Frankly, I found the Hindi film '3 Idiots' totally unconvincing. I view it as a failure and am surprised at the extensive applause it is getting, for I feel that it has a really important message that is urgently needed to be spread around the world, but is done in such a crude way that has left me totally disappointed. Let me correct myself – not totally but largely disappointed. There certainly are some funny sequences, but if you juxtapose the crudely conceived ones with the clever ones, you end up feeling sorry that it was made this way.
Islam has many very important messages. Very useful messages if you care to look at it carefully. But it also has messages that can be interpreted in a dangerous way. It could have been the design of the universe to allow humans to choose and select useful messages from others that are not very helpful. Would they have the discrimination to select a good interpretation and reject the bad ones? Swans are birds that are supposed to have an uncanny ability to separate out milk from a mixture of milk and water. Would humans likewise evolve to become like swans using the faculty of discrimination? Unfortunately they chose to remain humans. Man was tempted by the promise of ‘heaven’, ‘seventy one virgins’ and all the associated evil desires man is tempted by. Islam preaches brotherhood in the path of God. But while taking this message, if you have the right understanding, you will reject the interpretation that this brotherhood is to be established to slaughter others who refuse to believe you. There is the concept of Zakat – the useful idea that a person is to set aside a certain amount of money by realizing the suffering that other deprived persons are undergoing. The concept is there with the idea to arouse in you the emotion of empathy and understanding. But missing the point and offering Zakat largely with the idea of firstly, the fear that they may be punished if they do not obey and secondly with the idea that they would be rewarded with heaven and of course the ‘seventy one virgins’ seems to negate the very spirit of the message . Consider for an instant the fate of those seventy one virgins – have they done supreme good deeds to be honored to be used by you. Or is it true that those virgins are actually condemned to suffer in hell. Could it be heaven for you and hell for them? Humankind should develop the discrimination to select the right messages from various religions. Hinduism promotes a very significant idea - viveka - that translates as discrimination. A man is advised to exercise this faculty as he goes through his daily life. Now, with this warning, if they were really sensitive, they would have a totally different attitude towards the people that they interact. You may find an eager Hindu calling someone a mlechha and viewing him with contempt. You may find a Brahmin not at all feeling guilty when he sees that a fellow human being is made to collect his feces totally blind to the other man’s plight. So you have that instead of empathizing with the man, he ends up calling him an untouchable and refusing him his rights. He is not even sensitive to the hurt feelings of the other man. Could such a blatant loss of awareness in the Hindus have caused the decline of India? Could it be the judgment of a universal intelligence?
Can humankind now be facing a similar lack of discrimination in selecting useful information from the ‘scientific attitude’ and rejecting potentially dangerous ones! Can the universal intelligence be warning humankind by sending signals that are being ignored because of a lack of discrimination which is incidentally due to a lack of consciousness? Why are humans failing to see that they are not omnipotent, but are like feeble ants which could wipe themselves out anytime? Why are films like Armageddon being made, where Human’s arrogance over nature is so blatant as to be embarrassing? Can the West clearly see the arrogance they seem to have? Can they care to look at how they portray themselves and how they portray Indians as an asteroid is about to hit the earth. If they come to know the truth, they may realize that it is actually humankind that has to bow down. Maybe the early men were right to a certain extent - they had bowed down much earlier to the power of Nature and in good time!
I started off by citing the crudity of a film in spreading a useful message and use this instance to reference how intelligent humor can be used to convey a very important fact. In the film The Great Dictator, Hitler mouths a long winded pompous message to his secretary with an air of self-importance. He pauses and looks at his secretary hoping that she is impressed. He is surprised to find that she reacts with only two key-strokes! Hitler is thoroughly confused. But he does not know what to do and involuntarily reacts with just the word “Nein!” This has the secretary typing and typing and typing, and Hitler just watching helplessly and surprised till he gathers the wisdom to order her to ‘Stop!’
I feel it is time humankind shouted 'Slow Down!' if not totally 'Stop'.
1 comment:
A very nice read Deepak.
3 idiots appealed to me a great deal!
Everything we see, read, encounter is at the mercy of not how it actually is but at the mercy of our interpretations. This is where discretion comes into play.
I agree with you. Whilst the modern man continues to fiddle with mother nature, early men were certainly right.
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