..thou art that..

Slava Kavadi @ Penang Thaipusam

The actor-director who made the much-talked-about Kannada film 'Kantara', is said to have performed some of the stunts himself. One of the scenes that he had to carry out was a particular dance for a diety. In an interview, he admitted that he followed the prerequisites before delving into that pious act. The rest, as we know it, is history.

These types of dos and don'ts are rife in many Indic practices. All have them have a said ancient scientific to them.

Growing up, I had seen many who religiously performed annual penance for Lord Muruga on Thaipusam. I heard they had to undergo a gruelling 30-day or 14-day regime before going anywhere near the tent to initiate the ritual involving body piercings and feats that would befuddle them later. 

It involved consuming two simple vegetarian meals a day. Abstinence from the luxuries of life is a must. That would mean no personal grooming, no manicure and pedicure, no footwear, no hot showers, avoidance of self-indulging activities, no entertainment, no TV and in the present day, it would mean no YouTube! The devotee can only sleep on a floor mat with no mattresses or pillows. All these were intended to prepare one mentally for the monumental task at hand. I heard of another person who would undergo similar self-torturing rituals to partake in the temple's annual fire walking ceremony to fete Goddess Kaaliamman.

The fantastic thing is that they would complete the task, return to everyday life the following day, and carry on as if nothing had happened.

Recently I heard a clip that gave a somewhat scientific explanation of why a Swami Ayyappan devotee fasts for 48 days. It seems that it took that much time for all the cells in the body to be replaced. That means that after 48 days, one is essentially walking with an entirely new set of cells in his body, hopefully as a rejuvenated, unique individual. 

The breaking of a coconut is the best symbol of what we aspire to. The rough, uneven exterior is broken to reveal a pristine white interior that can generate something new -a life. As the ancient sages used to quote, 'tat tvam asi', meaning 'you are that'. You are what you want to be. In other words, you are the architect of your life. Sometimes we do not know who it is 'that' we want to be. The Greeks also appreciated that.

At the entrance to Apollo temple at Delphi, is inscribed 'know thyself'. Sometimes, that can be a problem. We really do not know what we are capable of until we are pushed to the limit. The maxims that followed 'know thyself' were 'nothing to excess' and 'surety brings ruin'.

P.S. Masons who carved out murtis (religious sculptures) in ancient India are said to also go through vigorous fasting routines to attain a trance-like state to chisel out an error-free product. They never have a second chance attempt at their task; invariably, these figurines last many generations and are still awed today.

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The many roads that converge...

Kanthara (Kannada; 2022)
Director, Writer, and Actor: Rishab Shetty

Through this movie, I learnt about the 1.8 million people from the districts of  Udupi and Dakshina of Karnataka and the Kasaragod region of Kerala who call themselves the Tulu people. These cultural occupants of Tulu Nadu believe that their land was salvaged from the sea by Vishnu's 6th avatar, Parasuraman, the sage warrior. He is said to have yielded his axe to reclaim the land from the sea. To neutralise the land of salt and change it into a lush, fertile land, he employed the venom of Vasuki, the Snake King. The Tuluvas, as a gesture of appreciation to the guardians of the land, the boars, snakes and tigers, have celebrations called Bhuta Kola, an annual ritual performance. This type of their merriment was what Hollywood thought was exotic when it decided to depict eye-ball gobbling Thugee believers in their second instalment of the Indiana Jones franchise. 

I also learned that there is a movement towards the demand for acceptance of the Tulu language as another accepted language of India and a Tulu land.

Since its release, this film has garnered the attention of many moviegoers and even academics. In the current rage of cinema buffs wanting to know many of the long-forgotten cultural beliefs of Indians, this presentation is trying to erase the colonial mindsets that the cultural practices are animistic and pantheistic. A rational explanation is that people are trying to live in a symbiotic relationship with Nature, one of self-respect. Whichever way people show their reverence to the Almighty, it all refers to one distinct entity in different names or avatars, as is known in India. 

