Who's your hero? Is it Neil Armstrong, for giving a giant leap to your lonely dreams? Or is it BR Ambedkar for winning you the freedom to dream? Maybe it is Aamir Khan or Priyanka Chopra or Virat Kohli for living your dream? Or is your hero an idea? An idea that made us who we are? The big bang, natural selection, maybe advertising?
I know who my hero is. He changed our world permanently and forever, but we never even think of him in passing. That's his great tragedy and I'm here to redeem him.
You see it all started twelve years ago with a photograph tucked away in the travel column of a Children's Digest. A man was using the apparent depthlessness of a two-dimensional photograph and the deception of perspective to make it seem like he was holding a castle's tower by his two delicate fingers. With just my first glance, I knew something iconic had happened. A new realm of imagination had been gifted to this shallow, depraved world. Of course by the next decade, his idea had taken over every living mind. Pinching castles, pushing the tower of Pisa, holding the sun in your hand. Everyone was doing it. A hero had been born, his genius robbed, and him forgotten.
Sometimes I have sleepless nights, thinking who he is, where he lives, what goes through his mind, the guy who started it all. Does he look at all these pics imitating him and feel triumph, does he feel a sense of accomplishment, a satisfaction reserved only for the Aristotles, the Savitribais, the Nelson Mandelas, the Phoebe Waller-Bridges, all these messiahs of mankind? Is his mother proud of him? Does she go to bed with a twinkle of tear in her eye, at the marvel that is her son. I wonder if he boasts to his friends. I wonder if they see him as a trailblazer, an entrepreneur, and I wonder, how well are they able to hide their contemptuous envy, if at all? Perhaps he has no friends. Maybe that scathing loneliness is what pushed him into being funny, into standing out with his creativity and making history only paralleled by Leonardo Da Vinci and Woody Allen before MeToo.
I wish I could meet my hero. I'd ask him, when he did it, when he grasped a swath of atmosphere between his hands as if he was clutching at the corroborating pillars of history, was he aware of the magnitude of his attempts? Did the idea feel like a revolution, like the cherry streets of Moscow under Lenin? Did he feel powerful, loved, accepted? Did it change how he treasured imagination? There must be a very specific feeling, in the broad spectrum of feelings we are capable of experiencing, that is reserved for men like him, who transform existence, though in a very tiny and innocent way, but then they get to live in its conscience forever.
What if he never experienced that feeling? What if he has a 9 to 5 job where he sits on an Excel, away from social media where his idea breathes on between the vacuum of binaries? What if he hates himself, thinking, he has never lived up to his true potential, that he has failed to bring a change to the world, that his life is just passing by? What if his kids are ashamed of him, what if they tell him to bugger off when their friends show up? What if he died in a car accident before 3G could even become a thing?
What if his act was more than just momentary creativity, what if it was a message to society? An emblem of human resistance to the limits imposed by our very own bodies. A protest against nature itself that dictates what we can and cannot hold between our fingers. A rupture against the underwhelming constraints of physics, against the arrogant hegemony of logic. What if his act was the bravest middle finger humankind has ever, or will ever raise to the cosmos?
There's no answer to these questions. There never will be. I wish I could find that Children's Digest again, run through it's pages, see that hero of humanity once again. Or maybe it's the mystery that keeps his heroism intact. That's a bargain for believing in grandeur, and I humbly accept it. This essay is an ode to that man, to that feeling, to the proof that change can come from anyone, from anywhere. It is a proof that heroes are made of ordinary people. I hope to meet you some day, Mr Pincher, my hero.