Skip to main content

Brainwash?

  So the General Elections 2014 for electing the Members to the Parliament are over. As things turned out, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won a simple majority in the Lok Sabha. The interesting aspect of the elections and one that I imagine will be part of future documentaries and analysis was the campaign by the BJP. The Prime Minister elect was nominated by the party well in advance and their campaign was centered around the man, Narendra Modi. There were ads on the TV, in the print media and in the social media. If you were in India during the months of March through May this year, it was near impossible to miss seeing his face or hearing his name being spoken about. There have been references in the media to how this might have been a highly well planned effort by an agency to promote his and the party's agenda to maximize their chances of success. If true, it shows how a large population can be swayed by anyone with enough resources at their disposal.

  Switching to a different scenario, we in India, are brought up with a map of the country that shows the entire Kashmir region depicted as a part of the mainland. However, cut to another country, probably Pakistan, and they would be showing Pakistan occupied Kashmir as a part of their nation's territory. China would lay claim to it share of the land in the Himalayas. If a school going student in India were asked to draw a map of his country, it would invariably be India's version of it and not what might be considered an international version of the boundary line separating the nations. We are brought up to believe that the entire state of Kashmir was declared in 1951 is a part of India. The reality, for those living in Pakistan, varies, of course. It can be argued that we (as much as the students in Pakistan) have been brainwashed by the powers that be into believing their own version of the boundary lines. 

  It is a touchy subject, this. Anyone not complying with the belief system being propagated would be labeled an iconoclast charitably, a threat to the society and a possible criminal, in the extreme. The movie, Shutter Island, had a creepy take on the events that unfold in a man's brain. We can easily be lead to believe that a certain version of a story to be entirely true simply by being told the story repeatedly and consistently. We replay the sequence of events in our minds over and over again until it overshadows the truth and voila, we have a new story - one that is as much believable as the truth itself because we believe it. We have lived the story in our minds and hence it becomes the only conceivable truth. 

  Spin it in a positive way and you get The Secret. The power of positive thinking beckons all that you want towards yourself and it shall come to pass. The anti-thesis of this secret holds just as good. Are we aware of it though?
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Leadership - Trump style

One of the latest tirades from Donald Trump was against Lebron James.  I have been thinking of his style of functioning and that of the "traditional" style of leadership. All the books that I have read on leaders, all the leaders that I have seen, are more or less, role models. At the very least, they offer words of wisdom and speak what I like to call, "The Universal Truth". Take Barack Obama - I am no expert on his policies or the impact that he had on the economy of the United States or that of the world. I was always impressed with the way he carried himself and the way that he spoke. His handling of particularly volatile situations seemed to always be in a calm and measured method. Mr. Trump, on the other hand, comes across as very petty, impetuous and pusillanimous. Trump is the President of the United States of America. Arguably, one of the most prominent jobs in the world and definitely a job that is not easy. There, we have a person who is cheap enough ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Great Debaters

I watched the movie - The Great Debaters (released in 2007), directed by and starring Denzel Washington. In my opinion, he is one of the best actors in the world at the moment. The movie is inspired by  a true story that took place in the year 1935 when a small school in Marshall, Texas broke new ground in debating against the top white colleges of the time and won. Like most Denzel Washington movies, the movie was excellent. The actors and the depiction of the time - 1935, is supreme. In the movie, the character Melvin Tolson  narrates a story about the origin of the word "lynching". He says, " Anybody know who Willie Lynch was? Anybody? Raise your hand. No one? He was a vicious slave owner in the West Indies. The slave-masters in the colony of Virginia were having trouble controlling their slaves, so they sent for Mr. Lynch to teach them his methods. The word "lynching" came from his last name. His methods were very simple, but they were diabolical.  Keep ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Leonardo Da Vinci - Case Study of a Genius

The first impression from the book is the incredible amount of research that has gone into making a book on a person that lived in the late 1400s through till the first quarter of the 16th century. Helped, undoubtedly, by the voluminous notes left behind by Leonardo, Walter Isaacson has weaved a wonderfully chronological and detailed story around the life and times of the arguably one of the greatest geniuses that the world has ever known. Starting from his ancestry, tracing the story of his birth and childhood, through the multiple cities and works of the man leading up to his demise in 1519, it is truly a testament to the work that the author has put in to bring Leonardo's story to us. For me, what stands out from the entire book is the pure obsession that Leonardo had with whatever interested him. Like the author suggests, even if Leonardo had chosen to write a book or had been able to publish one of his many research topics, he would have been credited with having discovered...
Post a Comment
Read more