Folks,
I had of course heard of writer's block, but being strictly an amateur of the species, writing as and when the fancy took me, I had never before experienced it. That is, till yesterday, when my Sunday weekly take on Mahakumbh fell due. I think I invited the wrath of the gods who preside over amateur scribblers like myself when I wrote on one of my threads that while the weekly brief felt to me, on Sunday mornings, like undone homework I would rather skip but could not, once I began, the post more or less wrote itself. Well, yesterday it most emphatically did not write itself. In fact it flatly refused to be written.😉
I think it was largely because I did not much like the week as a whole, and I detested the endless scenes between a trussed up Shivanand and a Dansh trying to gloat but not quite succeeding. They put me off so much that they spoiled my mood. Moreover, there was not a single standout scene like the one at the end of episode 72, to which I find that I devoted no less than 3 pages! Is baar to kisi bhi scene ki tareef mein ek para likhna bhi mushkil laga.
Anyhow, one needs anushasan, discipline, and one cannot cite writer's block and bunk an allotted task, even if it is self-allotted. So here I am, and if the end product does not make the cut, maaf kar dijiyega.
As for the title, it is because the action, and the results thereof, kept yoyoing throughout the week, now against the garuds, now against the nagas and then back again. But overall, it was advantage nagas. I am not going into the details of the events, as we are all familiar with that, but merely commenting on the characters, and their evolution as could be grasped from these scenes.
MB: Guardian and guru sans pareille: That is to say, peerless, without an equal. In fact, one of the grouses I had against last week was that one saw so little of her. I hope this lacuna will be remedied this coming week!
She is, above all, strict with Rudra. Strict and demanding. She longer perceives any need, now that all his chakras have been opened, to cheer him up with pep talks to boost his morale. She realises that he does not understand the imperative need to carry the rest of team with him, but is instead trying to ride roughshod over them citing his authority as the Garuda Pramukh. This, given that the other garuds are not robot soldiers like the nagas but each a strong individualist, is a recipe for disaster.
So the only time she supports him is vis a vis the other garudas, who are all livid at his having saved Leela. And even more so with his homily to Charles Bhoolna mat, (if he had shot Leela) in mein aur hum mein kya farak hai? Hum rakshak hain, maanavta ke rakshak . Charles could have retorted that Leela is not included in maanavta, but he is not quick-witted enough! 😉
MB gets Rudra out of that bind by pointing out that Leela could be used to counter the naga poison in Maya: Hamare haath jo aaya hai, uska tumhein ehsaas nahin hai- adding a patently false but morale booster Hum haare nahin hain.
But once she has healed Leela, MB hoists the first warning signal for Rudra. Ab yeh ladki to theek ho gayi. Par hamare beech kuch nikal gaya hai. She agrees that it was for him, as the Garuda Pramukh, to take a decision, par baaki garud is se naraaz hain..
But Rudra does not grasp the cardinal importance of what she wants him to understand, for he harps on the mission: Hum sabse bada hai hamara kartavya, aur use yaad rakhna hamari zimmedaari hai..Ab jab sabhi soch milenge, tabhi sab saath milkar chalenge.. He is sure that if they have a little dheeraj, they will be able to get his Baba back. What he does not get, or does not want to understand, is that so long as he is not able to carry the other garudas with him, sabhi ki soch kabhi nahin milegi. MB is left looking after him, her eyes very thoughtful.
But then comes the total fallout with the other four garuds over Rudra's categoric and autocratic insistence on freeing Leela - whom he sees as nirdosh in the deaths of his family members, whereas the others only see her as a representative of a murderous race - unconditionally. MB is not present there, but with her special powers, she undoubtedly knows about the level of resentment created in the other four, and of their likely reaction to Rudra's abrupt departure after having told Leela to leave. She decides that the time has come to lay down the law to the Garuda Pramukh.
She does this as soon as he has finished his meditation, before departing on his second solo mission to get Shivanand back.
