When I was a child, I loved superhero things. Superhero cartoons, superhero comics, superhero serials and movies. Everything about them fascinated me. How they convert the most flagitious problem into a piece of cake and engulf it to be dissolved into the acid flush of stomach (I love cakes). With the insensate superhuman strength, they beat up the ‘bad guys’ and throw them into the trash can like littering pieces of junk. How they successfully maintain a secret identity in which they act like morons taking shit from the pieces of shit, with a smug glow on the face and then secretly changing into what they are in real. They are the superheroes. They save the world.
There was a time I used to wear a large towel or a folded bed sheet on my back trying to waver it so that I look like one of them (I never tried underwear on pant). I used to look at the walls with anger so that it melts or at least allow me to look through it. I observed every other person walking on the road, imagining him to be a crazy scientist or an alien in disguise and how I could beat him up with my bare hands. I never got tired of swinging my wooden sword, claiming it to be ‘Shamsheer-e-sulaimani’, the famous sword of the hero I don’t even remember now, carved out of lifeless timber by the old man at the crossing smiling euphorically at the sliver coloured metal piece tossed by my uncle. I used to wake up in the middle of night, trying to practice the ‘kame-hame-ha’, placing my hands sideways and throwing them out at the chair so that it burns by the energy balls created by me (at least swing once for god’s sake). It was my dream, rather, my wish.
As I grew up, out of the zillion things I tried to figure out the superhero power within me to define my identity, I succeeded in none (maybe underwear on pant could have worked). I was no longer a child then. My quest for that power ended, but my thirst hasn’t. A slight adrenaline push makes me think what if I was an invisible man, what if I could fly, what if I could… . The heart breaking truth that I did not have any superpower moulded my activities to the level of being sensible. The wild imagination was brought down from outer space to my desk with the smell of kilos of assault weapons neatly placed on the shelves. Every other person thinks he or she could use a little of superpower to change his/her so called fucked up life (that includes me except for the latter part). Nostalgia pushes us helplessly to think about time travel, a beaten up college teen wants to be the hulk, a puking child after the merry-go-round wants to become spider man and a screwed up worker wants to change to superman so that he could put his pen deep down into his boss’s ass.
If there was some super hero watching our asses and protecting us from the daily trauma, he would have died or would have taken a permanent retirement from the job. Unfortunately we are the powerless heroes of our time, powerless enough to become a ‘martyr’ handling our own lives than to even think of the world.
I was thinking what if someone in this world would suffer from this ‘superonthrotitis’ (man! I really screwed it up). Out of all the wonderful things God has created, he has not created a superhuman. It came to me that the list of ‘the superhero work’ made by me as a child will change slightly if i make it now (I rather not reveal it). But it makes me conclude, why I or we, were not given any superpower.
It is human to be human and it will be inhuman to be superhuman.
