Remembering Shawshank

I say, it is the mother of all movies. Simply put, it is an extraordinary tale on friendship and hope. Had been using that line for more than 7 years to promote Shawshank to the uninitiated. So far, everyone seems to be enjoying it, from scholars to average Joes like me. Somewhere this time last year, I watched it again (probably for the 8th time); the thought of it suddenly, reminded me to highlight Shawshank's greatness in this blog.


Andy and Red

Red: And that's how it came to pass, that on the second-to-last day of the job, the convict crew that tarred the plate factory roof in the spring of '49 wound up sitting in a row at ten o'clock in the morning, drinking icy cold Bohemia style beer, courtesy of the hardest screw that ever walked a turn at Shawshank State Prison...The colossal prick even managed to sound magnanimous. We sat and drank with the sun on our shoulders and felt like free men. Hell, we could have been tarring the roof of one of our own houses. We were the Lords of all Creation. As for Andy, he spent that break hunkered in the shade, a strange little smile on his face, watching us drink his beer...You could argue he'd done it to curry favor with the guards, or maybe make a few friends among us cons. Me, I think he did it just to feel normal again, if only for a short while. (Movie Monologues)

Of what Marx thought on India

Now, sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness those myriads of industrious patriarchal and inoffensive social organizations disorganized and dissolved into their units, thrown into a sea of woes (referring to the British), and their individual members losing at the same time their ancient form of civilization, and their hereditary means of subsistence, we must not forget that these idyllic village-communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies. We must not forget the barbarian egotism (referring to the natives, the Indians) which, concentrating on some miserable patch of land, had quietly witnessed the ruin of empires, the perpetration of unspeakable cruelties, the massacre of the population of large towns, with no other consideration bestowed upon them than on natural events, itself the helpless prey of any aggressor who deigned to notice it at all. We must not forget that this undignified, stagnatory, and vegetative life, that this passive sort of existence evoked on the other part, in contradistinction, wild, aimless, unbounded forces of destruction and rendered murder itself a religious rite in Hindostan. We must not forget that these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of elevating man the sovereign of circumstances, that they transformed a self-developing social state into never changing natural destiny. - Karl Marx: The British Rule in India, New-York Herald Tribune 1853

Allowing no social mobility, even when the individual is capable? What a ruthless society this is? Even the thought of it can prove to be so fatalistic in nature. The British meanwhile, had not done anything useful to tackle the social injustices tactfully. To be honest, they have used the divide and conquer strategy to their advantage to falsely claim superiority over the natives.

I sincerely hope, all these shit, (yes shit) can be completely removed from the minds of the natives at least during our children's children time.