Incidentally, that was a gorgeous shot, stylishly conceived and taken . Rudra, all in black, seated near the steps to the (now startlingly spic and span😉) Saraswati Kund, in the perfect padmaasan pose. His face still, the eyes closed and seemingly looking deep inside himself, and a glow behind him, perhaps that of his chakras. Just perfect, exactly what a young siddha yogi should look like!
Enter MB, and she says straightaway: Chahe jo sankat aage aaye, par aaj tujhe Shivanand ko wapas laana hi hai.. and she almost glares at him , to emphasise that this is not advice, but a command. When he seeks her blessings as usual, she does not oblige. Instead, she is looking anxiously at the far distance, and when he questions her Maimuyi?, she lowers the boom on him.
Saaton garudon ka ek hona ab aur bhi zaroori ho gaya hai. Rudra, Shivanand ke saath baaki garudon ko bhi salaamat rakhna teri zimmedaari hai..And her left index finger is pointed straight at him, as if to drive her injunction home. And he responds correctly : Vachan dete hain, agli baar jab Saraswati Kund aayenge, tab saaton garud saath honge! It is another matter that thanks to Dansh's hallucinogen, saaton garud wahan upastit to hain, par saath to bilkul bhi nahin.
Ishwar ki yeh Leela: MB's handling of an initially truculent and later bewildered Leela is classic. Not only does she make it clear to Leela that she has been saved by the garuds, jo mrityu par nahin, jeevan par vishwas rakhte hain, whereas her own race had left her behind to die, but her final comment is marvellously ambiguous: Ishwar ki yeh Leela to samajh mein aate aate hi aayegi! By this she means not just the garuds and the rest of the nagas, but that Leela too will come to understand her own self only slowly.
Rudra: not yet a leader: It is pointless to lambast Rudra too much, for he is still on a (very slow) learning curve as far as his being the Garuda Pramukh is concerned. Plus, in most things, he is programmed to follow his heart, and while his instincts are invariably noble, they are, at least as of now, mostly impractical, and at times downright dangerous;
So, all the brownie points for leadership that he had gained during the bomb crisis are lost, and the balance turned sharply negative, after the fiasco of the proposed exchange with Dansh. This was a decision Rudra has taken on his own, in the face of stiff opposition from Shivanand's guru, Prof. Rao, and dubious reactions from the rest. Taking this, or any other decision, is of course his right as their leader, and it would have enhanced his stature had it worked. But it does not, and in fact it fails in grand style.
Wrong to go it alone: The first mistake Rudra makes is in deciding to go it alone on this mission, asserting that he did not want to endanger the lives of any of the other garuds to save his Baba. This sounds heroic at first sight, but its implications are all negative.
Firstly, this amounts to treating the others not as responsible and capable colleagues, for whom he is the primus inter pares (first among equals), but as persons needing to be shielded from a danger that he alone can tackle, which is almost insulting. Also, by reducing it to an almost personal matter, the rescue of his Baba, rather than of the indispensable brains trust of the garuds, it negates the point Rudra had himself made earlier, that they could not move forward at all without Shivanand. If it is a mission need, the whole team should have been included in the effort.
Secondly, it deprives him of their support and their inputs which, seeing that they are all more worldly-wise than he is, might well have helped him focus on his priority, getting Shivanand back, and if not, at least making sure the Two Books were safe. If I am not mistaken, Rudra had at no time promised Dansh that he would come alone, and if Charles, the DM and Katharine had been there, they would have either stopped the nagas from putting Shivanand back in the shav vahan or one of them would at least have grabbed the Two Books.
Instead Rudra, thanks to his mahaanta and his excessive humanism, ends up minus both the Books and his Baba, a situation that might perhaps have been predicted, and with a nag kanya on his hands whom he resolutely refuses to pressurise, even to save Mayal
Avoidable harm: Of course,as he is the hero of our tale, it all has to come right later. Which it duly does, but in a totally inexplicable manner, for no one knows HOW an earlier clueless Rudra, operating without the GPS, managed, this time to blast himself straight into the underground naga lair! This one is for kiddie fairy stories, not for a mytho-thriller wanting to be taken seriously.