Cultural flag of Tulunadu (Wiki)

During the era of the British Raj, in their rapaciousness to reap the wealth from the lands and jungles, they passed a law to make forests restricted areas. The tribal people, who live off the ground, protested. The British vilified a particular group of Thurgeeswari-worshipping freedom fighters as bogeymen. They painted them as members of a secret cult that robs and kills people. They created such fear among the speakers of the English Language that the word 'thug' had been appropriated into the language and is synonymous with violent crimes.

This storyline follows the same vein as what the British did back in the day if one were to analyse it critically. 

In 1847, an unhappy King was looking for the meaning of life. After searching near and far, he realised that happiness was in his backyard. He found solace in a deity worshipped by the tribesmen. He took home the deity to honour and verbally agreed to let the nomads roam freely in the forest owned by him. Such was the arrangement till the new generations of the King, now landowners, no more royalty, wanted to reclaim the forest.

Guliga Daiva, the Protector.

This time, the descendants used the guise of the Government wanting to reclaim the forest to usurp back the land. The Government is painted as bad and the tribes as troublemakers. The movie shows this showdown in many graphic portrayals accompanied by spectacular cinematography and mesmerising music. The shenanigan is exposed with the help of the Protectorates of the jungle, and the symbiotic mutual-respecting way of existence between the tribals, the beasts of the wilderness, and the authority continues. Everyone agrees that God is One, albeit our different pathways to reaching Him.

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Hey Ram!

Nine Hours to Rama (1963)

Director: Mark Robson

This movie is based on a novel of the same name written by Stanley Wolpert. Both the book and the film were banned in India when they came out. Nehru and his government at that time thought that the story created a human out of Godse, justified his crime and did not give enough dignity to Gandhi. This was even discussed at the Rajya Saba level.

Throughout our childhood, my sisters and I could not help but see an imposing statue of Gandhi in our living room. My mother had bought it from a Thaipusam fair to remind her kids to be a person who brings glory to family and nation. At that tender impressionable age, we took in all my mother's Gandhi stories of his tenacity and eloquence. We were reminded of his vow to his mother to stay vegetarian upon boarding the steamship to England, the land of beef eaters and gin. And staying true to his word, he allegedly stayed vegan, this Mahatma (great soul).

Alas, when we grew, one by one, the onion peeled skin by skin to reveal that perhaps the story is more layered than it was thought to be. Probably the one thing that Gandhi managed to do in this land with hundreds of languages, scripts and personalities is to be a unifying icon. Under the excellent strategy of 'divide and rule' by the tyrannical British, he led the nation under one banner for the first time. This process, however, was marred by many incidences that seemed to favour one particular set of social and selected leaders.

Gandhi seems to go all out to appease the Muslim minority in the eye of the majority. He helped to start the Khalifat movement in India in solidarity with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. He fasted whenever riots broke out without ever condemning the actions of rabble-rousers, especially when they involved Muslims. In retrospect, his non-violence stance of opposing is said to have delayed independence by decades. In the end, it was the stern rebuttal by the Indian National Army (INA) and the mutiny of the Royal Indian Navy that did the trick. By all accounts, Gandhi did not want India to be an independent nation. He wanted India to be a British Dominion, much like Australia and Canada, with the British monarch as the Head. The British, of course, were not keen to treat the brown-skinned subjects as equals.

Gandhi's actions (or inactions) are solely blamed for the Partition of the country and all its miseries and heartbreaks. Gandhi's extra-political activities also raised eyebrows. His experimentations with celibacy would be considered criminal in this age and time.

Still, my Amma thinks she had done the correct thing in that Thaipusam fair when she purchased that Gandhi statue. She still thinks it must have inspired us. By the by, she also bought a Nehru figurine to complement Gandhi. Of course, she does not know of Nehru's tryst, not with destiny, but also with Lady Edwina Mountbatten. Let her have her peace.

This 1963 Hollywood production narrates the nine hours that passed between Godse reaching Delhi railway station and Gandhi collapsing after a gunshot in the compounds of Birla House, sighing 'Hey Ram'. It used a predominantly brown-faced white cast with a smattering of local crew.

