Civilisation does not equate to civility!

Civilisation does not assure civility!

So, what is it that makes someone great? Is he the one who has conquered all his animalistic desires and knows that his real needs are beyond the realm of physicality and materialism? This man seeks knowledge and is satisfied when the lock of the meaning of life and the hidden secret of the Universe is unlocked. Such a man is fiction. Nietzsche described him as Übermensch. Hindus referred to him as Rama or Krishna, the revised 2.0 version of a complex man. 

Javanese Trishul

Another version of understanding how life works is to look at Hinduism's representation of the Universe - Trimurti, the Trinity - Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva and their consorts. Brahma, the creator, has to work in tandem with his consort, Saraswati. Saraswati is the Goddess of education and creativity. The take-home message here is that to create anything; one needs to have enough knowledge and creativity.

Once the creation is done, life does not just go on unabashed. It has to be preserved and preserved well. To maintain this creation and look after it, one needs the brains, plus the resources for that. For this comes Vishnu, the divinity assigned for this purpose, who operates with his consort, Laxmi, the Goddess of wealth and prosperity. The point here is that to conserve any creation; we need affluence. Wealth is required to ensure the continuity of anything that we create. Maintenance takes money. And money begets money.

At the same time, to guard any property, one should have to power to destroy evil and negative forces. Human instinct is to usurp and squander. He will sleep until his material possession is more than his neighbour's. The guardian for this is Shiva, the dissolver (destroyer). Goddess Sakti or her manifestations Parvati or Kaali, the most ferocious form of divinity, is there to assist him in his task. To maintain the status quo and to keep one's possessions intact, he needs to have the power to destroy. Power is mandatory to stay in charge. Unstoppable rage is pointless. Shiva, by being the brake to unbridled violence, acts against the killing machine of Sakti.

One cannot go on destroying everything in sight forever like what the jihadists are doing. Nothing would be left to protect or protect for. Hence, the creation, preservation and destruction cycle needs to be repeated.

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It is only natural to move forward!

May 4th Movement
Tiananmen Gathering 1919;
a turning point in Chinese history.

It seems biological warfare does not just mean sending anthrax spores or releasing serine gas at a railway station. It had evolved to something quite specific to the intended victim.

Like in the latest James Bond offering, like how Spectre had perfected the art of individualising weapons against its enemies, some conspiracy theorists believe that the emergence of the Wuhan virus is one step closer towards this end. The constant mutation of this RNA virus at such neck-breaking speed all through alpha to zeta variants in a matter of years further cements their arguments.

When the western world decided that facial recognition software does not work well, in came the Chinese with a technologically functional system so advanced that it puts shame on the Western stereotype that 'all Chinese faces look alike'!

The condescending look of the world (read West) probably reached its zenith after the 1919 Versailles Treaty. After dismantling the Chinese dynasty and fighting an uphill battle with opium addiction, the Treaty sealed the last nail on the coffin at a time of turmoil. Even though China was aligned with the Allied Forces, she got a raw deal. She had the area around the Shandong peninsula, German holdings before WW1, assigned to their mortal enemy, Japan.

The time after that was of great upheaval; the age-old Confucius styled civil service entrance examinations were revamped, the May Fourth Movement, political and cultural revolution and finally Communist China came to being to restore China's past glory. At every turn, the world viewed China hawkishly as a despotic, third-world godless country that does not respect human dignity.

So when the world foolishly thought that China could be cajoled to perform the Western world's menial and laborious chores, China jumped at the opportunity. Slowly, on the sly, it improved its human capital.

Zheng Ho, the 1400s

After a century of slumber, the dragon has awoken. The ugly duckling has turned into a swan. Suddenly their brilliance shines the world over. If the club of space-venturing countries thought going to the moon was unproductive, China shocked everyone by approaching the moon from the dark side.

The fear of 'Yellow Peril' is ignited once again by people who tend to be negatively affected by the rise of the sleeping dragon. Will they repeat their previous feat in the early 15th century when their fleets explored the four corners of the world, including the New World, almost a good 90-over years before the European looters?

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The robe and the abacus...

Never trust a man in a suit and tie.

He may hide his evil intentions behind

his haberdashery perfection. In the

same vein, a female who reveals much

more than is needed to hide the 

necessaries may be masking the real 

thing she is hiding. 

