Lore and Legend: Icons were once rare. Now, there are more of them on social media than in the world

 WE ARE ALL trying to be legends. Some—a lit­tle ahead of us on this track and field rou­tine—we are catching up with, some have just breasted the tape, and some, a little bored of having been legends for some time, are waiting to be upgrad­ed to the next stage. What fol­lows becoming a legend one doesn’t really know—one has to continue remaining a legend for the rest of one’s life. It’s a bit like being dead—one doesn’t know how long one will have to remain dead. But just as we know—or can guess—the route to dying, we have an intuition about how to become a legend.

Efficiency, talent, diligence, industriousness, all of these coming together in one person— this was the Petri dish on which things formed and became active to produce a ‘legend’. I use scare quotes consciously. That is how we saw these people—marinated by life, by time, to become this six-letter word. Pickling was a necessary part of this operation, a period served to time. An element of mysticism attended this process of ‘natural selec­tion’, but it was time that made all the difference. For fermentation was inte­gral to it, and fermentation needed time. All of this is to suggest the obvious—one couldn’t be born a legend; that it was im­possible to imagine the process of becom­ing a legend in a quick-fix manner—that it was bound to take longer than dyeing one’s hair does. It was this instinct that was held in the idiomatic, something like ‘a legend was born’. The counterintuitive energy of that saying, that we know that a legend cannot be born in front of our eyes (but must become one, in the way Simone de Beauvoir said women had to), is held in such an expression, almost scanned as an emphasis.

But all that was a long time ago, and our understanding of the word has become anachronistic. For I’ve heard that Taimur Ali Khan, now nine years old, has been a ‘legend’ ever since he was born. These things are possible now—for people to travel around the world in two days, re­verse aging, for miso and wine to become miso and wine in a few hours. Even the length of an earth day is getting shorter, and, as if it were only natural and concomi­tant with it, the period of time it takes to be­come a legend or classic. I must apologise if I’ve begun to make the old-world under­standing of the word ‘legend’ sound as if it were a thing that must come only to old people. There’s always history to correct me—Nadia Comaneci probably became a legend even before her menstrual cycle started. And Krishna, the child who was considered worth worshipping.

I mention a god—so what if it’s a baby god—only because one of the earli­est uses of the word ‘legend’ involves the lives of saints. One was to read about their lives, and to find the direction of one’s life from theirs. A ‘legend’ was something to be read, a story, a narrative. These leg­ends were of extraordinary people, usu­ally men, most often saints and religious figures, but it was also a word that was capacious enough to hold the wayward energy of, say, someone like Robin Hood. It is only a little more than 300 years ago that the meaning begins to shift, its cen­tre of gravity moving from the story, the action, the verbs, to the person. This shift might be simultaneous with what would climax into the hyperactive personality cult of the 21st century—it’s important to remember that old-world words like ‘legend’ made that transition possible, and somewhere on the conveyor belt the moralising code in the story of legends was dropped. It is this that now makes it possible for social media vocabulary to label Charles Sobhraj a legend.

What is called the X-factor—a phrase that recurs in talent hunts, as if emphasis­ing that it is this, like a genetic code, that de­cides canonisation —was once covered by a word such as ‘mystical’ whose location between folklore and pop history made it appropriately slippery. It is this slipperi­ness that Roland Barthes wanted to reveal and critique and crack and crackle as he held it between his fingers, like a wafer, in the word “mythology”. It’s a word that would have turned him off—as we see him clicking his fingers for it repeatedly in his essay ‘The Brain of Einstein’, using it like Shakespeare’s Mark Antony used the word “honourable”.

“Einstein’s brain is a mythical object: paradoxically, the greatest intelligence of all provides an image of the most up-to-date machine, the man who is too powerful is removed from psychology, and introduced into a world of robots; as is well known, the supermen of science-fiction always have something reified about them. So has Einstein: he is com­monly signified by his brain, which is like an object for anthologies, a true museum exhibit. Perhaps because of his mathematical specialisation, super­man is here divested of every magical character; no diffuse power in him, no mystery other than mechanical: he is a superior, a prodigious organ, but a real, even a physiological one. Mythologi­cally, Einstein is matter, his power does not spontaneously draw one towards the spiritual, it needs the help of an inde­pendent morality, a reminder about the scientist’s ‘conscience’ (Science without conscience, * they said...).”

