Rang de Bizarre

10

Five badly behaved but photogenic young louts, and their hanger-on girl, regularly gather at night at a geographical feature resembling the Grand Canyon. There they take deep slugs of beer. Next they speed through rural Punjab on motorbikes and eat parathas with one of their mothers who tells them about Sikh folklore. One of them returns home, which is a pillared palace, where a nasty father sips whiskey in the morning and clinches an evil weapons deal. The "Muslim" member of the gang goes back to a very "Muslim" home where a lungi-clad dad is waiting to deliver a short seminar paper on Partition, vote bank politics and other "Muslim" issues. A pretty (but cerebral) cultural tourist from Britain arrives. She reminds the foul-mouthed brats about their history. She wants to (and does) make a documentary on Bhagat Singh and Chandrashekhar Azad in which the five take the....

Re-write the Purusa-Sukta

10

There is a wonderful work on the Indian caste system called Homo Hierarchicus by Louis Dumont. Some critics have called Dumont's book an oversimplification, others have called it Orientalist, but one of the book's most important contributions is the argument that the caste system is not just a social arrangement. In fact, the caste system is a system of ideas. The idea of hierarchy, according to Dumont, lies at the core of Indian society. Hierarchy as based on age, gender and caste, hierarchy which is sanctified by religion itself. "Greater" and "lesser", the two categories that are crucially antithetical to a modern egalitarian society, are in fact embedded in Hindu social consciousness. Every upper caste child grows up with a mind's eye image of the "achchut", the "untouchable", the "scheduled caste". The imagined Untouchable is perpetually filthy just as the Brahmin is perpetually pure. The imagined Untouchable is....