In 2006, I bought a twenty-year-old Maruti Suzuki car for just ₹35,000. Despite its age, I was extremely fond of it. I had little money, which was why I bought such an old car.
Every morning, I would wake up and wash it, polish it, and make it shine like a new car. I drove it hundreds of thousands of kilometres.
Because it was so old, something was always going wrong. Almost every third day, I would take it to a mechanic. I spent a great deal of money keeping it on the road.
Yet I loved that car. It gave me the pleasure of owning a brand-new vehicle, even though it was already twenty years old when I bought it.
Then one day, I decided to replace it.
Why?
Perhaps I had grown bored with it.
But why had I grown bored with something I once loved so much?
There was a simple reason. I had chosen it myself, and then I actually lived with that choice.
I drove it, cleaned it, repaired it, and spent money on it. My relationship with it was practical. It existed in my daily behaviour.
And because it existed in my daily behaviour, there came a day when I no longer felt the same excitement about it.
Now consider something quite different.
Why do you never get bored with the great men you admire?
You may spend your entire life worshipping a religious teacher, spiritual leader, prophet, saint, or historical figure. You may admire him from childhood until old age without ever feeling that you have had enough of him.
Isn’t that strange?
You can grow tired of a car you once loved, a house you once dreamed of owning, or something you once desperately wanted.
But you never seem to grow tired of the great man you have been taught to admire.
Could it be because that great man has never actually entered your practical life?
The Great Man Who Never Enters Your Behaviour
Think about an ordinary visit to the market.
You buy groceries, speak with shopkeepers, negotiate prices, deal with strangers, and return home.
Have you ever come home feeling disappointed because you failed to behave according to the teachings of your great man?
Have you ever said to yourself, “What a terrible day! Not even once did the teachings of the person I admire appear in my behaviour”?
People worry about all kinds of things.
People complain about constipation, poverty, hunger, and stress. These are problems they experience and struggle with in their daily lives.
But how often do you hear someone complain that the teachings of their revered spiritual figure failed to appear in their daily behaviour?
Imagine someone saying, “I have been following this great man for thirty years, but today I realised that not a single one of his teachings has become part of my life. This is a serious problem.”
This is not the kind of complaint we ordinarily hear.
What does that suggest?
There are two possibilities.
The first is that the teachings of great men have become such a complete part of everyone’s behaviour that nobody has anything to complain about.
The second is that these teachings have never truly entered people’s behaviour, so their absence doesn’t trouble anyone.
Which possibility seems more convincing?
Look at the world.
People continue to lie, cheat, exploit one another, commit crimes, and fight in the name of religion.
Almost everyone has someone they regard as a great moral or spiritual guide. Yet admiration for these figures has not prevented the behaviour they supposedly taught people to abandon.
If their teachings had completely transformed human behaviour, the world would look very different. Courts and prisons would have far less work to do. Religious conflict and exploitation would be much harder to explain.
This makes the second possibility worth examining.
Perhaps the great men we admire have remained outside our practical lives.
And perhaps that is precisely why we never get bored with them.
Something that never enters your behaviour never gets worn out by your behaviour.
My old car could lose its charm because I actually lived with it.
A great man who exists only in my beliefs never has to face that test.
Everything Practical Has a Beginning and an End
Consider an ordinary meal.
You begin eating, enjoy your food, and stop after a few minutes.
You don’t continue eating forever.
When rain begins, it eventually stops.
Even a cup of tea has its own beginning and end. You prepare it, drink it, and finish it.
You may prepare tea again tomorrow, but you cannot repeat the first experience exactly.
What has happened once cannot return as precisely the same event.
Practical life keeps moving because things begin, take place, and end.
My old car followed the same pattern.
Years of driving and repairing it gradually changed how I felt about it.
Eventually, I bought another car.
Suddenly, I was excited again.
I began cleaning and caring for my new car with the same enthusiasm I had once shown toward the old one.
What had happened?
An experience had ended, and another had begun.
But something even more interesting happened when I sold my old car.
How One Old Car Made Two People Happy
The man who bought my old car was delighted with it.
Think about this carefully.
It was the very same car that had stopped giving me pleasure.
Nothing about its age had changed.
Yet the buyer was excited.
Why?
Because, for him, the car represented a new beginning.
For me, that car had reached the end of its journey. For him, its journey had just begun.
I was happy because I had bought another car. He was happy because he had bought mine.
The same old car made two people happy, one through its departure and the other through its arrival.
The happiness did not depend simply on the age or quality of the vehicle.
It depended on what was happening in our lives.
