Shelley, a famous early 19th century British poet, wrote Ozymandias, a sonnet.
This is the backdrop of the sonnet: An exploratory traveler — this was a different era, a century before packaged tours became the norm — is traveling in a desolate desert in Egypt. He sees a large pedestal on which stood “two vast trunkless legs,” remnants of an old statue of an imposing imperial figure.
Looking around, he sees a large head nearby, half-buried in sand. The head must have broken off the statue on the pedestal. On the statue, the large eyes with regal countenance would have told that he was a powerful king a few millennia ago. The traveler finds on the pedestal this inscription: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.”
Evidently, the statue was installed a long, long time ago to declare the grandeur of the kingdom and its ruler, Ozymandias, “King of Kings,” Emperor, Kaiser, Tsar, or Chakravartin. Around the statue must have stood a great city with royal boulevards radiating outwards from the statue as the focus.
The emperor died like any other mortal. After him, his empire also declined.
Strong sandy desert storms, blistering summer’s dry heat and cold nights alternating relentlessly. And then, internecine wars with invading local armies took their toll on the statue, now in ruins. The protruding eyes on the face now look grotesque and bizarre. Only sand dunes here and there punctuate the landscape.
At the empire’s peak, the words, My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, look on my works, ye mighty, and despair! declared, “O, visiting princes and dukes from neighboring places, look at my great accomplishment! If you want to replicate my work, forget it. You can NEVER do it, and so, despair.”
For the intrigued traveler, the same inscription, with the statue now in ruins, sharply brings out a great irony.
“I built this metropolis with my vast resources. See, my empire is now gone, and my statue is in ruins. TIME takes its toll on all human endeavors. People conceitedly believe they have accomplished so much. When they die, most leave not a trace for others to remember. Such is life. Therefore, don’t be vain, and learn to move on.”
Echoing the same idea, Napoleon, the French emperor, with cynicism and sarcasm, is believed to have said, “The cemetery is full of indispensable people.”
I grew up with my three siblings in a 1-bed room rented place in the 1960s in Madras, now, Chennai. In my circuitous life with many peaks and valleys, and twists and turns, I reached benchmarks I could not have dreamed even in my wildest imagination. Ignoring my “valleys” — believe me, I had several since my young days — I was conceited looking at my own “peaks.” I was my own Ozymandias (😀). Here are a few:
1. Going to a demanding renowned engineering grad school in the Bay Area for a PhD after a 10-year gap after my B.Tech, a gap long enough to completely forget even core subjects.
2. In the late 1970s buying the Bombay-to-San Francisco air ticket from the ENTIRE savings I had while working in an iron ore mine in the rain-infested central India.
3. Finishing my grad school without paying a red cent in fees, and with decent grades as a married student with a kid, and publishing many technical papers in peer-reviewed professional journals.
4. Letting my kids graduate in subjects I knew nothing about. Not that I had a choice! And conducting my daughter’s arangetram, something I never thought I could even dream of, while growing up in India.
5. Experiencing in the 1980s, for the first time, traveling in Business Class flying from Portland, Oregon, to Tokyo on work. For a hoi polloi guy growing up in a rented 1-BR Madras apartment with three siblings, and raised by his mother on a widow’s family pension, sitting in Business Class for a long-haul flight was a fricking BIG DEAL. 🤣
6. Publishing a community magazine in my spare time — the one you are reading right now — for twenty-nine years in the midst of my erratic business travel, and earning notoriety in the community. And even making some paltry money, after paying the bills and honoraria for writers.
7. Getting several bylined opinion pieces in American metro dailies. This was no mean achievement for a kid who went to a plebian “vernacular” Tamil-medium municipal school in Madras in the 1960s.
8. Getting good feedback annually from peers and subordinates at work on my technical skills, my ability to communicate with technicians, peers, and managers using appropriate levels of detail, and for being a good mentor for technicians and young engineers.
And then came the IRONY that hit me hard for my sophisticatedly camouflaged vanity and conceit:
1. Fifteen years after getting my PhD degree, I went back to my grad school. Out of curiosity, I went to the library to see how many people have checked out my PhD dissertation. To my UTTER despair, only two people in fifteen years after my graduation. For ALL the four-and-a-half years of grunt work in the lab, only two people interested in my work! 😜
2. In the twenty-nine years of running a quarterly community magazine, I would have received only ten emails from general readers for all the 116 issues, with a few hundred articles on politics, society, economics, literature, spirituality and faith, culture… …
3. And when I stopped the magazine, not even one comment from readers on why I stopped the mag.
4. And This Grand Finale: After my retirement, in the company where I worked for 30-plus years developing and implementing technologies and protocols for many processes, I did not get even one phone call from colleagues. They would have justifiably felt that what I did while working with them was expected of me as a professional. Besides, they kept me on their payroll through several recessions and changes in technologies, and compensated me for my services. Did they not?
Then I went and re-read Shelley’s sonnet and the inscription on the pedestal of the statue of Emperor Ozymandias: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, look on my works, ye mighty, and despair! I realized I was a tiny Ozymandias in my own mind at my “peaks,” as the original “King of Kings” was at his peak.
In the autumn of my life now, I admire how the very same inscription conveyed an entirely different message to Shelley’s exploratory traveler! Wised up, I am learning to move on, taking my “peaks,” and my “valleys” as well, in stride.
Recognizing how my life unfolded in inscrutable ways, I saw that my so-called “peaks” and “valleys” were my own mental constructs. They were my subjective psychological reactions to plain events in life, with no qualifying adjective, like “happy” or “unhappy.” Now looking at them decades later, I also see no reality attached to them at all. 😀🤣
Yes, I saw no reality in them, but only when I looked at them decades later. However, while pursuing my holy grails, on getting them, and for a fleeting time after getting them, they looked so real. This exultation is what is pushing us to strive hard. But this euphoria soon abates.
Further, as often happens, what we get in our endeavors is not the same as, and often quite different from, what we imagined we would get. And in our quest to succeed, we justify our means, any means, and often, all means, to reach the end. This attitude invariably, and inevitably, extracts a terrible price in time and other intangibles. Our regrets and our buyer’s remorse, we try to grin and bear.
How we manage this paradox is a big challenge. Traditional cultures have been suggesting that people practice self-reflection for a few minutes every day in the midst of their daily grind.
If we do that, even as we unconsciously become our own Ozymandiases and revel in our “peaks,” we become wise enough to be our own exploratory traveler in Shelly’s Ozymandias, not to be taken in by our own “peaks.” That makes it easy to handle our “valleys” much better. 😀🤣 ∎