He stopped along the path to his home. He was tired. Tired of the same
routine, tired of getting up everyday to go to the same boring desk
job, and coming back to a large, cold home. His professional life was
not exciting, and his personal life was all but boring. He felt like
he was done, that the motor inside him had stopped.

He put down his shoulder bag, and lay down on the grass next to the
path. It was twilight, and there was a glorious sunset just waiting to
be seen, but he couldn’t even get up the energy to enjoy it. He lay
there, and he looked at the peaceful sky, and the passing clouds.

The sound of her laugh made him look up.

A girl had dropped down on the grass not too far from him. She was on
the phone, telling someone all about her day. Even from within his
gloom, he noted her vivaciousness, her vitality. She laughed for every
sentence, and everything about the way she talked — her wide arm
gestures, the sparkle in her eyes (which he noticed while she was
looking at the sunset), the life in her voice modulation, screamed out
how much she was enjoying life.

He observed her silently. Just being near her was like getting RedBull
pumped directly into your arteries. Some people cheer you up just with
their presence. He felt like her motor was getting kick-started. His
brain, always looking for analogies and connections, brought back a
memory he had with a friend long ago:

It was a cold, dark night. We were walking down the road to my apartment. I still remember how the street lamps looked so beautiful in the night, with their bright yellow set against the black of the night. 

“Rama is such an idiot. If I wasn’t there, God knows what would have
happened!”

“Heh, it looks like Rama really can’t do without you.”

“In a sense. Rama can’t do without me, but the world can’t do without
people like Rama”

“What do you mean?”

“OK, this is going to sound trippy, but I believe you can divide all
the people in the world into three kinds. The first kind is people
like Rama: the positives, the motors of the world. They brighten up a
room just by being in it. They inspire people. They get things
started.”

“And the other two kinds?”

“The second kind is neutral people. People who won’t start anything,
but are happy to lend a hand. People who don’t affect a room
positively or negatively. And then there are people like me. The
negatives. The cynics. The people who try to stop stuff happening.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

“Meh, I know myself. Anyway, if you took out all the positives in the
world, people will get increasingly more and more depressed. Nothing
new will ever get started, people will stop being happy. Its not that
they will be sad, but they will be neutral, and neutral tends to
depression and sadness more naturally than towards happiness.”

“That sounds gloomy.”

“It does! That is why we need people like Rama. And its my job to
protect people like that — people like Rama cannot conceive how low
other humans can get, while it is all that people like me can see.”

“Heh, I bet it helps that you love him.”

I remember her blushing.

“Yes, I suppose that helps too.”

The memory of the conversation brought a smile to my face again. I
glanced again at the positive, the girl who was one of the motors of
the world. I stood up and walked back home, my own motor restarted.

Of course, people who make their products complex are not doing it merely to be dumb – they are hoping that more features will attract more people, and that everyone will find something they love. However, it is difficult to pull this off well. Such products tend to be hodgepodges of features, with no central vision.

This is the trap that Jigirthanda falls into as well. Karthik Subbaraj seems to have taken a racy thriller, and a comedy/drama film, and joined them together at the interval time. This obviously confuses the audience when they come back after getting popcorn and samosas to see how Siddharth and co will get out of this one, expecting more blood and gore, only to be met with “10 times kill and laugh”.

Now that I have gotten the main complaint out of the way, Jigirthanda was still one of the best films in recent times. The first half was extremely well-done, evoking comparisons in my mind to that classic, Puthupettai. The raw, earthy flavor of Madurai and the underworld was communicated very well. Cinematography was brilliant throughout the film, but especially so in key moments: the gang outlined in the lights through the rain just before the interval; the drops of petrol on Siddharth’s face near the end, all these moments stand out and make the film very visually rich.

The second half, if viewed from a comedy angle, was good. A friend told me he hadn’t laughed so much during a film in recent times. The acting classes were particularly rib-tickling. However, the comedy derailed the plot, taking the movie from cruising at 80 to meandering along at a 10. This is especially significant in a movie that is already longer than the usual – you want every moment to go by as fast as you can. The movie could definitely have used some better editing – personally, I am in favor of completely editing out Lakshmi Menon’s character and that awful drinks song out.

