Country with ~1.3 billion people which is crazy diverse (in terms of number of languages, number of scripts, history, culture, cuisine, arts, religion and geography), is guaranteed to have groups of people with many different views.
With such variety, in addition to the great percentage of users on HN being from India (this is just a guess), it's a difficult task to have a good debate without getting the conversation/topic/comment flagged.
While much of the popular international media (CNN, NYT, WSJ, WaPo, BBC, Reuters etc) sitcks to a certain ideology, it is near impossible to expect a fair debate based on the India specific content published in these sources of news, which often tend to view everything from Right/Left or Liberal/Progressive/Conservative POV.
Currently, the issue is that the history of India is written from the British POV, which has been tweaked later by Russian and American POVs. None of them really glorifying anything that is native to India. In fact a movie glorifying Winston Churchill just won 2 oscars in 2018, while people across the world, including many Indians are not aware of the artificial Bengal Famine orchestrated by Churchill, that lead to the death of 3 million Bengalis. Try inserting this in school texts, and similar uproar will occur.
Similarly, contribution of ancient India to the field of science, maths, astronomy and astrophysics is almost non-exsitent. Even now, none of the school texts in India do any justice to this, nor do modern (past 19th century) literature outside India.
Example: Many basic mathematical concepts like pythagorean theorem, the current numerical system etc are considered innovations/inventions from Europe and Arabian peninsula (respectively). In India, there's been enough proof available (as cited by those who believe these are Indian inventions) for many to think these are innovations from India and if not the world, at least kids in India should learn that these are Indian innovations and that Indians need to be proud of it.
Now based on which side of the debate you are, you'd either dismiss this thought, or hold on to it very dearly, or take a step back and say there needs to be more research on this, and in either case, present both the cases to students who are studying in schools.
Many thousand years of scientific understanding remain hidden in plain sight, because of such meddling with history, that draws many many students away from even exploring the real Indian history, from the lens of an Indian, and that is why this is a highly contentious issue.
With a Left/Left-liberal/Socialistic/Marxist type of a government India had for ten years (until 2014), enough meddling with history was done at school level, and now the Right of Center / kind of Capitalist govt wants to undo that, and make up for the tweaked history in India over the last few centuries.
The moment any such move is made in this direction, we have the world media of certain ideology hyperventilating on such issues and publishing clickbait articles.
Hollywood has always been all about escapism. In the 1930's - the golden era of film - most of the offerings were aspirational and inspiring, not Grapes of Wrath gloom and doom, which was a lot of people's actual daily experience.
There's a reason the mainstream entertainment doesn't make non fantasy films - it's because they are a for profit business and there's no money in it.
The recent Churchill film, which was very loosely based on reality and flat out wrong in many areas was all about triumph over adversity etc. There's a good argument to made about fantasy films supposedly depicting actual historical events and people distorting mass reality. That's where my beef is with hollywood...
Hacker Cinema
3 comments on Hacker News
The beginning of WW2 comes to mind (see the 2017 movie : Churchill)
Country with ~1.3 billion people which is crazy diverse (in terms of number of languages, number of scripts, history, culture, cuisine, arts, religion and geography), is guaranteed to have groups of people with many different views.
With such variety, in addition to the great percentage of users on HN being from India (this is just a guess), it's a difficult task to have a good debate without getting the conversation/topic/comment flagged.
While much of the popular international media (CNN, NYT, WSJ, WaPo, BBC, Reuters etc) sitcks to a certain ideology, it is near impossible to expect a fair debate based on the India specific content published in these sources of news, which often tend to view everything from Right/Left or Liberal/Progressive/Conservative POV.
Currently, the issue is that the history of India is written from the British POV, which has been tweaked later by Russian and American POVs. None of them really glorifying anything that is native to India. In fact a movie glorifying Winston Churchill just won 2 oscars in 2018, while people across the world, including many Indians are not aware of the artificial Bengal Famine orchestrated by Churchill, that lead to the death of 3 million Bengalis. Try inserting this in school texts, and similar uproar will occur.
Similarly, contribution of ancient India to the field of science, maths, astronomy and astrophysics is almost non-exsitent. Even now, none of the school texts in India do any justice to this, nor do modern (past 19th century) literature outside India.
Example: Many basic mathematical concepts like pythagorean theorem, the current numerical system etc are considered innovations/inventions from Europe and Arabian peninsula (respectively). In India, there's been enough proof available (as cited by those who believe these are Indian inventions) for many to think these are innovations from India and if not the world, at least kids in India should learn that these are Indian innovations and that Indians need to be proud of it.
Now based on which side of the debate you are, you'd either dismiss this thought, or hold on to it very dearly, or take a step back and say there needs to be more research on this, and in either case, present both the cases to students who are studying in schools.
Many thousand years of scientific understanding remain hidden in plain sight, because of such meddling with history, that draws many many students away from even exploring the real Indian history, from the lens of an Indian, and that is why this is a highly contentious issue.
With a Left/Left-liberal/Socialistic/Marxist type of a government India had for ten years (until 2014), enough meddling with history was done at school level, and now the Right of Center / kind of Capitalist govt wants to undo that, and make up for the tweaked history in India over the last few centuries.
The moment any such move is made in this direction, we have the world media of certain ideology hyperventilating on such issues and publishing clickbait articles.
Hollywood has always been all about escapism. In the 1930's - the golden era of film - most of the offerings were aspirational and inspiring, not Grapes of Wrath gloom and doom, which was a lot of people's actual daily experience.
There's a reason the mainstream entertainment doesn't make non fantasy films - it's because they are a for profit business and there's no money in it.
The recent Churchill film, which was very loosely based on reality and flat out wrong in many areas was all about triumph over adversity etc. There's a good argument to made about fantasy films supposedly depicting actual historical events and people distorting mass reality. That's where my beef is with hollywood...