It is said that the mark of the fall of an economy or, to go as far as a civilisation, is the disproportionate increase in the numbers of accountants and lawyers in society. Disproportionate to what, one may ask. For a community to propel to higher heights, we desperately need educators, engineers, scientists and health care workers. Educators to teach the young minds, engineers to push the boundary of the mind to explore new frontiers, scientists to discover ways to ease living and health professionals to ensure healthy bodies and minds for continual progress. As society becomes complicated, or the piece of the economic pie gets smaller, there would arise the need to protect or usurp material as much as possible, the legal way. After all, good times do not last forever.

Furthermore, the generation next would not be so resilient or antifragile to handle things given to them on a platter. Still, prosperity has to be continued down generations. Hence, there is an innate compulsion for good times to continue rolling within the family. Finances need to be fixed.

The significant jump in the numbers of lawyers and accountants may also mark the decline of morality. Whether the downfall of society is because of their increase or as a response to the fall, it is a matter of conjecture. When one sees things that used to be settled with a gentleman’s handshake amongst close-knitted friends or relatives now mandates legally signed documents to seal the deal, we know we are going down the rabbit hole of mutual distrust.

Washing dirty linen in public and broadcasting intimate detail to shame the other party is in vogue these days. The accusers think that they could play the victim card by putting all lewd pieces in the open. Little do they know, the public says a free daytime soap opera.

Trustfulness is now a forgotten virtue. When a person used to be entrusted with our monies, we did that not because he could give a beautiful account of our income and expenditure. We knew that there was no doubt about his trustworthiness as he would guard his assigned duty with his life. Now, we want a nicely executed (maybe concocted) Excel sheet with all the 't's well crossed and the 'i's meticulously dotted. Creativity and documentation supersede honesty and hard work.

Honest toiling and passion do not count in this material. All one needs to be successful and marketable in a colourful resumé with skills of articulation Lawyers and accountants help us towards that end. Teachers and medical personnel do not serve to broadcast their deeds. There do it because it is a service to mankind. At least, that is how it used to be.

[P.S. Writers and literary figures are still needed for they need to stir emotion and push boundaries, for we only know our limits when we push them to the brim.]

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Blinded!

A Billion Colour Story (2016)

History tells us that India used to be a welcoming land to any weary sojourner. It is proud of being the only country in the world where its people did not persecute anyone based on physical appearances or personal convictions. It stands proud of not harassing Jews. It ushered in visitors with such warmth, sharing their knowledge in the hope of finding meanings of life, so much so that they decided to overstay their welcome and so much as a rule over the roost.

Did the last of the visitors leave such a scar of conquest that can never heal? To ease their administration, the British, initially a band of looters in the form of East India Company and then later for the Crown, divided and subdivided their subjects by breed, colour, occupation, religion, etc., drilled in the idea that they were different. They mastered the craft of 'divide and rule' to its finest.

The divide became so pronounced that it carved out the limbs out of the tripartite sub-continent. The conquerors were happy to leave with such an arrangement that became cumbersome. It fitted very well with their intentions to destabilise the region by instigating brotherly skirmishes. As the Cold War was developing, political influence over the area was maintained. Destabilisation ensured the petroleum supply was kept in check with British aspirations.

The world was achanging. Ideas were spreading like wildfire. People became loyal not to the flag but to a belief of an invisible pink unicorn that was an oxymoron, but who dare ask. The representation transcended all rational thought and called for blood. A once peaceful existence has turned hostile. How do you expect the hosts to take things lying down? An eye for an eye, and I will instead be blind than do the blasphemous something, says one party. A tit for tat says the other in reply. The combatants are mired so deep in muck that they had forgotten who drew first blood and for what they are fighting for.

We encounter this award-winning film with this background that showcases an eternally optimistic trained in Australia movie-making couple who believes that the old India is very much alive. Despite the adverse publicity churned daily on the media, they believe that a billion colours that beautify India are there for taking. Reality sinks when they discover that their mixed marriage (Hindu and Muslim) is a big issue in modern India. They find dead end at every turn as they struggle to complete their movie. In the midst of all this is their son, Hari Aziz, trying to find his place in society.

