A century ago, a press correspondent approached Mahatma Gandhi with a question wrapped in the quiet condescension of an empire at its zenith: “Mr. Gandhi, what do you think of Western Civilisation?”
The British were ruling India. To the imperial mind, the peoples of the subcontinent were heathens in need of redemption by the White Man. Western Civilisation was deemed inherently superior, and the newspaperman fully expected the Mahatma—whom Winston Churchill had once dismissed as a “half-naked fakir”—to acknowledge that supremacy. Instead, Gandhi delivered one of history’s most devastatingly sardonic rhetorical counters: “I think it’s a good idea.”
Today, much water has flown under the London and the Howrah Bridges. The Empire on which the sun was believed to never set has shrunk to a pale, desiccated remnant of its old imperious self. Western Civilisation finds itself floundering in the twilight zone of imperial decline. In hindsight, perhaps the Mahatma’s retort should have been: “I think it’s not such a good idea.” Or perhaps, less pungently: “It’s an idea whose time maybe has come, but whose time to go won’t be very far off in the future.”
The Pre-Industrial Reality vs. The Civilising Myth
To understand how this civilisational template became a global monoculture, one must take a bird’s-eye view of the last half-millennium. The version of Western Civilisation exported to the colonies in the 19th and 20th centuries as an enlightened enterprise was, in truth, a very recent invention. Before the Industrial Revolution, Western Europe was a landscape of endless wars, barbarism, feudalism, religious crusades, tyrannical monarchies, loot, and plunder.
There were, of course, pockets of high cultural and civilisational achievement—Greek Philosophy, Germanic astronomy, the Italian Renaissance, and the Magna Carta. But these were merely episodic reliefs in what was otherwise a recorded history of war, bloodshed, and misery for the common people. The 17th century alone witnessed the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War, which wiped out massive percentages of Central Europe’s population under the twin banners of religious intolerance and dynastic ambition. High culture belonged to a microscopic elite; for the average peasant, life remained solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
It was only after the IndustrialRevolution, powered by the spectacular triumph of the Age of Reason, that Western societies became self-conscious of their own “Civilisation.” World-transformative advances in science, technology, medicine, manufacturing, trade, and commerce gave Europeans unprecedented mastery over nature. Armed with steam, steel, and sudden material wealth, they rewrote their own history. They viewed their technological supremacy not as a recent stroke of material luck, but as proof of an inherent cultural and intellectual superiority.
The Dual-Faced Imprint of Expansion
Over the next 400 to 500 years, the footprint of Western Civilisation was stamped across the globe. This expansion relied on six core instruments, each carrying a sharp, double-edged legacy:
1. The Printing Press: It spread literacy and scientific inquiry globally, but was simultaneously used to institutionalise colonial bureaucracy and censor indigenous thought. 2. The Vaccine: It eradicated ancient, deadly diseases, yet served as a tool for managing and preserving colonial labor forces. 3. Gunpowder: It drove military innovation but facilitated the brutal subjugation of entire continents and the erasure of indigenous empires. 4. Ocean-Going Ships: They mapped and connected global trade networks, while simultaneously enabling the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade. 5. Christian Missionaries: They built schools and hospitals, but systematically eroded local cultures, faiths, and social structures. 6. Mercantile Banking: It established modern global finance while extracting unimaginable wealth from colonized territories.
Every society that was colonised underwent deeply traumatic, turbulent, and transformative changes. Old cultures crumbled in the poetic manner of “the old order changeth yielding place to new.” The Camelots and Round Table Knights of older, enduring civilisations—Indian, Chinese, Islamic, and Aboriginal—withered away. They were forcibly replaced by values glorified as “Western Civilisation,” which became the de facto world civilisation.
Mackinder and the Blueprint of Geopolitical Toxicity
Beyond material extraction, Western Civilisation taught the world a deeply toxic doctrine: the zero-sum game of geopolitics and geo-economic power-seeking. The intellectual father of this tenet was the British geographer SirHalford Mackinder, who famously posited in 1919 his “Heartland Theory” encapsulated in this mantra:
“Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; Who rules the World-Island commands the world.”
The Mackinder Theory viewed the world as a giant chessboard of “Heartlands,” “World-Islands,” and “Crescents”.
Mackinder stripped human societies of their cultural, spiritual, and organic realities. He reduced whole civilisations to mere spatial variables, resources to be locked down, and choke points to be controlled. His theory introduced the final, most cold-blooded dimension of the Western monoculture: the reduction of the human experience to a mathematical equation of raw power and territorial containment.
When Mackinder published his Heartland Theory, he wasn’t just making a geographic observation; he was providing an intellectual justification for endless global management. This framework directly shaped the next century of Western foreign policy:
The Blueprint for Containment: During the Cold War, American strategists took Mackinder’s thesis and used it to construct the “Containment” policy. The proxy wars in Vietnam, Korea, and Afghanistan, alongside the creation of alliances like NATO, were all practical applications of trying to block any single power from consolidating control over the Eurasian landmass.
The “Grand Chessboard”: Decades later, Western strategists like Zbigniew Brzezinski openly referred to Eurasia as a “chessboard” where the United States had to maintain dominance to prevent a rival hegemon from rising.
The Ultimate Poison: Zero-Sum Logic
The toxicity of this doctrine lies in its absolute refusal to see international relations as anything other than a zero-sum power game. In Mackinder’s world, peace is never a natural state or a spiritual aspiration; it is merely a temporary, fragile equilibrium maintained by a “balance of power” or total hegemony. This framework became the hidden architecture behind Western foreign policy for the next century, giving birth to the Cold War policy of “Containment,” proxy wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan, and the expansion of military alliances like NATO.
Decades later, strategists like Zbigniew Brzezinski openly continued this tradition, explicitly framing global politics as a “Grand Chessboard” where the West had to manipulate Eurasian rivals ( “the heartlands”) to maintain its hegemony.