Note how Barthes can’t help overem­phasising the same register: ‘mythical’, ‘magical’, ‘mathematical’, ‘mystery’, ‘prodigious’, ‘mythologically’, ‘spiritual’. All of these exist outside calibration and method, and it is impossible to specify how one might go on to have a brain like Einstein’s. What gives Barthes’ essay its energy is his annoyance with this rei­fied object—the scientist’s brain. Every argument and every phrase is meant to prick that balloon. I know because I feel a similar an­noyance every time I hear the word ‘legend’. It’s like a mosquito bite. I recover from it soon, as one does from a mosquito bite, but there’s always the fear of being infected. I have to be careful that I don’t use it, not to praise, and now, not even to tease. I go about my day legend-proofing my vocabulary the way I apply mustard oil to my fingers be­fore cutting raw jackfruit—so that the sap doesn’t stick. For there is no way that I won’t see at least one ‘legend’ during the day—on my social newsfeed, on televi­sion, in the parking lot; or inside a lift, if you teach at the kind of institution I do.

 Once upon a time, a conditioning in the word made one feel that legends were rarer—since the cliché must be used for emphasis—diamonds. Middle class and lower middle class life protected us from legends and them from us. The words used for them, often interchangeably with “legend”, “idol” to take just one such example, had a sense of distance built in them—that one would never meet them outside a cinema or televi­sion screen or the pages of a book or magazine, that there would never be any interaction or conversa­tion with them, except, of course, the one-sided con­versations one has with god or Marx in one’s head. The two-dimensionality of these figures was both, a literal and metaphorical thing. Like the brain of Einstein, one had to imagine the rest.

Raised in such a manner of seeing, it is disorienting to see ‘legends’ being told that they “smell good”, as one sees on a red carpet now. ‘Star’ and ‘idol’, words that come from a similar lexical register of value and accreditation, are built on the idea of distance—the stars are beyond our reach; an idol is a product of our visual perspective, the reason we cannot idolise our hand or an ant or a cell we see under a microscope. The word celebrity does not have the time-space distance of legend— there’s an intuition of both in the word, that the muscles of time will need to be exercised for a favourable reputation to develop, and that a space will grow be­tween the public and the person who would grow into a legend. In this sense, the rate of growth into a legend happens at, what I have elsewhere called, tree time. “Celebrity” derives from “celebration”, from rituals of public honour, fame that might have come in the way an asteroid strikes another celestial object. It also has another etymological root, one where we see the impress of a crowd. What I’m try­ing to emphasise is that there is no sense of distance in the Latin celebritas, from which “celebrity” came to exist.

Though I have spent a ridiculous amount of time talking about these words and their evolving histories, the truth is that I dislike them immensely. I dislike the inequality in them—I do not intend to say this in a sociological sense; what I mean is the inherent discrimina­tion in the words, that there is no space for everyone on the pulpit or the dais or even the stage. A contrast is drawn, natu­rally, with exasperation and curiosity, about the DNA that marks legends apart from us, commoners. Often this mani­fests itself in a monosyllabic sound—an article: “The”. Most of us cannot afford to put an article in front of our name, a proper noun—we would become un­grammatical. But, in case our legend recognition software fails us, we are introduced to them by a well-meaning person with this sound: ‘The Popat Lal’. We might have no idea about who Popat Lal is or what his claim to fame might be, but that prologue of a word has declared his superior status. Once upon a time, the name was enough: “The name’s Bond. James Bond” or Shahrukh Khan’s “Naam toh suna hi hoga”. “The” does the work of what announcements in royal courts on television: So and so “padhar rahein hain…” On social media, this works slightly dif­ferently—there are no announcements of arrival but a record of a moment with the legend, the gushing sounds audible even in a photograph. But more than anything else, there’s the disco sound of the collapse of the lever system of the jaw, of it falling, not because of the legend but because of the epiphanic awareness of one’s good fortune in having met such a person. Imagine how you might feel if, by some stroke of psychedelic acrobat­ics, you were to find yourself in the pan­theon, beside Durga and her children on their annual holiday or as a guest in The Last Supper. That’s how it must feel when one meets an ‘OG’ or ‘The’?

There are more legends on Facebook and Instagram than there are in this world. That might sound weird and unscientific, but it’s true. There are more legends per capita on social media than there are in New York, New Delhi or the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. But, then, who isn’t a legend on social media? The Bengali poet Bishnu De wrote a poem with the line that held in it a Communist’s imagined equality: “Amra shobai Lenin (We are all Lenin).” This must have been a speaking back to Rabindranath’s “Amra shobai raja amader ei rajar rajottey (We are all kings in our kingdom)”. The replacement of raja, king, with Lenin, by a Marxist poet held the temper of the times in late 20th-cen­tury Bengal. A poet or songwriter today would, in all likelihood, replace “king” and “Lenin” with “legend”: ‘We are all legends in this legendary world…’ This would be completely in tune with the manifesta­tion software that runs our lives and the solar system today. Now even kings and Marxists and academics who critique the hierarchy that enables people to become legends want to be legends.

I am surprised that I still haven’t been given a business card that said Legend be­low the name. Or that there’s no app that can tell a “genuine legend” from a “fake”. And that no MBA programme has offered a course on how to become a legend yet.