By Madana-mohan Das
Please accept my humble obeisances. All glories to Srila Prabhupada.
There is a BG-based review of the newly released Avatar movie printed in Hindustan Times of December 27, 2009:
which is also referenced in the biggest most popular Internet movie database:
http://www.imdb.com/news/ni1341152/
I thought, since the movie is highly popular, this news piece might be of interest for Dandavats and its audience.
Begging to remain
your servant,
Madana-mohan Das
I was happy to see that a film critic for the Hindustan Times is a devotee of Krishna, with (I think) a Russian name?
In the comments on the Hindustan Times web page, Sunny Shet asked: “Interesting, are Hare Krishna bhaktas allowed to go to movies?”
I responded: “Sunny, to answer your question, there are bhaktas of different levels of commitment. Many live very normal lives, reading novels, seeing movies, working at different jobs (I am a lawyer in California), but following basic regulative principles (vegetarianism, etc.) and chanting Hare Krishna every day, attending aratis, lectures and so on. Others are more serious and live as full time monks or clergy who would not usually watch TV or Movies. It is not a question of being “allowed”, but more a question of an individual’s determination to focus exclusively on remembering Krishna.
“Also, an important principle is that of “yukta vairagya”, or the idea that more complete renunciation involves using everything as far as possible in Krishna’s service. For example, Mr. Osipov is demonstrating how a film critic can ply his trade in Krishna consciousness. By simply renouncing movies as ‘maya’, his renunciation would be less complete. I wish all film critics were devotees of Krishna.”
Two other comments I made on the Hindustan Times page are as follows:
Comment 1:
The technology is getting so good and the huge animated special effects movies are becoming so much in fashion, I am wondering when we will begin to see blockbuster films for international audiences that will seriously and effectively treat epics like Ramayana, Mahabharata and Puranas.
Yeah, the Pandoran Na’avis recognize an interconnectedness of life (they even have physical receptors at the end of their braids that let them “link-in” with other life forms and their planet’s collective awareness), but we do not have to invent sci-fi cultures to illustrate these points.
Great sage-poets have left fabulous descriptions of God and His various lilas that depict how He is seated in the hearts of all beings and how He descends age after age to protect His devotees and set the world back on the path of dharma. They are purifying to hear and speak of and recollect, and are full of great wisdom and beauty. I hope our filmmakers and screenwriters will be able to do them justice.
Comment 2:
I expect in the sequel to see Jake Sully become more like a traditional Avatar. He is already becoming a kind of spiritual leader and messiah of the Na’vi people. At the end of this film he has been able to drop his earthly human body and remain living in a Pandoran body.
(Although it appears to be a body cloned from his twin brother’s DNA, it has been able to pull off some remarkable stunts, and there is obviously some divine will backing him for bigger and better things. Is it really a material body, or is it just a trick of “yoga-maya” that makes us think it was created in this world?)
The imperialistic, rapacious earthlings will be coming back in force for their hilariously named “unobtanium.” (For all the wonderful 3D graphics, the characters of these baddies are remarkably two-dimensional). What divine powers will Sully, rider of the “last shadow”, show us then?
Madan Mohan Prabhu
Congratulations on this wonderful article. It addressed the ‘avatar’ misnomer, and also gave a succinct and thoughtful summary of relevant points of the movie. You tied it in with Krishna conscious themes from the Bhagavad Gita very relevantly. I hope other devotees can also make such inroads into the world with such relevant commentary.
your servant,
amala gaura dasa
My favorite part of “Dune” was how a mantra can be used as a weapon. My father told me, in the 1950’s, that the U.S. Army was experimenting with sound vibration weapons.
Thank you, Amala Gaura Prabhu, for your kind words.
I did not want to be seen as the author because, first of all, there are lots of brilliant writers in ISKCON who would (and should) do a much better job writing such reviews than me, and, secondly, authorship is not as relevant here as the fact that a major newspaper of India unexpectedly carried the article, and imdb.com picked it up.
I just thought that passing up on such an opportunity to introduce a drop of BG philosophy would be a crime. After all, when will we next have a madly popular Hollywood blockbuster having a Sanskrit theological term for name and featuring tall blue-skinned handsome positive characters sporting tilaks (and sort of shikhas) and teaching respect for all life? Didn’t Srila Prabhupada call us “the greatest opportunists”?
