The journey started right from childhood, even while the child starts crawling. The kind of stories the mother tells us goes into our minds and stays there influencing our personae in the days to come.
During my good old school days, entertainment was limited to the print media and Radio, a privileged possession of a few. “Phantom” was one of our favourite heroes whom we read and saw in the pages of “The Illustrated Weekly of India”. He was the hero of the jungle. He had the sense of danger any time and appeared instantly to knock out the evil doers, mostly outsiders in the peaceful and wealthy jungle (there was even a gold island). Over years, our world extended into Cinema, and later Television, the number of such Heroes also increased some forgotten and new ones acquired as we grew in age and maturity. The kind of Heroes as taught in Sunday School those days were Moses, Gideon, Samson and Joshua and the likes. However in posterity I acknowledge that these were looked upon by us more as moral science and larger than life probably as there was no element of fantasy attached to them by our teachers or parents. They remained in confines as Bible story, as a moral story session.
Today in my later years, I feel that definitely “Phantom” was invented based on the morals of the Bible as he often talked about love, synergy and peace (in the jungle). Even his oft quoted slogan was inspired from Bible.
“The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, The leopard shall lie down with the young goat. The calf and the young lion and the fattened calf together: And a little child shall lead them…...They shall not hurt or destroy in all My holy mountain." Isaiah 11:6-9
As I entered the career path, the concept of heroes shifted to our in-house mentors and CEOs and adoration for other achievers in the field.
