OPM appears in the Thursday edition of Bangalore BIAS and previews a Friday release

OPM*
Presents - India’s Temple of Doom? OR Why I’d rather believe in Harry Potter


The curious case of the UPA’s Presidential candidate, Pratibha Patil, has me in a state of shock.
It isn’t just the normal allegations of fraud, loan defaults and the odd linkage to a serious crime, common to most Indian politicians, which we, as a public, are now used to. Well, used to, like we can digest Sunil Shetty singing ‘Hai Hukku Hai Hukku Hai Hai’ to some awfully co-ordinated limb flailing or Chiranjeevi (in tight pants and shiny shirt) with Radhika/Roja/Rambha (shiny towel wrapped around head) singing and dancing to ‘Jammakku Thaa, Kassakku rroo’; i.e. we can live with it, but not understand it for the life of us.
No, coming from, possibly, India’s next President, it is other things she has to say that shock me.
Her unadulterated silliness over the purdah system and the Mughal’s with its clarifications and retractions and on the need for compulsory sterilisation for those with ‘hereditary disease’ are merely politically incorrect starters in the main course of National embarrassment that her Presidential speeches will guarantee to serve. And then there is the matter of her chats with a dead God man of the Brahma Kumaris sect at Mount Abu in Rajasthan. With a President who chats with dead people, India is sure to scale new heights as a tourist haunt for foreigners who want a piece of the mumbo-jumbo ‘Indiana’s Jones and Temple of Doom’ India. Expect spectacular seven-course-meal botch-ups in the coming years.

Unfortunately, as seen with said Patil, the more enlightened aspects of Hinduism and our ‘culture’ are lost on most of its practitioners. Our legacy is an inexplicable set of rituals and ’knowledge’ of our texts, mostly from televised versions, as with the Mahabharata and Ramayana. It seems that our culture and history are being redefined by this new half-baked knowledge in its practitioners and the world press. With Patil as first citizen, misinformed worldviews that associate India and Hinduism to Occult and other gobbledegook will only get exaggerated.

With this as background, in the week the new Harry Potter movie is hitting screens, it has been reported that Shekhar Kapur and Deepak Chopra have ambitious plans of translating Indian Epics onto the medium of film. These movies will be on the scale of an LOTR at a fraction of the production cost. The movies, if and when they are made, will be termed ‘Mythological’. There is an astonishing insight here (yes, astonishing because this column is making claims to enlightened thought, however dim the enlightenment), but first, some background.
The word Mythology (from Greek ‘mythos’, meaning a narrative, and ‘logos’, meaning speech or argument) literally means the oral retelling of myths – stories that a particular culture believes to be true that use the supernatural to interpret natural events and to explain the nature of the universe and humanity. This oral retelling was particularly tough, considering the sheer number of stories that mankind developed in the absence of television (a much more serious issue that the absence of God). It was made even tougher as the tape recorder had not been invented, thus ensuring that every person with a story to tell (which was almost everyone), was left pressed for time. (This explains why the advent of the tape recorder coincided with the population explosion, as everyone had better uses to put their oral skills to)
In modern usage, "mythology" is the body of myths from a particular culture or religion (as in Greek mythology or Indian Mythology).
But it isn’t that simple because the popular and common meaning of the English word “Myth” is that of a rumour, misconception or mistaken belief. This is in marked contrast to the meaning "stories of deep cultural or spiritual significance".
I have observed (however oxymoronically) that the stories and mythologies of pantheistic faiths such as Hinduism or faiths of the ancient Greeks and Romans etc, when translated to film or other media are always termed ‘Mythological’ by the foreign press while one never hears terms like Christian or Islamic mythology. And I suspect this is because the term ‘mythology’ today alludes to the contextually undesirable modern meaning of ‘Myth’.

Of course, when Deepak and Shekhar’s mythological releases, we will see that they have adopted the Mahabharata to suit today’s deep cultural and spiritual ideas.
For instance, the Pandava’s will be less than ideal blokes, thus translating them to modern times. Examples:
Yudhishtira will never speak a lie, except when he really needs to, usually while gambling.
Bheema will pay for his excessive eating and will have to go on GM and Atkin diets regularly.
Arjuna will be shown to be the crybaby he really is.
Nakula and Sahadeva will resent being clubbed together always and reinvent themselves as popular DJs Now-cool and Dev.

Yes the five Pandavas will still share a single wife, but for reasons that are deeply culturally rooted. Kunti, having had the luxury of watching TV soaps all day will realize the deeply cultural TV soap truth that families go nuclear because of daughter-in-laws. For this reason, she insists that her sons share one wife. (Other than the fact that the modern version is set in Chandigarh, where the Female sex ratio has fallen to 790)

Amidst such modern day contexts (some positive, such as Bheeshma having no problem fighting Shikhandi, in these days of gay rights) I suspect many of us will see the merit of seeing “culture” as something that is not constant, something that is best as it evolves (and, *wink*, brings with it more national holidays)
For instance, feasting on Bertie Bott’s Every Flavoured beans is a better way to spend your old age than becoming an ascetic with the aspiration of an afterlife spent in sterile heaven along with Yudhishtira, Harischandra and other moral but boring denizens of that supposed space.
This is why I’d rather believe in Harry Potter than any mono or pantheistic idea of religion, afterlife, God, UFO’s or 72 Virginians in heaven.


* Objects in the Preview Mirror may appear sillier than they are.
Disclaimer: Characters in the above story are not based on any characters in the film. Any resemblance or humour is pure luck.