Before Apu came to America…

About a year back I had watched this fascinating biographical documentary on the Discovery Channel about the life and times of Sabu Dastagir, the first Indian to successfully crossover to Hollywood as an actor in the 1940s.


It was in the Royal Elephant stables of the Mysore Palace where Sabu was discovered by the documentary film-maker Robert Flaherty, whose wife Frances Flaherty, wrote to a friend in a letter from India in 1934 about a film project that they had tentatively titled as ‘Elephant Boy’, the storyline of which was loosely based on one of the tales in Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Books called "Toomai of the Elephants," that aimed to feed the popular British interest in the exotic details of life in its colonial empire.

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the Good, the Bad & the Zer0

From the philosophers of Ancient Greece to the scientists of Newtonian and Einsteinian caliber have tried summing up the “underlying unity” that’s concealed under an apparent diversity of appearances.

“However the Universe seems to be greater than the greatest human imagination can ever hope to be”

If one starts to imagine how wide the ‘Spectrum of Everything’ could be considering the fact that the range would then have to include every entity (from subatomic to human, alien and even celestial systems) that have faced creation and destruction across space and time (be it past, present and maybe even the future).

Countless Coordinates. Unending Viewpoints.

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Hail thy Déjà Vu Revolution

Uncertainties and unpredictable twists and turns aside, the only thing that's certain about life is that it comes a full circle.

Today, after experiencing a massive sense of

Déjà Vu for the very first time, the only parallels that I can draw of the same, is with the magnificent Sun.

The Sun orbits the center of the Milky Way galaxy at a distance of approximately 24,000 to 26,000 light years from the galactic center, moving generally in the direction of Cygnus and completing one revolution in about 225-250 million years (One Galactic Year) at an estimated orbital speed of 251 km/s .

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Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high

The best time to be in the government is when the opposition is busy imploding itself into the news.

Every entity, be it the BJP (now) or the Congress (a decade back) has found itself facing existential threats, that's primarily caused by a 'Leadership Void' which extrapolates the infighting within.

Borrowing a line from Rabindranath Tagore's poem 'Chitto Jetha Bhayshunyo' is far easier than finding an Inspirational 'Lotus' like Leader floating above the sullied waters of arrogance, pageantry and sycophancy that devours most people who find themselves in the 'Position of Power'.

As erstwhile luxuries furiously metamorphose into seemingly indispensable necessities of life and the edifice of alluring ambitions are increasingly built on compromised values, the slide into Kalyug, only appears to be hastening.

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Outsourcing Warfare to the Drones

CIA financing, arming and training the Afghans to fight the invading Soviet Union may have contributed to the collapse of USSR but the price that the Americans had to pay to win the cold war became clear only after a decade when the Mujahideens from the Soviet war in Afghanistan re-branded themselves as Al Qaida and Taliban and teamed up to plan and execute 9/11. 

Now, after two decades since the end of the Soviet war in Afghanistan; Newtonian as it may seem, America once again finds itself fighting in Afghanistan but this time directly in war with it's former cold war ally; the Afghan Mujahideen, whilst taking into consideration their proud Afghan history where they have successfully managed to defend their country against invading 'kafirs' (foreign infidels) such as the British Empire, Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union in 'conventional warfare'.

'Remnants of an army' was Elizabeth Thompson's famous painting of

Dr. William Brydon, initially thought to be the sole survivor, was seen gasping away to the British outpost after arriving at the gates of Jalalabad from a 16,500 strong evacuation from Kabul in January 1842, helped make Afghanistan's reputation as a graveyard for foreign armies.

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Yes, Prime Minister (of Undivided India)

Diversity has always been an administrative challenge for the different Empires that have ruled India from the Maurya to the Mughals and the British. But now, matured by the upheavals of the 20th Century, Indian democracy seems robust enough not to face the threat of Balkanization in the 21st Century. The government would never the less have put out the fissures of forest fire engineered by opportunistic politicians from time to time who continue to harvest the age old British Empire's policy in India of 'Divide and Rule'.

In a way, Mohammad Ali Jinnah and the British have to be thanked for Partitioning India because managing an Undivided India (Pakistan + India + Bangladesh) would have been nothing short of being a 'Impractical Nightmare'.

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Polymorphism & Realism

Polymorphism in Greek means 'having many forms or faces'. Where 'Poly' means 'many' and 'morph' stands for 'forms or faces'. In the real world it can be interpreted as an entity having many more facets than what appears at a superficial level. It seems that some of the object-oriented programming concepts like Polymorphism and Inheritance mirrors the structural design of the world that surrounds us. The feature of human polymorphism is that the soul is usually buried under countless countenances. The human visage spectrum is adorned by happiness, sadness, elation, surprise, jealousy, depression, suspicion, pity, empathy, tears, hate, love, hypocrisy, honesty, convenient dishonesty and secrecy etc.

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