Buddha

Two Thousand Five Hundred years ago, a man was born in the Himalayan Valley. A man who challenged God.

We may not get enough hang of the Sub-Himalayan subcontinent of that time. That was much similar to the current civilization, minus our technology. Almost all the major janapadas were run on oligarchy, and sometimes had some type of primitive parliaments, with representations from a wide range of citizens.                                                                                                                                        

At that time, the Aryan conquest was complete. The battle between the Indra clan and the Agni clan on the possession of soma was settled too. The earlier inhabitants of this land, the dasyus moved downsouth. Others mixed with the newcomers. Vedic codes of conduct were standardized. With settlements, ritualistic dogma could set in. Religion begun.

Kings, Chieftains and Lords started totemic worship. Notable chiefs of the clan, founder of major bloodlines, were also worshipped. As cows were used as money, any kind of wealth became known as Go or Gow - गो, गौ, गाव: A population was bound to maintain gotra, for marital, business and religious relationships.

With time and settlement, the power hierarchy became rigid, as a formal caste system. Druids monopolized the acquisition and use of knowledge among themselves. Even Kings were not normally allowed to interpret the knowledge of the system without professional help.

They called the total system of knowledge by its Vedic name, Veda. And the knowledge flashed through intuitions and/or meditation, as wisdom, to the minds of certain knowledge-seekers (similar to Sophists in ancient Greece). They saw the truth, they uttered the truth in metred words. Truth was ṛta and the verse was ṛk.

Unfortunately, knowledge became dogma in few centuries. Nothing unusual. We have seen, how, in modern times, Marxism, structuralilsm, Bakhtin's dialogism, other forms of post-structuralism including Derrida's approach to Texts have become dogma. All types of formats and structures to knowing and interpretation become dogma in a generation.

In ancient times,  just like today, dogmas were firmly fed by the power pyramid. In turn, such dogmas gave a validity to the power. Such feedback loop was clear, even in those pre-historic days, to some ṛṣis. Some of them, like Kapil, secluded himself. Some, like Viswamitra, challenged the leaders of the system to get a pie from the system itself.

There were challenges within the system. Continuous immigration from the agnijaji Persians, and the other middle-Asian tribes, introduced new clan-leaders and gods, in every generation. To maintain the system, in a settlement, standardization was necessary.

To keep things in order, a rigid code of conduct and a set of overseers were born.

Interesting. Isn't it? That is exactly what today's Indian constitution and the judicial system do. And you cannot challenge the Indian constitution, other Laws and the judicial system in the Court. You can challenge the application of certain Laws and certain interpretations through appeals in the higher court of Law.

Direct challenge and denial of the Judiciary would result in the Contempt of the Court.

It was exactly the same, three thousand years ago.

That is why Charvaks were to be hanged in most Kingdoms. That is why Rama, the Great King, cut off the head of Shambuka, a Shudra ascetic practicing Vedic ritual (does not matter if the shambuka story is an extrapolation. It reflects the rigid power hierarchy of this land.)

In a nutshell, Knowledge was not for all.

In a nutshell, majority were to follow the dictum of the extreme minority as the god's voice. No dissonant tone was allowed. Plutarchy and Monarchy ruled together.

The whole population was treated as child. Don't we see the same attitude today when leaders say, "They don't have voice. We have to give them voice."

Didn't we see the same thing when even leaders like Rabindranath, Gandhi and Nehru advocated in favor of civilizing the savage. Today, the savage has another name - the subaltern. Leaders could never put up with a dissonance in history. It was a curse for them that certain people could be outside the grab of the history.

This mentality did not let Gandhi allow the abolition of caste system.

However, we, participants and witness to this large play of history, meekly ask, "Who is Gandhi to allow? Is he god?"

Similar questions were raised two thousand five hundred years ago. That period was more difficult than today. Counter-cultures were part of dogma, just like today.

Yet, rebels appeared. They appeared with a long history.

Jains trace their root back to the beginning of the Iksvaku clan, to the first Tirthankar Parsvanath. Interestingly this clan gave birth to  Rama, the great King. All Jain Tirthankars were Royal Princes. All of them except two were from the Iksvaku clan. 

Surely, this looks like some kind of validation.

