THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING

THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING

#Rajinikanth, perhaps the most talented and loved film actor of our time, was born on 12 December 1950, into a Marathi family in the city of (the then) #Bangalore , Mysore State, India, which is now a part of Karnataka .He was named Shivaji Rao Gaikwad after the great #ChhatrapatiShivaji, a Maratha warrior. He was brought up speaking Marathi and Kannada.  Rajinikanth's ancestors hailed from village Mavdi Kade Pathar now in the Purandar taluka of the present-day #Pune district ,Maharashtra.  His father Ramoji Rao Gaikwad was a police constable.

The family's financial state was far from good and on completion of his school education Rajinikanth sought  jobs. He took up various jobs in the cities of Bangalore
and Madras, including that of a coolie , a carpenter,
and then, finally as a bus conductor in city Transport Service.

There he came across an advertisement issued by the newly-formed Madras Film Institute which
offered acting courses.

During his stay at the institute, he was once performing in a stage play when he got noticed by Tamil film director #KBalachander .  The director advised him to learn to speak #Tamil , a recommendation that Rajinikanth quickly followed. The rest, as they say, is history !

Rajinikanth, is famous for his style and genre. The actor is also known for his down to earth character. His #humility is beyond comparison. Here is an example :

"The actor who was seated
among the audience down
stage was asked to distribute the most prestigious Rajinikanth Award to his mentor K Balachandar, but
the actor refused saying that he has no standing to present an award in his name to his mentor. Saying so the superstar said that the award be changed to K Balachander award from here on. This act moved the director to tear"
( http://www.moviepettai.com/news-id-rajinikanth-balachander-21-01-12373.htm)

And thus spoke the director :

"Rajinikanth claims that I am his school. But I must admit that this wasn't the Rajinikanth I introduced. he has evolved on his own merits and strengths. I gave him an opportunity and unveiled him to the world. He went and conquered it."
—K. Balachander about Rajinikanth

All great people have one thing in common and that is HUMILITY !

TIME : A RIDDLE

How do you define Time ?

  'Time' is difficult to define. when you say 'it is ten o'clock',Time is a moment. when you say 'it is dinner time' it is a brief span .When you say 'it was the time of Napolean the great' it becomes  a long stretch . When you say 'Times are bad' it covers an abstraction !

We see that Time moves forward. a child grows up then becomes old. A class room period begins and then ends. Rain starts, floods the street and then stops.

Now consider this : In a train journey you start from Delhi towards south India .Then  Jhansi station comes. Sometime later Bhopal comes. Long afterwards Nagpur comes. But do these stations really come ? They were always there !! You, infact, went to them !!

The ancient Indians (their descendants are called hindus) claimed that Time does not move. On the contrary we move across a fixed canvas : We move across a 'happened' time just as Jhansi station does not come to you - you move to jhansi which is already there. This theory was considered a crap until Einstein stepped in, in the beginning of the 20th century. Read this :

"The static interpretation of time is a view of time which arose in the early years of the 20th Century from Einstein's Special Relativity and Hermann Minkowski's extension of Special Relativity in which time and space were famously united in physicists' thinking as spacetime.

Essentially the universe is
regarded as akin to a reel of film – which is a wholly static physical object – but which when played through a movie projector conjures a world of movement, color, light and change. In the static view our whole universe – our past, present, and future are fixed parts of that reel of film, and the projector is our consciousness. But the 'happenings' of our
consciousness have no objective significance – the objective universe does not happen, it simply exists in its entirety, albeit perceived from within as a world of changes."

In the ancien times, the pre-historic times about which we know little,  great civilizations existed such as the Mayan, the Sumerhans, the Egyptian, the Indian and so many others. They had far greater knowledge about the functioning of human brain than our scientists (who are now barely discovering the mysteries of the Peneal gland for example). They knew how to move across this fixed canvas called Time. Here is an excerpt :

"The RISHIS of ANCIENT
INDIA maintained that Time is absolutely static and motionless. TIME DOES NOT MOVE. ( LAND MOVING BACKWARD AS SEEN FROM THE WINDOW OF A MOVING TRAIN IS AN APT ANALOGY). Our mind moves and hence it seems that time is moving on backwards. So, it is said that controlling the mind and making it absolutely static (Manolaya), time in its entirety, including past, present and future, reveals unto the person. It is believed that one can attain such a state of mind through meditation and the seer is then called 'trikālajňa’, the knower of past, present and future."

It is believed that in modern times too there have been people who could travel across TIME. One such person was NEEM KAROLI BABA , a twentieth century saint of India. To know more about him here is a link :

http://www.dlshq.org/saints/
neemkaroli.htm

THE FESTIVAL OF COLOURS

In India and in some parts of the world people celebrate a FESTIVAL OF COLOURS known as HOLI. This year the festival will be celebrated on march seventeen (17.03.2014).

