Demands of mediocrity are simple to fathom, it asks you to feel joyous about Abhinav Bindra's gold, it tells you to clap heartily for a Zakir Hussain's performance and expects you to write-off a Prosenjit-enacted Bengali movie potboiler. It does not tell you to add a new brick on the wall. It ensures that you be a good audience. It is a self-sustaining institution and primarily feeds on itself. There are Arundhati Roy-s and Amartya Sen-s and Saurav Ganguly-s and Moni Bhowmick-s who had been entrusted with the task of taking care for setting new precedents and new standards, which fall in the domain of excellence.
Funny thing about mediocrity is this, it wants to grow. Picture this "When I grow up, I want to be a Metro"- written on a Calcutta tram on a B.B.D Bag-Shyambazar route. It is saying, I know I am a mediocre but I want to end up being excellent because I can see what can be achieved by excellence, a 75 minute strainous tram journey can be reduced to a 15 minute Metro ride. It is this sheer sense of acknowledgment that mediocres indulge in, which has sustained them for years.
As Subhabrata Ganguli posed this wonderful query "What's driving?". I think a one-word answer will be excellence.
The queries are this, with our mediocrity can we define a new cult, a new standard for others to follow. Maybe we won't hog the covers of Newsweek, Guardain or Cosmopolitan, maybe we won't have Patents against our names, but can we create a platform, a podium where we can give ourselves that chance to be excellent and thereby define a norm that hasn't existed before in any form in any shape? Can we celebrate our mediocrity with a bottle of Champagne and luchi-alu-r dom, can we sing "Chorono dhorite diye go amari" and at the same time grab our Subway sandwhich while listening to it? Can we be seemingly sacrilegeous yet be sacrosanct and thereby do an Adam Smith by co-authoring a book named "Theory of Mediocre Bengali's Moral Sentiments?"
