Padmanabha Nagar: Problems plenty

inviting you to the screening of the film;

Kakkoos

Directed by Divya Bharati

Duration: 107Minutes

Date: 26th August (Saturday)

Time: 5.00 PM

Venue: Xavier Hall, St. Joseph’s College of arts and science(autonomous)(Langford road, Shanti Nagar, Bengaluru)

The
documentary film Kakoos was released on 26 February 2017, and
immediately received much acclaim and positive reviews as a courageous
film exposing how even the State is perpetuating manual scavenging. But,
after the premier, the Tamil Nadu police have stopped screening of the
film in Nagercoil, Coimbatore, Madurai and Kanyakumari claiming it might
pose a threat to law and order.

On July 25, the police
barged into Divya Bharathi’s house and arrested her for allegedly
failing to attend a court hearing about a student protest in 2009. Now,
there are 12 cases filed against Divya across five districts in Tamil
Nadu under charges including promoting communal enmity. She has received
more than thousand phone calls with acid attack and rape threats.

Film maker will be present for the screening

Synopsis

Kakkoos
documents the lives of “manual scavengers” in Tamil Nadu, focusing on
the dehumanization that comes with their occupation. The film shows that
manual scavenging is a problem of caste, class, and gender; and raises
issues around contractual employment, delayed payments, and the social
ostracization faced by sanitation workers.

Divya and her team
covered many towns and cities in Tamil Nadu on foot to be able to locate
manual scavengers – whose work is usually done ‘out of sight.’ The
sights and scenes the film covers – men and women cleaning overflowing
toilets, toilets clogged with sanitary napkins: cleaning human faeces
with their bare hands – are difficult to watch and must have been
extremely difficult to film. But it forces the viewer to face facts
about the sheer crime of allowing millions of human beings to do such
work in India. It shows the unspeakable – and asks hard-hitting
questions about caste and class in the process. It is not a film
designed to elicit sympathy for manual scavengers: as Divya herself has
said many times, she wants people to feel guilt and anger and an urgency
to eradicate manual scavenging without a moment’s delay.

For further details

With
due respects & Credits to the Master Artist brother T. Murali T ,
I’m posting this detailed article for the knowledge of every NATIVE
INDIAN

 (Medium: Acrylic on canvas. July 2015. size: 91 cm x 61 cm. Painting by Murali T, Kerala, India)

This
painting is the outcome of an effort to understand the curious
construct of the  image of Lord Ganapathy (Ganesh) in its relevant
social and historical background. Lord Ganapathy, who is considered the
tutelary divinity of Knowledge and the scriptures and is the Lord of 
intelligence  and wisdom,  has a bizarre image:  a human with the head
of an elephant!
This god with the elephant’s head,  one of the many 
Hindu deities, is known by several names like  Ganapathy, Ganesh,
Vigneswara, Vinayaka etc.  It can be assumed that this God was taken and
fostered by the  casteist Hindu religion from the cradle of the then
declining Buddhist religion  (the tantric faction of buddhism)  around
the fourth century. The  God Ganapathy’s image which is being worshiped
now-a-days  is the  body of a human  who had lost his head  and the head
of an elephant  which had lost its body,  joined together .  But this 
artist  is searching for the parts discarded and  lost while the form of
Lord Ganapathy was concieved, the head of the human,  and the body of
the elephant.  The answer to that search may not be available in the 
frivolous  myths propagated by the brahmanic  priesthood.  The search,
for those parts discarded, are to be extended into the domains of 
social history and our logical reasoning.
The idea of the
collective-strength can be seen in  the  “gana” root of his names
Ganapathy and Ganesha.  And the ‘vigna’,  resistance, the causing of
hindrance, to the castieist- chathurvarnya-brahmanic religion,  can be
read in his  decapitated head.  The ‘gana’  in his name point to the
vigilant  resistance-group supporting him. The context,  that the 
castiest Hindu religion  referred to Buddhists, as ‘Kshatriya’, (Jaina
followers reffered as ‘Vysya’) and that Ganapathy has a tantric
Buddhist  heritage brings about an idea that Ganapathy was an annoyance
to the Brahmans.  There is  also a  myth of Parasurama, whose mission
was to annihilate  the ‘Kshatriyas’(Buddhist) and the cutting off one
tusk of Ganapathy can be read as an allegory to  the establishing of 
brahmanic supremacy.
As far as Buddhists were concerned,  elephant is
a symbol of the Buddha. Many animals like elephant, bull, horse etc
which are described in  the epic of   Buddha’s life  were his memorials
by the Buddhists  who were not idolaters.  There is a statue, aprox.
2300 years old,  of an elephant coming out of a rock formation in
Dhaulagiri near Bhuvaneshwar, sculpted as part of the Buddhist
evangelism of emperor Asoka. This statue symbolically depicts a story
related to Buddhas birth. Importing  the image of elephant,  which was a
symbol of Buddha, into casteist Hindu religion was a plot to diffuse
Buddhists. The concept of   Ganapathy   was a technique to defeat and 
surmount, the inexorable moral strength of the Buddhist ideology using
its own images and misleading  by such  symbolic representations.
The
present image of the God Ganapathy was formed during the fourth and
fifth centuries of the Christian era, in the  castiest Hindu  and the
tantric- Buddhist religions. The concept of  Ganapathy, considered  as
the embodiment  of alphabets and knowledge, highlights his relevance to
the Buddhist thought and religion.  The  casteist- brahmanic-social
setup, whose modus operandi  to retain hegemony was  to monopolize
knowledge, gained upper-hand  towards the end of the Gupta regime.
During that time the adversaries of the brahmins were the Buddhists. 
After the Gupta regime (AD. 320-550) the castiest-brahmin-priests lost
their glory and  supremacy in the society and a disgruntled lot of 
these sorcerer-wizard-scholars  infiltrated the centers of advanced 
learning like ‘Nalanda’ and ‘Takshashila’, and established  strong
caucuses of antagonists of Buddhism. The plots for  destroying  those
kings  who did not conform to their policies of Yaga-yajnas, sorcery,
dismembering  the society into  castes, establishing a  status of
unquestioned  supremacy of brahmins in society etc., declaring them to
be  ‘Asuras’, ‘Rakshasas’ and despots,  where hatched during that
period. Under these circumstances we can  reasonably assume  that the
formulation of the Ganapathy myth  was to assuage the  wrath of  the
general public,  after such a genocide  of the Buddhists  by the brahmin
priests.