No review would be complete without mentioning Bobby Simha. What a performance! Facebook was filled with posts about him after the movie released, and rightly so – it is his performance that carries the movie through. The rest of the cast were selected carefully as well – they all gave the Madurai feel off very well – with one exception.

I am conflicted about Siddharth being in this movie. On one hand, having well-known stars act in movies like this raises the movie’s profile (I wonder how many people watched this because they thought it was a Siddharth movie..). It will make other stars eager to act in movies of upcoming directors like Karthik. On the other hand, Siddharth’s was easily the weakest performance in the movie. He looked so out of place in the whole movie – even the posters, with all the characters in it, evokes the reaction of one of these is not like the other.

Finally, I loved all the self-referential shots in the movie. With Siddharth’s character obviously based on the director, many dialogues in the film felt as if they were thoughts Karthik had while filming this movie itself. After Pizza, Karthik had raised expectations a lot – he hasn’t completely met them in Jigirthanda, but he is definitely on the right track.

But he would do well to learn from Steve Jobs.

Overall, the book was much more polite than I expected it to be. Dawkins has a reputation for being hostile towards religion and as someone who does not mince words in discussions. Yes, the whole book is about why it is highly unlikely that there is a God, but Dawkins makes a number of sincere attempts to understand the other side: to postulate reason after reason, and theory after theory, as to why someone would believe, or want to believe, that God exists. I have not seen this from religious people: contemplation as to why someone would want to be an atheist, and it was very refreshing.

Dawkins writes very well, and presents very convincing evidence to advance his arguments. I found myself enjoying and nodding through most of his arguments. Some of the facts he presented were very startling: that as recently as in 2006, a man was killed in Afghanistan for converting to Christianity privately. Dawkins also described the money and influenced wielded by fundamentalists in America: what I had always thought of a fringe loony group controlled millions of dollars of money, and had huge numbers of volunteers.

One of the chapters I most enjoyed in the book was where Dawkins shows us that you don’t need religion to be good, or to define what is good. He shows extremely convincingly that scriptures aren’t the source of morality anymore, that we define what is good or bad irrespective of what is in our holy books. And surprisingly, he shows that the sense of good is amazingly common all over the world among very different people.

There were two arguments where Dawkins and I disagreed before I read the book: for one of these he has convinced me thoroughly, and in the other, he has made me think very deeply, but I am not yet convinced.

The first is the question of being an agnostic or an atheist. The difference between the two is simple: an atheist strongly believes there is no God; an agnostic believes there might or might not be a God (similar to: there might or might not be unicorns). I was leaning more towards an agnostic before reading the book. Dawkins points out clearly in the book that there are other things we cannot disprove 100%, but still quite strongly believe in: such as evolution. The probability division between the existence/non-existence of God may never be 0/100%: but Dawkins points out that is hardly 50/50 either, rather something like almost 0/almost 100%. Dawkins of course supplements this with other arguments in the book — I am merely mentioning one.

The second thing we differed on is the attitude towards moderate religion. Most decent people have no problem condemning extremists, including ones bent on violence and destruction. It is also taken for granted that the moderate practitioners of each religion are gentle and peaceful, and should generally be allowed to go about their business. I was (am?) of this view at the start of the book.

But Dawkins presents compelling reasons as to why even moderate religion could be harmful. He presents stories of 12-year old Christian kids who were taken to Hell houses, where Hell was actually enacted via burning fire, the smell of sulphur, people moaning in pain as they were tortured, so that they could obtain a healthy Christian fear of hell and therefore be good Christians. Even kids not attending these grotesque places talk about the fear of hell drummed into them by their parents and their religious community. The stories of the nightmares and continual fear due to these experiences were moving. And of course, one does not need to more than mention priests and young boys for the reader to get the idea.

Another reason to oppose “moderate” religion is their interference with education and science. Given that creationism and intelligent design in taught in schools even today in the US, I will treat this as moderate rather than extremist religion. And this argument I entirely buy: I detest religion which would force schools to drop evolution and teach ridiculous theories like intelligent design instead.

