Of Venus and Asuras....

Vidivelli (விடிவெள்ளி, Morning Star, Tamil; 1960)

Written, Directed: Sridhar

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1431188/

Thanks to SK for keeping me informed about this a long time ago. On a clear morning, if we look into the sky, we can see planet Venus. It appears as a bright light that does not flicker, unlike a star, and has a yellowish tint.

In Tamil, Venus is called Velli (வெள்ளி), and sometimes Sukhran (சுக்கிரன்) in Vedic astrology. Sukhran is a deity in the Navagraha system, associated with beauty, wisdom, love, and wealth, and is a guru to the Asuras. Therefore, Friday (Vellikizhamai, வெள்ளிக்கிழமை) is connected to Sukhran and the planet Venus.  

Asuras are not inherently negative characters, as we have come to understand. In the earlier Vedic scriptures, Asuras are depicted as powerful forces comparable to the Devas. Over time, in Hindu writings, they became synonymous with uncontrolled senses and powers. Paradoxically, on the other side of the Sindhu-Saraswati civilisation, among the Zoroastrians, there is a blurred distinction between good and evil. Ahura, as in Mazda Ahura, the primary Deity in the Zoroastrian religion, is an Asura (pronounced Ahura).

Vidivelli translates to 'morning star', i.e., Venus, which is visible before sunrise, poetically representing a positive turning point in life, the light after darkness.

This obscure film escaped the notice of most Tamil cinema enthusiasts. Although Sridhar released many innovative movies addressing compelling social issues, this particular film seems quite uninspired. His major hit as a debut director was 'Kalyana Parisu' in 1959. Most of Sridhar's successes came afterwards - including Nilavu (1961), Nenjil Or Aalayam (1962), Kattallika Neramillai (1964), and Vennira Aadai (1965).

It tells the story of a brother stealing a necklace to give his sister as a dowry. Although he feels guilty about the whole affair, he feels compelled to do it because he believes it is his duty as the elder brother to provide for his younger sister. As fate would have it, the brother secures a job with the very same people he had stolen the necklace from. Neither party realises who they are dealing with.  

The sister is happily married and was showing off her necklace one day when her husband realised that there was a photograph of a young man in its locket. The husband suspects her of infidelity and chases her back to her mother's home. The emotional brother now has to prove his sister's loyalty and admit his own crime. Things get complicated when the brother falls in love with his boss's daughter, from whom he had stolen the necklace, and her father is not too pleased with her choice.

Amongst film circles, this movie received much admiration for its direction, storyline, and stellar cast. The benchmark for the commercial success of any Tamil film is its ability to run in cinemas for over 100 days. 'Vidivelli' achieved this.

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Match made in heaven!

As part of the ritual after marriage, newlywed Brahmin couples are told to search for Arundathi-Vasishta pair of stars (Alcor-Mizar). These double stars make part of the Great Bear constellation and named after a great sage, Vasishta, and his philosopher wife, Arundathi. They were an exemplary couple that complemented each other, without one dominating over the other. 

Unlike most double stars where one star would be revolving around the other, the Arundathi-Vaisishta pair orbits around each other. The Hindu traditions believe that that is how a husband-wife pair should be - the couple should work together; not one exerting dominance over the other!

Varaha

It is beyond comprehension how ancient Indians knew so much about astronomy. These traditions have a long history that predates Corpenicus and Gallilee. At a time when the world was arguing about flat Earth and imprisonment of scientists whose discoveries clashed with the Church, the Indians knew that Earth was a sphere. Varaha, Vishnu's boar avatar, tried to save a spherical Earth from the major floods on his snout. (Not a disc)

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Of concordance and schisms

Aryabhata (476-550 CE)

Mathematician/Astronomer.

The first person to say that Earth 

is spherical and revolves around 

the sun. The first to suggest that 

any number divided by 0 

gives infinity ∞. (pinterest)

Continuing in the quest to make sense of things around me, I stumbled into something quite thought-provoking. It has something to do with our idea of separating knowledge into the sciences and the arts.

