Banality, Thy name is Tollywood.

The first few days of the Telugu film industry were great. The movies that were made were either based on the great epics (vis-à-vis Ramayana, Mahabharata, etc), or on wonderful Telugu plays. They were truly artistic films and people enjoyed watching them. Those were the days of great thespians who were highly skilled in the art of dialogue delivery. They could fit into any character, any role seemingly effortlessly. The only thing is since they were theatre artists before joining the film industry, their actions were a little over-emphasized. The entire country has come out of that mould. I do not think anyone is making “pauranic” films anymore. But that doesn’t mean that the quality has stayed the same. In the transition from pauranic to modern, the movies that roll out of the film industry have lost all sense of originality, they have become completely banal.

One can easily surmise the story of almost all the new movies coming out: boy meets girl, they fall in love, calamity strikes either boy or girl or both, boy and girl overcome calamity individually or together, boy and girl are either shown getting married or engaged, boy and girl live happily ever after.

And invariably almost always the boy and girl are in college. Any deviation from this scenario is so subtle that it almost escapes ones attention. Even the name of the industry “Tollywood” stinks of banality. The Hindi film industry is called Bollywood (I am not a fan of this moniker either) in an imitation of “Hollywood”; the B being a reference to “Bombay” which is the old name of the city of Mumbai where the Hindi film industry is situated. And imitating that, the Telugu film Industry has been named Tollywood.

Despite its shortcomings, Bollywood has managed to produce impressive and path breaking movies such as Rang De Basanti, Taare Zameen Par, Lage Raho Munnabhai that are capable of touching an emotional/patriotic chord in the heart of the audiences. The Telugu film industry on the other hand seems content making superficial movies that leave the audience completely dissatisfied.

Frankly, it seems as if the imagination of the film artists of the Telugu world has gone dry.

Metal

Rock sets you free
Metal is all about ecstasy
Classical is all about the soul
Music makes you a complete whole

Rock is all about pleasure and pain
Metal sets you on a higher plane
Rock makes you open your mind
And makes you forget the daily grind
Metal fills up your senses
And neither of the two has ever been
About false pretences

Classical connects with your soul
It gives you the gift of happiness
Metal too connects with your soul
But it takes you to a darker place
That is if you associate
Carnality with darkness

Metal and classical both
Enable one to tap one’s own
Primal energy
Its an energy that nature’s provided
To every beast it has spawned
It is something primordial
It is something spiritual
And it brings out the animal
In people

I see no difference
Between metal and classical
To me metal
Is just a more aggressive version
Of classical
For both these styles of music
Transcend your physical being
And touch the life force inside

To me metal is more than just music
It is a portal
A portal that takes me to a place
Where everything is the way I need it to be
According to my specifications
A place where I can think
A place where I can meditate
And conceptualize
And develop a better understanding
Of life
Metal and classical both
Put a lot of power in your hands
And that power
Is yours to channelize

You can use it to better your life
You can use it to ruin your life
You can use it to control your mind
The choice is yours
And that is the way it ought to be
For, of what use is it to be alive
When you don’t have charge of your life?
But a catch in that there is
For, to have charge of your life
You need to be able and wise
Or you might take your life
With your own hands
Crush it into oblivion

This is a power that can’t be explained
By science or any known knowledge
Except by the ancient wisdom that
Has been passed down to us through generations.
Immaterial of where you have originated from
Your folklore is filled with such things

This power can’t be otherwise explained
And that which can’t be explained
Cannot be controlled
And it is the neo-human nature
To fear that which cannot be controlled
And that is why metal has been deemed as evil

Many have taken advantage of this
And written blood-curdling lyrics
To metal songs
But
This music has always existed
In places of worship
It has been used to draw your concentration
“Dhyaana” as it is known
Towards the deity being worshiped
It is just the modern open-mindedness
That has brought this musical style
Out of the temple
And into the studio
And given it a name,
Metal.

