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MEASURE OF SUCCESS
"It is over", he said. Having said that, all the people in his country began weeping. "Apu," they cried, "do not leave us. We do not know what to do and think without you. You are our hero, our greatest writer, our greatest leader, our greatest philosopher..." "Enough idiots!" his voice thundered, his hands pressed against his ears. "Enough of your empty accolades and praises. Stop speaking to me all you without limbs and backbones. Let me not hear another word from any of you again." He slammed his door. He would not let anyone near him again. His people became suspicious he lost his mind. He did not lose his mind. He simply wanted to understand what he had done. He stood by the window overlooking his city, his country. He stood with his jaw pressed against the steel frame of the window, a window through which his house had been burglarized a thousand times, a window whose memory recalls nothing but the slow disintegration of his land and people. Every person is poor, all the people are divided, there is no sanitation, the bridges have long been beyond repair, the fish in ponds have carried poisons to the brains of his people, and the poison is reflected by their weak thinking. Every action in his country is suspected : a kind action is ridiculed, an attempt at any reform is not guaranteed, the only thing sure is the unsure-ness of things. But why, he cried, why did it all come to this? He is considered the greatest in his country. He made sure that only He could produce the best results. When he was faced by his political enemies, he wiped them out with his vicious words, tore them into pieces until they could not stand on equal footing against him. His enemies fought him every other way - they tried to kill him. But in discovering their plots, he made them kill each others. He wrote his daily newspaper columns that suspected everyman in his country - everyone is suspect of wrong-doing, he claimed - and the people listened to his logic and perfect use of words. His influence was so great his people thought and wrote the way he did. To the people, everybody, whether a politician, a businessman, a student, a parent, a priest, Catholic, Muslim, a writer, a reader, everybody - could not do anything good because he is a suspect of wrong-doing. His philosophy was to downgrade everyone. After all, to smell good, all you need is to make everyone smell bad. To be superior, all you need to do is to humiliate everyone. It is a simple philosophy. So simple it made him the best-smelling and most superior human being in his country. And everyone, except him, became a failure. And failure became his country. At the end of his life, he was the most beloved in a country of crooks. He could not walk around without fear of being assassinated by his political enemies. His house had the most sophisticated security system because his neighbors became so poor they turned into robberies and kidnappings. He had written his great ideas which could not be read by his increasingly illiterate nation. He was considered the greatest because he killed all those who believed otherwise. He was the greatest philosopher in a country that could no longer think. On the night of his death, he measured his success. "It is over," he said.
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Volume 1 |
Alex Maskara |