The fan, the star and the hypocritical cycle

Have watched all of this guy's videos on Youtube!

I’m a fanboy. If I like someone, I can’t help but know everything about that person. It’s like an obsession. And yet, I can’t help but flinch at what fans do- they stand in lines to get autographs, they fight others if they diminish the image of their star, etcetera, etcetera. What kind of lame people are these? Don’t they have any self-respect? Why can’t they actually do something with their lives?

This is not a blog where I have realized which of these sides is right. I write this to acknowledge the hypocrisy. My hypocrisy. Where I can listen to all Thom Yorke interviews one day and silently mock the people who watch Salman Khan on Big Boss. And yet I feel proud- proud of having read all that Carl Sagan wrote, all Anurag Kashyap interviews, all Noam Chomsky lectures, all Cyrus Broacha books.

It is a vicious cycle. But in between the mocking and the following, I sometimes wonder what it must feel to be like these men. And in these moments of delusion, I wonder what Richard Feynman might say about my research. I wonder how Shoaib Akhtar might feel when he has a cricket ball in his hand. I wonder what words Gulzar may use to express an emotion. And then there are moments when you don’t have to juxtapose anymore. You are yourself. You are a scientist solving a problem, a writer penning his thoughts, a man throwing a ball. You are that and nothing else.

But is that really you? Or has your impersonation got so refined that it escapes detection? Perhaps the only way to answer this is to see if you can defend yourself against the point of view of the star you admire. If you can do that, you’ve become your own person, now capable of poking around with the workings of the world.

So perhaps, we have stars not really to be like them. They are there to inspire the others to become who they are by showing how they became themselves. I guess till we refrain from the "star-worship", there's nothing wrong with this hypocrisy.