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By Ausama Anwar:
I’ve never been hooked on Bollywood productions. Actually, only a few Hindi movies have attracted me. Lately, I came across a headline describing one of them as the finest production to emerge from decades of Bollywood films. I didn’t care much at first, but then decided to study the extent of technical and artistic development reached by Bollywood over the years. Fortunately I can testify that it has made great strides in the levels of artistic form and content.
“PK”, unexpectedly, fixed me in front of the screen for two and a half hours. This movie is well-directed and amazingly scripted. I guess it will be acknowledged as one of the most legendary movies ever broadcast by Indian Cinema. I will no mention details about the plot here. I’m not attempting to review anything here. However I will use this movie as a significant reference that stands for what I am about to write.
Humanity is the product of some million years of evolutionary processes. Along that period of time, the most long-lived conflicts were based on the issues of race, ethnicity and above all theological beliefs. Why would God be involved into such conflicts and who stands behind them, stoking them in his Name? Why are we so afraid of questioning religious beliefs these days? Who do we fear: is it God himself or rather those who claim to be his representatives?
Let’s consider this vicious circle: From the first drops of blood wasted during the process of colonization, to the vain destruction of both World Wars, whose soldiers came from different places around the world believing in the delusion of being supported by God, from the Jews who believed that God saved them to the Nazis who shared Christianity’s God, or even, obviously, from today’s ISIS who terrorize in the name of God. The question to be asked here is: who are all these Gods and if there is one, why would he make all those versions of himself? Is it valid to search for an invariable truth (God, Religion)?
We’ve been witnessing the same failure for thousands of years. And, if you say we weren’t aware before, then we are now. Till when should this bloodshed continue in the name of God? Where’s God? What’s the solution?
“Where’s God?” is one of the most important questions in “PK” which was scripted according to the principles of a sci-fi, comic scenario that resists ideological interpretations, and I believe it’s because of our radical beliefs which we hold against each other, that we can’t get to the heart of any of these serious matters. But here it successfully takes the shape of a movie. Just after watching it, I thought that it won’t be easily accepted in India, which has dozens of different beliefs and thousands of different Gods, and I knew I was right when I saw this headline: “Religious leaders demand banning of PK in MP”.
To get back to our subject. Raising the questions: “Where’s God?” or “What’s the right path?” may cause some problems, especially when everyone, everywhere, from different beliefs, consider God to be theirs and any theological issue a supreme truth. These beliefs, actually, are what we have been taught since we were in the cradles. Hence, it’s time for change.
Unfortunately, because of those crowd makers, dogma holders, we barely hear a humanoid-shared belief. One of the philosophy schools that emerged from the 20th century is the Traditionalism School which disseminated Orthodox philosophies about the world’s great religions, claiming that all religions share the same origin (in a primordial principle of transcendent unity) and are, at root, based on the same metaphysical principles. These ideas are sometimes referred to in the Latin as philosophia perennis. That’s the only belief that can hold all religions, despite differences in God and path, peacefully without sending each other to hell or heaven.
Many of those who read this may not be acquainted with philosophy, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is the principle of sharing and believing in humanity, before anything. This is the only aim. I personally called for that according to an Islamic perspective (Muslim’s peace worldview) in my second unpublished book. This is considered from my friend Alan Cleveland’s perspective as being “Nativist”. What you call it doesn’t matter .what really matters is believing in its content.
So when the man who brings out all those brave questions in “PK”, gets asked about his religion, he replies by pointing at all those people who represent different religions and saying that their religion is his. And concerning the answer of the question of the right path, it’s simply that, “we don’t need one, knowing God is enough.”
Now, relating the philosophy of the movie to this article, I would say that what I wrote is a call to work peacefully against those who make wrong calls (as the movie mentions those who claim to be God’s representatives). From this scope, education becomes the tool to solve this, added to the cutting of connections with those countries that still make wrong calls and bully people to serve their business, authority and autocratic laws. If we don’t do any of this, any other attempts will be useless and humanity’s bloodshed will never cease.
I’m not dreaming about utopia here, but I merely call for stopping an obvious stupidity done by humans for centuries. A call to stop letting our future generations feel sorry for how we thought, the same way we feel sorry for the past of the preceding generations. And I know for sure that future wars won’t be based on such matters but rather economically-oriented as they are now.
Since we are aware, why wouldn’t we make the change?
The “PK” movie highlights what is perceived as a right call on the basis of wrong ideas. Here I, and many more like me, wait for a chance to also speak it out. In brief, what makes me happy is Quartz.com’s headline: “PK” as Bollywood’s most successful film ever. Which makes me say: it’s a Must Watch movie!
Ausama Anwar was born in 1994, in the capital of the Kurdistan region, Hawler. He is a writer and author of two books. ‘A Gate to the Intellectual’ is dedicated to youth generally with an intellectual background. ‘Hidden Idea: Some Samples from Movies’ is a work of creative movie analysis. Ausama is also freelance Journalist and President of Zamwa Society Development Organization.
