Friday, January 23, 2015

PK Film and Charlie Hebdo Cartoon

Nothing could have been more contrasting to the modern world in recent times – the huge boxoffice success of a Hindi movie PK which makes a complete mockery of the religious rituals of the Hindu Sanatana Dharma (HSD) majority in India, the world’s second largest populated nation, and the horrendous massacre of journalists in the French satirical publication Charlie Hebdo for a cartoon purportedly of a religious Prophet. Atleast a few hundreds of innocent and related lives of human beings have been lost in different parts of the world on account of these cartoons in the last few years. The fundamental differences between preaching in the two underlying faiths are too obvious to be elaborated any further.

Outside faiths have always made fun of the beliefs and rituals of India’s own Hindu Sanatana Dharma without realising its true meanings and real reasons. Ridiculing the native faith is part and parcel of any invading faith. This is bound to be so when the main motive of the invading faiths is to capture as many followers as possible in order to capture political power. Isn’t it astonishing to note that both the invading faiths have failed (so far) in their political mission only in the case of India? All other civilisations (and cultures) of the ancient world viz. Greek, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Mayan, Chinese, Japanese, African etc., have been either overrun or changed beyond recognition by the two or three invading ideologies.

This necessarily calls for a study on the inherent strength of HSD in the face of tremendous onslaught by the invading ideologies. The answer is its inclusiveness and openness. In modern parlance, HSD is the only religious ideology with an Open Source Code. It is freely available for everyone to modify according to their own requirements and interpretation, except for its basic tenets of Advaita, Rebirth, Karma and Moksha, which are very much in tune with modern Science.  There is no pre-eminence for any God or Prophet or any individual. What else can be better ideology for the emancipation of mankind relevant at all times?