The car was old, but his experience was new.
This reveals something unusual about beginnings and endings.
Something doesn’t have to be new in the world to become new in your life.
My car was twenty years old when I bought it, but it was new to me because I had never owned it before.
Now imagine that I had refused to sell my old car simply because it had once made me happy.
I might have said, “This car gave me so much pleasure. How can I ever abandon it?”
I would have remained attached to something that no longer gave me the same experience, simply because I was unwilling to let an old experience end.
And without that ending, the new beginning might never have happened.
Now return to the great men we admire.
Do we ever allow our relationship with them to end?
Why Don’t We Give Our Great Men a Break?
Suppose you have admired a particular spiritual teacher for twenty years.
You have read his words, listened to stories about his life, and praised his wisdom.
But your behaviour hasn’t changed much.
You still become angry, tell lies, act dishonestly, and struggle with the same habits.
Why don’t you say, “I have been trying to bring this man’s teachings into my life for twenty years, but they haven’t worked for me. Perhaps I should try learning from someone else”?
Why does this thought rarely occur to us?
If a car repeatedly disappointed you, you might replace it.
Yet when it comes to great men, most people never even consider changing.
They continue admiring the same person until the end of their lives.
There is no real experiment. No practical assessment. No conscious ending followed by a new beginning.
And without an ending, there is no opportunity to discover what a different beginning might offer.
The problem is not necessarily with the great man.
The problem is that you never give your relationship with him a break.
You protect your attachment without giving his teachings a fresh test.
But why are you so attached to this particular great man in the first place?
Did you actually choose him?
You Never Chose Your Great Man
When I bought my Maruti Suzuki, I made a choice.
I chose what I could afford.
Nobody assigned it to me at birth.
But how did the great man you admire enter your life?
Most likely, you inherited him.
When you were a child, your family introduced you to particular religious teachers, holy books, traditions, and historical figures.
You were told which people were great, which books were sacred, and which teachings deserved your respect.
You were too young to evaluate these things independently.
You didn’t examine different traditions and then choose the one that seemed most useful to you.
The choice had already been made for you, without your permission.
Consider this.
If you had been born in Pakistan instead of India, might your religious identity and the great men you admired have been different?
Quite possibly.
Your place of birth could have changed the people you regarded as sacred.
Yet you might have defended those different figures with exactly the same certainty.
What does this reveal?
The great man you regard as unquestionably right may have entered your life largely through the accident of your birth.
You didn’t discover him through a personal experiment.
You inherited him.
And there is a great difference between inheriting something and choosing it.
I personally chose my old car. That choice led me into a practical relationship with it.
I drove it. I discovered its strengths and weaknesses. I experienced its pleasures and problems. Eventually, I became free to leave it.
But when a great man is handed to you as an unquestionable authority, your relationship with him is different.
You may never test his teachings against your actual behaviour.
You may simply continue believing.
Your great man becomes part of your tradition without becoming part of your actions.
This is why a person may praise honesty in a religious gathering, then cheat someone in the market. His admiration for his great man has remained separate from what he actually does.
What Happens When You Choose Someone Else’s Great Man?
Imagine that you belong to one religious community.
Millions of people in another community admire a spiritual figure whom you have never seriously studied.
Why not try reading him?
Why not examine his teachings and see what happens when you apply them to your own life?
What exactly would you lose?
If millions of people find something valuable in a figure you have ignored, isn’t that reason enough to become curious?
Yet people often refuse even to examine the great men admired by other communities.
They behave as though accepting their own tradition requires rejecting everyone else’s.
Does this mean that all the great men of other communities are wrong?
Or does it mean that we have become attached to figures we never personally chose?
Remember the man who bought my old car. He did not inherit it from his family or receive it as an unquestionable obligation. He chose it, and that choice gave him a reason to care about something I had stopped enjoying.
Now imagine that you consciously choose to study a great man from another tradition.
You want to know what he discovered. You examine his words. You try his ideas in your daily behaviour.
You pay attention because you have made a choice.
For the first time, you are not merely repeating what your family taught you.
You are investigating something for yourself.
A teacher who has become an inherited name in one household may become a fresh discovery in another. And the person you inherited might mean far more to someone who chooses to examine him for the first time.
The important difference is not necessarily between the two great men.
It is between a relationship created by inheritance and one created through personal choice.
Choice does not guarantee that his teachings will change your conduct. It gives you a reason to engage with them and find out.
Why Changing Great Men Once Is Not Enough
Suppose you leave behind the great man you inherited and consciously begin studying someone else.
At first, you may feel excited.