Ganapathy is a symbolic representation of the 
beheading of the Buddhists. That is why  offerings  to  Ganapathy  is
made  mandatory  before   the offerings to all the other divinities that
the brahmins have introduced. Thus the worship of Ganapathy became 
acceptable and became a solace even to those Buddhists who were 
reluctant to leave their allegiance to their  former religion.  Today 
on all auspicious occasions, the ritual of  offerings to Ganapathy which
ensures the presence of a brahmin priest , haunts our society.
Carrier Mouse
It
is to be considered that the carrier of Lord Ganapathy is an
insignificant rodent. A harebrained, elephant-headed, gluttonous,
bloated god image  riding a small mouse, reveals the  hatred, animosity ,
vengefulness, mockery and the despise that  the brahmin priests
nurtures in their collective racist memory  towards Ganapathy. The story
of  Parasurama,  an incarnation of Vishnu  and   the destroyer of
kshathriyas,  confronting Ganapathy and cutting off his tusk can also be
read as a reference to the vengefulness of the priesthood. In short,
Ganapathy is a matyr. The deified victim of brahmin priesthood, in their
infamous  machinations to subdue the tantric Buddhists.

Courtesy : Thanks to Ms. Jaya M for English translation

#SHARE_IT_ACROSS_YOUR_FRIENDS_AND_GROUPS

#TRANSLATE_IT_TO_YOUR_RESPECTIVE_LANGUAGES[11:49
AM, 8/24/2017] +91 94492
60443: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythological_anecdotes_of_Ganesha                                                                                              
 
[11:55 AM, 8/24/2017] +91 94492 60443: Elephant head  Decapitation by Shiva
A common four-armed form of Ganesha. Miniature of Nurpur school (circa 1810). Museum of Chandigarh.[16]

The
most well-known story is probably the one taken from the Shiva Purana.
On hearing that Lord Shiva has been liberated from Gajasura’s stomach
and is on his way to Kailash, Goddess Parvati started preparing for a
bath. As she didn’t want to be disturbed during her bath and since Nandi
was not at Kailash to keep guard of the door, Goddess Parvati took the
turmeric paste (for bathing) from her body and made a form of a boy and
breathed life into him. This boy was instructed by Goddess Parvati to
guard the door and to not let anyone in till she finished her bath.

Subsequently
when Shiva finally reached Kailash after spending a long time in
Gajasura’s stomach, he found himself being stopped by this strange boy.
Shiva tried to reason with the boy saying that he was Parvati’s husband
but the boy did not listen and was determined to not let Shiva enter
till his mother Goddess Parvati finished her bath. The boy’s behaviour
surprised Shiva. Sensing that this was no ordinary boy, the usually
peaceful Shiva decided he would have to fight the boy and in his divine
fury severed the boy’s head with his Trishul thereby killing him
instantly.

When Parvati learned of this, she was so enraged and
insulted that she decided to destroy the entire Creation. At her call,
she summoned all of her ferocious multi-armed forms, the Yoginis arose
from her body and threatened to destroy all. Lord Brahma, being the
Creator, naturally had his issues with this, and pleaded that she
reconsider her drastic plan. She said she would, but only if two
conditions were met: one, that the boy be brought back to life, and two,
that he be forever worshipped before all the other gods.