Legacy

In the US, you can’t be President for more than two terms. And so, towards the end of the second term, every US President starts focusing on his “legacy”, or what posterity will remember him for (if at all). Thus, they try and do something grand, and something visible globally.

Obama, of course, won the Nobel Peace Prize right after becoming President simply because for not being George W. Bush. Obama knew how ridiculous that prize was and so rightly doesn’t that count that as his legacy. Instead, his attempt at leaving a legacy seems to be to change the US’s equation with its long term enemies. First Cuba, and now Iran. And in Iran’s case, if he has indeed succeeded in setting a system in place to prevent them from going nuclear, that would be a huge bonus (at least from an American perspective).

Such attempts at creating a legacy makes sense for a US President. After all, it’s not like he will do much else after his second term, right? Except if he is Jimmy Carter. Carter went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize decades after leaving the White House. But that’s very difficult and hence very rare.

For the rest of us mere mortals, Alex Balk says “Don’t even bother”. The longer version I’ll quote it in its entirety because of how caustic yet well written it is:
“When you look back at your past you see mostly the sorry parts and bad decisions. After a certain age these mount to an almost intolerable level not just because there are so many more of them but because you realize that with the finite amount of time you have left and your inability to do anything right they will become the bulk of your legacy in life, to the extent that you will have any legacy in life. (Knowing that there is actually no such thing as a legacy in life and that all eventually comes to dust should, in theory, make the terrible things you’ve done and the awful amount of time you’ve wasted somehow feel less soul-crushing, but theory only counts in particle physics and social justice warrioring.) If you started to draw up a list of your disappointments you might never be fully finished, and the idea of even ranking them seems overwhelming when you consider just how horrible all the things that have happened to and because of you really are, but that doesn’t mean that someone else can’t give it a go. How many of these disappointments are on your own personal list? Tell us on social media or whatever!”
I loved the ending: where else but Facebook or Twitter can all that drivel end up?!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more