Whose truth?

Of late, I have been writing on my blog about stuff to which I had not been giving much thought for a long, long time. Take, for instance, my two Mahabharata-related posts: Best of Enemies. http://digbig.com/4xsbk and Maya. http://digbig.com/4xsbn. Or, the one about Lord Vishnu's ten incarnations: Ten. Far better than Tolekien. http://digbig.com/4xsbp. All of them deal with Indian mythology and, indirectly, religion. I was familiar as a child with what I have written about here. I never paid it much heed as an adult, though. Soon after writing these posts, I switched to writing about Gandhi who used to be preoccupied with these things all his life. My last post, MK Gandhi aka 'Mahatma'. http://digbig.com/4xsbq, ends with a quote from Nathuram Godse whose disagreement with Gandhi hinged on the interpretation of Bhagvadgita. Both thought they had an exclusive access to Truth. Both had worked to eradicate untouchability, incidentally. Godse confessed that he considered the writings of Savarkar and Gandhi most relevant for India. According to him, the teachings in Bhagwadgita literally related to the happenings on the battlefield of Kurukshsetra. For Gandhi, it could well have been about a spiritual struggle, the heart's search for a saviour, more in the vein of the Sermon on the Mount.

Photoshopping as Worship.

Life sure is getting funnier and funkier by the day. The old Irani bakery, Sassanian, opposite the Gol Masjid, close to Liberty and Metro, where I go to buy crispy and delectable mutton and chicken puffs twice a week or so, has started calling itself a Boulangerie of late. I find it as pretentious if not pernicious as the recent propensity of the Bollywoodians and journalists to add the ‘Mr’ tag before Amitabh Bachchan. Nobody does that to Tom Hanks, Robert de Niro, even Paul Newman in Hollywood, for Pete's sake. I’m dreading the day when the credits in an AB-starrer start using the ‘Mr’ tag before his name. Indians seem to have mastered the art of morphing admiration for a movie star, a sportsperson, a politician into worshipful obsession. A daily example are the ads released by government departments with VVIP and VIP photographs. The recent news story about the Vasundhara Raje Scindia qua Goddess Annapurna poster is an apt case in point. That this work of art is the brainchild of a BJP MLA and a local priest is an especially illuminating clue. Both have a vested interest in the Hindu pantheon. Equally illuminating is the fact that Vasundhara Raje who only last year was caught on camera smooching or being smooched by Biocon India Chief Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw has also to her credit a fan-inspired poster depicting her as Goddess Durga as well as a batisha, a chalisa (32 and 40 worshipful couplets respectively) and an aarti. (The most famous chalisa, of course, is the one dedicated to Lord Hanuman. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanuman. It is significant that one of the couplets in it claims that Hanuman’s worship is the one-stop route to Lord Rama’s worship.) Those who object to the Annapurna poster saying that it hurts their religious sentiments ought to remember that Hinduism isn’t strictly a religion but a tolerant way of life. The seemingly bizarre behaviour of the worshippers seamlessly fits into it. Don’t’ forget too that most gods ultimately reveal their feet of clay, as several recent examples show.

“You made me do it.”

The irony of the Blacksburg massacre, I reckon, is that the killer chose not only 33 victims including his 23-year-old self but also several scapegoats to pass the buck to – that is to say, to blame – excluding himself. These were: religion (rules and restrictions, dos and don’ts?), women (rejection?), “deceitful charlatans” (hate?), “debauchery” (sin and guilt?) and “rich kids” (envy?). He even wrote an 8-page rant blaming them profusely. He was majoring in English. This probably explains the verbosity of the outburst. His creative output, according to those who studied with him, was steeped in profanity and obscenity and hate and violence with chainsaws and hammers – all pointing to his psychopathic bent of mind. The themes he chose – a fight between an allegedly paedophile stepfather and his stepson and students fantasizing about stalking and killing a teacher who had sexually molested them, for instance – left no room for doubt about his mental state. He seemed to have first-hand experience of stalking. According to a Chicago Tribune report citing unspecified source, he had recently stalked some women in addition to setting fire to a dorm room. According to the Virginia Tech authorities, Cho Seung-Hui posted a warning on a school online forum: “im going to kill people at vtech today.” http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/apr2007/tech-a18.shtml. Both the play scripts he wrote for a creative workshop have been posted online by Ian Macfarlane who was Cho’s contemporary at Virginia Tech but who now works at AOL. The script for ‘Richard McBeef’ is here: http://news.aol.com/virginia-tech-shootings/cho-seung-hui/_a/richard-mcbeef-cover-page/20070417134109990001 while the ‘Mr Brownstone’ script is here: http://news.aol.com/virginia-tech-shootings/cho-seung-hui/_a/mr-brownstone-title-page/20070417141309990001. Of the two, the former bears an uncanny resemblance to ‘Hamlet’. The writing is crude and lacking in craft as well as class but the storytelling is not bad. Given time and persistence, the writer could have turned into a proficient practitioner. Fate intervened unfortunately and tragedy struck. Life once again proved its random nature.

Dan Brown’s ‘truth’.

As a child, Dan Brown (born in 1964 – which puts him bang in the so-called Conscious Revolution era, a time of spiritual awakening in American history, demographically speaking – Viet Nam protests, feminism, ecology, a rebellious counterculture, that sort of stuff http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_Revolution) had what might be called a ‘proper’ Christian upbringing. He used to attend Sunday school and summer camps run by the Church. He also used to sing in the Church choir. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Brown. Yet he grew up to write the bestselling novels, The Da Vinci Code (1993) and Angels & Demons (2000). Fiction though they claim to be what they’re saying strikes an echoing chord in the mind of anyone who knows his history. I think they’re popular not because they’re racy thrillers but because they offer a premise that seems reasonably plausible. The fundamentalists will do anything to keep their monopoly of knowing and dispensing truth. Kill, torture, maim, character-assassinate, lie, twist facts… you name it. All of which reminds me of what Aldous Huxley wrote in Ape & Essence:

Church and State.
Greed and hate.
Two baboon persons
In one supreme gorilla.

Also, of the incidence earlier in the same novel where there are two groups of apes facing each other with a different flag waving behind each one. Each group of apes has an Albert Einstein, on his hands and knees, on a leash. Each of these Einsteins is facing the other and speaking of how terrible their exploitation is. The scene ends with the announcement of the death of modern science by suicide.