Let time be your judge
He who always ran a tight ship did so as he saw ahead, he who couldn't care less did so as he couldn't see beyond an hour, he who sings of fear and trembling sings so as time has already judged him.
Usually, stories of doom, death, disgrace and decline are told to justify such titles but the Joker stands out as an example whose character ages rather gracefully.
The most powerful scene for me from any movie is the ending of Mera Naam Joker. In his last performance, the old Joker thanks his audience over all those years, and we get a close-up of 5 aged faces, Meenu, Rajendra, David, Mary, and Marina. All of them are closely related to the Joker. But somehow the scene is full of irony and discomfort, on the stage stands the old-poor-ill-lonely joker at the end of his life, soon to be forgotten, amongst the audience sit the famed actor Rajendra and his actress Meenu, David and Mary share decades of wonderful journey together and Marina is as youthful as ever but somehow Joker towers over all of them combined. Why?
I have been wondering over this irony since 7 years, the answer is because our Joker passes the test of time thrice with flying colors, while David, Mary and Marina are not tested by time as per the script, Rajendra and Meenu are tested once and they fail miserably. It is well to live a meaningful, holistic and expressive life but it is quite difficult to live a life that stands the test of time.
While it is not in our total control to have a meaningful, holistic and expressive life, it is definitely in our hand to try to make choices that stand the test of time. In fact, that’s how I see my freewill, it is not in doing what I want to do, it is in making the right choices at right time. If you’re of my age, you will mostly be able to relate to the rare beauty of how passage of time validates your decisions, sacrifices, struggles, and also the common horror of it invalidating your obsessions over that which is not your own, ignoring that which is your own, getting blinded by arrogance and self-satisfaction, smallness of your mind, laziness, inaction etc.
But how to stand the test of time? The self-fulfilling way is to be prescient and see the future but that’s not possible as per current science. Let us then assume that time is generous and if you make the best possible effort to stand the test of time, you are deemed to have stood the test of time. With this assumption, how can we then achieve prescience?
1. If you’re doing something that others have done before you:
You can emulate prescience by getting your actions vetted by those who came before you; you cannot see your future, but they might be able to.
2. But if you’re doing things differently or ground reality has changed:
Their evaluation may be outdated. In this case, you can listen to the successful and unsuccessful experiences and judge for yourself how a failure (more likely) and success would look like; this is harder as you have to prepare to make the right choices for both cases.
3. If you’re doing something entirely new with no precedent:
Embrace logic - if your actions follow from logic, it doesn’t matter how time judges you because logic is above any judge. However, embracing logic is by itself a Herculean task, this requires courage, open-mindedness, intelligence and experience, and unfortunately, is much more difficult than 1 or 2. But this is also most graceful. Imagine that IIT tag which you still hold on to so proudly like a loser, but you’re not going to need it anymore for a job, you’re not going for higher studies either so its completely useless but why are you holding onto that which is useless? Logic dictates if it is not helpful, it is harmful, so free up your mind and embrace your mediocrity for logic says प्रकट जिसका यूँ हुआ प्रभात, देख अब तू उस दिन की रात.
4. (Most common) If you don’t even know what you’re doing or supposed to do:
Use imagination to see yourself as the judge: Imagine being disappointed by your present mindset because your expectations are unmet, logic dictates that you either give up your expectations or give up your mindset. Then what are you waiting for? Logic has spoken, this is the promise of South Bengaluru after all, come unto it after giving up everything worth giving up, and it will give you everything ever worth having.
Imagine obsessing over an idea or a person not worth obsessing over and then just imagine now looking back 50 years on, if it was worth doing it. Write weekly assessments of your short life as if this were the last week. Try to develop that ability to imagine the future and be the judge. While it is very painful to write such an assessment, I will write one for myself:
This creature, while given one of the best opportunities on this planet, mostly struggled to produce anything, living or dead, worth remembering. Owing to his mental and moral weaknesses, he would waste a decade of opportunities after opportunities to be the beloved of the beloved of his Lord. Too weak to make choices and decisions, even at rare times of making a delayed choice, he would almost always obsess with wrong and inferior ideas, wrong (To his credit, not bad) and underwhelming people. While he would sometimes show remarkable use of logic, subsequent actions would hardly follow from that logic. A hallmark of his thought would be a constant referral to some glorious, imaginary past. It is not difficult to imagine the world as if he never existed for such a world would be mostly the same. The only positive trait of this creature, that it would share from the lowest insect to the fullest man, is an ardent desire to survive and he must get due credit for prolonging himself out of fear for as long as possible.