Padmavati….Pride or Prejudice

What is a man without an identity and what is a nation without the sense of pride in its identity? Whether Rani Padmavati had a real historical existence or she was a work of fiction cannot change one basic fact that she was a symbol of pride. We have all grown up reading stories of her Jauhar, the stories that have inculcated in us the values on the premise of which we claim our rightful existence, the stories that we tell our children to teach them values our ancestors lived by, to nurture them with the respectful identity of themselves and their nation.

I would have had no issue with the film had the filmmakers not claim it to be a work of fiction. Had Mr Bhansali claimed and believed it to be historically true then it would have qualified to be a case of unravelling the truth and gone  to different tangent but clearly, this is not the case and Mr Bhansali is presenting a concocted version of a virtuous story for his monetary benefits  at the cost of hurting the pride of a large section of the society.

Pride is a virtuous vice that a nation should savour and protect at all cost. Useless intellectual debating, political or otherwise, eclipses our ability to savour and nurture our own identities, we need to come out of this shell to feel such virtues in its pure and sublime form devoid of any aspirations about its origin. Let us not forget that beyond a few generations, all history is hearsay, potentially distorted or constructed.

The quality of us, Indians, to corrupt such pure values for individual gains and to analyse them with our pseudo rational mindset, has resulted in national catastrophes more often than not.

Let us direct our efforts in, constructively and collectively, building a strong national identity.