Mahakumbh 49-52: The gathering of the white clans

Folks,

Having been laid low by a migraine attack over the weekend, I am not quite clear-headed yet. So this is a test case, this post, to see how far I have got over it, and I would request you to bear with such lack of clarity as might creep in. I shall also be forced to keep this shorter than usual, which might come as a welcome relief!😉

A zero sum game: I had rewatched these 4 episodes, as is my wont, on Friday. What struck me was the coming together of not just one of the white clans - the Brahma Nisht one of Daadi, Shiva, Ganga, Rudra, and now the pouthravadhu to be, Maya, though her life was, in the final precap, hanging in the balance - but also of the other, and far more important one, that of the sapta garudas. Now, with the unveiling of Thappadiya Mai with her Rithambara pragnya siddhi, all of them, bar the mysterious 7^th garuda, stand revealed.

On the opposite side, the Sri Santh Panth, seemed to be getting weaker by the day, making the power equation between the two Panths look like a zero sum game. The Sri Santh Panth are now minus one solid thug in chief, Animesh, and even Naanu has been forced to abandon his moh poorna nirnay to preserve Animesh's mortal remains in the hope that they would be able to resurrect him with the amrit.

As for Balivesh, he has deteriorated badly from his early, Sinister Swami days. He now looks merely repulsive, that too in a pedestrian fashion, and he reminds me of no one so much as Mogambo, except that he is not even khush! 😉

He seems to have lost the sharpness of mind he once had, and seems to be clinging desperately to the coat-tails, or the angavastram, of his father to know what to do next.

Maya ki maya: Naanu's Delphic order to Balivesh to get rid of Ganga and get hold of Maya, so that yeh bhikari huyi baazi punah hamare haath aayegi, accepted as deva vakya by his worshipful son, come to nothing when their mentally challenged thugs fail big time. They are not just taken in by Maya's deception but also, incomprehensibly, they violate the categoric order: Maya par kharonch bhi nahin aani chahiye! and decide to bump her off. For what? And how did they think they were going to get away with such a murderous mistake? In the event, they don't, but the whole sequence exposed the shambles in which Balivesh's thug army finds itself.

This apart, though the explanation for Maya getting hit instead of Ganga has been very neatly and convincingly scripted, what was it with all those swords et al and about half a dozen men with all that ironmongery to kill just one fragile woman? And to do that openly, at the Mahakumbh? It is utter nonsense.

That Rudra has a vision of what is going to happen to Maya, exactly as he had had about Maimuyi (when he was in his teens ) is clearly supposed to highlight the subliminal bond between them. By now, I have given up fighting this artificial prem kahani, which now threatens to become amar as well!😉

The dishum dishoom by Rudra against the rest was nice for a change, but I was all the time wondering about poor Payal. After having been dunked in that mucky marsh and made to almost drown there, so that Rudra could do his Tarzan act and rescue her by hanging upside down over the water, she must have used up a whole bar of Dettol soap afterwards!😉😉

Greyerson all at sea: To revert to the anti-garuda forces, Greyerson, who was AWOL throughout this week (I find that I missed him!😉) seemed to have been paralysed with the disappearance of Katharine. What was very strange was that till Thursday, it was not clear if Katharine had resurfaced and contacted him at all. Maybe she was debating whether or not to keep her promise to Charles!

Even in the last precap, Greyerson is shown being foolish enough to make an involuntary move towards his designer jhola when Shivanand demands to know where the First Book is. Sure enough, Shivanand, having knocked Greyerson out cold, will now collar it and thus complete the vital set.

The nagas at last? : As for the nagas, they seem to have arrived at long last. About time!

There was a blue-eyed character, most likely to be a naga, who seemed to have injected some (appropriately colour matched !) blue venom into Maya's drip at the Brahma Nisht clinic at the Mahakumbh. He has been appearing in at least 2 precaps as of now, and might well show us his blue-eyed profile in more of them, if Life OK sticks to its precap policy. 😉

He was then shown walking away, all togged out in a heavy overcoat and a hat, like Mr. X or the Invisible Man in the old films, carrying a metal briefcase, undoubtedly containing his naga vish pharmacopaeia.

Shivanand was later shown informing Dr. Rao that the poison had been specifically chosen so that the death would be as long drawn out and as painful as possible. This raised two questions.

One, since when has Shivanand become an authority on obscure poisons? Two, why would the naga, if indeed he was one, not only poison Maya, but try to make her suffer as much as possible? That hints at the kind of implacable hatred that the Veshes have towards Shiva and Rudra, but why would a naga harbour such virulent hostility towards Maya?

