Captive Adaptations

No, the image below is not Lincoln. Yes, that is Mr. President elect, and I am trying to link Obama to Lincoln.

Am I the first one to do so ?. No. Mr. President-elect, the man who will be Mr. President today, himself started drawing parallels to Lincoln as early as 2005 in a time magazine article. And there have been articles highlighting the daring nature of Obama campaign to do so. Of course after his victory it’s been a season to do such comparisions. Read News week article here and more here.

Some of the similarities are actually quite compelling (at least on the surface), you would have already read in the articles above.

• Both are from Illinois, and both are adopted sons of Illinois, started their campaigns from Springfield, etc.
• Mr. Obama has taken the train journey similar to Lincoln last night and he also apparently will be using the same Bible
• Most importantly both accepted the mantle of leadership during the time of crisis.

I would like to draw your attention not to these parallels, but to what I call the “Sikander effect“. To the common world its called Megalomania or Delusions_of_grandeur. The concept was captured wonderfully in the movie “The Man Who Would Be King”

Yes, if you believe something strongly over a period of time, the mind can trick you to start accepting that you are ordained, endowed with divine blessings, and are the chosen-one. In the process our own mind, can cut us from our roots, rendering us to not be well-grounded. We all experience this in our lives, especially Indian Immigrants to the US, who come from humble beginnings, soon start to taste success, forget that at the very core they truly belong to their not-so-wealthy Indian backgrounds and crave to cling on to the “delusions_of_grandeur” in the US. So its very important that we keep reminding ourselves about our origins.

Will Mr. Obama become another Lincoln ? Can we truly start believing that he is indeed the chosen one to lead the world out of the crisis ? Time will tell.