But it is not as though everything has been, miraculously set right completely. For there has been, in the interim, still more damage to Shivanand that could have been easily avoided, the effects of which will become apparent to Rudra as soon as his father grabs him by the throat in a murderous grip.
The worst of all, the naga guru has managed to map Shivanand's brain, and has tapped all his secrets about the emergence of the amrit kalash on Mahashivaratri. Had Rudra not botched the exchange plan so thoroughly, no matter what devious plan Dansh might have had ( the buried mines that he triggers in the end prove that), the garuds would have retained at least one of the two vital ingredients for success:Shivanand and the Two Books. Then the naga guru would never have been able to blend the gyaan in both these ingredients to get where he is at present, which is well ahead of the garuds.
Mistaken priorities: This is what comes of plans where the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing, and where the leader makes the cardinal mistake of thinking that he is sarvagna or omniscient, and also self-sufficient. That, in Mahakumbh, is reserved for MB!
Even so, it is very hard to understand why, once the exchange, and thus his Baba, was out of his reach, 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 he then runs like mad, not after the shav vahan to rescue his Baba - he is at one point ahead of it - but after Dansh and the Books. Then he stops, inexplicably, before the explosions are set off. He turns back to the exchange area, where the garuds and the nagas are engaged in desperate hand to hand combat. Does he stop and help the garuds and the police tackle the nagas? With his immense strength, he could have prevailed over the whole lot in no time.
But no, he does not. Instead, he runs right past them without even looking at them, and starts hunting for Leela!! The lives of the policemen who are being killed by the nagas do not matter to Rudra the Garuda Pramukh, only that of the enemy agent does. Remarkable.
Dismal communicator: Then of course rescues her at some risk to his own life, and tops things off by delivering a moralistic bhashan to the other garuds, antagonizing all of them bar MB.
Later, when they remonstrate with him, and demand that he hold Leela back so that Maya can be cured and/or Shivanand located, Rudra treats us and them to a master's class in non-communication skills.
Does he explain his decisions to them? Does he tell them that even if Leela is released, if it is fated that she should cure Maya, that will happen when Leela comes back of her own accord? Or , something appealingly devious, that he is letting her go so that using his second sight (always assuming that it works this time, for it is temperamental and erratic!😉), he can spot the way she takes back to the naga headquarters, so that they can then get there themselves? No, he does not.
Instead, he talks down to them from a high moral pedestal. Hamare parivaar ka doshi Dansh hai.. Badle ki bhavana mein hum kisi nirdosh ki jaan nahin le sakte (how he is so sure that Leela, given her cocky naga attitude, is nirdosh is a mystery). .. Hum is ladki ko apne swart ke liye nahin, apni zimmedaari samajhkar bachaya hai..Baba wapas aayenge, par is ladki ko majboor karke nahin.
As noted above, Rudra feels no zimmedaari re: the many policemen who, as the DM remarks sharply, died in the encounter. He reserves these feelings for Leela.
Later, after facing down the irate Thappadiya Mai, and telling Leela, over his shoulder Jao! , Rudra turns on his heel and leaves. But happily not before she has given him a sound piece of her mind.
Civil war brewing: Rudra could have the luxury of doing all this and playing the moral autocrat, if his plans were always successful, but this latest one has been a total washout, and most of the other garuds attribute that to his mistakes. The 7 garuds are 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 now 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, decides 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.
Right now, there is thus hardly anything else that the leader of the garuds can do wrong. Rudra the Maharakshak evam Garuda Pramukh needs to be shaken till his teeth rattle, and taught his priorities. MB does just that, short of shaking him, and I devoutly hope it works!
But I liked the way in which Rudra did not offer any excuses to Dansh for the DM and the other garuds turning up unknown to him, but made it sound as if he had intended it all along. That makes for unpredictability, which is always useful with a Dansh convinced that Rudra the Garud Pramukh will never cheat.