There is a dilemma in there which makes me uneasy however: in the case of Amish kids and kids of parents who subscribe to creationism, it is clear that they are losing out on education, and a chance to develop the ability to think critically. However, in general, I am usually of the opinion that one must not interfere in other people’s business: if the Amish want to eschew electricity, it is their choice to make. A trickier question is what to do about their children: they certainly did not choose to be Amish, and have no way to rationally make the decision to be/not be religious. Dawkins goes all the way and says that these kids, if they had knowledge of what was going on, would certainly not choose to be in that lifestyle, and hence that lifestyle is wrong for them. I think that is going a bit far, and is dangerously close to deciding for them what is best for them.

One of the things I didn’t like about the book was the (what seemed to me) excessive adulation accorded to Darwin and evolution, and the concept of “consciousness-raising”. There were several points at which the way in which Dawkins used it seemed extremely condescending of those who did not think in terms of evolution and natural selection. This theories about memetic selection and the evolutionary reason for religion seemed at points to be a stretch.

In conclusion, although Dawkins doesn’t directly answer the question I posed in my previous blog post, the answer is quite clear: religion may offer many things like a sense of community, a moral code, a form of therapy, and so on in a nice bundled package — but the package comes with a lot of things you don’t necessarily want, such as an assertion that faith is better than reason, along with limits on education, thought and marriage. It might seem that as it stands today, religion is one of the attractive packages on offer; but I am confident as time goes by, that more and more people will become atheistic. This trend is already seen in many parts of Europe, and I would not be surprised if 200 years from now, religion would have become a thing of the past.

My own position on religion is something like this: I don’t really believe in a personal God who is watching over us and interferes in our affairs and so on. However, my parents are fairly religious, and I’ve been bought up with all the rituals and rites that go with religion. So I’m quite comfortable with those things: praying in a temple, vibuthi, all that sort of thing. I’m also quite comfortable with other people believing in God: if this is something that gives you comfort, more power to you! Each person has the freedom to personally believe in any kind of God they want.

Where it goes bad is when your religion forces other people to do things they would rather not do. Religious fundamentalism (indeed, fundamentalism of any nature) is particularly nasty to deal with.

I think of all the people I’ve met, one person perfectly describes the way in which I view religion. This is Marcus Geduld from Quora, who has extremely clear thoughts on this topic (and a lot of other topics too). Let me quote from one of his recent answers (Marcus Geduld’s answer to Religion: Do you think religion will ever become obsolete?)

If you hang around religious people, you will discover most of them spend little time making truth claims. Yes, such claims are part of their religions, but they don’t (for the most part) sit around telling each other that God makes rain or that He put dinosaur bones in the ground to fool paleontologists. A minority of vocal theists may say things like that when they’re arguing with atheists, but it’s not mostly what they talk about when they’re at home, and it’s not the main role their belief-systems play in their lives.

Religion gives people, amongst other things, a moral system, a form of psychotherapy, a social order, a political order, a means of doing good works, a way of relating to the numinous on a personal level, a way to cope with fears of death, a series of rituals, a means of coping with loneliness, a connection to a web of narratives, and a form of community.

If you have all those needs and want to find meet them with secular systems and institutions, you have to piece something together for yourself. You are unlikely to find an efficient, unified system. Your form of psychotherapy may not slot into place neatly with your communal system and your web of narratives. Maybe you don’t care, but many others do. Meanwhile, there’s Christianity, Islam, Scientology, etc sitting there, offering everything in a streamlined package.

I’ve read the intro to the book, where Dawkins describes what the different chapters will include. I was a little disappointed that a majority of it seems to deal with “truth claims”: disproving claims like God created the world in 7 days, for example. The book seems to deal very little (or not at all, hard to say at this point) with what Marcus talks about above: that religion is more than just about truth claims. While it is true that there will always be people who interpret religious texts literally, I think a much bigger group of people are only marginally attached to the “truth claims” and would not perturbed at all if it was conclusively proved that some major claim of their religion was not literally true.

Dawkins says there are a group of people who say “I am an atheist, BUT.. “: people who are non-believers who make excuses for religion. Perhaps I would fall into that category at the moment. Lets see if the book changes my mind!

