heroes

I like them fallible…if they weren’t they would be gods.

And that’s not something I can readily relate to.

By an incredible process of retrospection, in my case getting hammered and get screamed at by a mean and vicious alter ego, I managed to figure out that I have always managed to be devoted to the "almost but not quite" variety.

Let me explain

Boyhood cricket idol: Sanjay Manjrekar. Sanjay Manjrekar????? Who the hell has this guy as a hero? He was preceded and followed by genius of once in a lifetime proportions (we all know who they are don’t we?).

Boyhood tennis idol: Ivan Lendl. Do I need to say more?

Boyhood superhero idol: Captain America. Forget the fact that this guy couldn’t fly or vault over 20 storey buildings but he probably had to flag down a cab to get home. Now how cool is that?

And this pretty much continues….I support Honda in Formula 1.

The whole process of fantasizing about being a hero is that you get to be things you can never be. To bask in the reflected glory of a true blue star. To fight with cretins who imagined that their hero could have five of yours for breakfast without even waking up.

Aha that last sentence pretty much gives it away. It’s this masochistic ability of mine to get pummeled over the losers I supported which I imagined (or so I thought) set apart the people in the know as opposed to the abovementioned cretins. This smug feeling of a supposed higher level of thinking gave me the moral victory.

In retrospect I should have just hung up that damn poster of Viv Richards in my room and saved myself years of screaming matches.

But it wouldn’t have been as much fun would it? Gods are no fun….my heroes on the other hand gave me years of feeling wronged by the naysayers….