An average school-going child in India goes to morning assemblies with a secret wish – hoping desperately that none of the so many greats of her country should have either been born or died that day. The abundant supply and legacy of greatness has somehow meant that she isn’t lucky on most days. There are more chances of her being made to go through the mind-numbing rituals of iconography with speakers using same words for so many historic births and so many irreparable losses to the nation. That’s the type of dread with which you approach official social media accounts of public figures. So within 10 days of mourning BR Ambedkar’s 62nd death anniversary, on December 15, you woke up to be reminded by the Prime Minister that we lost Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel 68 years ago.

You may wonder whose fate is more pitiable – the citizen consuming the overdose of greatness or that of the country grappling with the problem of plenty of it. The lament can make you recall what German playwright Bertolt Brecht once remarked, “Pity the land that needs a hero.”

So what kinds of societies have this insatiable urge to cover themselves with heroes – that yearning for having light houses for reflected glory? Perhaps that has to be preceded by asking, what type of societies can do quite well for themselves without the halo of great people? There is a belief, and a reasonable one at that, that prosperous societies, and people having no persisting memories of crises, can generally do without (and do away with) heroes. The late Vinod Mehta, one of India’s most respected editors, once observed :

“The most settled, harmonious, gender-fair, affluent and egalitarian countries on our planet (the Scandinavian quartet of Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland, and you can add to that Belgium, Holland, Canada, and Switzerland) have not produced many great men and women. How many of them can you remember? Olof Palme and Dag Hammarskjold from Sweden are the only ones I can recall. (Sample this rather cruel joke: How many famous Belgians can you think of? The fictional character, Hercule Poirot, created by an Englishwoman, Agatha Christie, topped the list in a BBC poll.) The poor Swiss have been lampooned for decades, by among others, Orson Welles, for being capable of producing only cuckoo-clocks and chocolates. However, an independent-minded person will be forced to concede that these nations have not done too badly without the benefit of great men to guide them.”

So can one infer that societies, unlike the Scandivanian ones, which have a history of being exposed, or are more vulnerable, to conflicts, crises and struggles are more prone to have a proliferation of great people? What explains the hero-heavy landscape of Third World societies as they come to terms with a past of glory, conquests, wars and colonisation and then the present of poverty, ethnic strife, nation building, identity clashes and developmental deficit of different forms? Is the cultivated reverence for our greats a vicarious way of celebrating our attempts at defying our fate as a group of deprived people? Or is iconography also a product of multiple groups, as seen in lands of diverse communities like India, which need to have larger-than-life figures to hinge their identities on?

Interestingly, for all his explanation of how prosperous societies skipped the bug of greatness, Mehta couldn’t resist the urge to make Outlook (the magazine he edited then) conduct a poll in 2012 to rank the greatest Indians after Gandhi. Ironically, the popular vote ranked Ambedkar as the greatest, a man who warned Indians against hero-worshipping in his last speech in the Constituent Assembly. The fact that media has contributed to, and relished, in such pecking order of iconography world over, is something this writer had addressed in a piece for this site five years ago. Icons, past and present, are tailor-made for the mass media’s fetish to have a number assigned to almost everything around us. So media’s fetish for top 5/ top 10 lists can will obviously list the icons when it ranks your smartphones, toothpaste, universities and, of course, movies and songs.

That hasn’t meant that academic chroniclers of our times, say historians like Ramachandra Guha, have been able to escape the appeal of narrating greatness. Guha, part of the jury of the Outlook poll, had preceded the exercise two years go with a book which was a tribute to figures he regarded as greats of modern India. Leaving nothing to the imagination, it carried the title Makers of Modern India (Penguin, 2010). Earlier this year, speaking about the difference in how Indians think about their many heroes and how the jury rankes them, Guha argued, “The results revealed two striking (and interconnected) features: the strong imprint of the present in how we view the past, and the wide variation between how the “greatness” of an individual is assessed by the aam aadmi and by the expert.”

What amounts to India’s yearning for icons could be a case of cultural fetish for sublime human forms. But, it can also be traced to a psychology of inadequacy and sociology of group identity heroism, while still being steered by politics of competitive and often parallel iconography and rooted in history of crises and conflicts.

The larger-than-life father figure (or motherly grace) found in Indian families is an extension of how Indians have generally extended their anthromorphic anchors for belief and emotional sustenance to people, who may appear flawed and very fragile in plain sight but are more comforting in their inflated image of reverential greatness. That somehow is an aspect of the cultural psyche ingrained in young adults that makes the mechanism of family work mostly in India. In group identities, and they are multiple in India, you cultivate a similar reverence for historic figures – ranging from Shivaji to Ambedkar, and Tipu Sultan to Periyar. For the precise nature of the origin of their heroic status, they become contested figures too.

That contentious nature of the legacy of many of our national heroes explains why competitive hero-worshipping is a political project in this country. The urge to counter Nehruvian halo with the parallel iconography of Patel by the Indian Right is an expression of how contested greatness is when we look at the legacy of its early claimants, institutional beneficiaries and historic losers.

There is also an element of vicarious fulfilment in the ways we cherish a different type of hero, say sporting icons. Are they responding to our deeper need to succeed in certain ways, is their success about us or merely their superb performances? Santosh Desai, advertising professional and social commentator, uses this to probe why Indians may like Virat Kohli but never love him like Sachin Tendulkar or Dhoni. He argues that our urge to succeed was reflected in the Sachin and Dhoni narrative but Virat has perhaps come at a time when cricketing success doesn’t evoke the same yearning or passion in us.

“The larger reason is that Virat Kohli lacks a narrative. His performance works for himself and the team, and by extension for the country, but it does not reveal any cherished truths about us as a collective. It does not feed into any deep seated anxiety, nor does it help us believe in an incredible dream. Sachin Tendulkar spoke to a nation’s need to be taken seriously. He was our cherub who could take on the world effortlessly. The Sachin narrative was always about us, never about him – we owned him and willed him to succeed,” Desai observes.

The crisis-response part of the rise and projection of great men isn’t too obscure to be perceived by Third World psyche which has ingrained notions of a struggle against colonial powers, as in a Gandhian movement, or struggles against dehumanising conditions of life or fight for rights at the barricades or battle heroes of actual wars. Perhaps one of the unintended scourges of conflicts and crises in such societies is the proliferation of too many heroes to deal with.

As we observed yet another day of remembering yet another great, it’s hard to avoid the revolting thought – is India dealing with an overload of heroism? In imagining our great ‘selves’ as something more than the sum total of our  ordinary selves, we have got trapped into fatigue with iconic faces that populate our past and present. The school-going child needs to know that there are many ordinary days too, and most of us are good without being heroes.