Rock sends you
Soaring across the sky
Metal sets you
On an orgasmic high
And that empowers you
It can enslave you
But you have to make it
Empower you
You have to be its master
It should not be yours
You should tap all its power
And make that power yours.

The Indian National Flag

Certain people, out of ignorance or otherwise have read a communalist meaning into the Indian National Flag, i.e. they have wrongly said that the Indian National Flag or some part of it refers to one community or another. That is not true.

My idol, the great Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishna said the following about the Indian National Flag in his address to the Constituent Assembly:

"Bhagwa or the saffron color denotes renunciation of disinterestedness. Our leaders must be indifferent to material gains and dedicate themselves to their work. The white in the centre is light, the path of truth to guide our conduct. The green shows our relation to soil, our relation to the plant life here on which all other life depends. The Ashoka Wheel in the centre of the white is the wheel of the law of dharma. Truth or satya, dharma or virtue ought to be the controlling principles of those who work under this flag. Again, the wheel denotes motion. There is death in stagnation. There is life in movement. India should no more resist change, it must move and go forward. The wheel represents the dynamism of a peaceful change."

The official website of the High Commission of India in London states "The saffron stands for courage, sacrifice and the spirit of renunciation; the white, for purity and truth; and the green for faith and fertility.

In a nutshell, the meaning behind the Indian National Flag is:

Saffron: Courage, Sacrifice and the Spirit of Renunciation;

White: Purity and Truth

Green: Faith and Fertility

Ashoka Chakra (Wheel): The wheel of the law of Dharma.

“Our leaders must be indifferent to material gains and dedicate themselves to their work.”

That was the sentiment of the people who helped build this country. Nowadays, it is far from the truth. I hope some day we can realize that dream.

Courtesy: CRW Flags Online Cagalogue

Democracy sans Education

My idol, the great Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan once said, “Democracy depends for its very life on the high standard of general, vocational and professional education.

“Dissemination of learning, incessant search for new knowledge and, increasing efforts to plumb the meaning of life, and provision of professional education to satisfy occupational needs of our society are the vital tasks of higher education.”

Source: “New ideas to invigorate science education” – D. Balasubramanian, The Hindu – page 17, Thursday, 12-07-2007.

This was said by the great man back in 1948; and now with the passage of nearly 60 years since that date, the situation has become all the more dire if anything. Anyone living in India, among our public can easily notice that education in the sciences is being forsaken as the public moves in favor of professional courses. And that too we aren’t doing sincerely.

Our response to an incompetent workforce is that instead of working to improve their standard by improving the quality and/or reach of education available in the universities of our country, we attempt to lower the standards of educations by introducing political gimmickry in the form of useless and often detrimental ordinances. A prime example of one such ordinance is the reservation bill.

Lots of people have expressed their opinion as to why exactly the reservation bill is detrimental to our country and society, I am not going to do that.

Let us take into consideration the “elite” institutions of our country. These are the institutions that are a focus of much debate – the IITs and IIMs. Though they are exemplary institutions and are way above almost all other Indian institutions in their respective fields, they fall drastically short of the international standard. No Indian institution figures among the top 200 universities in the world. You can clarify my claim on the following website:

Top 500 World Universities


I believe I mentioned this in one of my earlier posts, but I sincerely believe that the matter is grave enough to warrant a repetition. The way I see it, the universities themselves are not to blame; for I have heard from reliable sources that we do have pretty good people working in the faculty of our universities. I believe that these universities are ranked so low because the students who enter them are sub-standard, and even if all forms of reservation were to be abolished, the students entering these universities would still be sub-standard. Here’s why:

The students who enter these universities are the ones who have been through our “lower-education” System i.e. they have been through the classes 1 to 12 in either CBSE or the syllabi of the states. Therefore, they have been through a System that has systematically wrung out and eliminated all imagination from them.

The imagination I am referring to over here is not artistic imagination, because every human being is artistic at some level, no matter how mundane. It is scientific imagination that they are seriously lacking in. It is scientific imagination and creativity that allows one to innovate and invent. We seriously need to improve the quality of education at the grass-root level.

