BENGALURU: There’s a popular quote attributed to the iconic American poet Maya Angelou that goes, “Success is liking yourself, liking what you do and liking how you do it.” Maya Angelou lived an extraordinary life, facing enormous life challenges including childhood trauma, sexual abuse, poverty and – as a black person living in middle America – racial discrimination, and yet, lived with exemplary resilience to become one of the most popular Poet Laureates that the United States ever had, and going beyond that, continues to be the lasting literary icon that Maya Angelou is even today.
This quote about success talks about liking yourself, liking what you do and how you do it, but noticeably, doesn’t talk about who you do these things with - not who you do it for, or who is there with you, who witnesses these things with you. Nothing about it. Isn’t that a curious thing? For someone who lived through much pain, but still also loved deeply and often, Maya Angelou was very clear in defining success about liking yourself.
What does it mean about loving others?
In India especially, there is so much emphasis on love and relationships as a measure of a success, with parents feeling successful if they marry off their children, and even more successful if that marriage leads to children. But, is it really the individual’s success if they find someone to partner with in their life? Is someone not successful if they don’t have any such person? Is it failure if you do not have others in your life to love and hold, someone to partner with through life, to witness each other, protect and nurture each other?
We are social beings and as such, like some companionship. However, when we start assigning ideas of success or failure to whether we find and keep someone to love, maybe we start to unravel what it means to be a successful person.
This happens so often here in India, that we even have a uniquely Indian phrase “love failure.” It is not a phrase that you would see used in native English speaking cultures - I am sure no Hollywood movie has this phrase in their script. Still, “Love failure” is such a well-known Indian English expression that anyone, anywhere in India understands at once what it means, even if they don’t know English at all. The phrase immediately conjures up images of Devdas and other tragic figures. It even figures in narratives of death by suicide not only in movies in Kannada to Tamil to Hindi, but even in real life investigation reports on untimely deaths.
We really have to ask then: is not finding love, or love ending, even a failure? Is life a failure if there is no one to love? Maya Angelou showed that we could value love but we should value personhood a lot more. Our life’s success is not about whether we loved or were loved by other people. Our life’s success is about whether we like ourselves, and whether we like how and what we do. The rest is, to use another very Indian word, Maya.
(The writers’ views are their own)