ – and get married. And if all these happen before you turn 35? Excellent!

The reality couldn’t be drabber. What is more likely to happen is get average or slightly above average grades, get a few knocks before the clarion call comes calling, work one’s ass off and maybe, just maybe land that fancy job title – and that’s just the beginning of one's professional slavery. As for the home, car, accolades, peaceful in-laws and that trip to London, all that will also happen but that will take time. How’s that for reality? Now add to it corruption in public life, abysmal educational performance, dilapidated infrastructure and the rise in expectations of friends and family. So is early gratification possible? Can one cut through all the shackles and obstacles of the society and transport oneself into the life in the fast track? Yes one can …..by money. And if one does not have that money then what does one do? Do something that brings quick money and early gratification. And what is that something, no prizes for guessing - it is crime and notoriety.

It is the desire for instant reward that drives a contractor to inflate rates, a public official to make a false declaration, or ‘sit’ on a file and delay the implementation of a policy move until he/she receives a kickback, a traffic official to detain you for committing a traffic offence, until of course, you produce the customary bribe or political outfits indulge in huge scams. And if by foul and fouler means one is successful, one becomes a poster boy for the social and news media, a king of good times and a role model for the impressionable youth! How about 

The tragedy is that desperately in search of instant gratification; we are losing the real plot of growth and development of individuals, families, society and the nation which comes from a phase of constant back breaking effort and eventually a delayed gratification. Delayed gratification, in the simplest terms possible, is associated with resisting a smaller but more immediate reward in order to receive a larger or more enduring reward later. But the idea of waiting for a good job, earned through working from the bottom up, frequently upsets and frustrates emerging adults in today’s society.

Don’t get me wrong friends. I am not asking you to stop dreaming big. Do so by all means but put in matching efforts and give some time for the tree of success to grow and bear fruits. By deciding to dwindle your expectations of instant gratification a little bit may not be the silver bullet that jump starts an accelerated push toward a better state of well-being for India but it will at least nudge us in that direction. All of us cannot keep ‘hustling’ our way to individual prosperity without taking the nation along. The nation will have to prosper and our poor will have to come out of poverty. If we keep up with this present national attitude of instant gratification there will be only one casualty – India.