The word “Avatar” comes from Sanskrit. My take on avatar is a bit different and I will try to explain myself here but it might be a case where I may sound very ambiguous as it is beyond the scope of 400 words to explain everything. I grew up listening to stories of “Ramayana” and “Mahabharata”, two epics that are integral parts of life in India.
In fact according to the “Jataka Tales”, Buddha was born as a human in his approximately 43rd birth. He began as a monkey king and every life he would do good deeds to be born as a better creature. Every birth was a different avatar and you go from strength to strength. I was given to learn that an avatar is God incarnated as a human being. Lord “Rama” is an avatar of the best man ever born. “Goddess Durga” has 10 hands and symbolizes supreme power that is needed to overcome evil. Two hands are just not enough to kill the demon and thus she has different weapons in different hands. Similarly there are hundreds of Gods in Hinduism and each symbolizes a different trait and is worshiped for their respective qualities. So when I sit for an exam, I pray a different god and at other time I may worship a different god depending on what quality I am looking forward to. Sounds funny? Yes it is but the whole thing is very complex and I have not been able to completely understand everything myself.
But what I understand is that we do the same things in real life. We take different roles in different places and different times. As a child I had wanted to become a tennis player whenever the Wimbledon Season came and would want to be a pilot every time a plane flew by. But as I have grown, the scope of those roles closed down and now I know that I am a graduate student and might stick to academics for the rest of my life. My Avatar will never be a pilot or doctor again. However whenever I see a tennis player I become nostalgic and might be that my behavior with him will be completely different as compared to a football player. People change, philosophies change, so do the Avatars. Or should they? Can I not be a tennis player in my Fantasy? While reading the papers of this week I was reminded of a German Movie I had seen called “Das Experiment”. In the movie a bunch of common citizens were broken into 2 groups and were assigned roles of prisoners and police officers. Strangely enough the common citizens had behavioral changes and the acting police was much harsher than actual police and the situation spirals out of control. I have not played MMORPs but was once given the role of a Class Representative in school. The very first day I had hit my best friend, trying to maintain the decorum of the class and my newly found post. It had a very bad effect on my friendship. My personal experience is that give people responsibility and they will change accordingly. So do Avatars too have such influence?
But surely our experiences have an effect on us whether real or virtual. “By default” has become integral part of our common day language and is not just limited to computers. Its not far when we would start to act our Avatars in our real lives. I just wish we go from strength to strength and improve our lives and not tread the opposite way.