Before this hyper-materialistic doctrine colonized global thought, older civilisations approached statecraft through entirely different ethical lenses—such as India’s Vedic philosophy of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (“The World is One Family”) or traditional Chinese concepts of cosmic balance. Western realpolitik completely overrode those organic frameworks, hardwiring global politics into an endless loop of paranoia and containment.
The grand historical irony, however, is that the West successfully taught the rest of the world how to play its cold, cynical game. Today, as the global center of gravity shifts, non-Western powers are consolidating the Eurasian Heartland through sweeping infrastructure networks and energy pipelines, using the West’s own geopolitical rulebook with devastating proficiency.
For two decades, devotees and admirers have preserved the memory of Mukkur Swami through Tamil tributes, reminiscences, articles, and personal recollections.
Yet the English-speaking world has had very little access to a comprehensive account of his life and work.
This book seeks to fill that important gap. It brings together the story of an extraordinary Vedavith, yajna-karta, upanyasaka, and devotee of Sri Narasimha for readers across India and the global Hindu community.
A life remembered. A legacy made accessible.
Please find the links below where you can easily place your order for the book :
This happened for real on the banks of the Godavari, in Rajahmundry. Adiyen is not telling a lie. This is a true incident.
There was a person named Jagannatha Ghanapaathi. He was a Salakshana Ghanapaathi. When he started chanting a mantra, it will be like ‘Kamsukandam‘, his voice would resonate like pure bronze..! It would sound as powerful as a hundred people chanting together. He would chant alone. Such was the sheer majesty of his recitation.
He was an examiner. A person came to him and asked, I have a desire to learn Ghanam from you. You must teach me. He agreed. He taught him and the student learned. He mastered almost every part flawlessly. Finally, a spot in the seventh Kaandam. That is…
In this place, sounds like is, itthu, ikku are all densely intertwined. ‘_Thskyo thuthu thskyo ghrutham ghruthagum thskyo thuthu thskyo ghrutham_’
The student could not grasp this spot. He taught him for fifteen days. No matter how many times he said it, the student was saying something else instead of ‘Thskyo thuthu thskyo ghrutham ghruthagum thskyo thuthu thskyo...’ It just wouldn’t come. He saw this and said, I cannot teach you anymore. Please do not torture me further. You may leave..!
He burst into tears. He had chanted everything else perfectly. Why didn’t this one spot come? What sin did we commit in our past lives? He was very worried that this sound wasn’t grasped. What did he do, the teacher said it’s impossible anymore. He got up and was about to go inside. He used to come on a cycle daily. He started pushing the cycle to leave.
The Acharya who was going inside, that Jagannatha Ghanapaathi, called him.
Come here like this, he said. Is there full air in this cycle? There is, he said. Sit like this, he said. See that place where air is filled in the rear wheel, he opened that spot slightly. It went ‘_Sssss_’. You have to say it like this, he said. He let the air out like that twice. He got it…!! When the air was released, that resonance came out perfectly for ‘_Thskyo thuthu thskyo thskyo thuthu thskyo_’.
He got it immediately. He started chanting beautifully. He was so happy. Immediately he fell down again and again and did namaskaram to Jagannatha Ghanapaathi. Don’t do it to me, do it to the cycle..!!. I taught you and you didn’t get it. This insentient cycle taught you and you got it. Prostrate to the cycle, he said..!!
See, we humans think we can pronounce every sound. But insentient objects lower than us, bird species, all these speak much more distinctly than us. They pronounce sounds much more beautifully than us. When an insentient object, a sound coming from a cycle tire raises a Vedic dhwani, hearing that he understood. He didn’t get it when taught until now. This happened visibly like that.
Therefore, because Vedic pronunciation is very difficult, because pronouncing that sound is a state that requires a lot of hard work to earn, one must go to that Gurukula and struggle to learn it. ‘_*Aadau Vedaah Pramaanam. Akshara raasi grahanam.*_’
That is why when the Veda says ‘_Nathapanijanitha naattiya kanta moolatho bhaaga aabhyanthara samngnaka samvaaranatha alpapraana prayathna arthamaathrika paraangabhootha arka devathaaka braahmana jaathi akaara_’ – the Veda assigns a jaathi to every single aksharam here.
‘A’ and these are Brahmana jaathi. ‘Ja, Ksha’ are Kshatriya jaathi. The ‘Na’ varga are Vaishya jaathi. The ‘Tha’ varga are the Chaturtha varna, the fourth varna.
Thus, syllables appropriate to the four jaathis combine to form a padam. Many padams combine to form a vaakyam, many vaakyams combine to form a panchaasat, many panchaasats combine to form an anvaakam, many anvaakams combine to form a prasnam, many prasnams combine to form a kaandam, and many kaandams combine to complete a Samhitai..!!
If we look at the Veda aksharam by aksharam like this, some sounds must be chanted from the naabhi. ‘_Yattharathi tharathi yathyattharathi thatthaththarathi yathyattharathi thath_’
This must be chanted only from the naabhi. A person was saying ‘Yattharathi tharathi yat…’. If said like that there is no use. The sound ‘_Yattharathi tharathi yathyattharathi_’ comes from the naabhi. There is a dhwani sthaanam and karanam for it. Where that dhwani should be said from is all a determined matter. Therefore, it must be held and chanted from the naabhi.
Some sounds don’t need to be said from the naabhi. They come right from the kantam, that is, the throat. Some are like that, look at this:
‘_Chandramasayasi chandram chandramasi mama maasi chandram chandramasi mama asi mama mama aasyasi mama bhogaaya bhogaaya mama aasyasi mama bhogaaya bhogaaya mama mama bhogaaya bhava bhava bhogaaya mama mama bhogaaya bhava_’
This comes right from the kantam. It doesn’t need to be brought down to the naabhi. Some padams are like that.