Bṛhaspati was another rebel from the time of the Vedas. His sutras are perished (or annihilated?), however.

Thre are allusions to such rebels in the Vedic literature itself. Some of these rebels were assimilated. Others, like Viswamitra, wanted to be assimilated on their own terms.

That time was more like today's Hindu Bharat. It was similar to the golden calf worship of the orgiastic Jews, when Moses went up Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments.

People in power wanted the rigid social order to remain as it were. Kings wanted more wealth and power. Brahmins wanted more power in the society and eternal glory. Everyone believed in the ritual of sacrifice to gods to get more of everything.

The idea of indulgence, penance and payment, exactly like the Chrisitian Catholic Church, raised its heads through all these. One could commit any crime - genocide, rape, incest, theft, robbery and almost any other sacrilege. One just needed to pay the correct amount, or in the correct kind, as penance, to the head of the Priest class, or to the King, or both.

The goal of human life was to appease gods, and gods' representatives, so that one could have eternal bliss in the heaven, after death.

The idea of the cycle of births and the impermanence of heaven was there. But, nobody would actively think about impermanence. Materialist philosophers such as Brihaspati were marginal. People called them Nastik. They could not give any long hope. They refused any reality other than the one obtained through physical senses. They believed in the existence of the body, and the material existence of the soul attached to the body, in case a soul exists.

This is when Prince Siddhartha was born somewhere in the Himalayan valley, five centuries before Christ. 

We all know how he was predicted at birth by the ascetic Asita that he would be a King of Kings, like the one the world had never seen before. We also know how he was brought up within the confines of the palace, just like the Happy Prince. And then we also know what happened next.

One Hundred Years of Solitude

I first read García Márquez in the university. His most famous novel was my text, in the undergrads syllabus of Comparative Literature.

I was not used to reading long works in English, back then, thanks to the erstwhile government policy of introducing ABCD from 6th class. Unavailability of any library in school, or anywhere else, added to that.

I bought One Hundred Years in the first Calcutta book fair after I joined uni. I got a Penguin Modern Classics edition at a low price. I did not know, I was buying arguably the most powerful work in the World literature after the WW II.

It was very easy to read. Almost as easy as Alice in the Wonderland – the only other English novel I enjoyed reading until then.

What struck me most, however, were the images. Rarely I had come across a piece of prosaic work where images were born spontaneously. They were like rainbows after rain; or the blow of the wind through the dense leaves of Amazon forest.


It was actually a film unrolling before my eyes. I could not understand that, those days. I was witnessing the coming of modernity to Macondo.

I was, in a way, foreseeing the coming of modernity to Calcutta, to India.

This is why I feel perfectly at ease today with any technological innovation; with any social change ensuing that.

One Hundred Years prepared me for that, years ago.

That was the beginning of a new journey. Frenzied, I found out García Márquez from each nook and corner of every library I would visit.

I enjoyed the gory non-linear narration in Chronicle of a Death Foretold. I followed the life and death of a madman in The Autumn of the Patriarch. I tried to feel the Colonel’s grief who does not get the letter. I wanted Erendira fly away on her large wings like Pegasus.

I read about twenty books – novels, stories, non-fiction and interviews of García Márquez in two months. The only book which I began, but could not cross the first chapter, was The General in his Labyrinth.

That book has remained unread ever since. Maybe now I shall take to that again.

I have not read The Memories of My Melancholy Whores. But, I have seen the film based on that.

I sense I have to read that now.

I discovered García Márquez over a decade and a half back. He never stopped writing in these years.

I do not know what is magic realism. But, I believe human mind cannot imagine anything which does not exist anywhere. Very few can, however, see the real, uncovering the veil of gross habit that we call reality.

Some people get glances of that, and call that fantasy. Rarely a mind enquires so much that it pushes through.
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In my childhood, Bibhutibhshan took us to that playground. Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and Feynman’s writings made me an untrained visitor to the game.

Gabriel García Márquez inspired me to stay back, and embrace it, forever.

On the teaching of Biology

Biology is taught in India in very wrong ways.

It has always been taught like that. A boring, lifeless subject about life, where you have to draw a lot of diagrams and label them, accompanying almost all answers.

