When we are small, we tend to be fascinated by stories. Our little eyes and ears don’t really look for the end game. We don’t probe around for the agenda either; we stay glued to the narrative. A story is a story and we just enjoy getting lost in a different world, a world different from ours, a world that is clearly more action-packed and interesting. These stories become our introduction into the concept of fantasy: a place with no limits. However, the problem with most stories from our childhood is they are devoid of nuances. Almost everything is painted black and white, with little to no scope for background checks. One side is the force of good and the other side is the harbinger of evil. There is no middle ground in such stark stories.
Speaking of which, have you noticed how Indian cinema, Bollywood in particular, continued with fantasy, for decades? It’s only recently that we’ve started witnessing ‘real’ stories. From the 1960s onwards, Hindi movies were a laboratory of make-believe worlds, where things are never functioning the way they should. A world where the hero has to fight like Bruce Lee, and the heroine has no financial independence, and the society has faux morality, and the mores are never in favour of the good guys, and the police always arrive late, and there is too much iniquity meted out per minute ratio. By the time the credit rolls, you are genuinely relieved.
In real life, none of these repetitive factors are prevalent. In fact, it was the exact opposite for the most part. But then, what is a story if it doesn’t have the liberty to be false? So much so, when we reached the sizzling underworld-aided romance of the ‘80s, even our love stories were fantastical: in a country where arranged marriages enjoy 99% hold, this was a given. When you are not even allowed to choose your life partner, even a basic love story becomes a symptom of revolt.
Our thorough understanding, or should I say, initiation into enlightenment, occurs somewhere in between of these two extremes. A tale heard during childhood or a book read during pre-puberty or a movie watched in your adolescence have equal bearing on your adulthood. We like to assume that works of art and literature merely exist for entertainment, when this belief can’t be further from the truth. What we consume shapes us. It’s like drip irrigation but for our mind. How we think and speak, how we react to a given situation/problem must have some hook in our taste for leisure.
No wonder we act like we are above stories but we are exactly that. Call it whatever you like—gossip, facts, information, data, stats, news—at the end of the day, we are consuming nothing but stories. Even a so-called introvert is loudly seeking stories inside his skull. In a way, it’s a cannibalistic world of stories. We are stories, waiting for other stories to enthral us. Oh, and it’s an endless parade rooted in the deepest of our curiosities. Human consciousness can’t stimulate itself; it requires sagas and dramas and histories of the highest order. It doesn’t even matter whether any of these actually happened. Who cares? As long as we believe they happened, that’s all that matters. We feed ourselves those stories to keep ourselves relevant, just like the stories we tell others about us.
This brings us to the epics. For the sake of illustrative definition, an epic is like a Titanic that refuses to sink. At the same time, it’s a leviathan that only grows stronger with time. Regardless of how polished and primped and proper you get, irrespective of how advanced your technological levers reach, please remember that epics like Mahabharata, Ramayana, Gesar, Iliad, Odyssey, Beowulf and ilk won’t leave your back. They are there to remind us that we are stuck in a cycle and there is hardly any escape. The techbros use the word ‘simulation’ because vocabulary grants us the euphemism we think our species deserve.
In all the epics from all around the globe, one event is constant: conflicts exist for people to move on in life, not to hold themselves back to their past. When the 18 Day War ended, Yuddhistra was the saddest man on the battlefield. He remained depressed for the next 36 years. When Sita left behind Rama, she was completing the arc of returning to the very land she came from, leaving behind a dedicated husband to raise their twins. Despite being a mortal god, he neither stops her nor marries again. As she leaves, he smiles at her with tears in his eyes, knowing very well that not all love stories end with wrinkles. The Tibetan legend Gesar prods you to be a hero of your own story, to never accept your defeat, and to keep trying until you can. Iliad and Odyssey are riddled with so many humane themes—with twists and turns GoT fans can only dream of—that it’s impossible to preclude them from European culture today.
We can go on and on about epics and how they remain effortlessly timeless, but it’s imperative for the upcoming generations to underscore one element more than anything: change can’t be changed. When those Kindles took over, we immediately predicted the downfall of books. Poor super-thin wooden thing. We didn’t realize that books were just a medium for the stories to reach us. We simply overlooked the key to this equation: our desire to read. And today, reading is one of the biggest human activities. Humans are reading more than ever before. Just that most of us do it on our screens, scrolling endlessly, looking for stories to keep us amused. We don’t flick pages with our saliva anymore. We just keep fingering up our smartphones. Yes, we don’t spend hours in libraries but we are constantly prowling for words and—yes, you guessed it right, my darlings—stories.
Whenever humans run out of ideas, they will look back at the epics to re-energize their imagination. Take Hollywood, for instance. Yes, Martin Scorsese won’t like it because he is hung-up on content (and rightly so). Yet, if you dig deeper, you’d clearly notice that commercial superhero franchises suckle on the teats of Marvel and DC comics. Their universe exists only because some nameless writers thought of creating new epics in the previous century. But at the end of the day, all epics are not-so-innocent stories. Nothing more. Nothing else. Stories of you and me wanting to break free from the cycle.
Every human is a story.