The author takes a very critical view about the text that comprises the Mahabharata. The author explains that the original story of the battle, Jaya, was embellished and added-on to by storytellers as they carried the tale to different parts of the country. These embellishments became part of the story itself, until finally the whole thing came to be known as the Mahabharata. The author says we can differentiate between what was the core and what was added later by detecting inconsistencies: for example, the divinity of Krishna was clearly added later.

An interesting side-note about the name Vyasa: Vyasa is said to be the author of the Mahabharata, reciting it to Lord Ganesha who wrote it using a part of his task; the author speculates that the name Vyasa, which literally means collector or bringer of order to chaos. Thus, looking at it in this way, Vyasa simply denotes the person who takes all the stories comprising the Mahabharata and bring order to it. Thus Vyasa becomes a title, passed on from master to disciple, rather than a single person. I believe this makes much more sense.

What I love most about the book is that the author takes a very critical view of the story and points out inconsistencies mercilessly. For example, one of the most beloved characters in the Mahabharata is Bhishma: wise, strong, and without a stain on his character. The author tears this down in the very first chapter of the book. One of the claims she attacks is of Bhishma’s prowess at archery: she points out how the Mahabharata never talks about any battles/war that Bhishma won during his lifetime save one – the battle with Parasurama. The author claims that it was highly unlikely that Parasurama existed in that time at all, as he belonged to a much earlier period. If you take away that battle, there are no accounts of Bhishma’s strength being equivalent to Arjuna at all; he appears to be a wise old man, but not quite a strong one.

The author also points out how the Ramayana is a poem, while Mahabharata is history. One strong example of this is how the female characters and their family are shown: in the Mahabharata, the families of Draupadi, Kunti, and Gandhari all try to help them when they meet misfortunes; in contrast, once Sita gets married to Rama, neither Janaka nor any of Sita’s family appear in the Ramayana at all, not even to the extent of coming to comfort her in her misfortunes.

Yuganta also shows how my favorite character, Arjuna, is human and committed errors. The authors narrates how Arjuna and Krishna slaughtered entire tribes in the Khandava forest for expansion, and how it is this slaughter that led to Arjuna acquiring the Gandhiva bow. This was a bit painful for me as the Gandhiva had captured my imagination ever since I was a child: the thought of possessing an object/weapon that was special and unique in the whole world was very appealing. To see it tied to the massacre of a forest tribe in the pandava quest for expansion was jarring.

The book also takes away the myth that Karna was Arjuna’s equal in archery. It points out how Arjuna defeated the entire Kuru army, Karna included, when Arjuna defended Virata’s cattle at the end of their exile. In another incident with the Gandharvas, Karna was defeated and deserted Duruyodhana, who was later rescued by Arjuna. Karna losing to Arjuna at the end is conveniently explained using isolated incidents which “robbed” him of his weapons at the time of his death: if we remove those, we see that Karna is a much weaker archer than Arjuna. The chapter on Karna is one of the best in the book, showing how he was a tortured and conflicted soul, whose highest point was when he was enticed with a kingdom, five strong brothers, and Draupadi, and he said no and remained true to his salt.

It should come as no surprise that the author does not view Krishna as a god. Instead, he is viewed as a strong warrior, a crafty statesman, and a good ruler, who basically orchestrated all the battles, arranged for the Pandavas to get their kingdom, and once they got it, helped them govern and rule their kingdom. Reading the book, it becomes even more apparent how crucial the friendship of Arjuna and Krishna is to the whole Mahabharata: it is highly questionable if Krishna would have helped the Pandavas as much as he did, if he had not loved Arjuna deeply.

Let me end with a criticism of the book. The author talks about each person’s place in life as an absolute thing. Happiness lies in understanding what your place is, and living according to that. It attributes Karna’s troubles to his never really knowing his place: as the adopted son of a suta, not knowing whether he should get involved with kshatriyas, or at a deeper level, not knowing that he is the elder brother of the Pandavas. I think this is a very static philosophy, designed to keep people in their place. It reminds me of those dialogues in movies: know your place and hold your tongue!  Very convenient for people in power and those who don’t want the established order to change. I believe progress would be the very opposite of this: when your place in life is not pre-determined, and when you can move ahead through hard work and education.