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The butt of civilisation

Sometimes in times of introspection, I do wonder why the contour of the posterior profile of an individual is so important that people dared to go through great lengths and life-endangering surgeries to ‘improve’ theirs to what is perceived as ‘perfect’ in the eyes of the masses.

Even though poets have described the buttocks as the equal counterpart of a person’s frontal beauty, come to think of it, it hosts orifices of some the human excrements with putrefying odours that may, in cultured settings, be considered inappropriate on polite conversations.

Seeking the perfect symmetrical contour is some people’s favourite pastime. Performing of some kind of ritualistic war dance with the gluteals is some people’s idea of arousal and enticement to exchange bodily fluids.

When exactly did this part of the human body become an object of endearment?

Science suggests that just like the nuchal ligaments which stabilise our head to our trunk, the gluteus muscles revolutionised our species to stand. About two million years ago, these group of muscles transformed us to become endurance runners who could outrun many of its predators and make them our prey instead. The gluteal muscles stabilise the trunk and help in each running stride. Hence, developed endurance running which made Man outrun other speedy occupants of the savanna. This trait made them better hunters and soon came to dominate the world. Other primates with small butt continued wandering aimlessly occupying the lower rung of the food chain.

In other words, our buttocks civilised us.

Now that our lives have become sedentary; we do not pounce or kill our dinners, our rears do not fulfil much of its duties. Perhaps due to our high caloric intake, it has now become a storage space for excess fat stores performing its incidental function as padding as we sit on our asses all day.

People are fixated on symmetry, proportion and conformance to the golden ratio. They try to apply these in all their daily dealings and get high by satisfying arbitrary cravings and imaginary standards. 

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The cradle of civilisation

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) 

https://asok22.wixsite.com/real-lesson

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An old scribbling...

All it takes is for someone to snoop around to look for another destination. A place where people lead an idyllic life living in symbiosis with the elements of nature, with the divine forces as their guiding light. Venture capitalists move in. They show them the carrot and the lure of what money can do to enrich their 'impoverished' lives. They influence the elders who steamroll all oppositions who want to maintain the status quo. The general public thinks the opposers are just spoiled sports, reminiscing the old times, living in the past and not moving with times. The time to live, the new kids on the block say is now, and they do not want to be left behind.

So builds a frenzy, to join the bandwagon to draw sightseers to see what they had to offer. The natives were willing to play dance monkey to the tune of the first world revellers. Slowly, the natives' lives change. Their age-old tradition of caring for humanity rather than worldly materialistic things is but a thing of the past. Rituals and prayers are only for display like a caged animal in a zoo or a museum piece. Hey, it draws the crowd, and it pays for 'modernity' and 'development'. They all want to move forward in life, what to go one step ahead of what our forefathers left them. The world is changing, and they have a lot of catching up to do! They want modern education, modern amenities, industrialisation and avert the laborious unproductive ways of their fathers. They want to catch up with the rest of the world.

"For how long are they going to be cocooned on their so-called glorious past?" they ask.

Just like that modernity embraced the society.

Fast forward. What they see now is their people in the same helplessness. The only difference is that it had become worse with the introduction of greed as the primary armamentarium to prosper. Gone are the community spirit and need to live for continuity of the clan. They, instead, have become chess pieces in the game of the rich. Their way of life has become a hedonistic indulgence of the affluent to spread their beliefs as if they are too stupid to understand Nature and to live to respect it. The 'bearers of miracles' give them things under the pretext of bringing them out of the yoke of ignorance but time has shown that their shrewdness. See how many of theirs have been disillusioned with 'progress' and joined blindly to chase the mirage? There must be some wisdom in the words of the forefathers!

 https://asok22.wixsite.com/real-lesson 

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Everybody is doing it, why don't you?

Panam (noun) பனம் Tamil meaning money. Panama பனமா- expressed as a question or an exclamation of awesomeness. The word Panama is often used in combination with Pasama (love in a question mode) in philosophical circles to ponder upon life - பனமா பாசமா; whether which one takes the precedence over matters of life. Is it money or love?

பனமா பாசமா (Panama Pasama) is also the name of the 1968 tearjerker starring Gemini Ganesan and B Saroja Devi.

