Hawaizada
This post is to discuss not the film but the subject of the film.
It is as I watched the scene where a scientific breakthrough was inter-cut with glimpses of Ganesha and the soundtrack of one of my favourite aartis -jaidev jaidev mangal murthi..that I began to hear the first alarm bells go in my head.
Hawaizada is not just an untold story of an unsung hero.
The untold story would be that a man called Shivkar Bapuji Talpade existed who dedicated his life to building a flying machine at the same time as the Wright Brothers and many others across the world did.
But this film takes the liberty of proposing that recorded history is wrong. That Shivkar Bapuji Talpade happens to be the man who invented the world's first manned aircraft and he did it with the help of our Vedas.
Hawaizada represents a fragment of the extreme nationalist right wing thought-process and it's entry into the mainstream and THAT is something we need to aware of.
Some of us can tell why what is being said in the film sounds wrong. The claim that Talpade used the Vedas to do it is the clue. The contents of the Vedas is considered sacrosanct whereas Science is about questioning existing notions allowing newer learning and improved results. That explains why Talpade did not manage what The Wright Brothers did.
It is tempting for a lot of us to not think too much and get all emotional about what is being said in Hawaizada. But it is just the kind of emotional preoccupation that politicians find easy to manipulate us with, distracting us from the issues that actually matter to us.
The untold story would be that a man called Shivkar Bapuji Talpade existed who dedicated his life to building a flying machine at the same time as the Wright Brothers and many others across the world did.
But this film takes the liberty of proposing that recorded history is wrong. That Shivkar Bapuji Talpade happens to be the man who invented the world's first manned aircraft and he did it with the help of our Vedas.
Hawaizada represents a fragment of the extreme nationalist right wing thought-process and it's entry into the mainstream and THAT is something we need to aware of.
Some of us can tell why what is being said in the film sounds wrong. The claim that Talpade used the Vedas to do it is the clue. The contents of the Vedas is considered sacrosanct whereas Science is about questioning existing notions allowing newer learning and improved results. That explains why Talpade did not manage what The Wright Brothers did.
It is tempting for a lot of us to not think too much and get all emotional about what is being said in Hawaizada. But it is just the kind of emotional preoccupation that politicians find easy to manipulate us with, distracting us from the issues that actually matter to us.
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