I WONDER | Issue No. 02 The Prophets Among Us

“I Told You So.” — The Three Most Dangerous Words in Human History.

Somewhere, right now, a person is achieving something. And somewhere very close by, another person is clearing their throat, straightening their collar, and preparing to deliver the four syllables that will completely steal the show. “I told You So”.

There is a moment, in every success story, that nobody talks about. Not the sleepless nights. Not the rejection letters thick enough to wallpaper a room. Not the phase where the person in question seriously considered abandoning everything and opening a small tea stall by the highway.

No. The moment nobody talks about is the one that comes immediately after success. The two-second window between the good news breaking and the arrival of The Prophets.

You will recognise them. They travel in groups. They have been waiting. Oh, how they have been waiting.

“I told you so.”

Three words. Delivered with the quiet satisfaction of a man who has just won a bet he placed fifteen years ago and never told anyone about.

Let us trace the life cycle of an achiever, shall we? For science.

Phase One: The Struggle. Our hero is trying. Really trying. Applying for jobs, facing rejections, doubting themselves at 2 AM, eating instant noodles with the quiet dignity of someone who has chosen ambition over a balanced diet. During this entire phase — and this is crucial — The Prophets are largely absent. They are busy. They have opinions to form. Predictions to quietly log in the filing cabinet of their memory, to be retrieved later, at the perfect dramatic moment.

Phase Two: The Breakthrough. It happens. The job offer arrives. The business takes off. The exam is cracked. Our hero, bleary-eyed and slightly disbelieving, picks up the phone to share the news.

Phase Three: The Prophecy Reclamation. Within forty-eight hours — sometimes forty-eight minutes — The Prophets assemble. And the sentence begins.

“You know, I always said this one had it in them.”

“I told your father, years ago — mark my words, I said.”

“I never doubted for even one second. Not one.”

Now here is the truly magnificent part. The prophecy, as delivered, bears absolutely no relationship to what was actually said during Phase One.

During Phase One, the same Prophet may have said, with considerable authority: “This field has no future. Why not try something stable? Have you considered government service?”

But memory, as it turns out, is a remarkably flexible instrument. By Phase Three, that conversation has been quietly edited, rearranged, and rereleased — much like a director’s cut of a film, except the director is rewriting history in real time and no one is allowed to check the original footage.

The achiever, meanwhile, stands there. Holding their hard-won success. Wondering if they imagined the last three years. Wondering if perhaps the Prophet was, in some metaphysical sense, correct all along. Wondering if they should say something. Deciding, wisely, not to.

And then — oh, then — comes the extended remix.

Because “I told you so” is never just four syllables. It is a gateway. A portal to an extended monologue in which the Prophet traces, in extraordinary detail, every single moment they supposedly believed in you — including moments you have no memory of and strong reason to doubt ever occurred.

“Remember that Sunday lunch in 2019? I looked across the table and I thought — that one. That one is going places.”

You were eating rice. You had just spilled dal on your shirt. You were not, by any observable measure, going places.

But here you are, nodding. Because what else do you do?

The supporting cast, of course, is equally spectacular.

There is The Competitive Prophet — who told you so, yes, but also told seventeen other people so, and is now doing complex mental arithmetic to figure out which prediction to lead with.

There is The Reluctant Prophet — who definitely had doubts, enormous doubts, but has decided that publicly owning a prophecy is better than admitting they once suggested you take up accounting.

And then there is The Retroactive Prophet — the purest form — who, if pressed, cannot actually recall saying anything at all, but has by now told the story of their belief in you so many times that they have genuinely begun to remember it. The brain is a wonderful thing.

Meanwhile, the actual achiever. The person who set the alarm at 5 AM. Who rewrote the application seventeen times. Who cried once in a parking lot and told nobody. Who kept going on the days when keeping going felt frankly unreasonable.

That person is standing quietly in the corner, eating cake, occasionally nodding, and thinking: I wonder. I really do wonder.

But they smile. Because they know. And that, in the end, is entirely enough.

The next time someone tells you “I told you so” — smile warmly, nod graciously, and know, deep in your bones, that the only person who truly told you so was the one who stared back at you in the mirror every morning and said: keep going.

That person deserves all the credit. And the cake.

Capt. Shaji Kumar | I Wonder, Issue 02

To every achiever who did it quietly, stubbornly, and entirely on their own — this one’s for you.

All the best Vava. This one is for you.

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