That was how biology was taught in my school. And in almost every other school in the city, it was taught similarly.

Most other cities were not notable exceptions. Students were forced to remember different organ systems, tissues and their functions in animals. Topics like photosynthesis and respiration were like doses of quinine fed to the mind. Their relevance in everyday life, their application, were never clear.

Most of us hated biology. Not so much as we hated political geography. Yet, very close to the latter.

Nobody ever told us that Biology was the show of the magic called life. No teacher ever felt the necessity.

In my middle teens, the worst patch of my life begun. That would continue for the next twelve years. But, it was in those years,  I first came to see the magic show.

The magician's name was Ajit Sengupta. And the method he followed is structuralism.

He laid the structure of the science open to us. And everything changed!

It always began with the study of the cell. How the cell developed from inanimate proto-cells through geological evolution and replication, maybe quite accidentally. How the unicellular organisms behave.

I came to know some of those unicellular organisms are practically immortal.

That the multicellular animals like us may be seen as co-operative clusters of such unicellular organisms automatically led our interest to knowing more about them.

Detailed study of the cell started.

As those cells developed in the salty water of the sea (most of the earth is still the sea water), it was natural to be curious how those cells behave with a change in the concentration of salt in the water.

That led to matching it with our personal experience of physical discomfort which comes with electrolyte imbalance. This link threw us back to the evolution of human beings from the sea animals.

We studied almost everything in biology through cells. We studied the cell for about ten months.

However, in the school, it was the regular dose of clueless tissues, functions and life cycles.

Although they were sometimes interesting in themselves (such as, the life cycle of the earthworm), we failed to associate them with any immediate purpose.

It is not normal for a teenager to feel interested in anything that he cannot use for an immediate purpose.

But, some of them appear to do that.

They score highly. They become doctors.

I just wonder which kind of doctors they would make.

Of course, some of these same teenagers who crammed and diluted, would later change their pattern of association.

But, how would we know who they are?

A genuine disrespect and apathy for the teaching professions are responsible for this.

Students do not feel interested, because teachers do not know how to teach. Teachers do not know because genuinely passionate students usually do not become teachers in school.

They do not become teachers in school because they lose scopes for further research and studies.

Of course our education system is responsible for this vicious cycle.

Today, when I feel that I could be a doctor myself, I blame this education system which forced us to hate biology in our early teens.

I also hate this social system which forced us to see a career of doctor as a way of wealth creation, and not as an art or magic just like Physics.

It is not so in most other countries. I know the school curricula in most countries of Europe. They could associate teaching with everyday life.

But, that is another story!

Love is BDSM

This is not a review.

I am yet to finish Fifty Shades of Grey, forget about the rest.

When I was in Chennai, my best friend there, my classmate, S told me love is BDSM for him.

He also told me he believed love is BDSM everywhere in the world. In all families. Among every culture.

I was not so well-conversant with BDSM and its coded approach at that time.

As the computer games, the social networks, the interactive living even in the most lonely moments pervade us, love as an expression of BDSM becomes more clear.

It is a play. It is a play in truth. 

The vermilion in our marriage as a remembrance of bondage (as Rahul Sankrityayan addresses this issue in his Volga to Ganga), the mangal sutra as a token of bondage and dominance, the white saree to signify a colorless life in absence of the Lord - all signify bondage.

However, BDSM, like a computer game, has role reversals. Bondage and dominance are not restrcited to specific sexes.

There is a certain discipline followed in the game, which is shared religiously by the participants. 

All religious orgies are based on such disciplined sex related practices. Not only Tantric, but all.

Sadism and masochism are not only symptoms of psychosis. They surface in the healthy neurotic also. Role play is a very normal affair in all children.

And in adults too. What do the management schools teach after all?

A theory of unconditional love can be explained through BDSM too.

I rejected this trilogy as rubbish.

But, after a second thought, I came to reconcile. "Why not?", I thought. Only, a proper understanding of the rules of the game should be there.

I am not to practice it. I am enlightened.

For others...

Long live BDSM.

About Music

Ud Bade ghulam Ali Khan

Video Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLbknarPdbY

Our childhood passed in music.

