So Bahubali-2 has released. From whatever I have heard from my friends and family, it seems that the movie is amazing. I am not a desi movie buff. I don’t go out of my house and watch Hindi or for that matter any kind of cinema when it is released. I have lost my will to go and sit for 3 hours and watch a movie. But I have a feeling that this time I will be breaking that habit. And there is a good reason for that.
Because not only I’ve read or heard good about the movie from my friends and family, but also because I’ve read something else too.
I can’t figure out what I read because some people have mastered the art of presenting a word salad in good English that means nothing in reality. The Indian left that has mastered this writing disorder and has kind of achieved a PhD in this style of writing.
Say this article in a website called The Quint. If you follow me on social media you will often see me talk about parasitised mindsets. And if there ever was someone who epitomises that category it has to be the author of this article. The author writes – “To release such a film in Telugu and Tamil is nothing but a cultural Trojan horse of Hindi and Hindu nationalism, perhaps reasons for its wide success and critical acclaim across the ‘Indian’ media and the Hindi-belt.”
I hope you have wiped off the floor. If it fell on your mobile screen on laptop keyboard, I’m sorry.
But this kind of vomit inducing writing is a new fashion in India. Everything that is from India’s Hindu past has to be painted as bad and enabler of whatever is wrong with our society. As per such people, India was a cesspool of mediocrity until the great Mughals came and rescued us from our innate barbarism. And that was not enough. We then needed the British to come and get rid of the other minor chinks that were left in our armour as Mughals were too busy building great architecture after destroying ugly pagan structures.
According to the Indian left, we simply cannot show case Hinduism or any Indic thought system in good light. We cannot showcase that Indic value systems can also teach something nice. Also, how dare we make a movie without any major Muslim character? After all, Indian history only starts after Mohammad bin Qasim invaded, nay, arrived in India. Before that we were just meandering morons. We were devoid of history or a grand ethos.
The Indian left claims that they fight for liberal values. They claim that they are the ones that are fighting the battle to see to it that democracy stays safe and intact in India. You might be wondering what has democracy and liberal values got to do with Indic culture or thought system. It has.
Parasitised leftists don’t realise that the reason democracy survives in India is because majority of Indians follow Indic value systems. They don’t realise that most of the non-negotiables of the Hindu side don’t go against the classical liberal democratic system. And that is why the experiment of democracy has lasted this long. So damn right, Indians should celebrate what’s good about Indic values!
Indic values teach you to be comfortable with diversity. Respect multiple viewpoints. Indians don’t live in a binary yes/no worldview in many cases. They are more than happy to let the opposing viewpoint have its own “safe space”.
Just think about it. How is an average Indian Hindu child raised? What ethos do these children follow? I remember my parents teaching me “Ekam Sat Vipra Bahudha Vadanti” as a young school going kid. Heck by the time I turned 18, I was a full blown Nireshvarwaadi (atheist for the ones who don’t know what that is). And even today I sometimes go to the temple that is outside my house and bow down to the murti inside that temple. It is not that I see any divinity in that murti. I bow down to the values that murti represents. I bow down to this great thought system that did not believe in “othering”. I bow down to a society and a thought system that accepts people like me who deny the divinity of the murti.
Does that mean we did not have problems? No, we did have problems. Every society has problems. But it also doesn’t mean that we cannot celebrate the good things of our culture. What the left seeks to destroy is the very reason India is a democracy even after 70 years.
In fact, Indian leftists are the biggest threat to democracy in India. They have this very dangerous streak in them that wants to homogenise thought.
The bed rock of a healthy democracy is intellectual diversity. But intellectual diversity is something leftists cannot handle. The Indian left wants to showcase a barbarian like Aurangzeb in good light but cannot handle a movie where there are fictional characters that celebrate their innate Hinduness.
So Watch Bahubali 2 just to annoy liberals. Because if they think Bahubali 2 celebrates Indic values, it has to be a must watch. And this is why I am off to book the tickets.
