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Gilded Cage

I can't recall how I ran into this ancient NYT article where Nancy Mehta describes without much sugar-coating what it is like to be the wife of Zubin Mehta. Her experience is shared by other like her - the wife who remains silent and ever-present in the background so the star can shine brightly:

She herself tends to refer to him as “my husband” rather than by name. She attributes this to “the fact that Zubin Mehta is not my husband. There is no room in there to be husband.”

But, she continued matter-of-factly,  “I had a revelation recently that the great people in any category historically are basically self‐oriented. The self‐interest is necessary to bring the greatness to its apex. Nehru and Einstein weren't terrific family men. Not that they wouldn't have been if that's what they decided to do, but they decided to do something else.”

Self-orientation and greatness being strongly corelated isn't something outsiders would put together naturally. You imagine, there is the person beyond the fame and personality that does ordinary things like ordinary people- atleast some of the time. Perhaps even a temporary descent to ordinary is not permissible if a person is meant to achieve greatness. 

If she is happy living in the gilded cage, her honest words do not reflect it: “I can't think of a way this life isn't sacrifice. It is total sacrifice. But I'm working very hard, daily, without making much headway, to alleviate that."

Regular people can graduate to some version of a gilded cage too - maybe not quite as glitzy as that of the Mehtas but still something that projects perfection to all that behold it. So much so, that a person would feel foolish if they entertained thoughts of escape. Escape to where and do what that could even compare to the life they appear to have to outside observers.



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