Some come right from the mouth, called thaalu madhyam. Without going up to the kantam, from the mouth:
See, it comes right from here, it doesn’t go down.
Some sounds come right from the lips.
‘_The huve huve the the huve sava sava huve the the huve sava huve sava sava huve huve savaah mahagum sava huve huve savaham_’
It comes right from the lips.
Therefore, the sthaanam for Vedic chanting is from the naabhi to the lips. Therefore, if a person sits and chants the Veda…
‘_Thriyasthrigum shathvai devathaahaa_’
In his divine body, in his body from the naabhi to the lips, in those respective places, all thirty-three crore Devatas are seated. That is why ‘_Veda vidhyaa braahmanebhya: veda vidhye dhive dhive namaskuryaath_‘. We must daily bow down and worship those Veda-viths who chant the Veda. The Veda itself commands that we must fall down and worship the Mahans who carry it, telling us to see that and do it.
Therefore, the sthaanam is like that from the naabhi to the lips. It must be chanted like that. Some in these specificdhwanis:
‘_Idaa idopahoothae daa idaa_’ – It must be chanted like a goat bleating. It must be said like a goat bleating in that place.
‘_Hingaaraaya svaahaa hingk hi hi iheva keva hi hi_‘ – That means it must be said like a horse neighing.–!! ‘_Hi hi hee…_‘ means that sound must be said like the horse neighing.
‘_Thathkrouncha dhwani veethayaa sumangalaa_‘ If you strike a bell and let it be, how the reengaaram remains for some time, some sounds must be chanted like that.
Therefore, there is a kramam established for that Veda to say it exactly without changing that pronunciation.
*Such an immense wealth of the Veda, Aadau Vedaa Pramaanam. Such a Vedais the Parama Pramaanam*
(Reproduced in English translation by Mukkur Sri Srinivasachariar (MLS Swami, ‘Tiru Kumarar’ of Mukkur Sri Lakshminarasimhachariar).
A friend of mine — an ardent Carnatic Music Rasika of many years — forwarded to me this morning the below news item in the Telegraph of 2014 (which I’m reading now for the first time) featuring an interview with Sangitha Kalanidhi, T. M.Krishna, whose music I once upon time I used to delight in and whose political views I now despise only because they have polluted his music.
Yes, Mr TM Krishna, Carnatic Music is indeed an art form of the Tambrahms, cultured by the Tambrahms and exclusively for the spiritual upliftment of the Tambrahms. Other communities have always been welcome into the club, of course, but make no mistake about it : the club itself belongs exclusively to Tambrahms. This rare musical art-form has been over the last three or four centuries been tended, nurtured and curated with TLC (tender loving care) by the Tambrahm community and by generations of highly accomplished Sangitha Vidwans or artistes who dedicated all their lives, and sacrificed so much, for the cause of this genre of music and its hoary traditions.
Therefore, no self-respecting Tambrahm would have to, or ought to, have any reason to be apologetic about the fact. Au contraire, it ought to be a matter of well-placed pride for every Tambrahm who has an ear for this classical music… and T M Krishna has the insolence to say in the interview that he wouldn’t deign to grant the status of classicism to it!
The fact that you, T M Krishna, want to live down your Brahmin lineage — and hence go about continually abusing, spewing ridicule upon and audaciously trashing the roots of Carnatic music that even History acknowledges germinated only within the Tambrahm culture and community reveals starkly your own lack of self-respect and your deep low self-esteem. It also reveals either your utter ignorance of Tamil Society or your severely jaundiced understanding of it.
Poor you, Mr Krishna ! You are to be pitied not pilloried. Obviously, you’ve still not worked off the effects of the inebriation caused perhaps by that strong shot of heady shandy your kind mother handed you to quaff down when you were hardly out of your knickers. That boyhood rite of passage you underwent has unfortunately left a deep, unhealed scar upon your artistic sensibility and social sensitivity … and you seem to wear that scar on your sleeve as if it were a badge of honour.
Who the hell is going to read your new book, T M Krishna ? Not me, certainly .
A small WhatsApp exchange is sometimes like a spark struck between three flints: brief in duration, yet capable of lighting a larger chamber of thought.
The conversation from which this piece arose took place informally on the morning of 22 September 2026 among Sri Indira Parthasarathy—Eepa to his friends—Sri Amaruvi Devanathan, and myself.
It began with a quotation attributed to Donna Tartt: that films make voyeurs of us, whereas novels enable us to live from within another person’s soul.
Eepa objected. Amaruvi defended the novel’s special demand upon the imagination. I entered the exchange with sympathies which, I confess at once, leaned closer to Amaruvi’s than to Eepa’s—though not without being checked, enlarged, and instructed by Eepa’s invocation of Satyajit Ray.
The actual WhatsApp messages were brief. The conversation that follows is a literaryenlargement of their essential substance. Its principal views, illustrations, objections, and differences of emphasis have been retained; but its form has been imaginatively reconstructed as a parlourdiscussion before an audience. It should therefore not be read as a stenographic record, nor as a transcript of a formal symposium.
The critical reflections placed in the moderator’s mouth—including references to film theory, literary criticism, spectatorship, and the imaginative difference between words and images—were developed with the assistance of an AI research and writing tool. I have selected, adapted, and woven them into the present piece. Responsibility for the finished argument, its interpretations, and any errors or inadequacies remains entirely my own.
The purpose is not to pronounce a victor between cinema and the novel. It is to allow three different sensibilities to test one another in friendship: one trusting the great film’s capacity to make us participants in another life; another trusting the novel’s demand that we inwardly create its world; and a third—my own—wavering between the two, yet inclined towards the latter.