Now, as far as the “elite institutions” (the IITs, IIMs,NITs, etc.) are concerned. Their quality can be improved immediately by incorporating a few changes in the structure of examination. The current structure is pretty good, but almost anyone who has been to the training centers where they make the students study 12 hours a day and practice the questions till they have been burnt onto their brains can get through.The change I suggest is to make it mandatory for every student aspiring to enter the institution to write a statement of purpose, an essay on why they want to do a particular course in a particular institution. Once the results come in, feed them into a computer and match them against the essays that have been printed in test papers and/or guides. Eliminate the ones that match the pre-written ones and then rank the others and qualify only the best ones for the written exam. This should bring about a quantum leap in the quality of people entering the universities.

Now, what does all this have to do with democracy? What do the IITs and other elite Indian Institutions or even primary education for that matter have to do with democracy? The way I see it, they have everything to do with democracy. Democracy, can be defined as “a political system in which the supreme power lies in a body of citizens who can elect people to represent them”.

http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=democracy

In other words, the general population of a country elects certain citizens of their own country to represent them and to take decisions on their behalf. Therefore, the quality of the people elected for the task of decision making depends directly on the judgment of the people who do the electing. In order to elect able and just “leaders”, the people who do the electing (a.k.a the electorate) should be fairly good at analyzing and reasoning out the pros and cons of each of the contestants in the election and then make the unbiased decision of voting for the best person for the job.

Thanks to the low standards of our education System, the electorate (except for a miniscule minority), lacks those analytical and reasoning skills. Therefore, the majority of the people in our country believe all the bullshit mouthed by the politicians while campaigning even though they have heard of the misdeeds of the same politicians and proceed to vote for them. Therefore, in the absence of a System of education of good quality, democracy turns into a System of government which brings the most corrupt, incompetent, inept and unworthy people to power.

In the absence of a System that imparts quality education, democracy, what was once a noble idea is transformed into what can be termed as (thanks to the Hindi film industry) a Goondaraj. That is why, improving the quality of education in India, and making primary education compulsory in India is of paramount importance.

Caste and Meritocracy in Ancient India

In one of my earlier posts, I had put forth my theory on the evolution of the caste system as it is in modern India.

My Theory on the Evolution of the Caste System

This is my theory on how the caste system came into existence in the first place. A few days ago, I came to notice that its not only the Brahmins who wear the sacred thread but even Kshatriyas and Vaishyas do so. Then I heard someone tell me that they are ranked in the order Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya and Kshudra as per the descending order of intellectual aptitude. For some time that had been bugging me for I knew that there had to be more to it. To my scientific mind, the idea that intellectual aptitude was restricted to certain lineages seemed grossly ridiculous.

Then I remembered something that I overheard as my father was conversing with the priest who performed my thread ceremony. The priest said that the thread ceremony should be performed either at the age of seven or at the age of eleven, failing these two times, the thread ceremony could be performed just before marriage. I also heard somewhere that the thread ceremony marked the entry of a person into the life of a student.

All these facts seemed disconnected till I finally stumbled upon the significance of the ages of seven and eleven. This I gleaned from my memories of one of ma all time favorite television serials – Chanakya. In ancient India (I mean really ancient, that is before the time of Christ). It was a custom among the people of India that a child when born would remain with his/her parents till the age of seven or eight. Then the child would be sent to the Gurukula, which is basically a large group of teachers (gurus) living in an ashram mostly in a forest or densely vegetated area of some sort. There they would have to undergo a test of some sort. Those who passed through the test were made to undergo a thread ceremony as a kind of admission ceremony. And the thread ceremony marked the person’s entry into the Gurukula. Those who didn’t pass the “entrance test” did not go through the thread ceremony and hence did not wear a sacred thread. It is my assumption that these people were the ones who came to be known as the Kshudras.