Shivanand: Never say die: You might wonder what I could have to say about the man who was, during the week, mostly strapped to a chair with a laser playing on the back of his head and making him shake all over, or else tottering from the chair to the bench for the brain mapping. In short, totally passive bar a few snatches.
And in the end, hallucinating dangerously, wandering in the woods, knocking down Charles et al under the impression that they are enemies trying to hurt Rudra, another figment of his drug-induced fantaisies. Trying to run over Rudra, whom he takes to be Dansh, in order to protect the self-same, imaginary Rudra.
At long last, blessedly calling a halt to the juvenile spectacle of Rudra imitating Superman with the shav vahan, by crashing the vehicle into a rock. Finally, in a comic spectacle, repeatedly and deliberately knocking his head against the steering wheel!😉
But it is not to this Shivanand that I am referring. Rather, to the Shivanand who, even at his lowest ebb physically, his mind and body riddled with assorted poisons, his brains fried by the heat of the laser, can still summon up the guts to smile condescendingly at a Dansh who is cocksure that no one and nothing can now stop the nagas from getting the amrit, Na aap, na aap ka beta, aur na kismet, because hamare pas aap hain, yeh do kitaabein hain, aur unme amrit ka rahasya.
The guts to mock him subtly but surely. Kahin aisa to nahin ki hum tumhare praan lekar hi yahan se chootenge?
The biting sarcasm that Shivanand summons up even under such dire circumstances is nothing short of amazing, and it compels profound respect. He hits back at his tormentor with jibes so sharp and so insidious that they get under Dansh's skin, making him snarl: Joke lag raha hai? Badi hansee aa rahi hai!
Apna upahaas swayam karoge to hansi to aayegi na beta? Tumhein kya laga, yeh do kitabein mil gayeen to amrit bhi mil gaya? Hum garudon ko haraa liye tumne? Rudra aayega, aur humein yahan se le jaayega, aur koyi nahin rok sakta use.. Tumhare brahm jab tak hain tab tak hum saat garud ek nahin ho jaate. Ek ho gaye, to Dansh, wo ek tumhare jaise 1000 nagon par bhari pada tha, bhari padega, aur padta rahega..Apni haar se pehle agar apne aap ko jeet ki khushi se tum behlana chahte ho, to hum nahin tokenge tumhein!!
No wonder Dansh's face darkens and he hisses in Shivanand's ear: Apne bete se zara si mulaqat kya ho gayi to jaise vitamin ki gole le li? (Dansh has an exaggerated idea of the efficacity of multivitamins!😉) Bahut bol rahe ho Shivanand! To which Shiva, unfazed, unleashes a classic retort: Aaj na jaane kyon, tum humein sun bhi to rahe ho!
By now, Dansh's cocky self-satisfaction is long gone, and he is driven nearly mad with rage. So much so that he can find no outlet for his fury except to have himself flagellated, like the albino monk in The 😉Da Vinci Code, till his body is benumbed and can no longer feel the pain.
While Shivanand, his head once more under the brutal laser, is probably smiling to himself inside even as his body is wracked with pain.
Change of heart: I must confess that I had initially felt that Shivanand's boasting, that once all the garuds were together, the one garud had always been equal to 1000 nagas, resembled the foolish and unnecessary braggadocio of similar statements by our neighbouring country generals. That 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 ever materialising!
That is to say, keep him in permanent captivity with that laser on his head. Then, unless Rudra stumbled into a rabbit hole, like Alice in Alice in Wonderland, that led down to Dansh's hideout, he would never be able to find the naga lair or his Baba. Then there would be no question of all the garuds ever uniting. I had of course counted without Utkarsh's talent for pulling rabbits out of a hat and blasting Rudra straight into the underground naga lair!😉
I have changed my mind in this respect, being compelled to do so by Shivanand's raw, never say die courage.
But I still feel that Utkarsh is too fond of having Shivanand sitting strapped to that chair, 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?