Artistic representation of Eepa, Amaruvi and the Unknown Sri Vaishnava
A Parlour Soirée “The Unseen, the Imagined, and the Remembered”
Participants: • The Moderator (“The Unknown Sri Vaishnava”) — essayist and biographer, still carrying within him an unwritten novel. • Eepa (Indira Parthasarathy, Tamil Sahitya Akademi and Padma Shri Awardee) — novelist, scholar, playwright and defender of cinema’s power to make the spectator inwardly present. • Amaruvi (Devanathan) — young Tamil novelist and advocate of the imaginative labour demanded by fiction.
• The Audience — readers, viewers, writers, critics, and lovers of both arts.
The quotation
Moderator: Ladies and gentlemen, our conversation this evening begins with a remark by Donna Tartt. It is a formulation at once beautiful, provocative, and—if I may say so—almost calculated to irritate a filmmaker. She says:
I had thought this rather unanswerable—until Sri Indira Parthasarathy, whom we fondly call Eepa, said simply:
“I don’t agree with it. In a good movie you could be a part of it.”
Eepa Sir, that is a compact sentence. It denies not merely Tartt’s conclusion but the whole distinction on which her conclusion rests. Are we, then, not voyeurs in a good film?
Eepa: Not if it is truly a good film. In a poor film, perhaps we sit outside and watch people move, talk, cry, fight, and die. But in a good film we are not outside. We become part of its life.
Moderator: So the difference is not between cinema and the novel as such, but between superficial cinema and cinema that has found its true artistic language?
Eepa: Precisely. A great film does not merely put pictures before our eyes. It makes us live inside its world.
Moderator, turning to the audience:
That is the first and most important correction to Tartt’s aphorism. She contrasts the novel’s inwardness with film’s presumed externality: novels allow us to become someone else; films leave us as observers. Eepa rejects this division. He argues that spectatorship, in its highest form, is not a passive condition.
A film may show us a face, certainly. But a face is not simply an external object. A face can conceal, resist, plead, accuse, break, wait, remember, and endure. The camera, held in the right place for the right duration, can make a spectator enter an emotional region that dialogue could only diminish.
Eepa invokes Sathyajit Ray
Moderator: You immediately cited Satyajit Ray’s Aputrilogy.
Eepa: Yes. Have you seen it? I was greatly moved. It gave me thought too deep for tears.
Moderator: The phrase itself is a criticism of criticism. “Thought too deep for tears.” One may be moved beyond visible expression.
Eepa: Exactly. And in Apu’s trilogy, the unseen—physically unseen—is much more vivid in one’s mental eye.
Moderator: This needs pausing over. What Eepa identifies in Ray is not an abundance of visual information but the expressive power of restraint. It is not the picture as spectacle; it is the image that points beyond itself.
In Pather Panchali, Aparajito, and Apur Sansar, we are not continually told what to feel. Ray leaves spaces into which feeling enters. A look, a domestic object, a patch of landscape, a silence between family members, a sudden absence from a familiar room—such things may carry the burden of grief without announcing grief.
The Apu trilogy—Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito (1956), and Apur Sansar (1959)—is frequently recognised for its long human arc, following Apu from childhood through successive transformations and losses.
[One critic notes, for instance, Ray’s handling of the scene in which Harihar learns of Durga’s death: ordinary diegetic sound falls away, the father’s response is allowed to register, and music enters—not as a decorative accompaniment but as a form of unbearable emotional release].
Eepa: Yes. If everything is shown, nothing is left for the mind. Ray does not show everything. That is why he enters the mind.
Moderator: Then, Sir, you are saying something paradoxical: that cinema is powerful not merely because it can show but because it knows what not to show.
Eepa: Of course. The unseen is not absent. It is present in the mind.
Moderator, to the audience:
This is Eepa’s strongest answer to Amaruvi’s later claim that the novel makes the reader work whereas cinema “feeds” him. Eepa’s Ray is not a cinema that feeds. It is a cinema that withholds, invites, and trusts.
The film spectator has to infer the feeling behind the face, the history behind the silence, the sorrow contained in an ordinary object, and the world continuing beyond the edge of the frame. Film theory has repeatedly challenged the idea of the passive spectator: viewers interpret, remember, anticipate, infer, and emotionally complete what cinema only partly presents.
Amaruvi’s challenge
Moderator: At this point, I received a message from my friend Amaruvi Devanathan. He put the counter-case in the plain, compact language in which a novelist sometimes says what a whole seminar would complicate.
Amaruvi, your words were these:
“In a movie you watch. In a novel you take part. Movie—you are forced with visualisation. In a novel, you have to visualize. In a movie you don’t work. You are fed. In a novel you have to work to be part of the novel. That is why novels have that lasting impact.”
That is a formidable claim. You seem to say that the novel’s advantage resides not only in its content or language but in what it asks the reader to do.
Amaruvi: Exactly. When we read a novel, there is no finished face before us. There is no final voice. No house is already built, no village already photographed, no room already lit by somebody else. The writer gives words. The reader must make a world.
Moderator: And that inward making, you believe, is the source of the novel’s lasting power?
Amaruvi: Yes. The reader becomes a participant because the reader has to imagine. In cinema, the director has imagined it for you. Here is the hero; here is the heroine; here is the street; here is the colour of the sky; here is the music telling you what to feel.
Eepa: That may be true of many films. It is not true of all cinema.
Amaruvi: I said “in a movie” because that is the common experience. Of course, exceptional cinema exists. Satyajit Ray is one of the exceptions. But we are not discussing only the rarest peaks of cinema. We are considering the nature of the medium as most people receive it.
Eepa: But why should one judge cinema by its mediocrity and judge the novel by its masterpieces?
Amaruvi: I do not. I say only that even a fine film supplies a completed sensory world. In a novel, the reader must give the words body, colour, voice, sound, rhythm, weather, and space.
Moderator: There is a distinction here which may rescue the conversation from an unnecessary quarrel.
