History spares no nation(title is OK, i meant 'notion' only)!
Though we don't have much time for history and its lessons, nor we share any regard for what history tries to tell us, in most of the cases hard ways.More often than not, historical rendering meanders through the wasteland of human follies only to be sheltered in the high drama of Shakespearean comedy...waiting for learn-able translations.History repeats itself is an age old dictum, to some minds as old as history itself...to some flighted minds, even older.
The new dictum is history depletes all! The nation in the grind is Greece and the notion are many.
Watching 'Troy' may make any shirt too short to contain the puffed up chest and may put any pant to vulnerability test failing incessantly to keep the mercurial adrenaline to its owner's original level thus risking a momentary riot, personal.Remember the toned, thundering, marauding Achillies who single-handedly could destroy an army of hundreds...who was lurking through the 'scared to the surety of the death' eyes of the great Hector...and who in the process escalated you into the super human fantasized you. He was a Greek. Just one Greek, as real as our own Arjun, Karan, Suyodhana. And there were thousands spread over the mountains, swathe of plain and sea and over the bark of trees out to conquer and stamp great Greek imprints all over the known or unknown horizons of this planet and beyond,yes and beyond if you have a heart to trust the epics Illiad and Odyssey by Homer set in the 2nd Millennium BC and written at the end of that millennium(subject to historical scrutiny)!
Having through '300'(the movie) may have thrown you out of your couch with a few bruises to your sense of patriotism and a few blows to your sanctimonious selfishness. And, may have exhorted you to collect yourself to be the man from next morning or may have suspended your sense of being altogether or to the extreme pull and push may have shattered you into unrecognizable pieces of your egotism or may have shrieked your heart off your cosy chamber at the cruel treatment they meted to the disabled.Whatever the thrashing your soul may been through, the great King Leonid was a Greek, the proud and the real, historically proven, Greek.A Spartan. The Spartan, to bewilder you a bit more, were the first to make the war a scientific, tactical and mental exercise which was at the core of the nation building, expanding, developing and retaining and was a process... bold step by bolder step process.You got it right if you got it, nation building is a Greek gift to the human civilization!Alexander was no fluke, but a resultant embodiment of the process so masterly inculcated and nurtured through the blood and sweat addition and subtraction of generational field contributions. He subdued the almost,except India, whole of the populace known to the geographist then.
Whenever you get over with the number of gold coins there may have been in the vaults at the Sri Padmanabha temple in Kerala don't forget to give a slight mind share to the Greek, it were they who minted the first, Gold or whatever, coin. Before we chalk out our own historical journey through the corridors of democratic institutions we so deservedly boast of, lets collect our breath and thank again the Greek for their invaluable gift to us and to the world.
Political science was never a science or an art or whatever.The mammoth institutions which Anna and his team is crusading against are the later additions,but the Greek prepared the mould and cast the dye for the original political institutions. The multidimensional contours it so feverishly displays may not be the Greek setting, but the sapling and a few ribs clearly belongs to the great Greek invention lab.They started discussing, evaluating and coding politics not occasionally , but as a calendar exercise...en masse! Probably, much earlier than our own genius Chankaya set out to give civility his very own political cult and art, than science.
He was a genius of no parallel, even today. Shakespeare, i wish to drag here.What Shakespeare, and a few before him and very many after him, tended to master, he surely did, and muster, the Greek were on the test ride in the streets of Athens,etc much much earlier. Aristotle, father of literature and philosophy, brought down to the size of wordly wisdom what flowed in the Greek city-state streets.Literature, as we know it today,got its first cesarean precision in the woods of Greece where 'the real master' inked the vastly fertile wordscape which even today so decidedly sits atop that none has dared challenge but learn from it.It was in the same or extended woods, but well within the sacred boundaries of Greece, or Hellas or the Hellenic as it is alternatively known, that the seeds of the philosophy were sown, nourished, sweated and raised to be harvested by the generations to come. So many generations have, since then, taken themselves to different woods only to find themselves struggling in or out of the Greek conundrum.The drama,comedy as well as tragedy, owes itself nowhere else.
No sporting event has more sweat to its share than the Olympics, i shouldn't bother much words arguing that.The games have indelible Greek stamp. The Kenyans or the Ethiopians grab the news, gold and the green today, but it was Pheidippides a Greek who ran for 26 kms to death from Marathon to Athens to announce to the fellow citizens the news of the Greek victory in the Battle OF Marathon(490 BC against the Persian intrusion) .
Last, but not the least is the university education which is the hallmark of a nation or a society's state of intellectual affairs has its mapping done in the brainstorms of the Greek pedagogy. It was here in centuries before BC when somewhere else man was busy distinguishing himself from the monkeys that the Greek were assiduously engaged in the strenuous task of feeding its youth with what was the Greek paradigm and what should be the future rhyme.
It may not take a blink for the historically blind to pass Greece as a nation on sale, but a gratitude world citizen knows what it means to be a Greek. No civilization can survive on the laurels of its past, in case of Greece long past, glory, but that gives enough courage to look further.
I wish not to be judgemental, but once the torchbearer of human civilization, Greece is now in the darkest phase of its existence and probably no torch at hand. It pains to pity a nation which once was the pride exemplified!
