Tag Language
Reading the IAST
During my visit to Chennai the last month, I came across a film that was community-funded and community-made without paid professionals. This film was about the life of a Vaishnava guru of the thirteenth century, called Vedanta Desika, or Venkatacharya.
The film
The film is in Tamil. The idea of the film was to reach the story of the guru to common people, “during the times when people are forgetting their roots”. The jibe aside, and irrespective of that I do not support religions, I believe that we must expose people to the different philosophies, but at the same time, allow them the freedom to choose what they feel is right for them. This approach is at the core of Hinduism. I did my part of offering to write the subtitles, so that we expand the audience by lowering the language barrier a little.
On Unification
So far, we saw how we are not the kind to be identified by “one”, but are based on some core identities. Let us proceed further to understand a little more on how things changed and why. It would help us go towards better understanding of the situation.
On Sub-Nationalism
This post is in continuation to the post, On Reduction, which lays the ground about what’s to follow in this post; we spoke about how India was not founded on the principles of “one” anything other than a nation. Sardar Patel, back in his day, set out to unify the country on no principle other than a single point of governance.
On Reduction
Historian and columnist Ramchandra Guha did an hour-long talk on how nationalism is a nineteenth-century European phenomenon, and how Indian nationalism was founded on the exact opposite principles.