Lastly, it would seem that, at least for the present, the nagas should be counted on the side of Naanu-Greyerson & Co. as they are all arrayed against the garudas. Given this, why would the naga try to destroy Maya, Naanu's supposed trump card in his scheme to secure the amrit? Is it simple lack of co-ordination or something else?

The Rithambara pragnya: As for the concept articulated by Shivanand, of all matter consisting of vibrations and thus of dhwani, or sound, modern quantum physics says that the fundamental building blocks of matter - the protons, electrons, positrons, neutrons and other smaller, fundamental building block particles - can all be explained as either waves or quanta, or packets of energy, the two being inter-convertible. But the wavelengths of these particles, and thus their frequencies, would not be in the audible range at all. So these particles would be waves, yes, and thus so would the matter of which they are the building blocks, but they could not be heard as sound.

This aspect of the Rithambara pragnya that Shivanand cites is thus stretching the edges of physics to fit a fantasy framework. This does not rule out the idea of a seeker getting a particular sensation, from a particular object; it merely means that an object cannot be visualised as a vibration. Then again, maybe the ancient rishis could hear those frequencies inaudible to ordinary mortals.

Of course, in a mytho-thriller like Mahakumbh, such extrapolations are probably only to be expected. And it is a novel and fascinating extrapolation, introduced with drama and panache by Shivanand , with his toyambuwarijalthannineer

Yudhviraam: This brings us to the most punch-packed episode this last week, Episode 50. I have chosen this sub-title because of the (temporary) halt in hostilities between Daadi and Rao-Shiva, with the apparent retreat of Professor Rao from the Saraswati Kund investigations.

I say "apparent" because he cannot possibly abandon the quest, but I do not see how they can return now unless they lock Daadi up, but where? The haystack that is masquerading as the Brahma Nisht Panth Hqrs in the Mahakumbh grounds does not have any handy cupboards!😉😉

I was delighted with the neat trick by which the DM winkled Sahadev Malla away from his duties, but alas, it did not work, as I had half feared. But how on earth does Daadi scent mischief, even while she is making Rudra's head as sticky a mess as she can, and the pillow too, and apparate in on the dismayed duo in a Potterite fashion ? I begin to think she is a witch, and not just a jail warden!😉

The debate between Daadi and Rao, both dignified in their stance and their expressions, was, as all such debates must be when one side has already closed its mind, inconclusive.

There was no shortage of marvellous lines, mostly from the redoubtable Daadi:

Drishtikon nahin, drishti alag hai..

Aastha samasya ka vidhaan dekhti hai, vigyan samasya ka samadhan..

KYA samajh sakte hain aap? Accompanied by a terrifying glare and a litany of accusations, mainly directed at Shiva. Bete par toot the vishwas ko dekhti ek maa ki asahaayataa samajh sakte hain? (It is tough to imagine Daadi as asahaay under any circumstances, but let that pass!😉)

Aapki samajh vigyan ke mastishk se upaji hai, aastha ke marham se nahin.. Isilye, aap vaigyanik hain, gyaani nahin..

Ek boond bhi baaki kahan hai jo aapko milegi? Yahan sab kuch sookh chuka hai..Brahma Nisht seva, satya, satkarm aur swabhimaan (Daadi clearly likes the anupraas alankar, or alliteration!) ke char sthambon par khada tha, wo char sthamb toot chuke hain..Ab yahan amrit nahin, mrut bache hain.. Kya ab hamare kankaal par bhi prayog karenge aap?

Daadi is clearly convinced that it was not the Sri Santh attack, but Shiva's "sacrilegious"experiments that made the Saraswati Kund dry up. As she asserts, Kabhi socha hai ki shayad Saraswati Kund is liye sookh gaya ki ise aastha ki drishti se kam aur prayogon ki drishti se adhik dekha ja raha tha?

In the end, after a token, qualified bow towards vigyan: Mujhe vigyan se samasya nahin hai, vigyan ke karya kshetra se hai... Daadi issues her fatwa: Is Mahakumbh mein, aur visheshkar Saraswati Kund mein, aapke koyi bhi anusandhan ka na mein hissa banungi, na mein aapko koyi anusandhan karne doongi.

Rao's calm, collected and logical arguments fall on deaf ears; he might as well have not offered them at all, for all the attention Daadi pays to them. In the end, just like Shivanand when Charles threatened to blow his brains out if he was not allowed to take Katharine back from the underground hideout, so too now, faced with an implacable Daadi, Rao has no option but to retreat for the present.

But what of the immediate future? Daadi's fatwa would seem to imply that she, that is to say the Brahma Nisht Panth, would oppose any scientific experiments by Dr. Rao and his team anywhere in the Mahakumbh area. This would then include not only the Saraswati Kund, but the crucial Sector 53 as well. So what now??

