The Religion Deluge

Religion has been both a savior and an atrocious monster.
Christianity gave hope to the Europe of the dark ages. Islam gave a way of life to the inhabitants of the barren span of the Middle East. The most obvious truth of life is death. A man drunk on Faith is much better equipped at facing it when compared with the learned Atheist scientist.

But lets face it. Christ can't possibly have been the son of God. The Quran was written by humans. Krishna was a king, no avtaar. Any one who is out to challenge these facts is fooling himself/herself.

Why is it important to accept these logical facts? Organized religion creates strongly knit communities. But it alienates these communities from other ideologies. The core psychological idea behind Religion is to create strong communities and/or make its followers lead their lives in a certain fashion.

Why does the "monotheistic" Muslim laugh at idol-worshipers? The Quran denounced idol-worshiping because it differentiated their religion from the pagan/Hindu way of life. Thus creating a distinct society. Pilgrimage is a tool in the same direction.

Remember that the near East and Europe of those times ( when the now dominant Christianity and Islam originated ) were war torn lands.
Taking a man away to battle-grounds, away from his family for seasons at end, was a difficult task. He would yearn for the comfort of home. He would dread an almost impending brutal death in battle. He would yearn for his partner/ a partner.
In came the tenets of his religion to show him the right path. In came the concept of eternal glory. Of paradise. In came sexual conservatism. Something that pervades entire societies even today. (It has several advantages. Well formed families, lesser unexpected pregnancies.But essentially, it was meant to keep the patriarchal structure of the society in control.)

Lets not go into details of religions themselves here.

Human Migration

The interest began in the summer of 2006. Well, it existed before that as well, but that's another story.
So it seems there are dudes out there who are trying to map down the entire sequence of human migrations from Africa to now almost the entire world.

The story:
* Ice age begins. Most humans and human-like folks perish as ice covers most of the Earth.
* Now, some 10,000 or so of them survive in Southern Africa.( Yes.. thats how close we were you tiger hunters! )
* Switch back to 75 TYN ( TYN is a term i cooked up just now to mean Thousand years from now ). These guys start moving out of Africa.
* Lots of details you won't want to read here.

Now, those of you who are Indians should be particularly interested in the eventual results of this genome study going on. All our castes are a result of the way our religions and societies dealt with the problem of different kinds of populations co-exiting and merging.
So the entire concept of marrying within one's caste is not just a tradition we follow. It has strong political ( read RACIAL ) significance.

More of that in some later post.

My theory:
tribes found in chhattisgarh , andaman etc are part of that initial push ( 60TYN )
10TYN: Dravidian type races move in from the north west..
3TYN to 1.5TYN: Aryan type races move in from the north west. They have the obvious advantage of horses and iron tech .. so are able to dominate the resulting social framework.
from then on till 1400AD.. movements from the west, the north east etc keep happening.
Then thers the whole quesiton of whether some of our religious trends made us a weak nation. ( Buddhism etc ). But that too for later

abhi itna hi

Acting skills..

Theatre acting in particular , and generally any kind of acting seems at the first look a very simple task. There are lines. Learn them up - speak them out. With the right emotions ofcourse. And the right volume. And diction. And feel. And who the heck writes those lines?

A good regime to get yourself going will be the following:
Ask yourself the following questions. Give a 0 for a NO. A 1 for a YES.
* Am I bad at speaking the language i'm supposed to act in?
* Is Kareena Kapoor my favorite actress?
* Was I the most soft spoken bloke in class?
* Will i die at 4 hrs a day sleep?
* Is my face totally expressionless?

Any non-zero score implies a non-fit person.

Any swagger in the walk can be worked on. What we also have to work on is understanding emotions/expressions and be able to match them together. For example, in my second play, my diro noticed that what I believed was "thoughtfulness" no my part was looking more a detective's "look" ! we called it the "Sherlock"

Looking down too much, or above ppls' heads is another common imperfection. Again, workable.

Volume is workable as well. But only till a point. In comes the concept of projection and being able to speak out of ur lungs instead of the throat directly. Perform in an auditorium as weird as BITS Pilani and u'll need a lot of those projection skills.

abhi itna hi..