Dansh: Hidden insecurities: For all his ceaseless bluster and arrogance, the most lasting impression that I have of Nag Pramukh Dansh is one of an endemic insecurity that peeps out even when he is at his autocratic best.
It is this that makes it possible for Shivanand to bait him with his jibes and drive him to a white hot fury that climaxes in his self-flagellation, and the high pitched assertion that while he would earlier have been content just to get the amrit, now he would not be satisfied till he had personally killed every one of the 7 garuds. It is this that makes him so angry that he forgets that with the erasing of his naga chinna, his supernormal powers too would all disappear, and he would be reduced to an ordinary human being (Not a naga? It is odd that till now, not even one of the nagas has been shown assuming his asli roop, even if very briefly).
This hidden insecurity in Dansh might be partly due to the endless, dismal pronouncements of Guru Drish (who would have made Cassandra proud 😉!), that this or that act of Dansh's would make their defeating the garuds a pipe dream. Any shishya, even one so confident of his superiority as Dansh appears to be, would be disheartened by such repeated, pessimistic pronouncements, especially as they are not accompanied by any sound, practical advice as to what he should actually do instead.
It is such persistent negativism from Drish, rooted in millennia of the nagas having been defeated and subjugated by the garuds, that probably makes Dansh all the more determined to rewrite history this time around, and the means be damned. Makes him as casually brutal as he is, as callous, and as totally lacking in the sense of right and wrong. Makes him ready to sacrifice his guru's daughter to gain the surprise element that enables him to escape with the Two Books and Shivanand, and then explain this calmly to his guru as an unavoidable qurbani for the naga cause.
But over and above all this rationalization, there is a strong streak of sadism, of deriving enjoyment from the tactile act of killing - witness the way in which he personally murdered Daadi - and from the pain he inflicts on others, that make the Nag Pramukh a full-fledged monster, incapable of a single soft feeling or of any fairplay or sense of honour.Which is a great pity, and makes the character far less subtle and interesting than it could have been, something that I have noted often.
To revert, such sentiments are, to Dansh , avoidable signs of internal weakness that are, luckily for the nagas, reserved for the garuds. I am waiting to see how MB's assertion that bhavanaayein are the greatest strength of the garuds, not their weakness, is going to be proved to Dansh!
A shrewd operator: But Dansh is nothing if not shrewdly inventive. It is he, not his guru, who thinks up the laser idea to keep Shivanand's location, and thus that of the naga headquarters, a secret from the Garuda Locator and thus from his fellow garuds.
It is he who thinks up the hallucinogen trick to reduce Shivanand to an emotional wreck, thus weakening him and the garuds as a whole. As he tells Drish: Meri vyakulta naye aavishkaar ko janam deti hai!
It is he who anticipates that the garuds (and here he overestimates Rudra's cunning!😉) would have inserted a tracking device into the Two Books. Finally, it is he who turns that trick on the garuds by fixing the 2 chips to Shivanand and turning him loose in the woods, thus making sure that having found Shivanand, the garuds do not look any further, and thus do not discover the naga hideout.
His guru comes into his own only with the brain mapping of Shivanand, and then meshing all that was thus learnt with the gyaan he has acquired from the Two Books, to predict when and how the amrit kalash will emerge from the waters, how it will be safeguarded, and how the Garud Pramukh will reach it.
He then leaves it to Dansh for the most part, bar the tunneling plan in Sector 53 (long a fixation for Balivesh & Co.) , to formulate a plan for how the nagas can seize the amrit instead. Let us see what Dansh thinks up. Right now, he can, true to type, only think of letting the Garud Pramukh do all the hard work of getting thru to the amrit, and then seizing it from him.
Neat takes: While I have, more often than not, clobbered Dansh for OTT performances, there were at least 3 segments this last week when he was really good.
The best was when Dansh, in the laboratory where Drish is busy mapping Shivanand's brain and meshing the information thus gathered with that contained in the Two Books, is literally on pins.