Eepa says the cinema spectator is not passive because great films ask us to interpret what is withheld. Amaruvi says the novel-reader is not merely interpretive but constitutive: the reader must bring the represented world into sensory presence from the prompts of language.
The difference may be stated without insulting either art:
Film asks us to interpret a world made visible. Fiction asks us to bring a world into visibility.
That is not a minor difference. In a film, I may have to decide why a woman lowers her eyes, why a doorway is held in silence, or why a train is heard before it is seen. But in a novel I must, in some measure, produce the woman’s face, the colour of the doorway, the sound of the train, and the emotional atmosphere through which they are perceived.
The long-standing distinction between the verbal-conceptual operations of prose and the perceptual-audiovisual operations of cinema does not settle the question of superiority; it does, however, clarify why the two arts make different imaginative demands.
The moderator now enters the argument
Moderator: May I now confess my own interest in the case? I am neither as entitled as Eepa Sir nor as qualified as Amaruvi to speak as a novelist. I am better known, if at all, as an essayist and biographer. Somewhere within me there is a novel still conceived and yet misshapenly foetal—perhaps to be born, perhaps destined, to remain only a still-born entry on a bucket list.
Yet I have watched as many films, perhaps, as I have read novels of every kind. I have sat in cinema halls and before television screens. I have known the sudden tightening of the chest, tears in the eye, a tremor in the body, an emotion so swift that one almost feels ashamed of its force.
But when I look back over a lifetime, it is novels—and lives encountered through books—that have settled more deeply within me.
Eepa: You are speaking of your own temperament.
Moderator: Yes, Sir. And that qualification is necessary. I cannot legislate for every reader or viewer. But I suspect that what I have experienced is not wholly solitary.
Cinema can seize us. Literature can inhabit us. A memorable cinematic scene may return as an image: a face, a gesture, a death, a voice, a particular patch of light. But a great novel sometimes returns not merely as a recollected scene. It returns as an inward climate—a sadness, a moral perplexity, a sense of another consciousness continuing somewhere within one’s own.
Amaruvi: That is exactly what I mean by lasting impact.
Moderator: Perhaps. But I would put the matter a little differently from your original phrase “you don’t work; you are fed.” A great film demands work too—of attention, interpretation, memory, emotional responsiveness. Eepa is right about that.
But a novel demands another kind of labour: it makes the reader create the sensory world inwardly, and then inhabit that world over the extended time of reading.
Eepa: That is fairer.
Moderator, to the audience:
Here we should resist an easy binary. The film spectator is not a helpless recipient. The novel-reader is not an entirely free creator. A novel guides imagination through language, point of view, rhythm, description, and narrative selection. A film leaves room for interpretation through framing, performance, montage, music, sound, silence, and what lies outside the frame.
The difference is not between activity and passivity. It is between two kinds of activity.
• The reader’s activity is largely world-making and inwardly visualising. • The spectator’s activity is largely interpretive, affective, and inferential.
Modern criticism has questioned rigid divisions between word and image, interior and exterior, conceptual thought and bodily perception. Kamilla Elliott, for example, warns against treating such oppositions as self-evident truths rather than inherited critical habits.
On the endurance of emotion
Moderator: My difficulty with cinema, if I may call it that, is not that it cannot wound or exalt the heart. It plainly can. The difficulty is that the effect is often fleeting.
A scene that devastated us at first viewing may, on replay, not release the same first rush of feeling. We may admire it more intelligently; we may notice its craftsmanship; we may remember why it moved us. But the original emotional tremor can diminish.
With a beloved book, or a passage from a biography, I have often felt something different. On return, the words can awaken almost the same surge of feeling. It is as if one does not merely revisit a stored object but re-enters a living inward experience.
Eepa: That also happens with films.
Moderator: I accept that, Sir. There are films one returns to with deepening response. The Apu trilogy is likely among them.
But I am speaking comparatively, and perhaps temperamentally. For a large number of minds, including mine, literature seems to have a greater power of emotional renewal.
Let me give one personal instance, with which all three of us, being Sri Vaishnavas, can easily relate.
Long ago I read AlkondavalliGovindaraja’sLife of Sri Ramanuja. The chapters concerning the catastrophe that befell Srirangam—the suffering of the Acharya, Kūrattāzhvār, and Periya Nambi—left me deeply depressed and distraught even after I had closed the book. Yet it was not an emotion exhausted by the first reading. Whenever I returned to those passages, I found a lump rising in the throat. It was not merely that I remembered what occurred. The narration itself appeared to recover its moral and emotional life.
Amaruvi: Because you had made that world part of yourself.
Moderator: Yes. The book did not remain outside me as an object. It became an inward possession.
I had a similar but different experience with Bhishma’s death in the televised Mahabharata.
In the darkened or half-darkened privacy of viewing, the scene could moisten the eyes. It carried genuine pathos. But the epic itself, when one returns to it in its written amplitude, gives Bhishma a tragic inward and ethical dimension that no single televised moment can exhaust.
The visual scene presents his death. The epic lets us live with the burden of his vow, his divided loyalties, his knowledge, his helplessness, his grandeur, and his tragic complicity.
Eepa: But a film need not be restricted to a single scene.
Moderator: Certainly not. And the Apu trilogy itself is proof that cinema can follow a life over time. Still, the novel’s duration is of a different order. It can pause inside thought. It can revisit an event through memory, contradiction, reflection, irony, self-deception, or altered understanding. It can remain beside a consciousness in ways that cinema usually approaches by indirect means.
Moderator, to the audience:
The moderator’s claim here must be stated cautiously. It is not that cinema cannot sustain emotion, nor that every rereading is more powerful than every rewatching. Such absolutes would collapse before countless counterexamples.
The distinction is one of recurrence. A film returns with its recorded face, voice, tempo, sound, and image. A book returns as language, which must again become image, voice, tempo, and world within the reader. Rereading is therefore often an act of renewed inward making.
