Amitabh Bachchan v/s Jim Morrison

I grew up watching Bollywood with a huge influence of Mr Amitabh B. The test of memory as a kid was how many dialogues I could remember of AB Sr. One dialogue that had a huge impact on me and my generation was ‘Mard ko dard nahi hota’. Whenever I got hurt and use to whine in pain I always doubted my own manliness because of this super dialogue from my superstar. I felt obligated towards this landmark dialogue. The heroes of my earlier years were all strong, matured, right, ethical, super understanding, sacrificing etc. The hero would take care of their parents, protect the sister, won’t cheat on the heroine, eliminate the anti-socials, give justice to the poor, robin hood types and the list goes on. There wasn’t anything wrong in them. Eventually with a trend of women-oriented movies coming up even the heroines started displaying strength, maturity and a sense of righteousness through their characters. Everything seemed to be so ideal where the heroes and heroines just didn’t have any shortcomings. The landmark dialogue then became applicable to the female fraternity as well. A hero would bear 6 bullets and still keep fighting whereas the villain would breathe last even with one bullet. All because our heroes were meant to be strong.

I was actually growing up with these folks who were apparently ideals, too much of pressure matching up to them. We were all growing getting trained to be right, perfect and strong.

While we were departing from college we had sessions on the tricks to crack job interviews. One of the usual questions asked during interviews of those days was to give out 3 strengths and 3 weaknesses. The trainer told us that while your strengths should always be outstanding, even the weaknesses that you share should be camouflaged strengths. In short even the weaknesses that we mention should indirectly sound like strengths. It was all about strengths, ethics and giving all right answers. That clearly meant that for getting a good job, I needed to have lot of strengths, even my weaknesses had to sound like strengths, everything had to be right with lot of maturity.

The same era had one more unconventional guy named Jim Morrison, the lead singer of The Doors. A singer, songwriter, poet, the lizard king. He led a controversial life and had a mysterious death at the age of 27. Had he been alive today, he would have been almost the same age of Mr. Bachchan.

One of his famous quotes said “People are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings most of all. People talk about how great love is, but that’s bullshit. Love hurts. Feelings are disturbing. People are taught that pain is evil and dangerous. How can they deal with love if they’re afraid to feel? Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But they’re wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It’s all in how you carry it. That’s what matters. Pain is a feeling. Your feelings are a part of you. Your own reality. If you feel ashamed of them, and hide them, you’re letting society destroy your reality. You should stand up for your right to feel your pain.” It was a good read of those days but somehow Jim would come across as a loser in front of the iconic Mr. Bachchan. As a youth even I resorted to AB Sr. as been strong seemed to more lucrative.

It took me almost a decade to understand what Jim was trying to say through his quotes and now after getting exhausted living Mr Bachchan I feel Jim Morrison made lot of sense.

We always want to project to others, a side which is right, perfect, strong, kind, and ethical. In case we are passing through a rough patch, instead of dealing with it we prefer distracting ourselves or disconnecting ourselves from all.

I was reading a blog on how a woman did a personal makeover, went on a world tour, joined the gym, started partying hard and indulged in retail therapies just to deal with her depression. The comments on that blog were all praises on how the woman had bounced back strongly from her depression.  A thought to ponder, was she really dealing with her reason for depression or was just distracting herself. While we think that we have bounced back the fact remains that we just keep distracting ourselves.

We keep treating the symptoms and conveniently ignore addressing the root cause because Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota. We keep distracting ourselves, we keep running away from our predicaments eventually resulting in things getting more compounded and complicated leading to people taking unwanted and undesired steps in life. The little demons turn into dangerous monsters. And all this because we don’t want to accept that there is something going wrong.

People enjoy self-pride in been strong, right, kind and ethical without realising that the actual strength lies in understanding, accepting and dealing with our short-comings and bad situations.

 One of my favourite villains Joker (batman villain) says “Give a man a mask and he will show you his true face”. It actually makes lot of sense as we all are bogged down by too much social obligations resulting in us losing our genuineness. It’s ok to have a bad phase in life, its ok not to have a happening life, its ok to have had a bad relation, its ok to have lost some reputation, its ok to be unsuccessful, its ok to be selfish, wrong, unethical at times. People who love you would anyways love you; rather the advantage here is you may get rid of all the hypocrites from your life.  As someone rightly said that “just one hole in my pocket and I ended up losing more relations than coins”.

As we start the New Year, may we all experience freedom from self-imposed compulsion of been right and strong always.

Happy New Year to all.