In the year 2016, the mention of the word 'Panama' strikes awe in the minds of the plebeians who would hear of the cavalier attitude of leaders who would transfer monies of gargantuan proportions across borders without an iota of guilt or feeling of moral misconduct. If fact, they would claim it to be of their sovereign rights and that no laws were broken in the process. Like the catchphrase of the Little Eva's 1962 hit song. 'Loco-motion', they say everybody is doing it, why don't you? Is it a mere coincidence that loco means crazy in Spanish?

History distorted with artistic licence?

The Physician (2013)


The mention of names like Bukhara, Isfahan, Rey and Samarkand may not mean much to an average Joe in the 21st century except for its turmoil and uncertainty. Less a millennium ago, however, these places were beaming with a hive of intellectual activities while the rest of its neighbours were frozen in the dark ages. These places had some of the greatest minds which engaged in the fields of sciences, medicine, philosophy, astronomy, theology, geography and much more. The zest to understand the secrets of the universe was so deeply entrenched. Even though many scholars from this region left their mark in the history of mankind, Avicenna @ Ibn Sina remains the leading figures who is said to have mastered all the knowledge that need to be known. He allegedly had memorised the Quran by the age of 10 and had been certified a physician by 16! His father had a tough time trying to find a suitable tutor because he soon out learned his masters before long.

Being a devout Muslim, he used to visit the mosque for his daily evening prayers. Complementing his daytime job of a healer in his hospital, he would write his treatises late into the night with the accompaniment of wine for inspiration. This and his undying desire to learn and question the known and unknown earned him the accusation of being a non-believer and a polytheist.

This 2013 film depicts a fictitious character, an orphan from England, Rob Cole, who travels all the way to Isfahan to learn from the master of Medicine at that time, Avicenna. Rob, who lost his mother to a disease called ‘side sickness,’ - appendicitis joined a travelling medicine man to learn his trade. Yearning to learn more, he travels to the East, masquerading as a Jew to avoid persecution. He was brought up a Christian. Travelling through the deserts, he falls for a girl who was going to be married off to a holy man.

He managed to get himself enroled in Avicenna’s academy. He even manages to teach the great master a thing or two about anatomy. Dissection and autopsy on the death are considered sacrilegious and the doctors in Isfahan were treating without the knowledge of anatomy. This, of course, is bending of the truth by the storytellers. We all know that Avicenna’s anatomy books were used later in Parisian universities.

The makers of this movie have managed to garner the wrath of Persians for distorting historical facts. In the film, this Rob fellow teaches Avicenna how to perform an appendectomy when the ruler (wrongly referred to as the Shah when the leader during Avicenna’s time was Emir). The Seljuks depicted here were actually from a different time frame. At the end of the show, it appears as if Avicenna decided to stay back in his burning library with his book to probably end his life but history tells a different story.

Despite these few shortcomings that geeks and sticklers to history are aware of, it manages to recreate and pass the message that the human civilisation had not changed much over the centuries. There will always be a group of people who would put aside their differences, like the Jews and the liberal Muslims, to explore and expand knowledge for the betterment of the human race. On the other hand, there would always be people who act as spoilsport to undermine whatever seeming beneficial endeavours that the others engaged. Like the Seljuks and even the Mamluks, they came, they saw, they destroyed institutions of knowledge, burned libraries etcetera.

Some conquerors, however, redeveloped their conquered lands afterwards. The Samarkand observatory which was destroyed by Tamerlane was, in turn, was taken by his grandson, Ulugh Beg, to dizzying heights. Ulugh is said to have made complicated astronomical calculations way before Copernicus and more accurate too. The Moguls in India are said to have burnt the largest library in the world, in Bihar, which allegedly raged for one whole month. When the flame settled, they instead reignited and embarked on a journey of academic, philosophical, theological, literary, artistic and cultural rediscovery.

The vicious cycle of life?

Al Andalus

It is a reversal of sorts, a reversal of roles. Way back in the 8th and 9th century AD, the greatest universities which promote intellectual discourse and thinking were in the regions which practised Islam. Islamic civilisation was the hip thing to follow. They supported liberalism, freedom, equality and justice, something alien to the rest of their neighbours.

