The idea of “the best” has never really assured me. I think the idea is very superficial. I have never been very confident about any idea of “the best”. On a personal level, there are things that are best to me, but when I talk about things on common ground with others, I never believed that the idea of “the best” anything can be generalized. This may be because I don’t think there is anything in the world that is “the best” – there is always something better. Indeed, you can use aspecific criterion, like a checklist, and then announce it as the world’s best; but that is according to you, others might think differently. So, the idea of the world’s best, at a universal level, is something that I don’t believe in. On an individual level, however, as I said, there might be one. Talking on a personal level, I do think of a friend of mine as the best in the world – my friend Shashank. He is not my best friend, but he is the best person I know to exist.
I don’t know how many will agree with my thought on what I think about Shashank. You see, this is what I was talking about how there is no universal “the best”, and at a personal level I do honestly think that Shashank is amazing and the “the best”. Many would find Shashank to be an average person – he is not a topper in his studies or an exceptionally handsome and charming man; he comes from a middle-class family, is not very popular but has a decent number of friends; he has the most commonly dark brown hair and eyes. If he were in the story, he would just be some plain, normal guy. He would though, nevertheless, woo a strong female character who has her thrill and adventure in her life. He would likely settle down for a nine-to-five job in a city apartment to have 2-3 children possibly. Conversely, he could also serve as a splendid secret identity for the main character but let’s not get into that right now.
Life as a human being is complicated -a lot of things in our life is out of our control. Our decisions are not the sole reason for the consequences we face. Itis not in our realm to remain sane persistently. There are so many times we must accept things even when we didn’t do anything to deserve it. We have a complicated history and are leading towards a fiasco as we are vulnerable to tragic accidents, and love never goes entirely right. The space between hope and actuality is a bit too much sometimes, and Shashank is the only person I have seen who accepts all of this of life effortlessly. He does, at times, mess up things, but he accepts that too. Maybe he does not feel he does it all effortlessly, but that’s how I see it. You see, nobody is completely sane, but you see a lot of us act overconfident and delusional. Shashank is different; he is different because he has a grasp of what is not entirely right with him. He is not completely balanced like none of us are, but he also does not assert insisting his normalcy. He admits with elegance and no loss of dignity of his inopportune moments. He never goes out of his way in an attempt to hide the anxiety that kept him up all night but instead uses humour to expose tragedies, victories, and sometimes the idiocy in life. He simply accepts fear, hesitancy, yearnings, craving, and practice which we don’t like to include in the conversation we have with ourselves. He also does not have defences of his acts ready all the time for the sake of justification. He realizes the incorrection of wanting to be correct all the time. He never claims or considers himself to be mature, but for a mature human being, he represents the most advanced possibility.
You see, 99% of the human population have not met him or will never meet him. I am sure most of the people who have met him don’t feel the way I do and as I said I don’t think even Shashank thinks the way I do too. But in my criteria and checklist, the way I see life, Shashank meets them all. He does it all which I see everyone around me, including me, struggling to do. I don’t know what it is about him that is so undemanding, so plain sailing yet so beautiful. That is why he is the best person I know.
