There was a documentary film that used to be shown on Doordarshan in my school days. It was about unity in diversity, and had a catchy song “Ek, anek…Hind desh ke niwasi sabhi jane k hai. That was the time when this sentiment was entrenched in all our hearts. Our country has for ages, had…
But nobody comforts a crying man,
Or holds his worn out heart again.
His calls are ignored in front of family,
Be it a crime against women,
He is the one you deplore.
We can never be free from ideology, as it is the ideology that is dependent on us and feeds on our belief systems. But we have to be free from ideological hegemony to start moving into the direction of freedom.
It all started when I was 8, a happy childhood, and I was still at the dunce level of understanding the real world. I was a teeny kid, happy in my own LaLa Land. The small toy that comes with every KinderJoy had me excited and jumpy.
Women before independence faced many evils that existed in the society such as Sati Pratha, Child Marriage, Prohibition of widow remarriage, Purdah system, dowry system, no education to girls, polygamy, female infanticide, domestic violence, sexual harassment and so on.
A few years back, I had a student of mine writing an email to me, asking for a relaxation in the assignment deadline. He wrote to me Dear Mam, my return ticket was cancelled because my grandmother fell seek…’ In the class, I asked him to re-read this and he did not find any problem…
In 1947, India had a population of 345 million. It was split. The high and lower castes, as well as the dominant Hindu population and other religious Indians, were divided. A wide diversity of languages, fashions, cuisines, and occupations were spoken in this large territory. How could they be forced to live in harmony inside one nation?
Freda Bedi, an Oxford scholar and an ‘Outsider’ has fought for Indian ideas of Satyagraha, Kashmir and Buddhism
Ram Ke Naam illustrates how the others are excluded from the public discourse, and they became a part of ‘counter public.’
The culture and personality school of thought in anthropology spearheaded by Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead strongly argues that the individuals’ personality in a society is determined by its culture.
Ishaan and Sakshi both are used as a prop in the story, and we never get to hear their side of the story. As an audience, you feel the plotline is forced upon you and is not at all subtle at all, with complex emotions and no context at all.
Cinema is considered one of the most influential mediums to communicate with global audiences irrespective of diversities. It is clear that along with being a medium for entertainment, cinema is also a tool to propagate or communicate various elements of the socio, political and cultural realms of Indian society.[1] In this case, Tamil cinema, popularly…
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