 There was no satellite channel, no internet. no Coca Cola, no Levi's. We had Doordarshan, from 6:30 to 9:30, in the evening. There was no second "Metro" channel as yet. We had magazines, little magazines, radio (yes FM was there too, from 7 pm onwards), and music.

 Our days used to start with music on the radio - the radio center's signature tune . After Subhasitam, music would start. The whole day used to be tuned according to music. Rabindrasangeet to Bhatiyali to Gazal to filmy on Vividh Bharati. 

Music was us. We were created by it. Most of us took formal lessons in music since early childhood. The regular seasoning of short khayal, bhajan, Tarana and Bangla Tappa took us ahead. Many of us who never went to the enlightened side of the city, before the market opened, never came to know what was happening there.

 Most Bengali teenagers of the late 80s and early 90s never went to the CSM. Amyt Datta was not so ubiquitously popular in those days.

 On the other side, how many of us actually went to 72 Jatin Das Road, where the famous Dagar brothers,Moinuddin and Aminuddin - the two Ustads - stayed? Most of us sang the whole life with a falsetto and always landing on a wrong note each time. We never had the real vocal training.

 Music was the pleasure ground for us. It was not to be seriously taken in life. It was not life's purpose. I wrote I wanted to be a singer and a full-fledged musician, in an essay on class assignment, when I was nine. I could never fulfill my promise. I was never sufficiently trained. 

Once, like a spark, I saw, for a split second, where a proper training can take one. Just after six month's training in Dagar Sangeet Ashram, in a typical Dhrupad voice training, I suddenly discovered any note, in any succession, in any rapidity, came so easily to voice. What a twelve years Khayal training could not do, a proper voice training under a Dhrupad guru did miraculously in six months!

 But, we are impatient! We were always so. Music was a part of life. But, fleetingly so. We never had time for anything. Music, as they used to make, has to wait for us till another life! 

Video Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWmJP56guUY

Tintin

Photo Source: Hergé, 1950. Au Pays de L'Or Noir.

 Fac-similé de l’édition ed. Tournai: Casterman.

                          Scanned Pg.1

'70s' and '80s' Bengali generations grew up with Tintin. 

For those of us who went, by mistake, by choice, or by compulsion, to Bangla medium schools, discovered Tintin through Anandamela.

Those days Anandamela was the Magazine for the kids, despite Sandesh still running under the provocative guidance of Satyajit Ray, and Kishore Bharati.

Nurtured under an apt editorship of Nirendranath Chakraborty, Anandamela brought many major writers of that time to wield the pen for teenagers, and young adults.


But, the stickiest attraction was Tintin, translated directly from the French original. Much later, we would come to know the translator.

 When I started learning English, in early teens, again Tintin was the closest friend.

Those days, thanks to the erstwhile government of West Bengal, students would learn ABCD from the 6th class. And the teaching was through translation.

Tintin came to the rescue when all other methods failed. A strikingly cinematic (say, contemporary, maybe even futuristic) narration kept our attention to the pages. New words in the dialogues and descriptions never halted the flow. They just enhanced the enjoyment.

English used to get automatically better each time we finished a book.

Amazingly so, if we remember even the English Methuen (and later, Egmont and Casterman) books were only translations. They are probably the best examples of how interesting translations can be good guides to a language.

Tintin was the first guide to the language of cinema for many of us. I guess it would have been equally so for Satyajit Ray who mentioned the comics a number of times, in his writing.

Tintin taught us how to say Meanwhile (the idea of parallel editing), or how to close in from a location frame on to a close up portrait of a single character, or the duo.

The idea of shot division also sprang up from Tintin.

Again, when I started learning French, in the university days, Tintin was the guide. This time, in original, I came to appreciate how close the English translation was to the French bande dessinée.

Each Tintin character was reference to someone in our schooldays. A Professor Calculus, or Captain Haddock, Or the famous detective duo were among us, sometimes in a teacher, sometimes in someone else's parents.

We came to know about the journey to the moon, and about the nuclear reactor, not from the newspaper. Tintin guided us there too.

Of course there was the racial, neocolonial politics prevailing. But, our restive minds were probably not much tainted by that.

Tintin meant adventure for us.

After thirty years it is still the same.

Why Cinema?

A decade and a half of intermittent indiscipline in food routine has led me to gastric ulcer. 