This Hindu festival of colours has a story behind it. For those who may not know, here is why Holi is celebrated by the Hindus :

The word Holi originated
from"HOLIKA", sister of
Hiranyakashipu a hindu mythological demon king. The festival of Holi is celebrated because of the following story in Hindu mythology. . .

"Hiranyakashipu ­
was the great king of demons, and he had been granted a boon by Brahma ,the creater of the universe,
which made it almost impossible for him to be killed. Consequently, he
grew arrogant and tormented the Heavens and the Earth. He demanded that people stop worshipping Gods and worship him instead.

Hiranyakashipu' s own son Prahlada was, however, a great devotee of God . In spite of several threats from Hiranyakashipu, Prahlada continued offering prayers to God. He was then poisoned by Hiranyakashipu, but the poison turned to nectar in his mouth. He was ordered to be trampled by elephants yet remained unharmed. He was put in a room with poisonous snakes and survived. All of Hiranyakashipu' s attempts to kill his son failed. Finally, he ordered young Prahlada to sit on a pyre in the lap of HOLIKA, Hiranyakashipu's own sister, who had a boon fully protecting her from being burned by fire. Prahlada readily accepted his father's orders, and prayed to the Lord to keep him protected. When the fire was set alight,everyone watched in amazement as Holika burnt to death, while Prahlada survived totally unharmed".

The salvation of Prahlada and burning of HOLIKA is celebrated as HOLI. It is symbolic of victory of Good over evil - a leitmotif in most religions of the world . . . !!
               **********

TOTAL RECALL: THE SCHOOL DAYS

My school was a little over half a mile from our house over a smooth light grey cement concrete road on which there was not much traffic. This wide road started at the railway station, in the north of our house, as a wide two lane concrete road and went past our house in the southern direction. It narrowed down to a single lane road after the kutchery (collectorate). Then, with a zig-zag, it continued farther and ended somewhere beyond the massive first gate of the Collector's residential estate which occupied over a hundred acre area full of a vast variety of huge trees. The big black iron gate to Collector's compound was a little beyond our school and it was yet another long drive inside, through a virtual forest and two more gates, before one entered the red winding gravel driveway to the portico of Collector's well maintained red bricks bungalow.

Our school was on the right of this road, towards west.

Facing it, in the east,on the left of the road, was a big church compound. The school was an ancient double storey yellow building which housed class rooms upto the eighth class, the assembly hall and the school's offices. The two single storey buildings on either side were new when I first came to join in class sixth. The science laboratories block was to the north and the southern side building held various sections of ninth and tenth classes. The principal's office was in the old building. It had a blue chick curtain on its door and a peon-in-uniform  sitting outside on a high stool.

The principal was an old weatherbeaten disciplinarian. Nobody ever saw him smile. He loved  caning  students. His bungalow was next to the school campus.

Our English literature teacher was  mr. Biswas, an absentminded old  man with a permanent scowl on his face. He was a constant target of pranks by  back-benchers. They would fix a dozen pins into the crevices of the teacher's chair, with the sharp points pointing upwards. Mr.Biswas would lower himself to sit down and then spring up as the pins pricked his huge bottoms. He would then stand by the table and continue teaching as if nothing happened. This pin-and-bottoms game kept repeating often. Sometimes there would be a small pup concealed in the big white duster-cloth. As mr. Biswas picked up the duster to wipe the blackboard, the pup would yelp loudly sending the entire class into a fit of laughter. In the rainy season these boys placed frogs into the chalk box !

The most welcome sound for the boys in my school was the final bell. When the time came, every boy was ready for it. While the gong at the end of the assigned time for each period was a simple ding-dong-dong, the last bell was a continuous, rapid ding-ding-ding-ding. At the first ding all the boys instantly poured out of the class rooms with an amazing speed, leaving the teachers half way through a sentence ! The whole school was on the road outside in ten seconds flat !

This small town of my childhood had a clean and quiet environment  and well swept roads, chirping birds and huge trees. On moonless nights the whole sky glowed with twinkling stars and there was a hazy white north-south band of the Milky Way. I could locate the Great Bears, the Orian Hunters, The Kite and all the zodiac signs that were there.

This has changed. It is now a big city with  expansion in all directions.Litters of garbage and traffic jams are a common sight. The sky is now so polluted that one cannot see any stars at night.The Collector's hundred-acre compound has been invaded by colonisers and converted into a big residential colony. It has no trees. In the spacious compound of the  house where we once lived, a shopping mall has come up which is part of the market area stretching on the two sides of the road right up to the zig-zag before my old school.

But the neat flat grey cement concrete road, said to have been built by British engineers around the first world war, is very much there - defying time, defying misuse, defying the general deterioration that has set in everywhere. . . !!