Even though the review was edited by HT down to 2/3 of its original length for publishing purposes, losing much of its important points and cohesion, I hope it will still make a few people more curious of the BG and its philosophy.
And I am confident that the preaching inroads opened up for us at the cost of $500 million are not exhausted by this tiny review. I think we can successfully use this movie for attracting people to the true meaning of ‘Avatar’ and the One behind it. After all, as if cheering us up, some Christian groups are already doing just that: “The True Avatar”
your servant,
Madana-mohan das
PS. BTW, you may want to leave your comments at the bottom of the HT article page. It will help more HT readers find and read it as well.
I did see the movie, Avatar, on 3-D IMAX several weeks ago. It is a remarkable film, and I also remarked that it would be wonderful if that technology could be employed to create beautiful and moving renditions of the events leading up to and including the Bhagavad Gita. It is expensive technology, no doubt. Perhaps a George Harrison-like individual will arise out from this field to help. Pusta Krishna das
I agree with Madana Mohan Prabhu that “Avatar” offers opportunities for book distributors. I am sure that sellers of Bhagavad-Gata As It Is all over the world right now are perfecting lines that take advantage of the popularity of this movie. We could say things like, “Did you know James Cameron says he based the idea and title of ‘Avatar’ on books of Vedic wisdom such as this?”
* * * * * * *
In a recent Prabhupada (Memorial Day) Festival in L.A.’s New Dwaraka, I had the good fortune of taking lunch in Govinda’s restaurant with Hari Sauri Prabhu and a devotee with experience in the theatrical arts (whose name I forget).
Hari Sauri related an incident where some big Bollywood producers approached Srila Prabhupada in Mumbai to obtain his blessings for a Krishna Lila movie based on Srimad Bhagavatam.
Srila Prabhupada’s advice to them was, not to jump immediately to the Tenth Canto and rasa lila, but to first produce a movie about the First Canto.
The impression I got, via my perhaps imperfect recollection of what Hari Sauri related, is that this advice from Srila Prabhupada was not exactly the blessings the film producers were looking for, and that they never took advantage of this transcendental instruction from the great maha-bhagavata devotee.
But wouldn’t it be wonderful if the right team of talents with appreciation for the material could make a commercially and artistically successful “First Canto” movie, or Mahabharata and Bhagavad-Gita movie. It could happen…
I mean, there seems to be a international demand for such things. Look at the big, lush, Chinese period epics and their mystical Taoist-Buddhist sensibility (think “Crouching Tiger”). Look at the popularity and critical success of Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy with its medieval Tutonic folklore themes. Look at “The Matrix” and the “Star Trek” franchise’s use of dialog lifted from freshman Philosophy classes. Look at the perennial popularity of “gladiators” flicks, like “Troy”. Indian productions like “Asoka” have also been somewhat successful.
Could devotee screenwriters and directors put together influential films about Vedic culture and literature in a way that would attract interest in Krishna philosophy and would not be cheap or cheesy?
Could we cast actors who are sufficiently sophisticated to portray the proper spiritual emotions? (To have a Pandava played by “The Rock”, Tom Selleck, or even Shahrukh Khan might be a farce, IMHO)
I have seen only one episode of the “Little Krishna” animated series produced by Big Animation. I was impressed.
It is being aired on Indian television and has been picked up for international distribution and broadcast rights have already been in countries like Malaysia and Brazil.
The downside it that it is presented primarily as a children’s entertainment and does not challenge the audience with philosophical inquiry. However, it does present lilas faithfully and might spark further interest in Krishna culture in audiences outside India.
I would like to see an engaging documentary about the Bhagavad-Gita, examining this great work from all different angles. Maybe that would be my film school project, if I went to film school. :-)
I was very disappointed with the final conclusion of the “DaVinci Code”. The ultimate realization that Christianity was originally based on simple Goddess worship, seemed a little tame to me, compared to the vast ocean of information from the Vedas about the Personality of Godhead. On every page of Srila Prabhupada’s books are so many ingenious details and aspects of God’s personality and intelligence.
