Kamal Ghorui
I always thought I was a winner. Not in celebrated Bollywood hero kind of way, but in the way my mother said it, like a family joke she loved too much to repeat. “You were the winning sperm,” she would tell people, as if she had been at the starting line clapping for a tiny athlete. I liked the picture of myself racing through microscopic waves and breaking a ribbon even before I could know my own name. It made me feel like Bill Gates, a person with a great human credit score, a little taller, a little less afraid.
People misunderstood and made a pedestal out of that joke. Teachers placed me on it without asking. “High emotional intelligence,” they wrote on my school reports, which were worded medals. Relatives called me “old soul” and used my patience as proof that the world still had hope. I began to believe the pedestal was my identity. I began to practice being big, bigger than my age, bigger than my temper, bigger than hurt. It was a job I didn’t apply for, but I got promoted to it by default.
Then the world handed me a thing everyone called “a miracle,” which felt more like a burden.
The hospital
The first memory I can vaguely recall is clearly a beeping sound that kept counting down like a metronome set by someone who’d forgotten to stop. White lights. I remember the way things felt at the hospitals. Everything felt urgent and final. I remember my mother’s face, always concealing worry with hope and optimism. I remember tubes and the way the room seemed as though it was closing in on me.
Viral pneumonia turned into a strange, severe thing; my heart decided to misbehave. I was small and loud and strangely tired. Doctors used words around me like “rare,” “complication,” “guarded prognosis.” Relatives said prayers as if they were spells. The whole thing gathered attention like a magnet draws metals.
People treated me like I had been survived by accident. “Against all odds,” they said, and everyone nodded. I heard people call me brave, as though bravery was almost an inheritance. I didn’t feel brave. I felt like a child who had been given a second chapter without reading the first one. Survival didn’t grant me a crown. It gave my mother nights of thinking I could stop breathing anytime. But other people turned my survival into a story they could tell at gatherings almost as their own personal experience. In those versions, I became a protagonist in a life that had to be a cine reel. My pedestal got wider.
The pitch
I fell in love with cricket even before I learned to tie my shoelaces. The pitch smelled like sun and grass, players like warriors. To me, it was like a sport that would be kind if you asked it politely.
I wasn’t good. That’s the blunt truth. I had the sort of talent that is polite and often late. The ball would arrive like an invitation, and my bat would answer with an apology. The scoreboard rarely owed me joy. Teammates exchanged looks with the practiced warmth of people boosting each other up because the bench needs morale. Coaches delivered analysis that sounded sincere but was meaner than it tried to be. Cricket taught me humility in the most patient way. It taught me I could be devoted and still belong right in the middle. I practiced anyway. I ran drills as if routine could polish whatever roughness I had into something resembling skill. Watching better players, swift, agile, certain, felt like watching a different species navigate a world we both lived in.
Every time I missed a catch or misread a ball, Mediocrity sat down beside me on the bench. He had no malice. He simply existed, heavy and honest.
The return
Post-COVID, returning to school was like walking into a room that had learned new fashions and left me in last season’s fashion sense. My body had changed, softness where sharpness used to be, like someone remade an extra outline without telling me. I packed on weight because lockdown taught kitchens to conspire with boredom, and to top it, my genes arrived at the party. I came back with new measurements that seemed to matter where they never should have.
Kids can actually make entire careers out of snickering. The jokes started as small that turned into a steady storms. Even friends slipped into the same rhythm, a laugh here, a “psst” there, an eyeroll hidden as a joke. I learned to protect myself with a kind of private armour. Not indifference exactly, but a make-do of strategies, humour when it stung, silence when I needed to recentre, a smile that did the job of a shield.
My mother never fit into the world’s script of normalcy. While others expected me to push for extraordinary, she cheered the softer things. Failed a math test? She ordered my favourite meal like it was a celebration. Miss an easy catch? She said, “You tried,” with the kind of pride that didn’t measure outcomes. She loved my middles in a way that made “middleness” seem like a medal. She told me stories during our pillow talk sessions. One I returned to often was the Ganesh–Kartikeya Hindu mythology. Kartikeya, the warrior son of lord Shiva, when challenged to race around the world quicker than his brother Ganesha, sped off on his peacock to encircle the universe. Ganesh who had a mouse for his “vahana”, orbited his parents and said that was his universe. Usual takeaway for kids from this tale is “brains beat brawn,” but my mother said it was like a map; the world is as wide as the people you carry with you. Kartikeya had speed and power. Ganesh had intelligence and humility. Neither was small but both chose different routes.
