In recent times, there have been several articles – scholarly and speculative – about the lack of heroes for the young today. There is no one to look up to and hence no model to follow is a commonly expressed lament – albeit in different forms and at different levels of erudition.
It is somewhat strange given the array of search engines and technologies at our disposal today that we are unable to locate one man or woman who would qualify for this post. Who is this elusive heroic being that the world seems to have produced in abundant quantities once upon a time?
There are many definitions of a hero but let us go by that given by Joseph Campbell. A hero, he said, “is the man or woman who has been able to battle past his personal and local historical limitations”. A hero shows us hope where there is none, he builds bridges where no man has dared to go before and is as close to human as the gods can get.
In many myths, especially in India, the heroes are gods incarnate or gods in their own right. For instance, Krishna was a god incarnate and Indra, a major god who later lost his lustre as newer tribes and modern cultures established their supremacy over the old. Indra was the prime deity as is evident from the many verses in the Rigveda (World Mythology, Illustrated Guide which has been edited by Roy Willis)
The lives of Indra and Krishna may appear very different from that of the Greek heroes like Perseus and Odysseus or the Sumerian hero Gilgamesh. But they follow a pattern. They all fit the frame of heroic journey as described by Campbell in his book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Very briefly: Their birth is miraculous, their boyhood feats, magical and supernormal. They follow a calling that takes them through a series of adventures which in some way or the other, end in personal destruction (as in the end of hope, loss of love or death) but, their lives hold up a candle for the rest of humanity.
What Campbell and many others have done is helped us look at a hero beyond his immediate social context. The cyclical path of the hero establishes a pattern that ties heroic personalities from all over the globe, across time and age. It allows us to place seemingly disparate characters such as Krishna and Gilgamesh on a single white board and dissect their lives for the principles they stood for. And in most cases, we find the principles live in a common basket of values. Societal good over personal greed, the end of tyranny, hope among despair and so on…These are the values our heroes lived for and these are values that are eternal.
If we accept that, there should really be no doubt about the existence of a modern day hero. For these are values that live within us and we can build the priciples that help realise them and as we do that, we may find that we have not one, but many heroes to guide us through our lives. And they are all living within us.