Being an incurable dreamer I have been working on a Mahabharata script for some time and have completed a second draft of part one of what is intended to be a trilogy. I am working with Yogamaya Films run by a devotee named Matt Moreale (yogamayafilms.com). It’s a humungous endeavour and its chances of seeing the light of day are remote, (I have heard of around 5 or 6 other Mahabharata films in-the-making since I began this one) but by Krishna’s grace all things are possible. Matt has it slated but first of all needs to build his profile so that the big boys might take notice when he pitches it. To that end he is producing other smaller films based around Vedic philosophy, the first of which ‘Continuum’ is now ready to go. He is looking for business partners on this one and if anyone wants to get involved in the exciting world of films, possibly culminating in showing the world the real, multi-dimensional Avatara, then they should contact either Matt or myself for a copy of the business proposal.
ys, Krishna Dharma das (kd@krishnadharma.com)
Please accept my humble obeisances. All glories to Srila Prabhupada.
A much fuller version of the same article is carried by a number of news sites of Australian Fairfax group of media, most notably on Sydney Morning Herald website. Readers are welcome to leave their comments there.
your servant,
Madana-mohan das
That is great news Krishna Dharma Prabhu. I happened to be reading your Mahabharata book recently (or one of them, if you have written more than one), and my first thought was, “This would make a great screenplay.” Unfortunately I was not able to take it with me (it was in a friend’s house), so I am going to have to buy my own copy from Torchlight if it is still in print. It was a real page-turner and the characters and scenes were very vivid and cinemagraphic.
Of course, show biz is tough, and producing movies can be really hard and really expensive.
I saw parts of (what I considered) a really lame gladiator pic that had Ben Kingsley as Merlin and, if I recall correctly, Aisvarya Rai as a martial arts expert from Kerala on loan to some middle-eastern empire that was allied with an evil Roman emperor, or something. The child actor from “Love Actually” was King Arthur and I forget who the male actin lead was, maybe Clive Owen or something. I forget because I thought the film was forgettable. It was on TV and I was not paying attention. Maybe it was a “made for TV” or a “straight to video” number.
I only mention it because, it seems entirely possible that some studio or big producers could conceivably back a project like this with big budget, bankable stars and sophisticated FX, in the current commercial film climate. Of course, even in the best of circumstances, you have to get the breaks, to get the film made, to retain the necessary artistic integrity, and to get it properly promoted and distributed, and even then I suppose it is not a foregone conclusion that it will be successful. But Krishna willing, anything is possible, and if it could get done successfully it would be a major coup. I am praying for your success.
I am not a showbiz person and I am sure you know better than I who might be good contacts for networking, but if you have not done so already please talk to Nrsimhananda, Yogesvara, Pariksit, Baradaraja, other L.A. devotees and gurukuli kirtaniyas who may have contacts in the yoga kirtan scene, Bhakti Caru Swami and I am sure you already may have contacts in the Bollywood world, etc.
May you get the film done, whether big budget or small. Hare Krishna!
I was taken aback by Akruranath’s suggestion that devotees may claim that Cameron based the title and concept of his movie on Bhagavad-gita. Is there actually any evidence he did so? If not, I hope devotees will be careful about such claims. In fact, the concept is rather derivative, borrowed from any number of previous movies. And the term avatar as used in this film certainly derives from the kind of avatars we see online, as in Second Life, etc., not directly on an incarnation of Godhead. While contrasting the film’s idea of avatar with the Vedic concept may tempt us, and may even arouse some short-term interest among a few, in the long run it’s likely to make us look a little–how shall I say it?–naive.
– ‘Could devotee screenwriters and directors put together influential films about Vedic culture and literature in a way that would attract interest in Krishna philosophy and would not be cheap or cheesy?’
Yes, I’m sure. But they’ll need money, lots of it. And the money people are only going to give money to ‘names’, a well-known director or actor. So you need a well-known director,or actor to get behind your project and then there’s a chance of something getting made.
Or you need a devotee well-wisher with deep pockets to fund it privately. But he/she needs very deep pockets. These are epic’s we’re talking about not small coffee house drama’s and most likely epics with heavy CG (computer graphic) work.
But still lets aim for the stars!
PS:
If anybody is interested in this subject matter they can write to me directly at mukunda@picturetree.co.za
Babhru wrote: And the term avatar as used in this film certainly derives from the kind of avatars we see online, as in Second Life, etc., not directly on an incarnation of Godhead. While contrasting the film’s idea of avatar with the Vedic concept may tempt us, and may even arouse some short-term interest among a few, in the long run it’s likely to make us look a little–how shall I say it?–naive.