It took the liberty to fictionalise Godse. He turned against Gandhi after being rejected by the British Army for being a Brahmin. He blamed Gandhi for his father's and wife's death. They both died in racial riots. In real life, Godse never married. Here he was married off to a child bride, fell in love with a married socialite and engaged with prostitutes.


P.S. There is a 2022 Telegu film with the name Godse. It has nothing to do with Nathuram Godse and Gandhi's assassination. Here, a prosperous Indian American industrialist decides to pay back to the country he grew up. He decides to invest in India. He soon realises that the memorandums signed to start industries do not actually go towards the betterment of India but are circulated amongst the inner circles of politicians. Like Godse, who went against a system that carved up his Bharat Mata, in this film, Visvanath, goes on a crusade to expose the corrupt political system.

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Love thy neighbour, they say!

Fauda (Chaos, Hebrew/Arab; 2015-2019)
(Miniseries S1-3)

Is it not ironic that the Western nations want to police the whole world but failed miserably at finding peace at the heart of the Judeo-Christian stronghold. It seems that the brothers of the Book perform poorly when it comes to showing brotherly love. Also funny that a place that four great religions of the world look up to as their holy land cannot be protected by their Protector. A land hardly larger than 30,000 square kilometres, but this piece of land had not seen peace since time immemorial. 

The feud has lasted so long that nobody can remember who drew first blood. Both parties, the Palestinians and the Israelis, claim legitimate historical rights on that piece of land. Looks like all that talk of the religion of peace, the religion of love and the religion of compassion is mere rhetoric. The reference to 'brotherhood' is only offered to the brethren of the same faith, not of the whole of mankind.

I am sure God must be in a quandary. It is like the old Indian saying or maybe an old movie dialogue. It is akin to asking a mother which child she wants to support; she would say, "you are asking me whether I love my right eye more than the left eye. I love them both." Probably that is why there are no permanent solutions here. Let both brothers fight it out till both exhausts each other. The trouble is that their course has sympathisers from people elsewhere. Everybody else is drawn into the bottomless wormhole. 

This miniseries shows, from an Israeli viewpoint, is about a group from an Israeli counter-terrorism unit in the Israeli Defence Force. They are often referred to as Mista'arvim, meaning living amongst Arabs. They speak Arabic and assimilate into the local population to collect intelligence on the latest Palestinian terrorist activities. In the series, we find a power struggle between the Palestinian Authority (PA), Hamas and the newbie around town, ISIS. It looks like PA wants to maintain law and order, but everyone else has their idea of which brand of Islam should prevail on their land. They want more possession of land, which they assert was theirs anyway, to start with. To die for such a course is divine; they have been indoctrinated and have the rest of Palestine (and the world) follow suit.

This is, of course, the Israeli perspective of things. The Palestinians should rebut with their own version of the ground situation, but then, there will be confusion on which version is acceptable. Each faction of society would insist theirs is correct and proclaim their claim is a pursuit worth dying for.

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Where does the fault lie?

Dahmer: Monster - The Jeffrey Dahmer Story (2022)
Netflix miniseries

I was curious growing up in the mid-70s and watching all those American documentaries about serial killers. I often wondered why all serial killers came from a developed nation like the USA. According to the FBI, the USA currently has 2,000 active serial killers (325 million population @ 0.00006%). On top of all that, it has the most number of its citizens locked up in prisons. Is modernity directly correlated to mental illness? Perhaps the country's vastness makes one go cuckoo or makes it easy for them to think they can hide their trails and get scot-free. Now experts are telling us that the fact that many families who end up with single parenthood end with this problem. In keeping with rising costs, single parents have to leave their children unsupervised and work two jobs. Children have to learn things on their own. In the century of the self, prioritising individuals rather than communal or extended family living may have perpetuated these many behavioural deviants.

On the other side, a country with such deep pockets has the luxury of re-investigating old cases periodically with newer technologies to smoke out perpetrators. Hence, an apparent increase in the number of instances and discoveries.