I know I'll fight out of it and the weakness it causes. However, such dizziness of mind put me face to face with an important question.

Last few days I was in the world of DA Vinci Code, Meluha and Panchavati, ancient Egypt and medieval Nalanda, Istvan Szabo's works on the modern holocaust and Exodus. And finally Spielberg.

That struck me face to face with the question - which films I must make now? Whose story can I tell most faithfully, and interestingly?

              Photo Source: Wikipedia

Framegrab from Chhinnamul (1950)

           Sourced from  E-Jumpcut http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc47.2005/ghatak/

Of course mine. And what is my story? The most haunting two are the Exodus of my people, after the partition; and the Naxalites. 
So few films have been made on the former, and so few logical treatments of the latter. But why?

I grew up hearing stories from my mom. Things were different there, on the east side, which is now Bangladesh. The most fertile land in the world - the Branga in Amish' Shiva Trilogy.

We always had a problematic relationship with the pure Calcuttan's, people from this side of the partition. 

Even to date I have a problem in mixing with them - they are neither another culture altogether nor my own. 

Their language and body language are ours, finally. But, they are different in social mores, cuisines, purpose of life and cleanliness.

Lots of us lost much and many while crossing the border. Many were deceived after reaching Calcutta. 

A lot were deported to Andaman and Dandakaranya. Interestingly Amish' books connect Bongs to Dandakaranya, 3000 years back!

Bengal Congress always had an independent stance from the Indian National Congress. Right from the time of S N Banerjee. 

The difference became an eye sore at the time of Bipin Chandra Pal. 

Subhas Bose took that difference to the greatest height and finally walked out of Congress, with a distanced respect for Gandhi, but with a disagreement on the latter's politics.

Photo Source: Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subhas_Chandra_Bose#mediaviewer/File:Bose_Gandhi_1938.jpg

Bengal was never culturally a part of the North. From the time of the Mahabharata it had its disagreements.

Who could forget the war between Harshavardhana and Shashanka, the last Gupta King?

And Bengal suffered the worst in the partition.

Many films have been made on the Punjab partition. But why only one (or two?) on the Bengal side of that?

Bengalis here supported that '52 language revolutionaries, and the '71 liberation war. 

The same Bengal that was suffering from the last State vs Naxalite fights.

And Naxalbari, the village, is in Bengal!

I have a personal, family connection to all these. My parents were refugees, both of them. 

They remember those days, the fiery nights of '46, to those one in post-Independence East Pakistan.


My own cousin was one of the top leaders of the '67 Naxalites. My family voted communists to power. 

They sheltered the '70s Naxalites. 

My dad used to teach in Bengal Engineering College, another den for the red berets of Bengal.

Photo Source: Wikimedia

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/72/CPI-M-flag.svg

I have grown up seeing how my family slowly became anti-CPI(M) through the latter's reign in the '80s and '90s. How they started supporting Trinamul Congress, and a whimsical frenzied leader called Mamata.

And I find the essence of the Bengali liberation war, the eternal Bengali psyche, in the same whimsical, frenzied leader called Mamata. She is one of my own.

My personal connections with Liberation, my party membership, troubled my parents. 

But, they were supportive. I was never deep into field politics. 

I was an interested dilettante at best. 

I wanted some hands on practice for the theories I was reading. I was never a professional in politics. 

Yet, the positive role of my parents in support of my politics, which was against theirs, always surprised me.

The refugees always had a communist past, probably, even when they denied it most vehemently.

I shall make films. I don't know about rich people's ambitions, or the international missile treaty as the first hand source. 

But, I know the story of my family, my relation to the modern Bengal - both sides of the partition, how I can never see the two sides as separate.

I know my connection to Bangladesh, the roots of my deep hatred for any religion, my concern for the original Buddhism, my love for strikes and confrontation.

I detested a comically made Bose: the Forgotten Hero. 

I still wonder in silence what forced Shyam Benegal to make such a pathetic film!

I don't know about others' stories. But, I know my roots. I have grown up with them.

Filmmaking is like writing a book, like leaving a treasure-trove for the next generations. Opening the trove would give them a glimpse of how things were like.

A ploy to fight the collective amnesia.


Not easy. But, not impossible either.