It is interesting to note that the Ionians, of the Eastern part of the Greek civilisation, and the Hindu culture started learning things about the world we live in entirely independent of each other. It is incredible how quite similar their discoveries were, at least in the initial stages.

The pre-Socratic thinkers thought that there was a connection between the Universe and the world immediately around us. Thales tried to say that water is the essence of our existence. Democritus put forward the theory of Void and eternal, indivisible atoms that made up our physical world. Pythagoras and his cult members attempted very hard to a mathematical formula for everything in the Cosmos, including music. His equations, he later realised, could be irrational at times. A case in point is the irrationality of √2. The hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle with dimensions of 1 X 1 cannot be calculated probably made him abandon his idea. From that time onward, another branch of knowledge is said to have developed - natural philosophy. Later philosophers quit looking at the stars for the answers but instead started gazing inwardly. They abandoned the physical sciences to rhetorics. Their idea of problem-solving was people watching. This type of wisdom continued all through Plato and subsequent sages. As we know Plato's teachings metamorphosed into Neoplatonic ideas which greatly influenced the Abrahamic religions.

Attempts to revive sciences through the works of Kepler, Copernicus and Newton met a lot of resistance from the society so ingrained in a kind of a dogmatic belief. Some of the branches of the Abrahamism realised their loss of grip on the flock and decided to move with the times while some found content in spewing their 6th-century or maybe 12th-century slightly improved ideologies.

On the other side of the world, in the Indus Valley, things progressed slightly differently. Their perspective of life on Earth seems to one that was devoid of the outside realm but of one that incorporated all the celestial bodies in the Universe. Till today, they appreciate significant events of the heavens like the birth of the new moon, the glory of the full moon and specific planetary positioning. Modern science is slowly agreeing to many of their old age believed traditions about the Cosmos and its cyclical manner of doing things. People of the Indian sub-continent continue showing their appreciations to things which are taken for granted in life. A simple example is the festival of Thai Ponggal or Makara Sankranthi which is celebrated during the Indic solstice as the sun enters the 10th house of the Indian zodiac Makara or Capricorn.
As more and more new things are discovered, one cannot fathom but only stand in awe trying to come in terms with how these ancient civilisations, with their rudimentary tools, were able to find things that were literally out of this world.

Kepler-186f is an exoplanet about 550 light-years from the Earth. It is the first planet with a radius similar to Earth's to be discovered in the habitable zone of another star. (Wiki) 

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Things just happen?

Christiaan Huygens (1629 - 1695)

I always wondered how such a small country as the Netherlands could transform themselves suddenly to a seafaring nation and a superpower from the 17 century onwards. Sieving through its history, one can find that it was paved with many upheavals and uprisings. Lord Burgundy is credited for uniting regions around Holland, Luxemburg and Belgium. Protestants, who were protesting silently against the tyranny of control of the Roman Catholic Church and congregated around the Netherlands, declared themselves as a Republic as the Spanish kingdom became weaker.

With superstition and dogma out of the way, with science as the guiding light, the people of the Netherlands prospered. Encouraging citizens to think, speak and not be ostracised for out-of-the-box ideas, scientists prospered. They had entered the golden age of their existence. With advances in science, in particular astronomy and navigational knowhows, they went places. Improvement in optics opened their vision to spaces far and beyond. 

The single icon which is often mentioned in Netherland during this era is Christiaan Huygens. Huygens was a physicist, mathematician, astronomer and inventor extraordinaire. He is credited for the invention of the pendulum clock, studies in mechanics, light, the discovery of Saturn ring and its moon Titan as well as work in probability.

It must have been a composite of things that brought all the changes in that nation. The fact that there was a genius being born in a place where thinking was allowed, away from the thought-controlling milieu of the Roman Catholic countries. The presence of other same minded and complementary figures also must have made their impact. Like a soup of possibilities, everything just happened to fall just nicely at the right place and right time. Only by chance. I do not think the divine forces ordained such a phenomenon as it allegedly occurred in a so-called 'renegade' state.

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