Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Time, Technology and... generation. Part 2


(continued from previous post.. )
 
"ye naye zamane ke ladke... " every generation bollywood movie has got this dialog. I used to think that 70's and older movies would not have this line. But a little bit of research helped me to derive the correct fact - the dialog has been the asset of the bolloywood for many a generation now. Like the ancestral property, the line has been inherited by all generations. So the theorem thus proves that every new generation gets deviated from the rules-of-good-book by certain degree. And every deviation of every new generation is aided by a new change that is remarkable in that generation - Movie, computer, internet, fashion, and the latest spoiler of current generation - the mobile phone and tablet pc. Every new generation deviating  got drifted away from the complex business of understanding the religion and its underlying fundamentals.

Lord Krishna says in Geeta “I provide the intelligence to human beings, how they use it is left to them”. Why go till Geeta, in the hit Hollywood movie “Bruce Almighty” Morgan Freeman says the same line. Technology has been developed by the humans with the intelligence they r gifted with. How do we use it is again dependent on us. Mobiles are used by teens for what not these days. But the same can be used to access social networking sites and share useful information. Recently I happened to watch the movie Oh My God and I instantly shared the good dialogs and scene pics of the movie. Many a people liked it.

The movie tried to expose the dirty affairs regarding the self-appointed religious heads (swamijis, christian fathers and maulvis) and showed how foolishly people are getting duped by them. Huge sum of money flows into their fold due to innocence (if it can be termed like that) of people.. There are a lot of rituals which many people follow in various religions. With the change in time, people started to ask questions behind these. Unavailability of people who could provide proper answers has made the younger gen loose faith in their respective religion. The movie OMG had an excellent message. If you don’t understand the rituals, fine. Instead of going behind the magic-making-self-appointed-swamijis and wasting crores of money, donate it to the people in need. Help the human kind (or at least that is what my conclusion was after watching it). Both the movie and the book have helped me a lot for answering so many questions that I myself had.

Thanks to the authors like Amish and Ashwin Sanghi who have made good attempts to decode the mythology and making it an interesting topic currently in the market. Amish's books gave out a message that "Gods are human beings, who became god due to their good virtue". Lord Krishna in udupi turned around in diametrically opposite direction, to give darshan to his famous devotee kanakadasa, thus creating the famous kanakana kindi (the window of kanaka) in the holy temple in udupi. Recently, i happened to listen to the pravachana that is read by purohit during satyanarayana vrata. In that, purohit explains as to why the vrata is so sacred. It seems Lord Narada asked some question to the Lord Vishnu(forgot the correct question) for which the lord replied that "for the sake of simplicity of the people of kaliyug, who are under delusion and always pressed for time and dedication for god, it is enough if they worship me by doing this higly simple vrata. No need for them to do any difficult yaga and homa as this vrata will be equivalent of all of them".  There is plenty of opportunities around us to feel the god and get answers for anything related to mythology. Only dedication is required i feel.


While Movies such as OMG might have helped us build the faith, there are some movies which might have acted in negative way although unintentionally.  The way the divine weapons (or rather magical weapons as one gets tempted to say) are shown in the war scenes of certain mythological movies have been matter of fun for many people. I too had this question as to how come there could be weapon of this kind in that era. But I was proved wrong. With every new Yuga, the knowledge of people goes down, opposite of what we thought. So these technology products such as Mobiles, computers and weapons of modern times are not greatest as we have believed. Just consider this – the fact that sushruta - the father of surgery, existed such long ago itself is the proof of great knowledge that the ancients had. There could have been so much of science knowledge present in those times that all the things which we read in mythology such as a person coming out alive from near-death situation, passing thru fires, building highly sophisticated palaces are not because they are connected to gods in some or other way. But due to the help of science! The fact that science was present during that time has been ignored and thus when we read such miracles without keeping the fact (of existence of science) at the back of our mind, either of two things happen i.e. we may either get forced to believe them without any logic since we believe in god or one may loose faith completely since we don’t find any logical base for that.

(To be continued... )

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