Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Human missing from Superhuman

Most writers of fiction are nothing but liars, and that is an unimpeachable truth. For the sake of creating a super hero they kill the heroism... to create a superhuman they slaughter the human in it. Worst thing they start by hitting the young mind first.

Edgar Rice Burroughs creation Tarzan, is white man born in Africa and raised by apes but the truth is that white men born and bred in Africa tended to die of dengue fever, not swing through the trees on vines. A country filled with blacks...deep in the African jungles Viola he ends up with Jane a white woman... Tarzan might not have been such a superhuman if he was in the Sherwood Forest where antics of Robin hood still misguide the righteous.

Robin hood - a bandit... a robber; he is not a superhero because he worked hard and gave his money to poor... no my friends, he is hero because he stole from rich what was not his and gave a fraction to the poor just enough to keep them cribbing and not find work... rest he and his merry men spent on late night jungle parties.

The written word abounds with similar outrageous verisimilitude. There was no Flash Gordon and Fantastic Four where snobbish socialites. James Bond - man with license to kill slept with all the woman he came across and used his license at will. Hercule Poirot never solved a crossword puzzle and never caught the criminal before the crime was committed. Clark Kent a.k.a Superman... Peter parker or Bruce Wayne of Gotham city...they patrolled the city where the common man was a non entity... citizens were crippled morons defenceless against anything and everything. To give them their superhuman image city and its citizens were stripped of their human persona.

King Arthur never pulled a sword from a stone, Cinderella didn't have dainty feet and Mrs Robinson loathed younger men. There is no monolith on the moon; time didn't forget any land and nothing happened in a galaxy far far away. Count Dracula was a drunkard who didn’t give damn about wine or blood in his goblet.

I like Sherlock Holmes though, the master detective. Pipe smoker, cocaine user, a violinist who never married but got fooled by a woman once and couldn’t solve the crime of the Century –“Jack the Ripper”. No wonder he had such a human touch that people kept sending mails to 221B Baker Street even after a decade his character stopped appearing on book stands.

What was wrong with our authors that they had to tell such lies? Was there something lacking in their lives, that they felt such a need to pervert the truth? What went wrong with us? Why we never stopped our kids from reading Tarzan or Spider man comics???

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

WHY R U SO WEIRDO???

Anonymous said...

very interesting!!! keep it up Imran

Danish