Cafeteria
There’s a particular cruelty in the laughter heard in the cafeteria, “if you know, you know”. People pick at you like crows pick at leftover food, never apologetic. Someone joked about my weight across the table, a verse I knew well. I wanted to be louder. I wanted to prove them wrong with some cinematic reveal, an unexpected six, a math score that stood out, a won contest. I wanted a single action that would recalibrate how they saw me. What happened instead was quieter. I started answering the snickers with small, sharp things. A sudden joke that redirected the conversation, a presence that, over time, stopped being someone to pity and started being someone to expect. It wasn’t drama, it was a slow practiced evolution.
Online gaming became my refuge because the internet doesn’t clap or whisper. It holds its gates open to anyone willing to be there. In the virtual world, I became the version of a person who always wins and has a place. Not all heroes are loud. Some are patient, steady, like worn ropes that hold up bridges.
The bed
It’s funny how revelation happens in the simplest manner. I was sitting on the bed, my mom beside me, almost preparing for our daily pillow talk session, when it occurred to me, “mediocrity could be a kindness”. I had always thought of mediocrity as something to avoid but it struck me then that being in the middle of things meant I could be a bridge. I wasn’t the peak that made everyone to look up to it, nor the crevice where everyone feared to fall, I was the bridge, the middle, where everyone felt safe.
The human library idea lived in my chest like a warm cuddle. People borrow pages from each other, courage, jokes, songs, apologies, and return them tainted and wiser. Some carry thick volumes of achievement, others, just thin notebooks full of small, steady acts. I began to see my life as one of those notebooks, not empty but full of footnotes of my journey.
From that day, I began to measure progress in millimetres like my mother told me, tiny incremental changes adding up, not always visible, but real. I stopped wanting one grand redemption and started valuing the tiny, stubborn acts of showing up.
Home
My mother made a ritual of the ordinary. When I came back from practice with bruises and flustered apologies, she would make a hot cup of cocoa in my favourite mug as if it were an offering. She never said, “You should be a champion.” Instead, she said, “I am so glad you played another match.” The phrasing was everything and felt like a hug.
She taught me to celebrate failure with the same joy most people preserve only for success. A failed exam meant we tried a different method of study together. A lost match meant we practiced more. She rewired the leaderboard in our home, wins were quieter, failures were louder because we introspected and grew. When I told her the Ganesh–Kartikeya story made me feel safer, she smiled and let out a content sigh. “Everyone’s path has a different map,” she said.
A small victory
There was a small moment, ordinary or unnoticed by anyone else, but it was one where I realized the truth. We had a match, a local academy against our team. I was nervous, but in the way you get excitement nerves, not the way you feel before a cliff dive. The bowlers were sharp, and I was not. I misjudged a delivery but managed a single that mattered. On the field, someone tripped, and I supported him. Someone else laughed at my running style, and I laughed with him instead of clamming up. We didn’t win, not even close. But afterwards, a boy from the other team came up and said, “You were cool today.” Cool?” I said, flattered but suspicious. “You kept trying,” he said. “That’s rare.” His words felt freeing and grounding. He hadn’t called me brilliant or exceptional. All he noticed was the steady part and that I was enough.
Where it leaves me
At thirteen, I am not the poster child of excellence. I am not spectacular in the way Marvel Cinemas make heroes. I am a story of small, steady edits. I keep forging ahead, I listen, I do not hesitate to apologize when I am wrong, and I try to be kind and live in gratitude which is not easy.
Mediocrity is not a curse. It is not the other end of the spectrum of success. It is a buddy that keeps me honest, that reminds me every day that progress can be invisible. It lets me borrow courage from others and give it back with interest.
I now have an acknowledgement that winning can mean arriving every morning with a little more care than when you left. I want to leave the world a little better each day, a gentle compliment to make someone smile, a held door, a meal shared, a rough joke that lands and makes someone’s face shift from tiredness to softness.
I have learned to be friends with mediocrity. A true steady friend, who is predictable and patient. It is not amazing, but it is mine and I am learning to be okay with that. I am learning to be brave. The kind of brave where I return to practice after failing miserably, the kind where I forgive myself for days that I feel small, the kind of bravery it takes to keep lending pages of kindness from my life’s book.
My goal is not to be famous. It is to leave gentle imprints on the people I meet every day. Not with grand gestures or a spotlight but with a slow, stubborn light that refuses to go out. I choose to be the main character of my story and only then I have hope to grow up to be the person I aim to become That is my kind of winning!
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
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