You have encountered new ideas. You are paying attention. You may even begin experimenting with those ideas in your daily life.
But what happens if you turn this second person into another permanent authority?
Eventually, you may repeat the very same mistake.
You will have exchanged one unquestionable great man for another.
That is why changing great men only once is not enough.
The purpose is not merely to replace one religious figure with another.
The purpose is to develop the freedom to choose, investigate, and leave.
Each choice gives you another chance to examine an idea, try it, and decide whether to keep it. Each ending weakens the assumption that one authority must remain final.
Obedience passed down through generations will not disappear simply because you change allegiance once. A new authority can become another prison.
This is why the process of choosing, questioning, and changing matters more than finding a particular great man.
You might learn something valuable from one person and later discover something different through another.
You might admire someone’s insight without accepting every opinion he held.
You might eventually reach a point where you no longer need anyone to occupy a permanent position above you.
But there is another consequence of this process.
The Great Man Can Become a Virus
When a religious figure enters your life as an inherited authority rather than a person you have consciously examined, he can begin functioning like a virus in your thinking.
You may not practise his teachings, but you defend his identity.
You may not follow his advice about honesty, compassion, or human conduct, but you become angry when someone questions his greatness.
You may even fight with people who admire a different great man.
Notice the contradiction.
The teachings that were supposed to improve your behaviour remain outside your practical life.
But the identity attached to those teachings becomes powerful enough to influence your relationships with other people.
In this way, an inherited great man can become a source of division rather than understanding.
You are not engaged with his ideas.
You are protecting a tradition.
And because you didn’t consciously choose that tradition, questioning it can feel like questioning your very identity.
This is why giving your great man a break is not a small matter.
It interrupts a relationship that may have continued for generations without ever being examined.
It creates the possibility of engaging with ideas instead of merely defending names.
Can There Ever Be a Final Great Man?
When I replaced my old car, I did not find the world’s final car.
I simply found another car that gave me a new experience.
One day, I might grow tired of that car too.
And someone else might find tremendous pleasure in owning it.
There is no final car that every person must buy and never replace.
Why, then, should we assume there must be one final great man whom every person should accept forever?
You might spend your life studying different people, learning from them, testing their observations, and leaving behind ideas that no longer seem useful.
There is no reason to believe that this investigation must end with one permanently correct human being.
In fact, the desire to find a final great man may be the very thing that prevents us from thinking independently.
When calling someone great means placing him beyond question, we remove him from the ordinary process of testing ideas and changing our minds.
We stop asking whether his ideas work for us.
We stop comparing.
We stop choosing.
We stop beginning again.
A person placed permanently beyond question can never become old in our eyes.
But perhaps that is not because his greatness is timeless.
Perhaps it is because we have never allowed him to enter the changing world of our actual experience.
The moment we begin engaging with him as an ordinary human being, things change.
Some of his ideas may impress us. Others may disappoint us. Some may help us today and become irrelevant tomorrow.
We can appreciate what he offers without promising to remain attached forever.
When We Begin Reading Great Men Like Shakespeare
Imagine a day when you read the words of a religious teacher in the same way you read Shakespeare.
You don’t need to worship Shakespeare before opening one of his plays.
You don’t need to believe that every sentence he wrote is correct.
You don’t need to fight people who prefer another writer.
You read him because you are interested.
You enjoy what he offers. You question what you don’t understand. You may return to him or move on to someone else.
His value doesn’t depend on your permanent loyalty.
Imagine approaching every religious teacher, prophet, philosopher, or spiritual leader in this way.
You could learn from anyone without becoming anyone’s lifelong follower.
You could appreciate a person’s insight without turning that person into an unquestionable authority.
You could leave one thinker and return to him years later, perhaps discovering something you hadn’t noticed before.
The same person might offer you a different experience because you have changed.
Just as my old car gave me a new experience when I first bought it, even though it had already spent twenty years in the world.
The object of our attention doesn’t always need to change.
Sometimes the relationship changes because the person making the choice has changed.
And once the freedom to choose becomes more important than the person being chosen, something else begins to disappear.
The need for great men.
Perhaps no human being needs to be great in the first place.
Every person is an ordinary human being, living, observing, making mistakes, discovering things, and sharing whatever he has understood.
We can learn from another person’s discoveries without placing that person above humanity.
We can admire someone’s work without turning admiration into worship.
To be ordinary is already extraordinary.
To be great is a disease of the mind.
Nova Kade
Read another article: The Buffalo had to disappear
Read the Book: Who Chose Your Mind?
Listen to the Podcast: Why you feel Stuck in Life?