The funny thing is that this stand of Daadi's plays straight into the hands of Balivesh , who is fiercely opposed to Rao doing any experimental work in Sector 53.

Arshi had done a delightful thread called Aastha aur vigyan: tark vitark, on which I had spread myself to an inordinate extent. I am not going down that road here, I simply am not up to it right now, so you can relax!😉 But if you are interested, and have not already done so, you might like to take a look at that thread .

No ritual obeisance by Shiva: Did you folks note one thing in this segment?Shivanand, who otherwise makes it a fetish to do paanv padna of his mother when he meets her and again when he leaves her, regardless of the fact that she almost never blesses him, did not make any move to do that last night. Maybe this will be the beginning of his defying her openly; he was dismayed and almost rebellious when Prof. Rao ordered him to pack up. There seems to be hope for him after all!😉

Daadi: An exasperating mix: Daadi is a wonderful grandma - that scene of her giving Rudra a nice tel maalish and putting him to sleep was so full of vatsalya that it was a delight to behold (though I keep wondering about all that oil getting into the pillow cases and even the pillows!😉).

She turned out, somewhat to my surprise, to be a wonderful saas, welcoming Ganga with eyes brimming over with incredulous joy and warmth, and then proclaiming her readiness to hand over the care of the Brahma Nisht Panth to Ganga. In general, to those she cares for, she is loving and giving, witness the domukhi rudraksha she bring to help Maya with her asthma.

She also seems to be an exponent of nari shakti, for she tells Rudra, with obvious delight, that tumne meri barson ki kaamna poori kar di.. Ab Brahma Nisht ka aadhaar sthamb phir se hamare kul ki devian hongi!

She is a devoted Brahma Nisht Panth pramukh, kind and compassionate to the kalpavaasis, sparing no effort to serve them.

But she is at heart, and where it matters the most, an aggressive, obstinate dinosaur, and she belongs in a museum.

The problem with Daadi is that she does not understand that nothing can be retained unchanged, for change is the one certainty in life. And there is no such thing as doing nothing (to change things), for inaction itself is a form of action, as it has definite consequences.

So, when she thinks that by avoiding all investigation of the Kund, and not provoking the Sri Santh Panth, all will be well, she could not be more wrong. Hatred and the savage desire to dominate cannot be foiled by the tactics of an ostrich.

But the most disturbing thing about Daadi is that she seems perfectly ready to forgive and forget the destruction of her family and of the Brahma Nisht Panth by Balivesh and Naanu, but she cannot forgive Shivanand for his probing of the miracle of the Kund and for his devotion to vigyan,This is truly incomprehensible, as much as her total indifference to all that her son went thru. And because of this hard heartedness and incredible obtuseness, I am unable to share the reluctant admiration for her that is felt by many here.

And how. pray, does she acquire the sole rights to the governance of the Brahma Nisht Panth anyway? In our tradition, it is the son who inherits his father's mantle, not the widow. Strange, the way she asserts her sole right to the Panth, and the way in which the eternally paanv padofying Shivanand never questions it. He has as much right to the Brahma Nisht parampara as she has.

Rao-Shiva & the Great Amrit Hunt: To recap in brief what I had set out in the annexure to my last thread, it is clear that

-Rao and Shiva are not thinking of using the amrit for themselves beyond using a kan, or perhaps, as seemed to be the idea in Episode 50, just discover an existing one and use it to revive the Kund.

-that they are not scheming to somehow use the Kund to make the amrit appear at the end of the Mahakumbh.

As far as I can make out, and I have listened repeatedly and carefully to the Shiva-Rao conversations and to Greyerson's long explanation to Balivesh about what the Secret Society had gleaned from the ancient tomes they had laid hands on (undoubtedly from the Nazis who escaped to Argentina!😉), the amrit will appear on its own, and the task of the garudas is to keep it invisible from the bad guys.

As for the fear that activating the Kund will revive the war for the amrit, why, the Secret Society has, quite independently of both Shivanand and the Kund's miraculous properties, decided to fight it out for the amrit, not the one kan in the Saraswati Kund, but the whole lot.

Of what use would one kan be for the Secret Society of for that matter to the 'Veshes? They want it all, and they are not going to forage in the Kund to get it.

I do not see the Rao plan for reactivating the Kund and the amrit protection issue as separate. As far as I could make out from what Rao tells Shiva about the machine, they are planning to locate the jeevit ansh of the vilupt Saraswati under the Kund, and then trace its course back to the presumed point at the Sangam, the hotly contested Sector 53, and thus get a clear fix on where exactly the Saraswati, and the amrit kumbh, will surface there. They need to know this so that they can spot the rising amrit with the minimum delay, get to it in time and hide it from evil eyes.

