Superlife

Quick quiz. Have you heard these before?

It's human to err.

Only human after all.

Human weakness, vulnerability.

The first one, we've been hearing since we were kids. The divinity of forgiveness might have been forgotten, but our errant humanity was branded into our impressionable minds.

The second one, the agent stands above a fallen Neo (bullet motion showed us a flailing Neo desperately avoid a stream of accomodatingly slow bullets before he ends up flat on his back with two creases and a sore bottom.) Trinity comes to the rescue, but the dialogue remains. Only human after all.

The third stands for all the excuses we make. Human error. The phrase condemns mankind to the land of the inferior. The weak. The errant.

Cast out from paradise to grovel on an earthly limbo two sins from hell, such is man's plight. Thus we've been told. We're flawed (the bible says so), clad in a filthy body (no less than a mobile toilet, Swami Vivekananda said), living our life in penance for sins commited long before we were born (the Hindu cyclical path towards salvation). We're only human. We're damned before we're born. Point made. Scylla is done. Let's move on to Charybdis.

Noticed a surge in superhero movies off late? They're getting bigger, better and more real. The fan base is growing (the Dark Knight ruled the IMDB charts at # 1 before the purists came out in hordes to pull it down to a more digestable 7 or 8.) The heroes are more vulnerable and yet more powerful (Spidey pouts, mopes and cries and yet manages to kick Venom's and the Sandman's collective derriere.) The effects are cooler and more breathtaking (didn't you cheer when Ironman tried on his red and gold suit for the first time?) The villains are more real too and yet so much more lethal (Heath Ledger's Joker... need I say more?) We're living in the golden age of superhero movies.

Is it just movies? Let's take books. Tolkien wrote the Lord of the Rings in the 1940s. But did any of us hear about it till the 1990s? Actually, most of us woke up to it in the new millennium, when the first movie came out. But now, everyone has read it. Look at the other books... the stupendous success of the Harry Potter series, the proliferation of hundreds of high fantasy series written by the Terrys, the Davids and the others, and of course, the elevation of the comic to the status of a collectible, with superheroes having their adventures chronicled in glossy high-detail art.

So is it just the books and the movies? Take video games. Take new age urban pursuits like free-running. Take the sheer variety and insanity of extreme sports these days. Take the conspiracy theories that do the virtual rounds and how all of them have the concept of a corrupt system and a chosen one. The collective imagination of the thinking tenth of the human species seems to be thirsting for a release from reality, from mundane inanity, from the plight of being only human.

What is it that we're looking for? Few know the answer. But apparently a lot many of us are looking. While we're at it, we indulge the itch with flights of fancy. We discard our human limitations as our imaginations soar with caped crusaders. We escape this crippling reality for a Neverland that entices us with a better reality, with a kind of superlife. But we do not recognize the symptoms. What our very core seems to be crying for is a release... from all that we do (and the superheroes don't). Think about it. what's the superlife you're itching for? How possible is it? How far are you from it? What are you doing to get there?

You could think about it. Or you could just go catch the latest escape from reality (X-Men? Terminator? Transformers?) Indulge the itch. Let your favourite superhero live the superlife. You can watch in the wings and applaud.

So... What are YOU going to do?

Cogito Ergo Finito