It's 2013. For the past few months, I have been living a lonely and quiet life all by myself. My siblings are busy with their life, and my friends adhere to different interests than mine. All I do these days is read and watch shows in my spare time sometimes. And Just sometimes, I go out for a walk in the afternoons to bathe with the brazen yet dying golden lights. As was going my life when I had found Walter White, a high school chemistry teacher living a quiet life with his family in a place called Albuquerque.
He is a genius nobody, and no one truly sees who he is. The most exciting thing about his life is grading exam papers and listening to the exciting tales of drug busts from his DEA agent brother in law over family dinners. A guy in his mid-forties, subdued by life, is all that he is. Then, one day, he is diagnosed with lung cancer, and all hell breaks loose.
I am a breaking bad supremacist only because of him. To date, I have not found one character who is more relatable than Walter, to be honest. Late at night, lying on my bed being among pin drop silence, I have imagined myself being in his shoes to see how it would be. How it would be to leap over pillars set by firm social norms and taste the euphoria of reckless antisocial behaviours if push came to shove. And I realized that I would be exactly like him. I would do exactly what he has done.
Walter white, from breaking bad by the end of the show, truly breaks bad. He kills and goes to the extent inconceivable again and again just to survive. Just to live and keep the soul reaper one more day at bay. For that, he pays with blood, of his family, of his friends. But, in the end, the net gain is zero, which is how it is supposed to be if you really think about it. Life itself is a zero-sum game. We are stuck in a closed-loop environment, and its reach is so deeply woven in our life that even the molecules we have in our body at some point in the past may have belonged to another human being, or maybe even a dinosaur. And Walter White, to me, is the literal manifestation of this zero-sum total absurdity.