Or maybe documentaries and podcasts are scavenging deep into the crypts into the police files to meet the insatiable appetite of crime nerds, and they succeed in making every American look like a potential serial killer in the eyes of a non-American.

Jeffrey Dahmer is an infamous serial killer who lured young men and even a 14-year-old boy to his abode, drug, tortured, mutilated, drilled their skulls to infuse with drugs, dissolved their bodies in acid and even consumed their internal organs.

These miniseries try to tell how this quiet boy turned into a cold monster, tracing his childhood and the family environment in which he grew up. One particular thing that struck me is the frustration that Jeffrey Dahmer's father, Lionel, had to go through throughout his life. He was trying desperately to balance his work as a scientist and his emotionally unstable wife and trying very hard to be an excellent father to Jeffrey. All throughout his life, Lionel is searching for where he went wrong.

Even before Jeffrey was born, his mother was popping pills like they were M&Ms. There was a concern about whether these powerful tranquillisers and anti-emetics had long-term ill effects on Jeffrey. The postpartum depression took an enormous toll on his mother. Jeffrey saw his mother overdosing on pills, and he even had to call 911 when his mother was unresponsive one day.

His parent quarrelled all the time. Still, when Jeffrey was six, his mother delivered his brother. His mother became more distant. His father was frequently away at work, making Jeffrey a loner and left to his own devices. Lionel, as his father, tried his best to live up to his role as a father. The parents separated when Jeffrey was 18, and by then, Jeffrey already had a severe drinking problem and was having issues in high school.

The most exciting thing that struck me from the miniseries is the frustrations the father had to go through trying to put Jeffrey on the right track. At no point did Lionel give up on his son. He also felt guilty that perhaps his genes were the ones that caused his predicament. Anyway, Lionel had had occasional thoughts of killing in adolescence. He wondered whether his father-son outings of dissecting roadkill made him cut up his victims later. He blamed himself for being an absent parent. Still, someone had to bring in the bacon. Should he take the blame solely for how Jeffrey's mother turned out? Was he wrong in taking a new partner? But then, Jeffrey's brother turned out normal. Lionel tried to put Jeffrey back on the right track in so many ways. Oh, how much he tried, unsuccessfully.

This is the curse of having a person with mental illness in the family -so much guilt, finger-pointing, and so many frustrations. Not able to get to the bottom of it, they may resign to the fact that this situation is a curse carried on from previous births, and karma is full throttle in motion.

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A relook at global warming/climate change!

FALSE ALARM
How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet
By Bjorn Lomborg

There is no denying that the world is getting hotter by the day. If we go by our life experiences, we do not remember feeling fearful of staying outdoors in the heat of the afternoon tropical sun. Fans were luxury items, and air conditioning was opulent at its height. 

In the early 1990s, I had the pleasure of meeting some guests from Dubai during a family function. I was surprised when they started complaining about the Malaysian weather, specifically the heat. Living in a desert country, they were complaining about the Malaysian heat. When enquired, they unanimously admitted that because of the architecture and setup of their infrastructure, they were nicely shielded from the blazing desert sun. That carries a significant weightage in how we handle climate change, according to this book which gives a different outlook on how the world should looking this problem. 

True, human activities and fossil fuels are contributing to our degradation of the environment and the loss of the greenhouse effect and all the things we are familiar with. The approach to dealing with it is the author's bone of contention. 

Take the instance of the yellow jacket showdown in Paris. They are the unhappy product of the European carbon tax system. The French ruling party believed it was criminal to use fossil fuel as it polluted the environment at this time and age. The government imposed a high levy on petroleum to discourage people from using private vehicles. It was their wish for the public to use Government-subsidised public transportation. Well, it worked fine for urban dwellers. For the farmers in the outskirts who solely depended on their beaten-up cars and tractors for work and transportation of their produce, it was a hit before the belt. At such challenging times when production costs are already so high, the rise in petrol price is a double whammy. Hence, the uprising. 