Ask for the best universities, they would name you, Alexandria, Cordoba, Seville, Istanbul and Baghdad. Equal rights for women? They would quote the Quran. The younger generation thought that was the best thing since sliced bread, but the only thing is that sliced bread had not been discovered yet! They were doing hype things. They had coffee, musical recitals, public debates, jurisprudence, perfumes, libraries and social lubricants. What the rest of the world had to offer? They were barbarians living in the Dark Ages. And the rest of the world was worried that the newest of the Abrahamic religions which had the courage to discuss God decrees in the open were influencing their own people.

The clerics and the philosophers of the Islamic tradition became conceited. They felt they knew it all. They can do no wrong. There was nothing more to learn. Then it stopped, the learning, the yearning to learn, to realise of man’s shortcoming of what they can know. They soon became dogmatic and obtuse.

The barbarians underwent a process of self-discovery, a Renaissance. In a flash, they had a revelation to gain wisdom to modernise. They started talking about liberty and freedom. Their society prospered. Their universities opened doors to all and soon they become the world standards. The believers in the Islamic world fell threatened. Some embraced it willingly. Others gave a fight. Unable to keep up with super rapid changes in the world, they recoiled to clamour the good old times of the 9th century and decreed that we all should return to its glory days. They push for their agenda and boldly exhibit their intent through gory, violent depictions of their conquests.

Now who is the barbaric one?

Everybody wants to rule the world!

Whilst reading through the history of Partition of India, I encountered that the people of Punjab gave a lot of resistance to the Radcliffe's line which carved out a portion of the fertile basin which fed a good portion of India. The idea of 'butchering-off' a piece of the cradle of civilisation of mankind seemed ludicrous. The inhabitants there were proud of their heritage. It is said to be the nidus of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa. It was at the crossroad of civilisation. Its proximity to the Silk Road promoted the meeting of minds of the Persian, Arabic and Chinese think tanks to discuss knowledge of the known and unknown at a physical and metaphysical levels. They had dwelled into many mystic secrets of the Universe.

Forget the fact that by the dawn of Indian Independence, one of its biggest cities, Lahore had more brothels than libraries and its citizens were thinking of their next meal rather than the mystery of the Cosmos, they nevertheless, felt a chip on their shoulder. They felt special.

Come to think of it, many of God's creations have reason to think that they are special. That they are the centre of human refinement and even enlightenment. Inhabitants of Southern Indian are proud of their heritage and claim stake to being the original inhabitants of the Indus Valley who were rudely chased away by less cultured forces who pulverised their advanced way of living. They stand high with their oldest spoken language and fairly old and advanced knowledge of science, medicine and literature. Scrolls of ancient scriptures are proof of their claim.

A bit to the East, the Chinese say they do not have to proof anything. Evidence of their influence to the world is seen nicely in the opening ceremony of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. With their mammoth armada of friendly ships exploring the four corners of the world when the rest of the world thought that Earth was flat like a pancake, their paper, gunpowder, you name it that they introduced to the world and the current resurgence as the biggest economy of the world, they feel that they are the centre of the world!

A bit farther, the Native American takes offence on being 'discovered'. As far as they were concerned, there was nothing to be discovered. In fact the red-hued people were discovered a band of bandits scurrying through their shores with ill-intent on their minds. Their pipe of peace was abused. Just because the travellers took a wrong turning somewhere, the Natives were called Indians. "We had something good going here till intruders came and screwed it up," they said. "We lived in harmony, in tandem, in symbiosis with Mother Nature, respecting each other!"

Further down south, the Aborigines reminisce of a very distant past in their existence way before memory of consciousness to a time when they knew all the phenomenal secrets of the Universe. And intruders came in and destroyed everything, claiming to give us, natives, modernity. They promise to show us a New World!

The visitors, one the other hand, looked at other civilisations with disdain and contempt. They had an urgent need to modernise the natives, bring modernity to their society. They did not want them to be stranded in their age old mumbo-jumbo animistic and pagan beliefs. They wanted them to be saved from eternal condemnation. 

What is it like to be a leader?

Selma (2014)

This movie did not garner much publicity even though it earned many accolades to its belt probably because it is a black movie made by blacks about something close to the blacks. 

It tells about a tumultuous time in America which they have not come in terms with. The relationship between the slaves and the slave-owners which had gone through many rough patches, again and again, all through the civil war, black rights movement and even to date with the rampant cases of police racial profiling as in Ferguson incident.

