A doctor by profession, Arthur Conan Doyle travelled to the Arctic, supported the early use of vaccines when they were still viewed with apprehension, and wrote poetry, drama, history and fiction. He was also an enthusiastic sportsman and introduced skiing in Switzerland’s Alps mountains.




But none of these achievements would define his place in popular imagination as the creation of one character: Sherlock Holmes.




Holmes became legendary because he was more than a detective. He observed what others overlooked, questioned what others accepted and followed reason where intuition might have led people astray. Doyle gave him a mind of extraordinary precision.




There were interesting contradictions between the author and the character he created. Holmes does not believe in ghosts, but Doyle deeply believed in conversations with spirits!




Some of the quotations by Holmes are intense and sets you to think. “There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.” “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” And, with characteristic arrogance, he declares, “I am my brain, the rest of me is merely an appendix.”




Doyle eventually grew frustrated that Holmes had overshadowed everything else he had written. So, in ‘The Final Problem’, published in 1893, he killed Holmes, sending him and his arch-rival Professor Moriarty plunging to their deaths at the Reichenbach Falls.




The readers could not accept this.




There was outrage and thousands of cancellations of magazine subscriptions. Doyle had underestimated the bond between Holmes and his readers. Eventually he resurrected him in another story.




Among Holmes’s many quotations, one particularly catches my attention:




“Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself. But talent instantly recognises genius.”




There is something profound in both halves of that sentence.




Mediocrity is not necessarily a lack of talent, nor is something to be looked down upon. The danger lies elsewhere: when comfort becomes a reason not to acknowledge efforts of others. The word mediocrity has a Latin root that means – ‘halfway up the mountain’.




Perhaps that is why the mediocre mind often struggles to acknowledge greatness . When someone spends years pursuing a mission; a writer writing, an artist creating, an entrepreneur building, a reformer changing, there may be someone who asks, “But he did not make any money” or “She did not take care of her family”. Lest they understand that the pursuit for greatness is fulfilling in itself.




And that is where the second half of Holmes’s observation becomes even more powerful.




‘Talent recognises genius’.




Helen Keller, deaf and blind, met M S Subbulakshmi when she visited India in 1955. When MS began to sing, Keller gently placed her fingers on the singer’s throat, sensing the vibrations of the music. Deeply moved, she is remembered for telling MS, “You sing like an angel.”




How beautifully one extraordinary person spotted another.




Long before Holmes, Thiruvalluvar had captured the human weakness of mediocrity with astonishing precision. In Kural 844, he says:



“Venmai Enappaduvadhu Yaadhenin, Onmai

Udayam Yaam Ennum Serukku.”



“What is mediocrity? It is the vanity that declares, ‘I am wise.’”




The mountain does not become smaller because someone has stopped climbing.




And greatness may simply be the courage to keep looking upward.