I’ve been reading up a whole lot of comics lately — Batman mostly, and some special issues like the Watchmen. And spending the day at Comic Con and reading the Watchmen specially set me thinking about this whole concept of “heroes”. In particular, Watchmen raises out a lot of relevant questions — both sociological and philosphical — about heroes, their motives, their existence (or lack thereof). There are a whole lot of things that I want to talk about on this topic, and I’ll try to address them one at a time.

For this post, I shall be focusing on just one question — how many heroes (let us leave aside the “definition” for now, and just work with whatever general notion people usually have about heroes) become who they are **by choice**. I thought long and I thought hard, and I was able to come with very very few answers. I mean just look at the history behind any character (real or fictional) and try to figure out why they became what they did. In most cases, the protagonist usually goes through some tragedy in his/her life, or at the least some “defining moment” which leaves an indelible impression upon his/her heart.

However, in most cases, I found that these “defining moments” were seldom “happy moments” — usually some sort of tragedy or irony was attached to them; which seems reasonable in the sense that you don’t really expect normal (happy) incidents to make a strong impression anyways because thats the way things are //supposed to be//.

I started out with comic book characters — with the exception of Superman (well, he did too), almost everyone else has a very strong tragic history. Of course, it goes without saying that there was always **some** choice exerted in making that conscious decision to go out and do something about it; something out of the ordinary. I mean Bruce Wayne could have just as well chosen to get along with his life and not worry about making Gotham a safer place at all. With Superman, this choice was excercised in the decision to make use of his powers (which were inherent in him, no choice there) for a humanitarian cause.

Then I started looking at some of the real life examples (now here the definition of hero makes things very subjective — Hilter might be a hero to some, but most certainly not to me, But still, just bear with me, for the point I’m making applies in either case). Naturally my first inclination was to look at figureheads from the Indian freedom struggle, and then some of the numerous great men and women that history has seen. Again and again, I found that people who did something “heroic” usually went through some traumatic experience, and then excercised that choice to do something about it.

However, I was not able to find convincing examples of situations where regular, average people whose lives were just “ordinary” had decided to do something like that; though there’s no compelling reason for not doing so — I mean who wouldn’t want to be a hero? Depending on what your definition of a “hero” is, Alexander the Great or other kings like him might fall into the Superman type of category — where the “power” was inherent, and no tragedy was needed to drive them.

So then, the question that I’m driving at really is, where does that leave the average man? Does all this mean that an average man can never hope to achieve something heroic (please, there are always exceptions. I’m just trying to look at the general case here) without having to forego a tragedy first? How effective is simply the “desire” to do something great? Does that generate enough motivation and drive to carry you through? If not, then why don’t we see a lot many “heroes” around us? (I know many ordinary people are “personal” heroes in their own right, but I’ll come to the definition of a hero later on. Right now I’m talking about the stereotypical image of a hero) Why don’t we see our average regular man inspiring and leading men and women to glory?

It seems to me that either an ordinary person just can not do something heroic unless he/she experiences something extra-ordinary (that “defining moment”), or worse yet, that we simply just do not have the need for heroes. Now thats another very very intersting question to think about — what exactly, is, society’s dependence on hero-like figures? Can we ever have a hero-less society, where everyone is just ordinary? Too many questions. I’ll talk about this more soon. Next on line is going to be, who decides a hero? What makes a hero? What are people’s definitions of a hero?