As is common in all institutions of education, the students could be classified broadly into three categories. The first category, and also what I assume to be a small minority among the students were those who had intellectual and philosophical inclinations. These students I assume were classified under the category name “Brahmana”. The literal meaning of the term “Brahmana” in Sanskrit is “the one who can realize the Brahman” where the Brahman is another word for “supreme spirit”, in other words, Brahmins were highly spiritual and philosophical people who became the future ministers, priests, and accountants and the crème de la crème of this group became scientists, philosophers, future teachers (gurus) and spiritual leaders.

The second category, and what I assume to be another minority among the student body of the Gurukula (I make no attempt to compare the sizes of these two minorities) were those who showed distinctive leadership qualities. The students in this group may or may not have had higher intellectual abilities or an inclination towards physically demanding activities. This category would have been labeled “Kshatriya”. They were leaders capable of leading common folk in times of peace as well as at times of strife. They commonly joined the armies of various kingdoms as commanders or commanding officers and the crème de la crème among them became monarchs.

The majority of the student populations of the Gurukulas were those who neither had the higher intellectual inclinations of the Brahmins nor the leadership qualities of the Kshatriyas. But they were reasonably good students. They made up the general society. They became artisans, craftsmen and traders. They were the people who enabled their respective kingdoms to function as economically independent social units. This category of people was labeled the “Vaishyas”.

If I am right in my assumptions, I believe it would be safe to say that ancient India was a true meritocracy where merit of each and every individual in their respective fields was given paramount importance.

If you would notice, I have tried to leave out gender specific pronouns in this text of mine. For, it is my belief that Gurukulas used to cater to students of both sexes. Maybe this can be passed of as an author’s idealization of the past, but I do have the beginnings of a deduction to back my assumption. The Aryans were a nomadic tribe of people who invaded the Indian subcontinent. The Indian subcontinent was inhabited by Dravidians. It is my belief that the Gurukula system is a remnant of the Dravidian system of education which was copied by the Aryans and thus passed down to the Vedic peoples. Dravidians followed a religion which now forms a part of modern Hinduism, some call this religion tantra, and call its system of philosophy yoga. And one look at the tantric pantheon is enough to convince any person of reasonable intelligence that theirs was a matriarchal society. An examination of any matriarchal society, for example the pagan/wiccan society described by Marion Zimmer Bradley in her book “The Mists of Avalon” shows that although importance was given to the woman, men were not as subjugated as women are in our modern patriarchal society. Therefore I feel it is safe to draw a conclusion that Gurukulas catered to students of both genders.

Therefore, when the Aryans invaded India, it is likely that they copied the Gurukula system from the Dravidians but made one minor change – they excluded the girls. One major drawback I find in the Gurukula system is that, all control was left in the hands of the Brahmins. It is always unsafe to leave all the controls in the hands of one person or one particular elitist group. The result of that small folly is the modern hereditary caste system which provides advantages to nobody except power hungry and uncouth politicians.

Back then, the caste of a person was a measure of his abilities and aptitudes. But this modern abomination of the once useful and beautiful system is absolutely meaningless. In this day and age attempting to use the caste of a person to judge his/her aptitude would be akin to using the cubit (distance between tip of thumb and tip of little finger) as a scientific unit of measurement.

The only way in which we can abolish this system is by promoting quality education and providing it to even the poorest of the poor. Unless that is done, India can never become a truly developed nation.

DISCLAIMER:
I, THE AUTHOR OF THIS POST, DO NOT IN ANY WAY SUPPORT THE CASTE SYSTEM. I DIDN’T WRITE THIS TO OFFEND ANYONE, I WROTE IT WITH THE SOLE PURPOSE OF SHARING MY VIEWS ON ONE OF THE GRAVEST SOCIAL EVILS PLAGUING OUR COUNTRY.

Glorious India.

The hour was midnight, on the fifteenth of August, 1947. It was a great day for the people of India. It was the hour of victory for the people who lead the freedom struggle. It was the day that their efforts bore fruit. From that day on, India would be a free country. We still celebrate that day, every single year. But looking back from now, I see that day more as the day we began our fall; a day that marked the entry of our people into our own version of the dark ages. That was the day the Indian people began to descend and turn into the corrupt, mediocre, sentimental, narrow-minded, selfish, arrogant, pathetic and ridiculous people that we are.