Now of course, thanks to Daadi, this plan has entered a Trishanku-style limbo.

Shades of Munich: As for Daadi's idea that Shiva and Rao are going to violate a sacred space by running that gizmo there, but that the outrage inflicted on her Panth and her family by the 'Veshes is only due to their karma, for which no revenge should be sought, but instead they should be drawn into the warm embrace of the Brahma Nisht Panth by the Rudra-Maya union, it reminds me of just one thing.

Of Neville Chamberlain, his infamous meeting with Hitler, and the Munich Agreement of September 1938, after which he proclaimed, on his return to England, that he had won "peace for our time". We all know what happened a year later. With the 'Veshes, it will not take a year!

The Rishis of old and vigyan: As for our ancient Rishis, as Meenakshi has rightly noted on Arshi's thread, their aastha and gyaan were not at all as allergic to vigyan as Daadi would have it.

In fact the Rishi Kanada, who was an agnostic, if not an atheist, is widely credited with having originated the atomic theory of matter long before Dalton.

Here, I am inserting the answer I had given to Arshi's objection that Rishi Kanada had only articulated the idea that all matter consisted of infinitely small anus, and that other scientific postulates of his had subsequently not been proved correct.

Yes of course he used the word anu, for that was the only one he could have used at that time. And he might have been wrong on many other ideas of his. He was not the first nor will he be the last man of science to be wrong in his ideas, Any number of practicing scientists are wrong, all the time, and when one loses out, the shindy that is made is terrific!

But that does not negate Kanada's scientific bent of mind, even if he could not prove the anu concept because of a lack of the empirical approach. That is why I noted that he was "widely credited with having originated the atomic theory of matter", not with having discovered the atom. Just like Einstein propounded the Special Theory of Relativity, which was not proved by experiment till much later. That is why he got his physics Nobel for discovering the photoelectric effect, not for his theory of relativity.

The point is that no one else, not even in the scientifically advanced West, had that idea of the atomic theory of matter, and that for hundreds of years, till Dalton came along. The person who originates an idea deserves the Nobel as much as the one who proves it, though he often does not get it

Missing in action: Charles and Katharine vanished after the opening 4 minutes on Monday, when he was getting her to promise - undoubtedly on the premise that she would not understand the failsafe mantra in our serials, the Tumhein meri kasam! - that she would not reveal what had happened in Shiva's underground retreat to anyone.

The segment was curiously incoherent; at the end it was not clear if Katharine had been made to "promise" to hide these explosive facts only from Rudra, or from anyone at all, which would include, though Charles knows nothing about this, Greyerson as well. And the sly smile on her face at the end did not bode well for her keeping whatever "promise" she had made to Charles.

Shades of Godfather: Well, this to be none too short after all! My posts have a life of their own, and they drag me along with them, willy nilly. But no more today, for my head has begun to ache, bar just one terrifying, and terrific, scene that seemed straight out of the Godfather series.

This was when the hour of reckoning arrives for Balivesh's goons, especially the one who had ordered that Maya be killed. Balivesh, strangling the first one, looked merely thuggish. It was when Naanu got into the act that one saw the difference between crass and class.

Naanu discards his bandages (to what looked like surprise from Balivesh. Did Naanu keep even him in the dark about this 24 year long charade of his?) and flexes his fingers. He then moves towards the cowering man, slowly, inch by inch, like a snake advancing towards a petrified bird. He does not narrow his eyes and glare at him like Balivesh does. He merely looks at him, and remarks, in a soft, sibilant near whisper: Abhi tak humne kucch bhi nahin kiya, aur tumhari saans atak gayi?

Then the fingers are around the man's throat, and the relentless squeezing begins, as Balivesh looks on in near horror. The sibilant voice continues: Kaha tha, Maya ko kharonch bhi nahin aani chahiye.. The pressure intensifies... Ab pata chala, jab saans atakti hai to kitna bhay lagta hai? And the voice morphs into a near sob of rage: Use bhi to laga hoga na?

As he literally throws the now dead man away from himself, Naanu leans against the wall, half in exhaustion, half in a spasm of bitter regret. The frail body is racked by sobs and his voice rises to a crescendo of grief and guilt: Hum tumhari raksha nahin kar paaye , Maya.. Apne Naanu ko kshama kar dena!

The pain Naanu displays seems genuine. In any case, what need has he to pretend in that company? It thus appears that under the surface ruthlessness and harshness, there is, in Naanu, a secret layer of caring for a girl who is, willy nilly, of his blood.

With this scene, in itself a little gem of the noir genre, the writer has added another layer to Naanu's character, and made him at once more complex and more fascinating.

That is it, folks! Till next week, then, and take care.

Shyamala B.Cowsik