Cracking the clichéd imagination

I’ve heard it said umpteen times and with equal degree of zeal and lack of it, that the ambivalence strikes me as crass, for nothing can be itself and its antonym unless you’re speaking of an actor in which case you understand he is at the mercy of his profession. A student tells me that X is his favorite teacher in the world, (that’s how he puts it, yes, with all the hyperbole, do you see?) but thinks to his own embarrassment, that a teacher is someone who has failed at anything else, and career-bound, has resorted to the one thing that requires neither creativity nor ambition, for that matter. By ‘anything else’, I wonder what he means. Perhaps, he’s a romantic and is referring to those A-1 jobs that take men and women to far-flung places to study plants and rivers, or the ones that fly them across the skies until a blip evanesces from a radar screen. But no, he constricts with all deference my sardonic conjectures and I’m almost ashamed to the point of apologizing for my unuttered thoughts. ‘I’m only alluding to jobs like civil engineering, or database administration or forensic accounting,’ he says. Yes, yes, I find myself thinking, conceding: these are exactly what I’d have opted for, given the chance to define ‘ambitious.’ But chance is compounded of the absence of intentions, and by wishing and hoping, one couldn’t be any more intentional. So I know, chance isn’t what I need to do that. I need the right to do it. Now, which doors do I knock to be granted such a thing as ‘the-right-to-do-it’, and on which floors do I grovel and in front of whom and why? I wonder who codifies rules, rights, and laws, and whether for some fee, might alter one of these to my credit. Alteration (or amendment as a legislature would have it), I’m told, ‘is no nepotic business my friend’, and is, by and large, a silent enterprise benefitting either oneself or no one else. Oneself, of course, being a ruling or an elite self. I conclude, thus, that people arrogate to themselves certain rights— a liberty without which I’m aware, democracy wouldn’t be a democracy and one wouldn’t dare buy poppy-topped bagel when everyone else is sharp-set on chocolate doughnuts. The problem, however, with mainstream prejudices (I’d never call them ideas or opinions, for they are far too absolutist and already too abounding to be accorded with any further publicity) is that in representing the unanimity of a majority, it overlooks the individuality of a minority.  So angry, I ask the fellow student, ‘Surely, Bin Laden was as ambitious as Obama for flying two Boeing 767jets into the World Trade Centre?’ The fellow student looks dubiously at me. But I assure him I’m not here to lionize a sadistic beast—I don’t wallow in the gore any more than I’m touting the merits of the Al-Qaeda. I write to make a point, and my point is ‘ambition’ isn’t unilateral. Ambition is multipartite. Multifarious. Multi-dimensional. He smiles in agreement. We finally reach a point of intersection.
‘Ambitious’, though singular in that it is a term universally agreed on to define someone with ‘an earnest desire for some type of achievement or distinction, as power, honor, fame, or wealth, andthe willingness to strive for its attainment’, is, however, plural in its vector. Ambition is present in each and every one of us, differing only in respects of inflection. Creativity, likewise, doesn’t conform to the ambit of a collective self. It travels to the darkest, most god-forsaken places to seek out the odd and the ordinary. It transcends means, social status, race, ethnicity, majority, geography, and the scope and extent of the clichéd imagination. How ambitious and creative is your baker who leavens and bakes dough enough to feed you and your family and the entire town and more. How ambitious and creative is your widow mother who works double shift and substitutes for your father? How ambitious and creative is your neighbor who climbs up a tree, trying to hold the line steady while he talks to his sweetheart on the phone? Today while all over the world, people are spurning each other with an unprecedented abandon, even kindness is inordinately ambitious and creative.
  ‘And the teacher?’ he asks.
  ‘And the teacher,’ I tell him, ‘is the most ambitious and creative of all. He relays his knowledge to undying generations.’