Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Wishing It Was Different...

the words i'm going to put before you aren't my words. but they are.

read on.

"anyone subject to the madness and distortion fame brings with it is less likely to yearn for someone to write a controlled, sanitised account of their life than you might imagine. why bother, if the result is planned from the start to be only one further twisting of their reality, another funhouse mirror, even when it is one constructed to flatter them? for most subjects, the appeal of being benevolently misrepresented quickly pales, because it offers no real antidote to the slush of nonsense, half-truths, carelessness, lies and misunderstanding that surrounds them. often, after a while, they hanker instead for silence, or some truth.

it's not even necessarily that they want, or expect, most people to understand their life and its strange predicaments; it is perhaps just that it would be nice for there to be something reliable and honest from which anyone who truly cared to could form an accurate opinion. i think people who are famous and over-examined often just also want to see some truth about themselves simply for themselves so that for once, when they see or hear themselves reflected back in their own direction, they can at least recognise some of what they see or hear. in this respect, being famous is perhaps like being in a canyon with an unreliable echo: whenever you shout, the echo you hear is of the same voice but different words, or the same words but a different voice. sometimes it would be nice just to hear something you recognise as yourself...

i think that in the long run, it's the little lies that somehow do more damage, because you're defenceless against them. these aren't the grand libels and slanders. they're the tiny untruths, the endless small misstatements of where you were and what you did and why you did it and what happened and who you are. if you try to point out a little lie, no one usually listens and, if they do, often they'll think you mad for making a fuss about something so unimportant. they are the grains of sand eroding a building; if you live inside its walls for a lifetime, you see the destruction they cause, but to everyone else they're just dust in the air. but these are the lies that tell the person being lied about that everything they believe is subtly wrong; it is the little lies that can, in the long run, undermine your faith in reality and your relationship with the outside world.to be famous in the twenty-first century is to pelted with little lies, day after day. to be famous in the twenty-first century is to find yourself trapped as a character in a book with an unreliable narrator, forever trying to shout from the pages to explain how it really was. how could you not sometimes wish for it to be different?"

I'm not sure if there's a point to this story but I'm going to tell it again.

My photo
India
I've been wilfully caught up in the self-defeating quest to get to know myself for years. I've never expected anything beneficial to result from such a quest. I tend to evoke extremely polarised reactions from people I get to know in passing. Consequently, only those people who know me inside-out would honestly claim that I'm a person who's just "alright." It's not a coincidence that the description I've laid out above has no fewer than, title included, eleven references to me (make that twelve). I'm affectionately referred to as "Ego." I think that last statement might have given away a tad too much. Welcome Aboard.

IHTRTRS ke pichle episode mein aapne dekha...

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