Though we don't have much time for history and its lessons, nor we share any regard for what history tries to tell us, in most of the cases hard ways.More often than not, historical rendering meanders through the wasteland of human follies only to be sheltered in the high drama of Shakespearean comedy...waiting for learn-able translations.History repeats itself is an age old dictum, to some minds as old as history itself...to some flighted minds, even older.
The new dictum is history depletes all! The nation in the grind is Greece and the notion are many.
Watching 'Troy' may make any shirt too short to contain the puffed up chest and may put any pant to vulnerability test failing incessantly to keep the mercurial adrenaline to its owner's original level thus risking a momentary riot, personal.Remember the toned, thundering, marauding Achillies who single-handedly could destroy an army of hundreds...who was lurking through the 'scared to the surety of the death' eyes of the great Hector...and who in the process escalated you into the super human fantasized you. He was a Greek. Just one Greek, as real as our own Arjun, Karan, Suyodhana. And there were thousands spread over the mountains, swathe of plain and sea and over the bark of trees out to conquer and stamp great Greek imprints all over the known or unknown horizons of this planet and beyond,yes and beyond if you have a heart to trust the epics Illiad and Odyssey by Homer set in the 2nd Millennium BC and written at the end of that millennium(subject to historical scrutiny)!
Having through '300'(the movie) may have thrown you out of your couch with a few bruises to your sense of patriotism and a few blows to your sanctimonious selfishness. And, may have exhorted you to collect yourself to be the man from next morning or may have suspended your sense of being altogether or to the extreme pull and push may have shattered you into unrecognizable pieces of your egotism or may have shrieked your heart off your cosy chamber at the cruel treatment they meted to the disabled.Whatever the thrashing your soul may been through, the great King Leonid was a Greek, the proud and the real, historically proven, Greek.A Spartan. The Spartan, to bewilder you a bit more, were the first to make the war a scientific, tactical and mental exercise which was at the core of the nation building, expanding, developing and retaining and was a process... bold step by bolder step process.You got it right if you got it, nation building is a Greek gift to the human civilization!Alexander was no fluke, but a resultant embodiment of the process so masterly inculcated and nurtured through the blood and sweat addition and subtraction of generational field contributions. He subdued the almost,except India, whole of the populace known to the geographist then.
Whenever you get over with the number of gold coins there may have been in the vaults at the Sri Padmanabha temple in Kerala don't forget to give a slight mind share to the Greek, it were they who minted the first, Gold or whatever, coin. Before we chalk out our own historical journey through the corridors of democratic institutions we so deservedly boast of, lets collect our breath and thank again the Greek for their invaluable gift to us and to the world.
Political science was never a science or an art or whatever.The mammoth institutions which Anna and his team is crusading against are the later additions,but the Greek prepared the mould and cast the dye for the original political institutions. The multidimensional contours it so feverishly displays may not be the Greek setting, but the sapling and a few ribs clearly belongs to the great Greek invention lab.They started discussing, evaluating and coding politics not occasionally , but as a calendar exercise...en masse! Probably, much earlier than our own genius Chankaya set out to give civility his very own political cult and art, than science.
He was a genius of no parallel, even today. Shakespeare, i wish to drag here.What Shakespeare, and a few before him and very many after him, tended to master, he surely did, and muster, the Greek were on the test ride in the streets of Athens,etc much much earlier. Aristotle, father of literature and philosophy, brought down to the size of wordly wisdom what flowed in the Greek city-state streets.Literature, as we know it today,got its first cesarean precision in the woods of Greece where 'the real master' inked the vastly fertile wordscape which even today so decidedly sits atop that none has dared challenge but learn from it.It was in the same or extended woods, but well within the sacred boundaries of Greece, or Hellas or the Hellenic as it is alternatively known, that the seeds of the philosophy were sown, nourished, sweated and raised to be harvested by the generations to come. So many generations have, since then, taken themselves to different woods only to find themselves struggling in or out of the Greek conundrum.The drama,comedy as well as tragedy, owes itself nowhere else.
No sporting event has more sweat to its share than the Olympics, i shouldn't bother much words arguing that.The games have indelible Greek stamp. The Kenyans or the Ethiopians grab the news, gold and the green today, but it was Pheidippides a Greek who ran for 26 kms to death from Marathon to Athens to announce to the fellow citizens the news of the Greek victory in the Battle OF Marathon(490 BC against the Persian intrusion) .
Last, but not the least is the university education which is the hallmark of a nation or a society's state of intellectual affairs has its mapping done in the brainstorms of the Greek pedagogy. It was here in centuries before BC when somewhere else man was busy distinguishing himself from the monkeys that the Greek were assiduously engaged in the strenuous task of feeding its youth with what was the Greek paradigm and what should be the future rhyme.
It may not take a blink for the historically blind to pass Greece as a nation on sale, but a gratitude world citizen knows what it means to be a Greek. No civilization can survive on the laurels of its past, in case of Greece long past, glory, but that gives enough courage to look further.
I wish not to be judgemental, but once the torchbearer of human civilization, Greece is now in the darkest phase of its existence and probably no torch at hand. It pains to pity a nation which once was the pride exemplified!
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