————————————————————————————————-
Thank you for your comment, Babhru Prabhu. Regarding the source from which the title ‘Avatar’ was borrowed from, this is what
Cameron himself credited for it:
“In a 2007 interview with Time magazine, Cameron addressed the meaning of the film’s title, answering the question “What is an avatar, anyway?” Cameron stated, “It’s an incarnation of one of the Hindu gods taking a flesh form.” He said that “[i]n this film what that means is that the human technology in the future is capable of injecting a human’s intelligence into a remotely located body, a biological body”. Cameron stated, “It’s not an avatar in the sense of just existing as ones and zeroes in cyberspace. It’s actually a physical body.”
So it seems that parallels between ‘Avatar’ the title and the Vedic concept of Avatar are not entirely unwarranted.
Your servant,
Madana-mohan das
Babhruji,
I was just throwing away a kind of typical sales line that a book distributor might use, basing it on the following comment to Madana-mohan’s article on the Hindustan Times website, where Danny Brown says:
“Eka, it is definitely the Hindu concept of Avatar that J.Cameron had in mind, and not the Internet subculture. Check out here:
“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar_(2009_film)#Themes_and_inspirations
‘In a 2007 interview with Time magazine, Cameron addressed the meaning of the film’s title, answering the question “What is an avatar, anyway?” Cameron stated, “It’s an incarnation of one of the Hindu gods taking a flesh form.” He said that “[i]n this film what that means is that the human technology in the future is capable of injecting a human’s intelligence into a remotely located body, a biological body”. Cameron stated, “It’s not an avatar in the sense of just existing as ones and zeroes in cyberspace. It’s actually a physical body.'”
My line does not specifically say that Cameron based the story on Bhagavad-Gita, but he may well have read Bhagavad-Gita, and he at least apparently said he was interested in the Hindu concept and not just the cyberworld concept of an “avatar”, so I think the “line” I suggested is not false advertising, really.
I am sure other distributors can come up with better lines.
You know how these things go. When you stop someone, you only have a short time to capture their attention and make an impression. Of course, if they want to talk further you need to be ready to explain details about the Gita and possibly compare and contrast to the movie (or maybe you can say, “I did not see the movie, but I read somewhere that Cameron said he was thinking about the Hindu concept of avatar, which is explained in this book.’ ”
I am not encouraging distributors to lie or to be shallow, but as a practical matter we come up with these ideas to catch people’s attention and relate things to something they are familiar with in popular culture.
One like I often use (works best with people of a “certain age”) is I show the Universal Form picture and say, “Remember this picture from the Jimi Hendrix album?” They all had a copy of “Axis Bold As Love,” so then I say, “That famous picture comes from this book. It depicts what happens in the 11th Chapter, where Krishna displays His gigantic Universal Form.”
Sometimes I say it was a verse from that Chapter that J.Robert Oppenheimer remembered when the A-bomb was first exploded.
Madana-mohana, after posting my note, I think I came across a reference to a similar statement from Cameron in a Wikipedia article. So I asked, and you answered. Thank you. I would further suggest that Cameron’s avatar is a sort of fusion of the concept of digital avatars with which Second Life participants are familiar and the “physical” avatars we know of. After all, it should be clear that in the film the hero is not a superior being descending into a Na’vi body.
Akruranath, I apologize for having misread your comments. You’re a decent, honest devotee with good association and much enthusiasm for service. I probably should have been more careful in my response.
I may be wrong, but I expect we will find in the sequel (and there will probably be more than one sequel, if the commercial success persists), that the hero Jake Sully really turns out to be a kind of superior being.
By the end of this first film, he has already shed his human body and remained alive in a Na’vi body. This demonstrates that “we are not this body”. After all, if Sully was really that crippled, human body, his Na’vi body would have died when his human body did.
This would have been possible for the Sigourney Weaver character too, except she was too physically injured already and perhaps not spiritually capable of making the transition. But the idea is that dropping the human body and becoming independently Na’vi should be possible for all of us under the right conditions.
But Sully is unique. Like Neo in The Matrix, he is a chosen one. Not everyone could ride the giant Pterodactyl. Only 4 or 5 special leaders in Na’vi history have done it, and here this “warrior from the jarhead clan” is able to do that?
Therefore I think in future films in this franchise, we will see that Jake Sully is not just a marine with remarkable powers who caught some lucky breaks. I predict he will be portrayed as some kind of anointed hero with a divine destiny.
