Taare Zameen Par

Up until now I have commented only on the film industry. I have berated it and the movies coming out of it at a pretty harsh degree. But this time, for the first time I feel compelled to write about a movie I have seen. The name of this movie is “Taare Zameen Par” which loosely translates into “Stars on the Ground”. This movie was produced and directed by Aamir Khan, he also acted in it. The lead character is a eight to nine year old dyslexic boy who has been in the notorious Indian system of education which shuns everything except the robotic pursuit of “perfection” that is displayed by the majority of the masses. In short, it is a system that ignores genius and harbors mediocrity.

Darsheel Safary plays a young boy by the name of Ishan Awasthi who suffers from the rare and often misunderstood disability known as dyslexia. Dyslexia is characterized by an abject impairment in the ability of a person to read or write as a result of not being able to identify the characters of the alphabet. As a result of this condition, the boy is ridiculed, insulted by almost everyone except his parents and sibling and labeled as an unintelligent, lethargic, good-for-nothing boy. The father is in fact so vexed by what he sees as his son’s unruliness that he packs him off to a boarding school. There too, the teachers treat him in the same way that the teachers treated him in his previous day-school. But then, a chance encounter with a substitute art teacher (played by Aamir Khan) changes his life and brings out the genius in him when he ends up winning a painting competition.

The acting in this movie was superb. Each emotion and feeling, so clearly and lucidly portrayed that anyone in the audience could feel the most subtle emotional undertone. But by far the best thing about this movie was the way in which the subject of dyslexia and the mystery surrounding it has been dealt with; mystery in the sense that not many know of the existence of such a disability. Most people in India recognize only two types of people: normal and retarded. The idea that an intelligent person and a possible genius could suffer due to a debilitating disability is virtually unheard of. I applaud the maturity, subtlety, artfullness and sensitivity with which this was portrayed in the movie.

Two of the more laudable sections of the movie were the two parts where the art teacher confronts the parents. The first part being where the teacher tells both the parents about dyslexia and how it doesn’t imply unintelligence; the second part is where he tells the father the difference between mechanically bring up a child and making the child feel loved and cared for without hurting his ego or treading on his toes.

If it were up to me, I would hail this movie as a masterpiece of Indian cinema.

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.