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I don't know whether or not this topic is a repeat one, but I'll post it nonetheless.
Two days back, I went to watch the movie "300". Here are my opinions on it:
Coming as I do from the country which:
a) Is home to the "Last of the Persians" (the Parsees of Mumbai, the last people to have preserved intact the culture of Achaemenid Persia (they still give themselves names like Xerxes and Cyrus))
b) Is a sister culture to the Persia depicted in the movie (both share a common cultural root, and are based on the concept of Aryan culture)
I must say that I am rather disturbed by the movie.
I'll give my reasons one by one.
The first is the historical inaccuracy.
Now I know that many people will counter with "It's based on a goddamn COMIC BOOK, just enjoy it, it's not supposed to be real". My point is not that.
You know that it is based on a comic book. I know that it is based on a comic book. Most people on CFC will know that it is based on a comic book. But does the common man in India who watches it know that?
I went to watch the movie with a good friend of mine, quite cultured and knowledgeable about history, but who had never taken much of an interest in the histories of Greece and Persia, and their interaction.
He came away believing that it was the truth. It took me some time to explain to him that the movie had got all the details ass-backwards, that it was the Persians who were lovers of freedom when compared to the Spartans, that the Persians were not monsters, that they were a noble people who shared much with our own India.
And this is the impression which was carried away by one who is quite intelligent.
Now imagine the image the common man of India, who knows not much of his own history, much less that of two empires only distantly connected with India in time and space, will form of Persia and her people.
At least the makers of the movie could have had the decency to add a disclaimer somewhere at the beginning of the movie that it was not true to history.
The second is the total hypocrisy
I was aghast when I saw the Spartan king throw the Persian messengers into the well, and when this was shown as a good thing.
In one of our epics, the Ramayana, the spy-***-messenger from the good side, sent into the territory of the bad side, is caught by the bad ones. He has caused quite a bit of damage to some state property. The villain of the piece, Ravana, wants to kill him for his insolence.
But his ministers and his own brother are shocked at the suggestion, and tell him that such a thing would be an abomination, unthinkable, and that he should not entertain such a thought. Finally, Ravana relents, and instead chooses to punish the messenger for the damage he has caused (the messenger being a half-human, half-monkey, the punishment is that his tail hair will be set on fire), but that he will be allowed to go back.
Even the greatest villain of our epics, written long before this Sparta thing happened, did not kill a messenger. And we have the Spartans, supposedly from the "Good Side", arrogantly killing the messengers the Persians sent them. And that is then portrayed as good! Absolutely shocking, and totally immoral and adharmic behaviour is condoned here!
And the Spartans lecturing the Persians about freedom is like the British lecturing Mahatma Gandhi about non-violence. Sparta was a society which consisted of professional soldiers, who had to be professionals in order to keep under their control the helots and serfs. The so-called "free men" never did a day's worth of productive work in their lives. They were legally debarred from doing any trading or agriculture.
The reason Sparta was so militaristic was because it was necessary to keep the serfs and helots in line, or they would revolt. And they did frequently revolt, and had to be put down repeatedly and mercilessly.
How people from such a society can talk of freedom and other values like that, when they did not actually practice any of them, is beyond me.
Completely, totally, and unbelievably hypocritical.
The third is the demonisation and dehumanisation of the Persians
No matter which way you slice it, the Persians are shown as a monstrous culture and people. Even though it may be from the point of view of the Spartans, this fact remains.
And also the fact that this is the impression that the audiences here in India carried away from this movie. They really believed that the Persians were like that.
There are roughly 60,000 Persians - yes, the same Persians who were shown to be demons in the movie - living in India today. Imagine you were one of them, and went to watch the movie. Now imagine how you would have felt.
Xerxes and others of the Achaemenid line are the heroes of these people. These are the people who fled the Islamic invaders, and settled in India, bringing their ancient culture to her sister, their only protector left in the world. They even brought the ashes of their fire temples, to maintain ritual continuity with their old fire temples, in which a fire continuously burns to this day - a fire which has never gone out for over a thousand years. Just because a culture is dead or nearly dead does not mean that you go and do to it what has been done in the movie.
In India, with the passage of time, the villains of our epics were progressively demonised over time. But in spite of all that, we still had the decency to acknowledge their greatness. Ravana, though a bad person, is still praised for his piety, for his composition of the great prayer to Shiva, the Shiva Tandava Stotram, for his contributions to the science of medicine.
And not only that, but Persian culture is shown in unimaginably horrible terms. The man with saws or blades for hands? The wanton killings? The sexual perversions? All this, and much more? For a culture which has given the world so much, to which all of us are so indebted? To a culture which was the first to have a universal charter of rights? To one of the first to give religious freedom to its inhabitants?
