History's Honourable Heroes.

“It Always Seems Impossible Until It’s Done”

Nelson Mandela

One thing I have noticed about great historical figures is that they have a lot of common characteristics. They are all stubborn, ruthless and a bit reckless. 

I guess you have to be to in order to achieve greatness.

Achievements of extraordinary magnitude rarely come to ordinary people.  They are reserved for the slightly mad, slightly eccentric lot, for they require fighting for what one believes in against all odds.

Ordinary individuals, at some point or the other during their struggle will accept the futility of their efforts and will be persuaded by logic and reasoning to back off. It is only those who relentlessly peruse their ambition or dream against all opposition are the ones that emerge victorious.

Whether obstinacy is a mark of brilliance or a sign of idiocy, depends wholly on the outcome. If the result is successful then those behind it are considered to be geniuses of highest degree, visionaries who saw what others could not see and went for it with everything they had.

Or

Complete fools who risked and lost everything on a foolhardy endeavor, who did not know when to back off when the time was ripe.

It is the final result of their efforts that determines how history will view them in times to come. 
But what factors affect the outcome of the efforts? 
Several, but two among them, possibly more so than others.

Grit and luck!

You use your grit to push your luck to its limits. Even the slightest lacking in either of the two could easily turn success into failure.

That is my opinion. Anyone or everyone has my permission to disagree with it.

So from where is all this musing coming from anyway?

It so happens that I just finished watching “Rise of Empires, OTTOMANS” on Netflix.  

Mehmet, the Conqueror has always been this heroic figure in Islamic history who achieved the seemingly unachievable. 

His conquests and his achievements are legendary.

But Mehmet' s character: strong, highly driven and obsessed with what he wishes to achieve, is by no means without flaws.

He is firm in his belief, determined to let nothing stop him from conquering Constantinople, the magnificent City that so many before him had aspired to conquer.

But firm and determined individuals are also at times merciless. In order to fulfil a higher purpose, they sometimes have to forgo the human element and softer side of themselves.

Felt a similarity between Mehmet II and another character that I read about some time ago.

Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor, who forged an empire from amongst a disunited group of nations and kings.

   Imperial Coronation of Charlemagne, by Friedrich Kaulbach

Both men left countless dead in pursuit of their ambition, and yet that is not what we remember them for.  Because the magnitude of what they achieved, the Dynasties and Empires they forged, overshadowed whatever shortcomings they might have had.
Mehmet II and Charlemagne are by no means the only two such flawed characters. History is full of such men and perhaps a few women as well, who share these traits.

To be honest, it was their flaws that made them great and helped them achieve their destinies.

A more merciful ruler, mindful of the death and destruction his ambition could lead to would not go to this length, would not cross that line which needed to be crossed in order to achieve his purpose.

The truth is that countless aspire to have achievements that would immortalise their name in history or the very least count them as among the “successes” of their own times. But do the countless have what it takes to get there or more importantly, are they willing to be that flawed in order to get what they so desire?

That is where most of us normal, regular human beings fall short.

I would say let greatness be a virtue of great men that God hath created for this purpose and let the rest of us be good and normal human beings that we are meant to be.

Hemidactylus Frenatus .......aka.... the common house lizard

Imagine waking up in the middle of night, walking into the bathroom still half dizzy with sleep and finding two lizards on two separate spot on opposite bathroom walls. Both equally fat, ugly and equally disgusting. That is the stuff nightmares are made of.

Admittedly I had been aware of the presence of one. The presence of the second came as a surprise. Apparently I had been sighting the two of them individually and thinking of them as one and the same until that fateful night when they both decided to reveal themselves to me simultaneously. They both have their own favorite spots and favorite hiding places and scurry into their own dark little corners whenever I enter the bathroom.  They also tend to leave a mess sometimes in the form of droppings and loose debris from the false ceiling above.

One of them has been there for years and follows a regular pattern: hibernates during winter and wakes up in summer. I don’t know if one of the two current ones is the original one that has been there for years or a descendant of it because I have no idea how long lizards live and have no desire to research the matter as I have never been fond of reptiles of any sort.

Not that I come across many reptiles, other than these ordinary house lizards whose ability to stay adhered to walls, defying gravity, is the only interesting thing I find about them. It is very rare that a lizard loses its grip and falls down, but when it does, the human body kind of acts like a magnet for it and it will fall on top of a person rather than on the floor. Almost everyone I know who has seen a lizard fall has had one fall on top of them. It is almost as if they deliberately aim for people when falling.

I have had one fall on top of me too. Although to be fair it was not the lizard’s fault. It was my husband’s.

There I was, one fine day, standing in the corner of my room taking something out of my cupboard, completely ignorant of the fact that there was a big fat lizard high on the wall above me when enters my husband into the room and yells,

“Don’t move”

And I am like  “what ? why?”

Before I can figure anything out, he takes his Peshawari Chappal off from his foot and throws it with full force. The heavy slipper flies over my head and hits the lizard smack in the middle.

The lizard completely taken by surprise loses its grip on the wall and lands right on top of my head from where it bounces off doing a kind of inelegant somersault to fall on my chest next. From there, with the speed of lightening, it slithered down the rest of my body and ran off to God knows where.

I am no dancer but the skipping and hoping dance like moves I performed back then, accompanied by a string of shrieking sounds would have given the most agile of break dancers a run for their money.

My husband for some reason found the whole situation to be hilarious and could not stop laughing.

As for myself, I didn’t find anything the least bit funny about it and was furious with my husband for,

A:            Hitting a lizard while I was standing right below it.

B.            Asking me not to move when what he should have yelled was for me to get out of the way before he hit the damned thing.

His excuse that it was an impulsive act, kind of like a spur of the moment decision didn’t pacify me much.

To cut the long story short. I don’t have a good history with lizards and having to share my bathroom with not just one, but two of them, is not at all pleasant.

Like I said, I am not fond of researching reptiles but these days I find myself searching the internet trying to find ways and methods to get rid of lizards ……… permanently.

My particular area of focus is how to kill them while maintaining a distance of six feet or more.