Shocked? Well then, name one thing that was either invented or discovered in India ever since 1947. Alright if you don’t consider that criterion for a nation’s greatness, name one Indian who has contributed so much to his own field that he has improved the quality of life of those around him. If that too doesn’t satisfy you, and you still think that the Indian people are the greatest in the world, then I guess you can take pride in the fact that over three million Indian children do not have enough to eat and lead a life of malnourishment. Or maybe it may be a matter of great prestige for you to know that even though your country has the largest university campus in the world (Shantiniketan in west Bengal started by Rabindranath Tagore) and the oldest university in the world (University of Takshashila, 7th century BC to 460 AD), none of our universities is among the top 100 universities in the world. Or you could take pride in the fact that the people who once were the original discoverers of the speed of light (by Sayana 1315-1387 A.D) and the inventors of the number zero (by Brahmagupta in 628 AD) are now nowhere near the cutting edge of development in science and technology. And we have no respect what-so-ever for merit and neither do we truly know what merit is (most applicable to the Telugu people).

I have dedicated my previous post to ranting about how “The System” is to blame for our pathetic status. This post is all about us, the ordinary people of India or, “India ka aam janta” as they say in Hindi.

We have sunk so deep into the quagmire of mediocrity that we have become mediocre in almost every field, including cricket. We insist on retaining players just because they once were good even though we keep going through defeat after crushing defeat. And I needn’t go as far as the Indian cricket team. I wonder how many Indian citizens still are proud to be Indian. Because I know a lot of people from a wide variety of social/regional backgrounds who would happily sell their souls if that would enable them to buy the citizenship of another country (mostly the United States of America).

The state of affairs in India is pathetic, and matters have deteriorated so far that Indians aspire to become millionaires even though they do nothing. We expect people to give us things for no reason, we believe it is our right to avail free stuff, and sometimes we even demand it. In that sphere we have lost our sense of dignity and self esteem. We have deteriorated so far that some kid goes on national television and says that “cricket is our religion”, some other blighters say that the Indian cricket team has “betrayed” us. They talk as if they own the Indian cricket team. I wonder if any of those people who rail against the underperformance of the Indian cricket team have ever done anything in their lives with any degree of dedication; that is something I seriously doubt. One newspaper (national) has this to say about the Indian cricket fan:

“The cricket fan is a lazy, pampered know-nothing who thinks he owns the cricket teams that he supports…”
They then go on to say thus about the Indian cricket fan while comparing them with England's barmy army:

“They are different from our couch potatoes who never leave their rooms, never exert themselves except to find their remote controls and yet treat every Indian defeat as a conspiracy.”

This above quote can be paraphrased to apply to all the Indian people, and I am not going to do that. We Indians go about bitching that this is not right , or that is not proper, this politician didn’t deliver on his promises, or that person is corrupt, etc. Why the devil are these people thriving? It is because of our not-so-benign negligence. “I will not bother about it unless it directly affects me.” That is the attitude of the general public, if not that, it is, “leave it all to the government, they will take care.” We have to kick ourselves out of this lethargy and into action. Otherwise we will end up a land of zombies who are exploited by the smart few.

The only inference I can draw is that this trend is because almost every Indian aspires to become a millionaire without putting any effort into it. And that leads to corruption. And when a person indulges in this dastardly act, despite knowing that it is a dastardly act, it kills his soul. And when a person’s soul dies, this is exactly how he acts. Therefore if you have any humanity left in you, learn to work for what you wish to achieve.

I will not end this tirade with a screaming “jai hind” like a pontificating politician. Because no matter what I say, India will always remain a great country, for this land has given rise to many great souls like Mahatma Gandhi, Gautam Buddha, Akbar (the Mughal Emperor), Chanakya, etc. as I said, India will always be great, it is we Indians who have to live up to that name.

