Why I Think It's Totally Okay To Believe In Superheroes and Other Unrealistic Stuff

My brother and I weren’t the sort of kids that liked to step out of the house and engage in that game of street cricket which our parents liked to think were ‘friendly’. We were the weird kids in the new house at the end of the street that got to watch WWF (later WWE) unsupervised in the evenings and whose parents got them to do most of the Sunday gardening (taught us responsibility they said). But as a five year old girl and a ten year old boy, you are expected to fulfil certain social commitments to avoid being called names in school and hence, we forced ourselves to go play with the other kids once in a while. Half an hour into a game of Catch, my brother would snatch my arm from amongst the other 5-10 year olds in the group and announce in the manliest voice he could muster,

“We have to go.”

“But you’re it!”

“Sorry, Batman’s calling.”

“What?” the 10 year olds would say while the 5 year olds, myself included, gaped on with stars in their eyes.

“Yeah on our phone.”

“I don’t hear your phone ringing.”

“Not THAT phone silly. The other one.”

“But you said that last week.”

“Yeah well, they call us every week. Right, Ammu?”

He’d shoot me a glance and I’d nod in hasty agreement. You simply don’t disagree with your big brother publicly when you’re five. We did this every week and all the kids we used to play with believed us, a little less bright as they were in the pre-internet era.  My brother would hold my hand and lead me up the steps to our house. We would go to this little cupboard that we had under the stairs (I know right!) and he’d pick up an imaginary receiver. Smart as I was, I’d venture.

“But they aren’t listening anymore.”

“Shh. Batman’s waiting.”

I would shut up. Nobody kept Batman waiting.

I like to think that that’s how everyone started off – believing they could have a superhero at the other end of a phone line tucked away in a cupboard under the stairs. That it’s everybody’s first real dream to own a cape, a mask, be able to wear their underwear over their pants and have a symbol across their chest. When you’re five and having your cheeks pulled everywhere you go, there is nothing more empowering than waving a plastic cricket bat in the air, shouting “I have the power!” and imagining your resident stray turn into the Mighty Battle Cat.

Superheroes are important when you’re growing up. They defy all logic, defy high-school norms and defy unnecessary rules like gravity. They fly, wear masks, fight the bad guys, champion the nerds in the cafeteria corners and more often than I’d like, they lose. But then they get up, all bruised and battered, and summoning their last reserves of awesomeness, proceed to kick some serious bad-guy backside. They then simply walk away, alter-egos intact, leaving ordinary humans still guessing as to who they really are. Unless you’re Tony Stark.

I am not and never have been a super-hero aficionado and I have never owned a substantial enough number of comic books. I am the kind of fan that stuck to the cartoons and gaped at the movies and like all the people that take that route, I have never known the internal workings of any super-hero universe. So yes, there’s me. And then there are the other super-hero fans who know and understand Peter Parker like he was their sibling. Now, these are the people that take personal offence if you even mention Stan Lee without talking about Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko first and who scoff at you if you believe that Spiderman had webs shooting right out of his wrist. He had a web-shooter! How dare thee!

They are the oddities that laughed at Zack Snyder’s Krypton while you sat there open-mouthed in innocent wonder and whose very souls were broken by Ben Kingsley’s Mandarin. They are the ones that noticed how Spiderman had blue hands in The Amazing Spiderman and oh boy, did they disagree. All this while you were probably preoccupied drooling over Andrew Garfield and/or Emma Stone. They are the ones that will break your throbbing heart and tell you Wolverine looks nothing like Hugh Jackman because “He’s much shorter – a little over 4’ maybe.”

 And then there are some sections of our population so grounded in reality that they question the sanity of us imaginative folk who love holding on to our fictional idols even after we’re legally adults. They call it ‘Escapism’ – a situation where we escape into a non-existent world because we’re probably too chicken to cope with ‘real’ problems. Well, what is wrong with a little escapism may I ask? I believe that sometimes that’s exactly what we need. I like being able to look at an awkward-looking guy in a crowded place and have my brain involuntarily wonder if he has a cape tucked away in his bag somewhere. It makes me extremely weird but it brightens up my day. I will not venture to say that superheroes teach us some very important life lessons. Maybe they did at some point, if you were a smart kid back in the day. But once you’re a certified adult, nobody pays much attention to the moral of the story when, instead, you can gawk at angry green men beating up demi-Gods.

I adore the extra-ordinary and thrive on the unrealistic. I am escapism personified. The way I see it, real-world problems do not get sorted out because you dwell on it. They get sorted out because you act and nothing gets my adrenaline pumping like a good super-hero story. Peter Parker dealt with abandonment issues, bullies, unpopularity, Uncle Ben’s death and being bitten by a radioactive spider. I am so going to resolve this toilet on that floor!

My mother never understood why I go absolutely ballistic every time Robert Downey Jr says “I’ve successfully privatised world peace” or why, at one point of time, my biggest dream was to get bitten by a radioactive spider. Sometimes, the 21 year old realist in me makes me forget too. Just when I begin to question my fitness to be in sane society a little after watching the latest Spiderman movie, I look to my side and see my friend waving her wrists, first at me and then all around, making “Tchoo!” “Tchoo!” noises and shooting her imaginary webs all over. You see, childish as it may sound, we’re the ones with the alternate realities in our head where we are wand-wielding wizards or masked vigilantes with the super-power to fight everything that’s wrong. We go there quite often and come out with minor quarter-life crises. It is our means of escape from the physical reality we live in that can get a little too mundane at times.

Super-heroes are important when you’re grown-up. They fly, wear masks, fight the bad guys, champion the social misfits and kick some serious bad-guy backside. And then if you have as much awesome as Tony Stark in you, you can go ahead and call that press conference.