Shaky Pedestals

As a kid, I have idolised a lot of people - friends, teachers, acquaintances, family, celebrities! I am sure so have you. All of us do.

I have adored them, looked upto them in awe. I have loved them with all my heart, treated them with all due respect, whole heartedly learnt the lessons of life from their experiences, channelled my decisions based on their advises, built a world of my own with them as foundations. I had placed them on pedestals.

As I wade through my routine, trying to make way, reality bites! My idols are humans. Their divine attributes have withered away with time. When I say human, it is not in a derogatory sense, but in an ordinary sense - a concoction of positive and negative attributes - love, generosity, care, selflessness, jealousy, greed, callousness, lust ! Time and again, these concoctions precipitate any one of these attributes. As an adult, I have seen the negative emotions in my idols even! It was traumatising, painful- it threatened the very foundations of my moral sense. My idols were not supposed to err! But they did! My idols were human after all.
A precipitate that makes its appearance very often is "envy". I have seen its ugly green hue stain the white souls of my idols many a time - when they deliberately forgot to compliment someone on their exquisite new piece of jewellery, when they conveniently missed enquiring about the well being of a young relative on a business trip overseas, when they cut off casual queries with rude remarks, when they refused to join in and co-operate, when they opted to sit aloof and disinterested, when they pointed fingers for the sake of doing so, when they talked behind people's back, when they accused wrongly, when they sniggered and forgot to smile, when they smirked and forgot to empathise, when they refused to help subtly, when they disregarded the obvious, when they set their priorities incorrectly.

Today, my pedestals are all shaky. The grumble of baseless foundations trying to hold their stance to evade the eventuality of coming down altogether is a sight difficult to digest. A part of me wants to look up to the idols still and cant bear having to looking down on them. I look away most of the time. Unfortunately, some of them have already fallen apart, shattered and scattered all over the ground. I have to learn to look them in the eye, see eye to eye and make amends. I guess its all a part of growing up.