Stripped of his usual arrogance and domineering attitude, he wanders around in his gurus's wake like a lost puppy, uncertain and shaky. He does not understand anything of what is happening there - the 4 cross sections of Shivanand's brain on the monitor, the moving shadow cast by the rising light on the sundial, the visualizations of the 12 signs of the zodiac circling the amrit kalash, and of the 7 dwaars guarded each by a garud, or of the spinning rudrakshas linked by spokes of light. He is like a bewildered child, full of both wonder and awe at these strange manifestations.
His eyes switch from side to side as if he was at a tennis match, and he is perched on the edge of a chair, for all the world like an expectant father in the hospital corridor, or nowadays, inside the labour room! 😉
It was a very convincing performance, all the more so as it was completely at odds with his usual persona.
The second was when Guru Drish asks him, after he has finished restoring the naga chinna on Dansh's back with a solid dose of (dark blue this time😉) naag vish: Dansh, Leela kahan hai?
Dansh is lying on his chest while the chinna on his back is being treated, so he gains some time before he has to react. For a long moment, his eyes show uncertainty as to how the guru will react to what he has to say. Then he slowly turns and faces him, and tells him, his tone as flat and level as he can make it, what actually happened. There is a moment when things hang in the balance, and Dansh is clearly on edge.
It is only when Drish enquries about the body that he recovers his poise, and explains how and why he had to shoot her, presenting it as a qurbani for the naga cause, and also why he could not retrieve her body himself. Drish then voices the hope that if the body had not been found, Leela might be with the garuds, where her life would be safe kyonki garud hatya mein vishwas nahin rakhte.
By now, Dansh is back in full form, and goes so far as to threaten that if Leela was not faithful to the naga cause, she would fall prey to his bitter hatred. And this after having, as he believes, killed and abandoned the daughter of the man without whose assistance Dansh cannot hope to achieve his goal and get at the amrit!
His attitude seems to be based on a curious mirror image of what Rudra says, to MB, about his fellow garuds: Hum sabse bada hamara kartavya hai. Because he believes in Drish's total commitment to the naga cause, Dansh feels that he can, literally, get away with the casual murder of his only daughter.
All in all, this sequence was well done, with Dansh bringing out all the nuances correctly.
NB: A real shocker, which would have hit many hard, was the attitude of Leela's father, for whom the naga cause apparently 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 puzzling, which is of course the normal state of affairs for us!😉
Lastly, the scenes where Dansh is monitoring Shivanand's progress after he has been tagged with the chip and set free, and his run ins with the 3 garuds, and then with Rudra himself. He was chortling with glee, and going overboard at many places, as if he was high on marijuana. But he seems to be at his best in that state, far better than when he is snarling with rage or looking out grimly from under lowered brows!
A horrid fascination: I did not like the hallucinogen scenes of Shivanand seeing those two unfortunate victims as Rudra, while Dansh keeps up an equally hallucinatory monologue about mrityu aur zindagi and the transition state between them. I hated them, and fast forwarded the whole the first time around. But then, as I had done with the scenes of Daadi being murdered, I went back to that part and watched it through, to see what it was about it that Arshi and Santhi liked so much.
After lasting thru it, I could make out where they were coming from. They were mesmerizing, the lines, with a kind of horrid fascination.Kisi ne gaur nahin kiya hai kitne adbhut naata hota hai shikari aur shikar ka, hatyare aur uska jis ki hatya hone jaa rahi hai...Jab mriytu aur jeevan aamne saamne hon, jab zindagi dekh rahi ho ki wo mar rahi hai, to yahi sachche aur pavitra pal hote hain.. Marnewala maut kea age gidgidata hai humein chhod do, jab ki unhein pata hota hai ki unki maut aa chuki hai..
Us aakhri saans ke kuch saans pehle, unhein kuch bhi dikhayi nahin deta. Par maut? .. Un aakhri palon mein maut ko marnewale ki aankhon mein uski sari zindagi dikh jaati hai..Aati hui maut, dheere, dheere, dheere, aakhri humraaz hoti hai zindagi ki...
