The world is often divided, conveniently might I add, between success stories and failure tales. But what about the ones in the middle, who are neither too good, nor too bad, but just average?
That’s exactly the section Naina Ojha addresses in her poem Average, which she performed as part of the Spoken Fest 2019 – an initiative by the performance collective Kommune.
She begins by describing how her hatred for Mathematics was so intense that she started looking at her life in averages.
And that led to her drawing a conclusion about how, basis all the insecurities she and her friends experienced, she was ‘ordinary and unexceptional’. But she wasn’t invisible.
Because she belongs to the section of society people generally don’t give a second thought to.
Her abrupt end to the poem is a fitting end to ‘not a sympathy poem but an okayish poem’ that explains why it’s perfectly fine to be an average soul in a world of overachievers and underperformers. Watch the complete piece here.
In a world that constantly swings between the first benchers and backbenchers, her poem speaks to the middle-benchers. The ones who haven’t failed drastically enough to serve as an example and not succeeded enough to be an inspiration. But we’re the ones making others achievements and failures truly count.
Design Credits: Kumar Sonu