Generally, humans tolerate heat better than extreme cold. Around the world, more people die from cold than heat. People have to spend more to keep themselves warm. Coincidentally, fossil fuel is needed for this purpose. If poor people resort to burning wood for cooking and keeping themselves warm, their health will be affected by the emitting soot.

What people need is resources (read finances) to uplift their lives. They must improve their living conditions to keep themselves cool when their living space becomes warmer. They need money to be able to afford air conditioning, fans and other means to make their living area bearable. People at the lower rung of society bear the brunt of the effects of climate change. They can ill-afford houses on higher grounds to avoid the impact of rising sea levels. 

If rising levels of our oceans are going to flood many low-lying areas, it is up to governments to build dykes, like the ones in the Netherlands, to protect the affected people. For that, countries have to prosper. 

If cutting carbon emissions is implemented so strictly, it will prevent newly industrialised countries from catching up with the rest of the developed nations. Wealthy nations handled adversities better than despotic third-world countries. The very nations that need assistance to pull themselves out of poverty will be trapped in the quagmire of poverty.

Chincha Island, Peru.
Pregnant with guano.

Sometimes, the world forgets that the human race is a resilient lot. They would not have become the most dominant species on Earth if not for their resourcefulness. Just see how fast we come up with solutions for any problem. Some time ago, we thought profound starvation would hit the world as the soil gets progressively depleted of its nutrients. The only known nitrogen-based soil fertiliser then was the progressively depleting bat-dropping reservoir on Guano Islands off Peru. In came Haber, who literally plucked nitrogen from thin air to make fertilisers via Haber Reaction. Of course, that led to other disastrous outcomes too. Now, we have malnutrition of the overfed kind.

With time, humanity can come up with ways to combat weather change. They can migrate to temperate countries. Different crops may be grown. In time to come, rice may grow well in Europe, or wheat may grow in what is now tundra land.

The author highlights that the occurrence of natural calamities has not really increased in intensity or number over the years. The publicity highlighted by the mass media makes it appear bigger than life. Fatalities naturally increase as the world population has jumped in leaps and bounds of late anyway.

The world's obsession with preventing temperature rise has diverted money away from what could have been used to develop industries, increase innovation and improve people's standard of living. After all, our civilisation is deeply rooted in energy. Climate change is real but let us be pragmatic about it.

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Hypnotised to conform?

Old Boy (Korean; 2003)
Director: Park Chan-wook

It looks like we are walking around like hypnotised beings, doing what is taught to us. We were coached to hold specific values close to our hearts because that seems the only correct way to live our lives. Again and again, we are drilled with these ideas to give a sacrosanct feel to it. In a way, we are all zombies walking around doing things expected of us. The funny thing is that nobody knows what is expected from our existence. We are told that, unlike other creations, humans are given that unique sense called consciousness that puts us apart from animals. Hence, there is a need to follow specific rules.

Living life by preset man-made rules must be difficult. Failure to conform carries a baggage load of guilt, and the results may not be most welcoming. Anger toward one's own self may cause malady of the mind. Anger towards others will invoke the very primitive primal desires that we kept suppressed as we become more 'civilised'. That act is Revenge. This film is the second offering of the director's trilogy on Revenge - the first being 'The Sympathy for Mr Vengeance' (2002) and the last being 'Lady Vengeance' (2005).

This story is about the annoying drunk Oh Dae-su, who is caught by the police for unruly behaviour. He is bailed out by his friend. Dae-su soon goes missing afterwards. In fact, he is imprisoned in a hotel for 15 years, where his only contact with the outside world is a TV. He soon realises that he is wanted for killing his wife. Confused with the whole arrangement, he is released one day. Dae-su tries to find his captor and the real reason behind his incarceration.

The convoluted movie deals with many unpleasant subjects like incest and suicide. A thought-provoking one, though. 4.5/5.

(It seems that the 1998 Asian Economic Crisis was a turning point for Korean cinema. When all other industries were down, the government decided to give incentives to its film industry. Pretty soon, the world started seeing quality Korean miniseries and soap operas. Way before 'Paradise' won the Oscars, there were already in existence many avant-garde Korean films which pushed the boundaries of film-making.)

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