Just do your stuff, don’t talk

Karma Yogis come in all sorts of disguises these days. Neil Armstrong, for instance, who���s now 78, wore a space-suit and became the first man to walk on the moon forty monsoons ago. That brought instant celebrity to the man who literally had the world at his feet. But he has never allowed fame go to his head, preferring instead to do everything in his power to actually diminish his iconic status.

Nor has he ever forgotten that there were 400,000 other people involved in the Moon landing so he���s kept on insisting that he didn���t deserve to hog all the credit and limelight just because he���d done the flying part. ���Initially, Armstrong went along with the celebrations,��� Andrew Smith, author of Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth, says. ���(But) he always remained aloof; an elusive presence who preferred to talk about facts rather than feelings.���
Two years later, the astronaut resigned from NASA and joined a small aerospace engineering department of a university. But that brought no respite from celebrity. So he started to decline speeches and interviews, eventually refusing to sign autographs and shying away from being photographed in public.

���He didn���t want to profit from it financially ��� even though a lot of the other Moon walkers have done ��� and amazingly he���s stood by that,��� Smith told The New York Times. ���An auction house told me that if Armstrong spent just one afternoon signing autographs he could make a million dollars, but he���s always refused. To my knowledge he���s done exactly two television interviews in the last 40 years ��� and he says nothing about what he felt about anything. He will talk about matters of fact and that���s it.���

Many in the global media machine are understandably baffled: is that a walking saint or just another eccentric, or a Howard Hughes in the making? The latter comparison may be unfair to both: as an aviator, industrialist, film producer and director, Hughes led a charmed life straight out of Vogue. It became marred by obsessive compulsive disorder much later. In contrast, Armstrong has always had the rightest of the right stuff. Having flown the X-15, he���s arguably the most distinguished pilot that has ever lived.

A better fit may be the equally taciturn ���pilot���s pilot���: Chesley ���Sully��� Sullenberger who landed his crippled bird on the Hudson River recently. Their motto seems right out of the Gita: Just do your stuff; don���t talk!