Where Are Our Stories of Defeat and Dust?

There was a time when I loved films and books that celebrated the ‘triumph of the human spirit’. This was before my cousin returned from Columbia after 7 years of struggle, suffering from a mental breakdown, overweight and dumped by her fiancé. This was before my husband was handed the pink slip 3 weeks after being awarded the company’s Quarterly Star award. Then, I didn’t know that no heartbreak on earth compares to the one you suffer when your child suffers her 1^st heartbreak; no shock as great as the one you encounter when your diseased heart refuses to beat according to a fixed rhythm.

Life as I’ve known it over the past decade has been a slowly accumulating debris of failures, thwarted hopes and faded dreams. About 4 years ago, a chance opportunity to relocate to the middle east seemed to be offering us a break from that monotonous run of disease, mediocrity and ordinariness dressed in fancy nurses, silver sedans and gated towers that characterizes middle-aged ennui and contentment. Several small and big changes were planned and for a fluttering 7-months or so, it all worked out beautifully. 

Till it didn’t one day. November 18, 2016.

Looking back on that morning, I am doubtless that it was a small catastrophe compared to the shit I’ve seen others stuck in. I acknowledge that it wasn’t anywhere close to the worst that can befall us. That came much before and taught us so much in its wake. What this did mark, however, was an irrevocable moment of defeat and its stolid acceptance by us.

Strive. Fail. Despair. Accept. Strive Again. Fail....

The sheer dichotomy that outlines what I see in the popular culture of my time and the reality of the lives of the people around me, is appalling. Suddenly, I’m left wondering -- where are the stories about the injured, the sick, the bipolar, the old, the 34-year old spinster who dreamed about being a bride since she first chanced upon her parents’ wedding album as a child, but is doomed to a life of loneliness and longing, writing mediocre rhymes that her friends Like on FB? Why aren’t there stories and posts about those whose lives aren’t a testament to the ‘triumph of the human spirit’? Sure, those tales will be morose, dark and scary. But wont they be authentic and closer to our shared humanity? Aren’t they worthy of being chronicled?

Why must we all Like and Comment on the endless fat-to-lean stories that proliferate social media? Who will write the story about that 32-year old girl whose eating disorder went out of control when she fell into a deep depression as her research funding was cancelled? Where is the story about the bright blind boy from Ajmer who was sent to a school for ‘special’ children and who slowly receded into a darkness far more potent than his visual impairment till he gradually stopped speaking? Ok, not so morose?

How about the homemaker from Jaipur who wanted to learn music all her life but was too busy to devote time for her hobby, and later found that when her son offered to enrol her for music classes on his visit home from Ontario, she had just lost interest.

You may say, I’m not a dreamer. You’d be right. I’m struggling to make sense and fit your shiny world where there is continuous adulation and celebration of the perfect, of victory, of shiny BMWs, 28-inch waists and lustrous hair, of IIT coaching and perfect 99% scores, of glass cabins, of the disabled who run marathons, and of the blind who write complex algorithms. I am protesting against the relentless Oprah-like glorification of the inexorable and commendable will to conquer obstacles. Because this relentlessness is based on a lie. The lie that hides the fact that the larger share of the pie belongs to those who have failed, whose scholarship didn’t work out, whose genius went unrecognized, whose weighing machine never reflected their efforts, who gave up.

Surely their stories matter, too?