Manu Joseph: Why people take pride in the achievements of others for truly odd reasons

It is a connection I made because I remember trivial things from childhood. Usually, people don’t remember much of their past, so I thought that no one else in my class knew of their Vijay connection.

I have only three recollections of him. His head made quick bird-like movements on a long neck, and he could run very fast. He left school the next year, but I saw him in church one Sunday.

I was surprised he was Christian, and also that he was rich. I was seeing him in something other than school uniform for the first time, and he was probably wearing a coat or something I only remember as too fancy for us, and he was with his mother who appeared distinguished. It was unusual for a woman to sit on the last bench in church because women usually didn’t leave mass midway, but there she was with her son. Maybe they wanted to be discreet because they were important.

Vijay would say something to his mother and they would laugh. We presumed they were laughing at us. I forgot all about him until a decade later when he would gain fame as an actor.

After Vijay’s spectacular debut in politics, my class WhatsApp group, of which Vijay is not a part of course, erupted in joy. Turns out they have known for a while, somehow, and for that reason they are proud of him.

Proxy pride is a puzzling human quality. Why are my classmates proud of Vijay? They have certainly not contributed to his success. They don’t share the same genes, and even if they do, that says nothing about their prospects or capacity. It is the same inane pride that the mainstream Indian media has in “people of Indian origin,” which is a daft description of a group of humans. Just because someone is one of us, why must we be proud?

Yet, my classmates are more proud of him than they are of themselves, even though many of them have been far more successful than him in my measure. They made it against extreme odds. They were from modest homes. Their failure “in life” was a daily prognosis of Loyola School, which sounds important but is a small establishment.

As irrational as community pride is a more powerful kind of pride: that of an individual in his own success. That requires one to be blind to the outsized role that luck plays.

Consider Vijay, whose success represents the decisive nature of a head-start. His father was an established filmmaker who planned his son’s career. That’s all there is to that story. Surely, there were other filmmakers who had sons, whose careers were planned, but no one achieved Vijay’s extraordinary success.

I do not say Vijay did not have to compete. Surely, there were 50 other boys who were all groomed to become Tamil superstars, who had the perfect physical ordinariness that Tamilians loved in their male stars. All I say is that Vijay had to compete with just a few lucky rivals, while the rest of the men who may have wanted to become actors had no path.

So what exactly is the pride of my classmates about? That Vijay was lucky? That a guy who got a good head-start went on to make the most of his luck? This makes sense. One way or another, what people celebrate in others is luck. It is never named, never recognized, but it is luck that people admire. People call luck by other names, more admirable things that can be imitated and achieved, like talent, because it is bizarre to be in awe of a person who has merely won a lottery.

I looked for envy in my classmates, which is a far more potent emotion than proxy pride. For envy is a signal that one considers himself an equal to a person who got lucky, it is a thing between equals. But I couldn’t sense it; it was as though they had long conceded that they might consider Vijay one of their own only to adore him with pride, but they don’t fully believe they fit in the same room anymore.

What about me? I don’t envy Vijay for being a Tamil superstar because I have no interest anymore in being a superstar, though I would have loved to have a shot at being Tamil Nadu’s chief minister. I have all the solutions.

So what is it that I feel? If not proxy pride in the luck of a classmate or envy. I realize that if a superstar who can defeat both the main Dravidian parties in a single election was once in your class, it still need not mean anything to you, and that is fine.

Vijay’s childhood is from a time when the rich and the poor went to the same school. We also watched the same television shows and films. Children of scholars sat on the same benches as the children of illiterate parents. Some of my classmates were from homes where both parents were illiterate and they had absolutely no idea how to make it through school. In response, the school beat them up mercilessly for not appearing literate.

There were close to 80 of us in the third standard. Then, as India began to prosper, better schools grew in number and one by one, my classmates left, like Vijay.

By the time we reached the 12th standard, there were only 16 of us left in class. India had transformed. Thousands of children were in famous schools, preparing for their future. Those who were not seemed fated to lives of poverty. But somehow we, too, made it. We, too, got lucky, except four who died. This is an extraordinary mortality rate for a class that just turned 50, or it’s a sign that the young die in higher numbers than people think.

But I wish someone had told the rest of us that we would be fine, that we, too, would get lucky.

The author is a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. His latest book is ‘Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us.’