Maut ko marnewale ke baare mein sab kuch pata chal jaata hai.. Aur yeh un palon ko kitna dilchasp bana dete hain!
Then the final verbal stab: Satsang kaisa tha, Shivanand?
I was still as disgusted as I had been the first time around by the killings that accompanied this peroration, however, and I still believe that such deliberately sadistic scenes have no place in Indian TV.
For all that, the lines, to be fair, were a tour de force, though I have always been told that the whole of the dying person's life passes in front of his/her eyes in the last moments. Not in front of death. But then what can one expect of someone like Dansh, who seems tailormade for a character in a Lovecraft horror novel?
The maya of blue eyes: Now, I am worn out, and will wind up, without going into the list of glaring verbal and other inconsistencies scattered thru the script this week. You would all have spotted them anyway! So here, as light relief , is a piece about a totally hatke subject, the physics of blue eyes! I can guarantee that you will find it fascinating.
Dansh has very dark blue eyes. So I think he must be of Irish descent, for they have that kind, which is popularly described as blue eyes "put in with a sooty finger" - i.e., dark blue and with long dark eyelashes.
Here is something very interesting about the physics of blue eyes, which, believe it or not, do not exist! The blue colouring is all maya! I was a physics major myself, but I must confess I had never given this any thought.
But as for Elizabeth Taylor, contrary to what has been said here, I met her at La Guardia airport in 1980 ( I was then at our Embassy in Washington as a junior officer and was going to cover the Democratic National Convention in New York) and her eyes were really deep violet. Quite amazing. I got her autograph too, Elizabeth Taylor Warner, as she was then married to Senator John Warner.
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THE PHYSICS OF BLUE EYES
Although some people have blue eyes, and many babies are born with particularly deep blue irises, no one actually has blue pigment in their irises. They're just a trick of the light.
With the news of Elizabeth Taylor's death, many people's thoughts have turned to eye color. It's known that her famous violet eyes were mostly the result of make-up and photo coloration, but even outside of the world of starlets many people rhapsodize about blue eyes. This is especially true with parents, who are startled by the deep blue of their babies' eyes. When people say that their children's eyes are sky blue, they're telling the truth. Blue eyes are blue for the same reason the sky is blue - scattered light.
Irises are made up of three layers, a thin top and back layer, with a spongy layer in between called the stroma. Any layer can have pigmentation in it. There are a few different colors of pigment that come into play. Most people have either dark brown or yellow pigment in at least one of these layers. The combination of yellow and brown go into making brown and amber-colored eyes.
Brown-eyed people have these pigments in each layer of the iris, giving the eye a strong brown color.
Blue and grey eyes, on the other hand, only have dark brown pigment on the back layer of the eye. The stroma has no pigment, but it does have small particles suspended in it. These particles give rise to the Tyndall Effect. The small particles in the eye scatter blue light. As light enters the eye, the blue wavelengths are scattered - some of them back towards the outside of the eye. The dark background absorbs most of the rest of light.
If the background of the eye were white, or were lit from within, more light would stream through, the blue wavelengths would be scattered out, and the eyes would look yellow.
Babies can often have blue eyes for a few days or months after birth, because the melanin - the darkening pigment of the eyes - has not fully developed in the stroma.
Even if the overall color of the eye doesn't change, babies and young children tend to have more intensely blue eyes than adults. As people age, the particles in the stroma get bigger, and scatter white light. As a layer of white is added to the blue, it comes to look more grey.
People can see this kind of pigmentation in weather. A dry sky is made up of tiny particles that scatter blue light and make the sky look blue. As clouds start to form water molecules fill the air, and the color of the sky changes to a whitish grey.
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That is it, folks. Finito, and alvida till next week. I hope Shivanand does not damage poor Rudra too much!
Shyamala B.Cowsik
Udne Ki Aasha