And after all, the original, archetypal hero is Krishna. The sad fact is, mundane screenwriters and directors do not know how to portray the real story of Srimad Bhagavatam. That is the one essential story of Absolute Truth, of which all other stories are but distorted reflections.
Romantic heroes get the girl and live happily ever after. The conflict and tension are resolved and it is irrelevant to our participation in the drama to think about what happens to the happy couple in their later years, the arguments and struggles they will have, and how they (like everyone) will be eventually crushed by time.
Comic heroes do much the same thing. They win their minor triumph which we, the audience, takes to be all in all.
Tragic heroes die, but in dying their heroic part transcends their fatal flaw and death itself. This starts to hint, at least, to our connection with immortality.
But Srila Prabhupada’s books explain in great detail how the real hero, Krishna, is transcendental to time and space, and manifests transcendental form and pastimes which surpass realization of the impersonal transcendence.
Krishna Dharma Prabhu could explain a real “avatar,” if he got the chance.
For distributing books.:
“Excuse me, have you heard about ‘Avatar?’
Most will say “of course”
From there any distributor can strike up a conversation. We can give an explanation of the term. Or just say that this book explains about many ‘avataras’ . Do you know where the word comes from?
ETC
One need not see the movie in order to use it for distributing books.
Excuse me. Have you heard of Avatar? Have you seen the movie. Far out, eh? Do you know where the word comes from? These books explain about many ancient Avataras. All of them had amazing powers.
Any book distributor will be able to have a nece conversation.
Bruce Rubin, who wrote the story for the movie ‘Ghost’, is interested in spirituality, teaches meditation, and got the idea for the Yama dhutas and Visnu dhutas in the movie from the Srimad Bhagavatam. It would be good to know where James Cameron got his definition of ‘avatar’ from. If screenwriters are increasingly turning to Prabhupada’s books for ideas, it’s just a matter of time before great epics like ‘Mahabharata’ are made into great movies. It’s an incentive for us all to distribute Prabhupada’s books with the greatest enthusiasm and determination. You never know who may be receiving them.
Madana-mohana Prabhu did a really good job in taking this opportunity to spread Krsna consciousness. Thank you.
Your servant,
Madhurya lila dd
The strong anti-colonialist message of “Avatar” might be a selling point for interesting people in understanding Bhagavad-Gita on its own terms.
The insensitive Earth villains in the movie, who are there to steal the resources from under Pandoran soil with practically no understanding or concern for “noble savage” Na’vi culture, are stark depictions of colonialist evil. The Sigourney Weaver scientist character (Dr. Grace __) is more sensitive. She wants to understand and benefit from what the Na’vi have to teach. But she cannot entirely “go native” the way Sully does. “You can’t fill a cup that is already full.”
After WWII, a lot of former colonial countries became politically independent, including India, but now more than 60 years later, the stubborn Eurocentrism still lingers. Not just that neocolonialism persists through continuing economic and political ties, but there are cultural values and historical assumptions forged in the old colonial relations that are extremely resistant to change. Malcom X exhorted, “Free your minds.” It is easier said than done.
Yesterday I heard a TV news reporter casually refer to the Haitian revolution circa 1800 as having created the “first Black nation.” Never mind that many Egyptian pharaohs were Nubian, or that there have been various kingdoms and empires in Africa for thousands of years. We still have this unconscious, unexamined idea that being a “nation” involves a certain kind of participation in modern European geopolitics.
So the “Avatar” phenomenon, with its popular indictment of colonialism, is part of a larger, long-term process of trying to unravel the cultural knot of our collective Eurocentric history. (Of course, in India there were centuries of middle-eastern colonialism before European colonialists even got there.)
There is a desire today among thoughtful young people to understand non-European cultures on their own terms, whether they be cultures of tribal, hunter-gatherer societies similar to the fictional Na’vi, or of more sophisticated civilizations like that of the Vedic Aryans.
This desire to free ourselves from Eurocentric assumptions bodes well for attracting attention to Bhagavad-Gita As It Is. Here is an authentic cultural presentation that begs to be taken in disciplic succession from an authentic spiritual master. Don’t lick the outside of the bottle with some dry, academic, “Orientalist” analysis. Dive in and try the chanting for yourself! Meet Krsna!