That may explain why certain written passages can reactivate feeling with extraordinary force: the reader does not simply recover a prior experience but partly recreates it.
Eepa’s rejoinder
Eepa: You both speak as though cinema’s images imprison the imagination. But an image need not imprison. It can release.
Look at Sathyajit Ray. You see a face, yes. But do you think the face tells you everything? The image makes you ask what is not said. It makes you feel what cannot be spoken. It is not a photograph in an album. It is an image in time, with silence before it and silence after it.
Moderator: That is an important distinction. The moving image is not the same as a static picture. It lives in duration, relation, rhythm, and sound.
Eepa: Exactly. You speak of the reader constructing a world. Fine. But the viewer of a great film constructs a life out of moments. A child runs through a field; a mother waits; a father returns; a person hears bad news; someone leaves a room. What is shown is little. What we receive is enormous.
Amaruvi: I agree about Ray. But the very fact that we must invoke Ray so quickly proves something. His is cinema of unusual restraint. Most films do not trust the audience. They tell us what to feel with music, dialogue, explanation, and exaggerated performance.
Eepa: Most novels also tell us too much.
Amaruvi: Of course. Bad art exists in both forms.
Moderator: There, perhaps, lies a point of agreement that deserves to be made explicit. Neither the novel nor cinema possesses moral or aesthetic superiority simply by virtue of being a novel or a film. Both can vulgarise feeling. Both can sentimentalise, explain too much, and substitute manipulation for artistic experience.
The genuine comparison must be between the highest achievements of each art, not between a great novel and a routine commercial film, nor between a masterpiece of cinema and a hurriedly written novel.
A major critical temptation is to treat the novel as naturally profound because it uses language, and film as naturally shallow because it uses images. But the opposition is inadequate. Great cinema does not merely display bodies and objects; it can make silence, waiting, absence, and time themselves expressive. Great fiction does not merely tell us thoughts; it can make the unsaid, the unthinkable, and the bodily reality of feeling perceptible through language.
The question of the soul
Moderator: We must return, then, to Donna Tartt’s most audacious phrase: “knowing another person’s soul from the inside.”
Eepa Sir, do you deny that the novel has a special privilege here?
Eepa: The novel can say what a person thinks. That is true. But is a person only what he thinks? Many things are not said even to oneself.
Moderator: That is the strongest philosophical challenge to Tartt. The inner life may not be identical with articulate self-consciousness. A character’s soul can be disclosed in silence, habit, gesture, relation, failed speech, physical vulnerability, or the passage of time across a face.
Amaruvi: But the novel can also show all that. And then it can go further. It can show what the person cannot say aloud. It can show the lie beneath the thought, the thought beneath the lie, the memory beneath the action.
Eepa: It can. But sometimes the novel explains too much. Cinema can leave a human being mysterious.
Moderator: So the difference may be not merely technical but ethical.
The novel offers a privileged intimacy: it can lead us into a consciousness through language.
Cinema offers a different intimacy: it confronts us with the otherness of a person whose inward life is visible only in traces.
The novel says, “Come inside.” Cinema says, “Look carefully; you will never know everything.”
Neither invitation is morally trivial. A great novel can make us inhabit a mind. A great film can make us encounter a presence.
In one, empathy may arise through imaginative identification; in the other, it may arise through the patient recognition that another person cannot be fully possessed by our knowledge.
The familiar proverb challenged
Moderator: There is an old cliché: “A picture is worth a thousand words.”
I have never entirely trusted it.
If that were invariably true, novelists would long ago have become extinct. The moving picture, with sound added to it, would have swallowed fiction whole. Yet the novel persists—not merely from habit, but because words do something pictures cannot finally do.
Amaruvi: Yes. A word can enter where an image cannot.
Eepa: And an image can strike where a word cannot.
Moderator: Then perhaps the proverb requires amendment.
A picture may tell what a thousand words cannot tell. But a thousand words may awaken what a picture cannot contain.
Or, if I may risk a slightly more extravagant line:
More things are wrought by a novel than a hundred movies can dream up about.
Eepa, smiling: That is the essayist speaking.
Moderator: Guilty, Sir. But perhaps the filmmaker would respond with an equally extravagant counter-proverb: that a single silent close-up may reveal what a hundred pages of explanation only circle around.
Eepa: That would be nearer the truth.
The moderator’s closing summary
Moderator: Ladies and gentlemen, our evening began with a quarrel over Donna Tartt’s assertion that cinema makes voyeurs of us while the novel lets us become someone else from within.
We conclude with less certainty, but perhaps with more understanding.
Eepa has reminded us that the cinema-goer need not remain outside the film. Great cinema—especially the cinema of Satyajit Ray—does not overwhelm imagination by showing too much. It enters the mind through what it withholds: through silence, gesture, duration, off-screen space, sound, and the unsaid. It can give us not merely tears but, in his unforgettable phrase, “thought too deep for tears.”
Amaruvi has reminded us that the novel makes a distinctive demand. It does not deliver a completed sensory world. It asks the reader to create the face, the room, the landscape, the climate of feeling, and the inward life of the work. Reading is not observation; it is collaboration. The novel lasts, in part, because the reader has helped make it.
And I have argued—subject to Eepa’s justified corrections—that the emotional life of literature often has a peculiar durability. Cinema may strike us with the shock of presence; the written word may settle into us, return through rereading, and recreate its emotional weather within the mind long after the first encounter.
Where, then, do all three of us agree?
• Great art in either medium requires imagination; neither reading nor viewing is simply passive. • Both the novel and cinema can moveus profoundly, morally, and permanently. • Neither medium is entitled to superiority merely because it is a medium; greatness depends on artistic intelligence, restraint, form, and truthfulness. • The most powerful works do not explain everything. They trust the recipient to complete what has been leftunsaid. • The deepest artistic experience often begins where mere information ends.
