Mahakumbh 74: A brewing storm
Folks,
I am afraid I do not feel particularly indulgent towards either Rudra or this episode as a whole, right down to the utterly cliched, last minute clifftop rescue of Leela by our boy wonder.Where did they find this deadly cliff so near Prayag, I wonder. Balderdash!
On Monday, Rudra, thanks to his humanism, ended up minus both the Books and his Baba, a situation that might perhaps have been predicted, and, by Tuesday, with a nag kanya on his hands as well. Seeing that he cannot fail in the end, I am sure it is precisely this that will work out in his favour down the line. But right now, the whole thing looked like a mess.
This is what comes of plans where the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing. Charles, above all, will have to learn that he cannot go on his own way like fancy free, unguided missile, keeping his leader in the dark and botching up the plan that he had already announced to them.
Nor could I understand why Rudra had to lose sight of the precious Books to cater to the enemy agent, which is exactly what Leela is. Not being able to shoot her in cold blood is one thing. Losing sight of his principal objective, and flapping over her while her leader calmly made off with both the Books and his Baba was really too much. And then he runs like mad, not after the shav vahan to rescue his Baba, but after Dansh and the Books.
If Rudra can be led astray so easily, he has to sit down and think this thru, for his has now created a major problem for all of them, , and the next time it might be even worse. I had started crossing him out of the two weak garuds as per Greyerson after his eminently hard-nosed choice during the bomb threat.. But now I am not at all sure. What can one say of a leader who panicks like this in a crisis?
If he cannof focus unwaveringly on the most important thing, in this case getting hold of Shiva, what will he do when the amrit surfaces and the nagas create another diversionary crisis, as I am sure Dansh will?
Rudra needs to be shaken till his teeth rattle, and taught his priorities. If no one else, MB has to din some sense into his head before it is too late. If he was not the hero, who
has to win out in the end, he would never last out on this slowly rising learning curve of his! đBy the time he has finished learning, the Mahakumbh, and the
amrit, would be both gone.
And I do not understand this 'save Leela' bit. She has been shot 3 times, and Rudra is not capable of saving her if she were dying. Plus she is not his responsibility; his Baba and the Two Books are. He fails big time, as I have pointed out above, not only in his priorities but in his ability to achieve what he has decided to do. The running after Dansh, instead of the vehicle with his Baba, is a case in point.
Today, he also displays his inability to carry his troops with him. MB points this out to him, but I did not see him do anything concrete to allay their concerns, bar preaching at them.
He would have the luxury of doing that and playing the moral autocrat if his plans were always successful, but this latest one has been a total washout, and at least some of the
garuds will attribute that to his mistakes. This is like a coalition govt. and you need a supple diplomat to keep the flock together and still get his own way. So far, Rudra has not shown that he has this talent, and the intra-
garud situation resembles an incipient civil war.
No wonder Tiwari, who is no Rudra
bhakt, and probably resents the way his
guru, Prof .Rao, has been sidelined, wants to strike out on his own after the
nagas, only to be opposed by Charles, who will follow Rudra whatever his personal reservations. But that would not be true of either Tiwari or Katharine, and unless Rudra exerts himself to get them too on board,
garuda unity, and their eventual victory, will both end up as pipedreams. That will not happen, of course, but that does not mean that the denoument, and what leads up to it, will be credible.
Just 2 more points. One, Rao is no Narad, nor has he caused any
phoot among the
garuds. The point about the
garuds is that they are not robot soldiers like the
nagas. They are individuals, and individuals have individual points of view that need not agree with that of the Pramukh. It was perfectly
lazmi for Rao to have doubts about Rudra's "surrender the Two Books and get Baba back and later we can get the Books back too" scheme. But even so he does add that it is for the Garuda Pramukh to take that decision. And why should Charles and Tiwari not feel the same? Any rational person would.
And now that gambit has failed, perhaps because of the clandestine
garud activism, but the fact is that it has failed totally, and Rudra has brought in, to quote Charles, a
nayi museebat. So naturally the doubts begin to emerge, and right now it looks like a civil war in the making!
Incidentally, Rao seems to have taken himself off, for he was nowhere to be seen yesternight.
And what about the Saraswati Kund and the Rao gizmo? Now that they can explore that to their heart's content without Daadi surging up from nowhere and fixing them with a basilisk gaze, Rao, the garuds and Utkarsh seem to have forgotten all about the vilupt Saraswati kas jeev kan, though that was touted at length as being the key to the amrit ka rahasya. Strange.
Seeing that they are also running out of time, I have an uneasy feeling that they will suddenly wrap it all up and close it by main force, like the old holdalls used for train travel, with all the odd bits still sticking out!đđ
Secondly, the real shocker, which is going to hit many hard, is the attitude of Leela's father, for whom the
naga causeapparently trumps his daughter's life. But this is not an unusual concept, and it is not so difficult to understand where Guru Drish is coming from.
In 16th century Rajasthan, Panna Dai let her own son be murdered to protect the heir to Mewar, who later became Maharana Udai Singh. It was not that she loved her son less, but that she loved Mewar more. The parallel is not exact, but in the main, it is the same for Drish. But of course no one will give him any credit for that, whereas if Shiva or Daadi had done something similar, they would have been lauded for their selfless sacrifice!!
Even so, I was surprised that he did not ask Dansh why he made an encounter killing of it, instead of shooting her where the injury would not be fatal, for that too would have served his stated purpose equally well. . Then Dansh would have had no answer.
It is all very puzzling, which is of course the normal state of affairs for us!đ
Dansh, I was glad to see, is entirely consistent, and the reasons that I had questions about a day earlier, concerning his shooting Leela and having himself whipped, were both answered tonight and highlighted his ruthlessness.
I liked the slow build up of frustrated rage in Dansh as Shivanand goes on and on about the superiority of the garuds once they are united. Which he then takes out, curiously enough, exactly as Rudra did repeatedly, by having his henchmen whip the naga chinna off his back.
Secondly, I am heartily tired of seeing Shivanand with his head lolling, like a piece of human flotsam. He was my favourite character till a couple of weeks back, and I strongly resent his being reduced to this. But his boasting that once all the garuds were together, that one garud had always been equal to 1000 nagas reminded me, in its foolish and unnecessary braggadocio, of similar statements by our neighbouring country generals. đ It was also a case of foot in the mouth disease, for Shivanand clearly briefs Drish here, if he is clever enough to catch the hint, as to what he should do to prevent this scenario from materialising!
For Dansh would just have to keep him in a captivity with that laser on his head. Then, unless Rudra stumbles into a rabbit hole, like Alice in Alice in Wonderland, that leads down to Dansh's hideout, he is never going to be able to find the naga lair or his Baba. Then there would be no question of all the garuds ever uniting.
Or kill Shivanand outright, which would really be the most sensible thing for Dansh to do under the circumstances, for it would cripple the garuds for keeps. But then Utkarsh will not let him do it; he is too fond of having Shivanand sitting with that laser on his head, shaking all over and making odd noises. Incidentally, when Shivanand was trying to burn the chinna on his head himself, in front of Rudra, there was not a squeak out of him, so why all these sound effects now?
Lastly, what was it about Leela helping get rid of the poison ingested by Maya? MB was offering that as an argument to pacify the irritated garuds who were dead against Rudra rescuing Leela. But the precap seemed to indicate that Rudra is letting her off scot free, possibly trying to outdo an Ekta Kapoor heroine in mahaanta!
Shyamala/Aunty/Akka/Di
Edited by sashashyam - 10 years ago
