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?