And where does a little sunlight still remain between us?
• Eepa maintains that great cinema can make us participants in another life with a depth that refutes Tartt’s dismissal of film as voyeurism. • Amaruvi maintains that the novel’s demand for imaginative construction gives its participation a special intensity and endurance. • I remain inclined to think that the written word, because it must be remade inwardly whenever we return to it, has a distinctive capacity to leave lasting and renewable impressions upon the mind.
Let the final word be neither victory for cinema nor victory for the novel.
Cinema gives us the trembling immediacy of presence: the seen face, the heard voice, the silence after speech, the body crossing a room, the passage of irreversible time.
Thenovel gives us the inward duration of consciousness: thought before speech, memory beneath action, the secret motion of feeling, and a world that comes fully alive only when the reader gives it habitation.
A great film may make us feel that we have entered an event.
A great novel may make us feel that the event has entered us.
Welcome to advanced semantic engineering. An elite military instructor pulls back the curtain on how governments transform raw violence, operational failures, and trillion-dollar budgets into sterile, high-end science experiments using the ultimate weapon: a dictionary.
The fluorescent lights of the lecture hall at the Elite Military Academy hummed. At the lectern stood Colonel Alistair Vance, a veteran of three decades of bureaucratic theater. He adjusted his glasses, looked at the eager, freshly pressed cadets, and cleared his throat.
“Good morning, future managers of global friction. Seat yourselves.
Today, we are skipping the tactical drills. We are not talking about logistics, and we are certainly not talking about physics—well, not the kind of physics that involves actual science. Today, we are discussing the most powerful weapon in your arsenal, one that requires no maintenance, never jams, and costs absolutely nothing to manufacture.
I am talking, of course, about Linguistic Smokescreens.
Now, I see some of you bright-eyed cadets looking confused. You think wars are won with stealth drones and hypersonic missiles. Nonsense. Wars are won by ensuring the folks back home think you’re conducting a sterile, high-end science experiment.
1. The Core Principle: Micro-Level Softening
Let’s start with a basic rule: Never use a verb when a multi-syllabic noun will do.
If you order a missile to detonate a building, what have you done? To a civilian, you’ve ‘bombed’ it. Terrible word. Sounds loud. Implies fire, shattered glass, and a budget deficit. Instead, you have engaged in a ‘kinetic delivery event.’ See how beautiful that is? It sounds like FedEx dropped off a package, just with a slightly higher velocity. Kinetic energy is just mass times velocity, cadets! You aren’t destroying a target; you are merely introducing a rapid atomic reallocation.
If the package accidentally hits the apartment block next door, you haven’t ‘killed bystanders.’ Do not let me catch you using that word in a press briefing. You have caused ‘collateral degradation of non-organic assets’ or, if pressed, ‘unintended demographic adjustment.’ It’s a statistic, not a tragedy.
Mastering this micro-level lexicon transforms grim actions into an orderly, manageable, and highly controlled technocratic process:
“Surgical strike” borrows from medicine to imply a clean, life-saving incision that only removes the “disease,” ignoring the collateral destruction.
“Theater of operations” turns a literal battleground of human suffering into a detached, staged drama.
“Neutralize” is used to substitute for the destruction of an enemy target, asset, or personnel.
“Ordnance” is a general classification used for military supplies including weapons, ammunition, and explosives, which categorizes items collectively rather than individually by specific function.
2. The Macro Level: Ideological Camouflage
Now, let’s look at the grand strategic level. Suppose you want to take a piece of land that belongs to someone else. History books written by civilians call this ‘invasion’ or ‘annexation.’ But we are professionals.
If you are a rising superpower and you want to swallow an island democracy that your party has never actually ruled, you don’t say you’re stealing it. You invoke Irredentism—asserting a claim based on shared ethnicity, history, or culture. You tell the media that the people on that island share your DNA, your cultural fondness for dumplings, and therefore, you are merely facilitating a ‘romantic, long-overdue family reunification.’You’re not invading; you’re just the ultimate long-lost relative showing up on their doorstep with an aircraft carrier to say hello.
If you lost a border skirmish eighty years ago, you lean into Revanchism—the motivating desire to reverse a past military or political defeat and reclaim lost national pride. You don’t tell your public you’re starting a bloody war for a piece of mountain terrain; you tell them you are ‘righting a historical asymmetry.’
Look at our friends in South Asia wrestling over Kashmir. One side uses demographic irredentism to claim a valley because of who lives there, calling it a ‘liberation movement’. The other side uses legalistic revanchism because of a piece of paper signed in 1947, calling it administrative ‘reintegration’. Both sides are trying to ‘reintegrate’ the exact same plot of land! It’s brilliant. If you say ‘reintegration’ enough times, the public forgets that ‘integration’ involves artillery.
3. Catastrophe Rebranding (When Things Go Sideways)
At this point, Cadet Jenkins raised his hand. “Sir, how do we deploy this linguistic toolkit if the entire deployment goes completely sideways? What happens when a ‘stabilization initiative’ turns into a total operational failure, and the politicians start ad-libbing their own smokescreens?”
Colonel Vance smiled—a thin, chilling line. “Excellent question. Sit. You are hitting on the advanced seminar: Catastrophe Rebranding.
When an operation falls apart, the civilian leadership will immediately panic and begin generating what we call ‘Vapor Rhetoric.’ Let’s look at the current theater—Iran.
Suppose we’ve sent three carrier strike groups into the Persian Gulf, the sky is glowing orange, and the oil markets are in cardiac arrest. The media is screaming the ‘W-word.’ War. As officers, you must never let that word escape your lips, and you must firmly guide your civilian leaders to do the same.
