Cheap publicity rules the roost

This is the era of publicity. Publicity-positive and negative-can make or break anything from commodities to coordinated ventures, simple folks to celebrities. Well, of the human species, some are born with popular appeal, some achieve celebrity status and some have popularity thrust upon them. People adore royalty such as the inhabitants of Buckingham Palace notwithstanding their frailties and deviation from the course charted by their predecessors. One cannot be blamed for questioning the hollow mentality behind such enthusiasms. But the fact is that people need some symbols to take inspirations from and if possible to emulate and do better even.
The problem with such a quest is the wrong selection of people with popular appeal. Do men and women now capturing the popular imagination deserve the attention they get? The majority of them are hollow and rubbish entities doing little good to society. Young boys and girls are misled to believe that their own lives can be modelled after such cheap and hollow entities posing to be important. When people accomplish bizarre feats in order to make news headlines, you know the meaninglessness of the yearning for fame. Vacuous and banal, the exercise exposes its own limitations.
One such practice is selfie taking. Apparently innocent, it is seldom so. People go to any length to take a snap of their own either in accompaniment with friends or animals as poisonous as rattle snakes. At least in one case, a man lost his life due to his overenthusiasm for taking a selfie that, he thought, made the picture special. The serpent was not in a good humour, though, and straightway delivered the killer strike on his nose. He could not be saved because it was quite late before he could be taken to a hospital.
It is an eternal human urge to still a moment in eternity. People with talents devote their entire life to achieving something special. Artists, poets, writers, dramatists, composers, musicians and other creative geniuses etch their names on the pages of history by fashioning the momentous out of the ordinary. Athletes, sports personalities, scientists, social reformers and philanthropists mark their presence in their own noble way. They make the world a better place to live in. Without their sacrifice and devotion to the cause of humanity, the world would not have come to where it is now.
Against their accomplishments, the futility of selfie-type practice looks so ludicrous that one feels pity for those craving for such cheap self adoration. Of course, those who take life in its stride, has almost a Charvaka school of philosophy to guide them. If it is only for fun and momentary enjoyment not to be taken very seriously, it is a different proposition. People have the right to treat themselves with something light and entertaining in company of friends. At some point those are the best source of nostalgia. Against delving deep into the innermost self, people at times have to indulge in some harmless pastimes. But there is a limit to dragging the pastimes too far.
Now there are others like a teenage Aussie girl who embarked on a solo circumnavigation on a 10.23-metre boat and completed the voyage. Her response to the question why she had undertaken such a task was simple-it was to challenge herself and be proud of something. This really defines the core of human spirit where a person challenges his or her capacity to rise up to an occasion. Not many live up to such dreams of the extraordinary. Two girls from Bangladesh also challenged their capacity to be equal to their dreams in that they conquered the Everest-one of them achieving the feat of scaling all the top peaks of seven continents.
On the occasion of the International Women's Day, the Air India operates an all-women crew flight around the world and applies for the Guinness book of records. Crew in Bangladesh follow their Indian counterparts by flying in a similar fashion on Dhaka-Sylhet route. These are feats no doubt, but not as challenging as those other 'firsts' involving challenge to none but 'self'. Focused on publicity, these latest events were arranged with the motive of creating some social impacts. No challenge to ownself.