In 1964, the right to vote in the southern states was made extremely difficult by the Little Napoleons of the civil service.

Without the right to vote, the blacks do not get a right to stand as jury in court, and without that, a black convict is not deemed to get a fair trial.

Martin Luther King Jr, a Nobel prize winner in 1964 for Peace, argues with President LB Johnson and Governor Wallace of Louisiana towards this end. As a political statement, people organised a peaceful march from the town of Selma to Montgomery, the capital.

A touching movie which gives a 3-dimensional feel of a leader giving him the very qualities that make him a mortal. He too has his uncertainties of what to do when his helpless followers demand from his the next course of action when the plan is derailed. As if he has all the answers! And the leaders have to take all the brickbats for all his shortcomings.

There was a scene at Selma when things were getting ugly - the marchers and the hostile patrolmen and onlookers. As if to gain guidance from the divine forces, the good reverend knelt, prayed and commanded the marchers to retread much to the chagrin of the blacks. By doing so, he had, in fact, averted much bloodshed. Interestingly, up to a third of his marchers were whites and religious leaders of different faiths.

The actor who acted in the role of MLKJr, David Oyelowo, did an excellent job of mimicking MLKJr's style of speaking so well that the speeches sounded like voice-overs. The film ends with another one of his heart-wrenchingly and neatly crafted speech.

Critics of the film complained that LBJ had been painted as a conniving two-faced racist politician who made things difficult for MLKJr. Historically, LBJ, being a Southerner, had been praised for being a champion for civil rights' movement. However, in this film, he is portrayed as a reluctant leader who partnered FBI chief Hoover, to give hell to King, his family and his followers.

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We need to be led

The Birth of a Nation (1915)

Yes, this silent film is 100 years old. It is the oldest movie that I have seen to date. It a 3hour long movie which drew a lot of flak from those who disagreed with some of the historical facts depicted here, especially as Ku Klux Klan is shown in a favourable light. It shows the most important single event that affected what would eventually transform into the biggest nation in the world one day - the Civil War and the aftermath.

It is an intense saga of brethren of a nation who are divided by their need to use slaves but united by their Aryan roots.

The first half of the movie dwells into the nation engulfed in Civil War. Two families are torn apart as collateral damage of the war. Brothers are fighting each other and are held as war criminals. The real drama starts after Abraham Lincoln is assassinated when his post-war plans are hijacked by carpetbaggers and profiteers. This is the time of Reconstruction after the war.

The black slaves, who all these while have quite contended with their simple servant life were suddenly told that they were free after the Civil War - all men were equal and free. They need not slave in the fields but can enjoy life instead, dancing and boozing.
The majority of the South, the blacks, are happy with such an arrangement. They are coerced to vote in their own people to Congress. Slowly the slaves become the masters. They demand equal rights, like walking shoulder to shoulder with their masters. They create a mockery of the legislative system with their inexperience. A black militia group also comes to fore to mete out justice. Even the jury is predominantly made up of former slaves. It appears like the slaves are on a rampage to avenge years of oppression.

Many injustices happen. The whites feel intimidated. It appears that the slaves do not know how to handle their new found freedom.
So all legal avenues fail to provide justice, what do people do? They recoil into religion and race!

In rolls Ku Klux Klan as a reactionary group to combat the menace of the growing black militia. In the turn of events, the Southern whites also found their Northern whites helping to protect against the blacks through their common Aryan roots!

And everything is put back in place. The whites become the ruling force in the next election while the KKK ensures that the blacks do not vote!

Now you understand why this movie kicked up a lot of dirt after its release. Just like in India after the release of Aamir Khan's PK, people in major town in the USA rioted in 1915. The demonstrators were mainly coloured as the flick glorified KKK as saviours of the South and portrayed blacks as uncultured, uncouth and highly sexed scoundrels. Anyway, as the censor board members were mainly white, nothing really happened.

My take-home message: Men are violent creatures. They regularly suppress their fellow kind for power and control. The 1% per cent will always control the masses and that is the status quo. The shift of power to the masses cannot sustain. In order to ensure law and order, there must be leaders and followers. The race has not reached a level where it can function unaided. Just my thought...