Tag: Mythology

One scorching May afternoon in 2015, as nearly a hundred men and women employed by an Indian government project dug across villages in search of the mythical river Saraswati, a trickle of water appeared, bubbling out of a paddy field. Pilgrims and tourists thronged from far and wide. “This is groundwater. With the discovery of river Saraswati, the Hindu right wing in India is jubilant because it aligns with its nationalist claims that Hindus are indigenous inhabitants of India and that Hindu civilization is the oldest in the world. The argument is simple: The Vedas were written 10,000 years ago, and they mention the river Saraswati, proving that an advanced civilization existed then. The minister of state for human resource development, Satyapal Singh, proclaimed that since none of our ancient texts mention apes turning into men, Darwin’s theory of evolution is wrong, and he cautioned against its being taught in schools. Accumulated over the past 500 years, learning based on experiments and empirical evidence has freed us from the fetters of absolute truth offered by religious texts, whether the Bible, the Quran or the Vedas. Attributing all human progress to religious texts written thousands of years ago is a reversal of the building blocks of the modern world. Their first feature documentary, “The Cinema Travellers,” has won 19 international and national awards. Op-Docs is a forum for short, opinionated documentaries, produced with creative latitude by independent filmmakers and artists.

Either way, though, the promise is one of genuine change — one way or another. Within the framework of mythology, whenever there are bright lights everywhere you look, whenever everything is perfect, absolute, going just the way that someone wants it to, etc., then you know the trickster is right around the corner — because he has now had a free hand of things, operating in the shadows that supposedly don’t or no longer exist. The Trickster is the part of existence that doesn’t fit neatly into static reality then, it could be said. It’s the “return of the repressed” — the reality that anything that’s disowned in “one’s self” will inevitably find a way to the surface one way or another, and explosively so. And what comes from this sort of ignorance? And from a generalized ignorance of actual human history as well? While the figure of the shape-shifter “Loki” is in Germanic mythology generally understood to be “the” trickster figure, such labels are arbitrary — whatever is repressed or “non-existent” at the time plays the part. But then America has always had a thing for hobo camps and tent cities, so perhaps they pose a possibility, rather than death as a broken-into-pieces collection of panhandlers on the global streets? It is apparently human nature to try to serve yourself at the expense of broader society, and certainly part of the individualism of the United States, and it is rather hard to only elect politicians who are focused intently on trying to serve the greater good. That is not to say we should give up on democracy and politics, but it is yet another reminder that we should be vigilant, should try to elect people who are genuinely trying to work for the greater good of society, and should work harder to keep documented con men out of politics.