Swastika

History of the Swastika
The swastika is an extremely powerful symbol. The Nazis used it to identify themselves as Aryans and to unite Bavaria, Prussia, and Austria under the German banner and instill a sense of national pride, but for centuries it had positive meanings. What is the history of the swastika? Does it now represent good or evil?

The Oldest Known Symbol

The swastika is an ancient symbol that has been used for over 3,000 years. (That even predates the ancient Egyptian symbol, the Ankh!) Artifacts such as pottery and coins from ancient Troy show that the swastika was a commonly used symbol as far back as 1000 BCE.

During the following thousand years, the image of the swastika was used by many cultures around the world, including in China, Japan, India, and southern Europe. By the Middle Ages, the swastika was a well known, if not commonly used, symbol but was called by many different names:

* China - wan
* England - fylfot
* Germany - Hakenkreuz
* Greece - tetraskelion and gammadion
* India - swastika

Though it is not known for exactly how long, Native Americans also have long used the symbol of the swastika.

The Original Meaning

The word "swastika" comes from the Sanskrit svastika - "su" meaning "good," "asti" meaning "to be," and "ka" as a suffix.

Until the Nazis used this symbol, the swastika was used by many cultures throughout the past 3,000 years to represent life, sun, power, strength, and good luck.Even in the early twentieth century, the swastika was still a symbol with positive connotations. For instance, the swastika was a common decoration that often adorned cigarette cases, postcards, coins, and buildings. During World War I, the swastika could even be found on the shoulder patches of the American 45th Division and on the Finnish air force until after World War II.

A Change in Meaning

In the 1800s, countries around Germany were growing much larger, forming empires; yet Germany was not a unified country until 1871. To counter the feeling of vulnerability and the stigma of youth, German nationalists in the mid-nineteenth century began to use the swastika, because it had ancient Aryan/Indian origins, to represent a long Germanic/Aryan history.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the swastika could be found on nationalist German volkisch periodicals and was the official emblem of the German Gymnasts' League.

In the beginning of the twentieth century, the swastika was a common symbol of German nationalism and could be found in a multitude of places such as the emblem for the Wandervogel, a German youth movement; on Joerg Lanz von Liebenfels' antisemitic periodical Ostara; on various Freikorps units; and as an emblem of the Thule Society.

The Origin of the Swastika

The ubiquity of the swastika symbol is easily explained by it being a very simple symbol that will arise independently in any basketweaving society. The swastika is a repeating design, created by the edges of the reeds in a square basket-weave. Other theories attempt to establish a connection via cultural diffusion or an explanation along the lines of Carl Jung's collective unconscious.

While the existence of the swastika symbol in the Americas may be explained by the basket-weave theory, its American presence weakens the cultural diffusion theory. While some have proposed that the swastika was secretly transferred to North America by an early seafaring civilization on Eurasia, a separate but parallel development is considered the most likely explanation.

Yet another explanation is suggested by Carl Sagan in his book Comet. Sagan reproduces an ancient Chinese manuscript that shows comet tail varieties: most are variations on simple comet tails, but the last shows the comet nucleus with four bent arms extending from it, recalling a swastika. Sagan suggests that in antiquity a comet could have approached so close to Earth that the jets of gas streaming from it, bent by the comet's rotation, became visible, leading to the adoption of the swastika as a symbol across the world.

Bob Kobres in Comets and the Bronze Age Collapse (1992) contends that the swastika-like comet on the Han Dynasty silk comet atlas was labeled a "long tailed pheasant star" due to its resemblance to a bird's foot., and further suggests that many swastika and swastika-like motifs may have been representations of bird tracks, including many of those found by Schliemann.

Barbara G. Walker, author of The Woman's Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects, claims that the crux dissimulata, an early swastika, represented the four winds. Concerning the short-armed version of this symbol, known as the gammadion because it is made up of four Greek gammas, Walker says this symbol was an emblem of the ancient goddess and probably represented "the solstices and equinoxes, or the four directions, four elements, and four divine guardians of the world."