Measure of Success

### Measure of Success

“It is over,” he said.

As those words fell from his lips, the entire nation erupted into sorrow. "Apu," they cried, "don’t leave us! We are lost without you. You are our hero, our greatest writer, our leader, our philosopher…”

“Enough, you idiots!” he thundered, pressing his hands against his ears. His voice cracked like a whip, silencing their pleas. “Enough with your empty praises and hollow words. Stop speaking, you spineless, witless masses! Let me not hear another word from any of you.”

With that, he slammed the door, shutting out the world. From that moment, no one dared approach him. Whispers spread—had their hero gone mad?

He had not lost his mind. He had simply withdrawn to understand the measure of his life. Standing by the window, he gazed out at the city—his city, his country. His chin rested heavily on the cold steel frame of the very window through which thieves had crept countless times. A window that bore silent witness to the slow decay of his land and its people.

The streets were filled with the wretched poor. Divisions among the populace ran deep, sanitation was nonexistent, and the bridges were crumbling relics of a forgotten time. The fish in the ponds carried poison, infecting the minds of his people with dullness and apathy. Their weak thinking mirrored their poisoned state. Kindness was mocked; reform was futile. The only certainty in the land was uncertainty itself. Why, he cried inwardly, why had it all come to this?

He was revered as the greatest mind his country had ever known. He had ensured that no one else could achieve anything close to his brilliance. When confronted by political adversaries, he demolished them with sharp, unforgiving words, leaving them incapable of challenging him. His enemies conspired to kill him, but he outmaneuvered them, turning their schemes inward until they destroyed one another.

Through his daily newspaper columns, he sowed suspicion across the land. “Everyone is guilty of something,” he proclaimed, and the people, awed by his eloquence, believed him. His influence was so pervasive that the nation began to think, speak, and write as he did. To his followers, no one—whether politician, businessman, student, parent, priest, Catholic, or Muslim—was beyond reproach. Everyone was guilty until proven otherwise.

His philosophy was simple: to rise above others, tear them down. To smell sweet, ensure that everyone else reeks. To be superior, humiliate all who stand below. The philosophy was so easy to follow, it worked flawlessly. He became the best-smelling, most superior man in the country.

And so, everyone else failed. Failure became his country’s destiny.

By the end of his life, he was the most beloved figure in a nation of crooks. Yet he lived in constant fear of assassination. His home, fortified with the most advanced security systems, stood as a fortress against the desperate neighbors who had turned to theft and kidnapping to survive. His brilliant ideas, immortalized in writing, lay unread by an increasingly illiterate nation. He was celebrated as the greatest because he had silenced all who dared disagree. He was a philosopher in a country that no longer knew how to think.

On the night of his death, he reflected on it all—his victories, his philosophy, his legacy.

“It is over,” he said.
2024-11-30 12:58:08
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