And the portrayal of Xerxes. The Persian king was always a figure of nobility, and nothing at all like what he was shown. Imagine how you would feel if one of your cultural heroes was shown in such a horrible light. Imagine how the few hundred thousand real Persians left in the world must feel right now, seeing their hero shown in such a way.
And the denigration of their religion. Zoorastrianism is one of the noblest religions in the world. They are essentially fire-worshippers. They use fire as a representation of Ahura Mazda, the force for good. According to them, the world is a battle-ground, where Ahura Mazda constantly fights Ahriman, his eternal enemy, in the ever-continuing fight between good and evil, and that we are fighters, and have to decide on which side we fight. This mirrors very closely the Indian concept of Dharma, or "that which is right".
Note that this religion is still alive, it is still practiced!
That such a great religion could be shown as nothing more than the aggrandisement of the God-Emperor, who is shown as someone who really has a God complex, continues to disgust me.
And now imagine how the opinions of simple people towards the Parsees (Persians) in India will change when they watch this movie, this being their only source of information on the subject.
The whole thing just horrifies me.
The fourth reason is the bloodsport
I like to think that human society has advanced since the times of the ancient Romans, and that we no longer enjoy seeing people suffer gruesome and horrible deaths. It seems, however, that I was wrong, and that we as humans are no better after all than our predecessors when it comes to bloodlust.
But is this what we should be encouraging? Is this really right? A friend of mine (a girl) was constantly cringing when she watched the movie.
Now I, having seen real decapitations, and real beheadings, don't think much of the violence - as always, it pales before the real thing. But what of others? Is it right to pander to the bloodlust and baser feelings of people? It is not a matter of whether this person has the right to or not - he absolutely does - but a matter of whether it is right to do so. And I emphatically say that it is not. As a culture, humanity should be moving away from all this, not towards it.
The last is the values being propagated
Suffice it to say that aggressive militarist eugeneticist slavery-based fascism, coupled with superioritism, does not appeal to my sense of morals and values.
I consider the movie also a very great insult to Arya cultures all over the world, including my own. India is a sister culture to Persia, and that our values and way of life, which still continues in many ways similar to the old times, are shown in such a manner is disturbing to me.
I can't fully express my distaste for the movie in words - it brings up too many associations and memories - but I hope I have done a fairly decent job of why I think this movie is disgusting beyond belief, and beyond redemption.
I'd like to clarify here that it is not a question of whether or not the people who made the movie should have a right to make it - they absolutely should. It is a question of whether or not making such a movie is the right thing to do.
Discuss.
Two days back, I went to watch the movie "300". Here are my opinions on it:
Coming as I do from the country which:
a) Is home to the "Last of the Persians" (the Parsees of Mumbai, the last people to have preserved intact the culture of Achaemenid Persia (they still give themselves names like Xerxes and Cyrus))
b) Is a sister culture to the Persia depicted in the movie (both share a common cultural root, and are based on the concept of Aryan culture)
I must say that I am rather disturbed by the movie.
I'll give my reasons one by one.
The first is the historical inaccuracy.
Now I know that many people will counter with "It's based on a goddamn COMIC BOOK, just enjoy it, it's not supposed to be real". My point is not that.
You know that it is based on a comic book. I know that it is based on a comic book. Most people on CFC will know that it is based on a comic book. But does the common man in India who watches it know that?
I went to watch the movie with a good friend of mine, quite cultured and knowledgeable about history, but who had never taken much of an interest in the histories of Greece and Persia, and their interaction.
He came away believing that it was the truth. It took me some time to explain to him that the movie had got all the details ass-backwards, that it was the Persians who were lovers of freedom when compared to the Spartans, that the Persians were not monsters, that they were a noble people who shared much with our own India.
And this is the impression which was carried away by one who is quite intelligent.
Now imagine the image the common man of India, who knows not much of his own history, much less that of two empires only distantly connected with India in time and space, will form of Persia and her people.
At least the makers of the movie could have had the decency to add a disclaimer somewhere at the beginning of the movie that it was not true to history.
The second is the total hypocrisy
I was aghast when I saw the Spartan king throw the Persian messengers into the well, and when this was shown as a good thing.
In one of our epics, the Ramayana, the spy-***-messenger from the good side, sent into the territory of the bad side, is caught by the bad ones. He has caused quite a bit of damage to some state property. The villain of the piece, Ravana, wants to kill him for his insolence.
But his ministers and his own brother are shocked at the suggestion, and tell him that such a thing would be an abomination, unthinkable, and that he should not entertain such a thought. Finally, Ravana relents, and instead chooses to punish the messenger for the damage he has caused (the messenger being a half-human, half-monkey, the punishment is that his tail hair will be set on fire), but that he will be allowed to go back.
Even the greatest villain of our epics, written long before this Sparta thing happened, did not kill a messenger. And we have the Spartans, supposedly from the "Good Side", arrogantly killing the messengers the Persians sent them. And that is then portrayed as good! Absolutely shocking, and totally immoral and adharmic behaviour is condoned here!
