A friend came visiting recently. It was his first time to the house so I took him round our home before settling him in the family living room which I felt was cozier since it was just the two of us. He commended the arrangement of the apartment and its ‘view’. Compliments over, we settled down to sharing a drink. We were watching a program on TV when he commented on the size of the TV screen.

He tried to put it delicately but the bottom line was that he felt it was small.  Until he mentioned it, I never considered the size of the TV as unbefitting or inadequate. Although it preceded the apartment, I believe it more than serves my purpose and I do not consider changing it. But this has not stopped me from thinking about my friend’s statement and its wider ramifications. I do not make a fetish of assessing the sizes of people’s TV screens when I visit but I suppose on hindsight, that his own is much bigger. I know we live in an era where size is seen as a status symbol.

Whether it is of a TV screen, a car or a house, size announces you and trumps functionality any day. So I can understand his sentiments if he felt the size of my TV was an understatement of sorts. After all, many homes these days have TV screens that cover a complete side of a wall. I once went on a tour of a house where the owner showed me their TV room. It was built like a cinema house with accompanying acoustics and the screen stretching almost from wall to wall. It also had lights in strategic places that could be turned down.

As I left, I wondered how many times she, or her husband who was hardly home, would find the time to visit the TV room in a month, let alone use the giant screen, especially with ‘big’ TVs dotted all over the house. But it really was not about the TV room being functional. It was about making a statement – like people who live abroad building a tennis court in a supposed country home in a remote part of Nigeria; or a sixty year-old man whose children have left home building a seven-bedroom mansion; or a fifty year-old man building a disco room. Life, for many of us, is about appearances; hence the desire to make visible statements. We want the society to see us as being successful and the trappings of success are in these showy things. So our need for acceptance often over rides rationality and thus fuels our greed.

 It seems like ages ago, but there was a time when the biggest colour TV screen was about 24 inches. Anything bigger and the images would be flat and distended. Then came the era of flat screens which first pushed the sizes to 32, 36 inches. Those who owned flat TVs then felt privileged. Needless to say, they enjoyed their programs without feeling anything was amiss until bigger models came out. Then came the era of the smart TV with its even bigger and better variations. Every affluent home must have a few irrespective of whether many of their digitally advanced functions were understood let alone utilized. The bigger the smart TV, the better the statement. So, it is a sign of these superfluous times that anybody would consider a 45inch TV small. In reality, nobody, except the visually impaired, needs anything bigger. Nobody needs TV sets in every room except to make a statement. Certainly, nobody needs a purpose built TV room especially when the children have grown up and have flown the nest.

Another area of our lives we like to show off is religion. We love to give the appearance of piety. It doesn’t matter what we do or don’t do as long as the society sees us as good Muslims or Christians. But it doesn’t stop there. We have to show that our religion is better than others. So we put down other religions while we elevate our own. Christians look down on Muslims while Muslims regard Christians as infidels. Both think worshipers of traditional religions are damned. In this zeal to show that our religious screen is better than others, we forget that the two main religions come from the same source. And that fundamentally, they both preach the same thing: love of God and care for humanity.

In fact, virtually all religions come down to these basics. As bad as this is, it still doesn’t stop there. There is a fight for supremacy, even among the sects that had been lethal in the past. While Christian denominations have stopped killing themselves, Islamic sects have not, unfortunately. The Middle-East, which is the cradle of Islam, could become deeply fractionalized on account of this with deep seated economic and political wars rising to the surface. I am personally of the opinion that no religion has the exclusive passport or visa to heaven and that these religious jostles are parts of the innate human desire for supremacy and glorification.

A kind of ‘my Mercedes is better than yours or in line with this article, ‘my TV screen is bigger than yours’. Very few of us have bothered to study other religions to know what they stand for, how they rate compared to ours and the deeper messages they espouse. We are simply practicing the religions we inherited from our fathers and pontificating on them. Unfortunately, in our zeal to show deeper, more exclusive knowledge of the higher realm which nobody has come back from, we have fractured our society and the present world. We have spewed hatred where true brotherhood could have brought greater trust and created greater happiness. The problems in the north which have led to unimaginable violence and privations, hide under religion.

The rat race for self-promotion and self-glorification could be better managed if we focused on the fundamentals of life. Those fundamentals would teach us humility, contentment and the joy of sharing. Real happiness doesn’t lie in private jets, bigger houses or for that matter, bigger TV screens. They also don’t lie in religious supremacy or bigotry. They don’t, because they were never meant to be. If they were, the rich and the famous would not be committing suicide; pastors, priests and imams would not be having deeply troubled homes. True happiness is deeper and more intrinsic. That is why a poor fisherman can be happier that a billionaire; an atheist than a cleric. Many try to demonstrate their greatness through opulent trappings. Instead, they merely succeed in revealing their smallness. ‘They grow small trying to be great’ to borrow a famous quote. Late Pope Francis has, by his life and death, shown us an aspect of true greatness.