And the Spartans lecturing the Persians about freedom is like the British lecturing Mahatma Gandhi about non-violence. Sparta was a society which consisted of professional soldiers, who had to be professionals in order to keep under their control the helots and serfs. The so-called "free men" never did a day's worth of productive work in their lives. They were legally debarred from doing any trading or agriculture.
The reason Sparta was so militaristic was because it was necessary to keep the serfs and helots in line, or they would revolt. And they did frequently revolt, and had to be put down repeatedly and mercilessly.
How people from such a society can talk of freedom and other values like that, when they did not actually practice any of them, is beyond me.
Completely, totally, and unbelievably hypocritical.
The third is the demonisation and dehumanisation of the Persians
No matter which way you slice it, the Persians are shown as a monstrous culture and people. Even though it may be from the point of view of the Spartans, this fact remains.
And also the fact that this is the impression that the audiences here in India carried away from this movie. They really believed that the Persians were like that.
There are roughly 60,000 Persians - yes, the same Persians who were shown to be demons in the movie - living in India today. Imagine you were one of them, and went to watch the movie. Now imagine how you would have felt.
Xerxes and others of the Achaemenid line are the heroes of these people. These are the people who fled the Islamic invaders, and settled in India, bringing their ancient culture to her sister, their only protector left in the world. They even brought the ashes of their fire temples, to maintain ritual continuity with their old fire temples, in which a fire continuously burns to this day - a fire which has never gone out for over a thousand years. Just because a culture is dead or nearly dead does not mean that you go and do to it what has been done in the movie.
In India, with the passage of time, the villains of our epics were progressively demonised over time. But in spite of all that, we still had the decency to acknowledge their greatness. Ravana, though a bad person, is still praised for his piety, for his composition of the great prayer to Shiva, the Shiva Tandava Stotram, for his contributions to the science of medicine.
And not only that, but Persian culture is shown in unimaginably horrible terms. The man with saws or blades for hands? The wanton killings? The sexual perversions? All this, and much more? For a culture which has given the world so much, to which all of us are so indebted? To a culture which was the first to have a universal charter of rights? To one of the first to give religious freedom to its inhabitants?
And the portrayal of Xerxes. The Persian king was always a figure of nobility, and nothing at all like what he was shown. Imagine how you would feel if one of your cultural heroes was shown in such a horrible light. Imagine how the few hundred thousand real Persians left in the world must feel right now, seeing their hero shown in such a way.
And the denigration of their religion. Zoorastrianism is one of the noblest religions in the world. They are essentially fire-worshippers. They use fire as a representation of Ahura Mazda, the force for good. According to them, the world is a battle-ground, where Ahura Mazda constantly fights Ahriman, his eternal enemy, in the ever-continuing fight between good and evil, and that we are fighters, and have to decide on which side we fight. This mirrors very closely the Indian concept of Dharma, or "that which is right".
Note that this religion is still alive, it is still practiced!
That such a great religion could be shown as nothing more than the aggrandisement of the God-Emperor, who is shown as someone who really has a God complex, continues to disgust me.
And now imagine how the opinions of simple people towards the Parsees (Persians) in India will change when they watch this movie, this being their only source of information on the subject.
The whole thing just horrifies me.
The fourth reason is the bloodsport
I like to think that human society has advanced since the times of the ancient Romans, and that we no longer enjoy seeing people suffer gruesome and horrible deaths. It seems, however, that I was wrong, and that we as humans are no better after all than our predecessors when it comes to bloodlust.
But is this what we should be encouraging? Is this really right? A friend of mine (a girl) was constantly cringing when she watched the movie.
Now I, having seen real decapitations, and real beheadings, don't think much of the violence - as always, it pales before the real thing. But what of others? Is it right to pander to the bloodlust and baser feelings of people? It is not a matter of whether this person has the right to or not - he absolutely does - but a matter of whether it is right to do so. And I emphatically say that it is not. As a culture, humanity should be moving away from all this, not towards it.
The last is the values being propagated
Suffice it to say that aggressive militarist eugeneticist slavery-based fascism, coupled with superioritism, does not appeal to my sense of morals and values.
I consider the movie also a very great insult to Arya cultures all over the world, including my own. India is a sister culture to Persia, and that our values and way of life, which still continues in many ways similar to the old times, are shown in such a manner is disturbing to me.
I can't fully express my distaste for the movie in words - it brings up too many associations and memories - but I hope I have done a fairly decent job of why I think this movie is disgusting beyond belief, and beyond redemption.
I'd like to clarify here that it is not a question of whether or not the people who made the movie should have a right to make it - they absolutely should. It is a question of whether or not making such a movie is the right thing to do.
Discuss.
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