Take a page out of the playbook of Vice President JD Vance. If the press corps corners him at a podium, asking why we are trading missile salvos with Tehran, his response won’t be tactical—it will be ontological. Imagine him looking into the cameras with that practiced, folksy earnestness:
“Look, folks, let’s be entirely clear here. To call what is happening in Iran a ‘war’ is not only irresponsible, it’s fundamentally inaccurate. A war requires two competing sovereign wills engaged in a formal, systemic struggle. What we are witnessing right now is simply a highly synchronized, cross-domain regional recalibration. We are merely correcting market and security anomalies in the Gulf. It’s an interactive containment strategy, not hostilities.”
See the beauty there? He hasn’t denied that things are exploding; he has simply redefined the explosion as an ‘anomaly correction’.
But then, cadets, you have the Commander-in-Chief himself. Donald Trump doesn’t do technocratic jargon. He doesn’t care about ‘cross-domain recalibration.’ He uses the Lexicon of Minimization. While the Pentagon is sweating through their dress whites because four divisions are pinned down, he will take to the microphone and call the entire multi-billion-dollar quagmire a ‘military excursion.’
“We sent our beautiful, tremendous boys on a little military excursion. A very short, very successful excursion. They went in, they did a fantastic job—nobody’s ever seen an excursion like it—and they’re just tidying things up. It’s a beautiful outing. Not a war. The fake news wants to call it a war, but it’s a very orderly, high-energy excursion.”
As future commanders, you must learn to love the word ‘excursion.’ An excursion is what a middle school class does to a museum. It implies a picnic lunch, a clear itinerary, and a scheduled bus ride home. By downgrading a massive, multi-theater logistical failure to a ‘minor outing,’ the administration reframes a bloody stalemate as a temporary delay on a scenic route.
So, Cadet Jenkins, if your brigade gets cut off, your communications go dark, and you are forced to abandon millions of dollars of hardware in the desert, what do you write in the after-action report? You do not write ‘rout.’ You do not write ‘failure.’
You write: ‘The unit successfully executed a non-linear, retrograde excursion to optimize resource conservation.’ You didn’t retreat because you were losing. You simply took an unprompted vacation to a more defensible position.
4. Fiscal Camouflage: Rebranding the Exorbitant Budget
Alright, let’s talk about the lifeblood of the entire enterprise: The Budget.
Suppose the administration has just requested a breathtaking, eye-watering $1.1 trillionfor the next fiscal year. The economy is tight, the public is wondering why they’re paying six dollars for a loaf of bread, and the opposition party is demanding to know why the Pentagon needs an extra eighty billion dollars just to upgrade the software on drones we haven’t even built yet.
How do we sell this to a skeptical public without sounding like we are hoarding wealth for a sci-fi movie?
First rule of fiscal camouflage: Never call it a spending increase. ‘Spending’ sounds like a teenager with a credit card at a shopping mall. It implies indulgence. Instead, we call it a ‘Strategic Readiness Investment.’ You see, cadets, ‘investment’ implies that the taxpayers will eventually get a dividend, even if that dividend is just the abstract privilege of not being vaporized.
Let’s break down the three pillars of financial smokescreens you will use to justify these numbers to a congressional committee:
A. The Inflationary Redirection
When the public complains about a bloated defense budget, you immediately pivot the blame to the cosmos. You don’t say, ‘We are buying more bombs.’ You say:
“We are merely absorbing systemic, macroeconomic headwinds to maintain baseline operational parity.”
Translation? ‘Everything is expensive these days, folks. If milk costs more, so do Tomahawk missiles. We’re the victims here.’ By framing the increase as a passive defense against inflation rather than an active expansion, you magically disarm the fiscal hawks.
B. The Deterrence Premium
If a reporter asks why we need a new generation of stealth bombers when the current ones work just fine, you look them dead in the eye and introduce The Deterrence Premium. You say:
“This is a non-escalatory, preventative asset architecture designed to optimize peace stability.”
You aren’t buying weapons to fight a war; you are buying weapons so the other guy decides today is a bad day to start one. It’s insurance! And who argues against insurance? If the budget goes up by 15%, you tell the public that the ‘Price of Peace’ has simply experienced a minor market adjustment.
C. The Supply Chain Resilience Protocol
This is my absolute favorite, cadets. When we spend nine hundred million dollars on a warehouse that stays completely empty, or three billion dollars on spare parts that don’t fit any existing airframe, that is not ‘waste.’ If an auditor calls it waste, you court-martial their vocabulary.
You explain to the press that this is a ‘Proactive Supply Chain Resilience Protocol.’
“We are strategically pre-positioning material redundancies to mitigate future logistical friction points.”
We didn’t overspend on junk we don’t need. We intentionally bought extra things to make sure our supply lines feel ‘resilient.’ It sounds so forward-thinking, so corporate, that the committee members will nod along just to look like they understand what you’re talking about.
Conclusion
Remember, future leaders of the military-industrial complex: your job isn’t to save money, and it isn’t just to apply physical force. Your job at the microphone is to apply vocabulary. Turn raw, ugly violence and massive expenditure into a corporate synergy report.
If you drop a bomb, it’s a ‘surgical incision.’
If you lose a city, it’s a ‘tactical retrograde reallocation of forces.’
If a budget expands, it’s a ‘readiness correction.’
If a project runs 400% over budget, it’s a ‘technological leap-ahead refinement phase.’
And if you start a war, it is always, always a ‘stabilization initiative.’
Master the language, and the public will keep their eyes firmly wool-covered, leaving you free to manage the kinetics.
In the Vedic-Upaniṣadic vision, sound is not merely a description of reality but its very substance: the Veda as śabda-pramāṇam, the cosmos as mantra-mayam, creation as the primordial vibration (nāda, spanda) of the Veda-Puruṣa’s breath.
This essay traces that intuition from its classical sources through a modern philosophical restatement, clarifies common misreadings (including misattributions to Einstein), and then asks: if the Veda is sonic through and through, why does it also confess the limits of speech before Brahman?
The answer unfolds in two major Vedāntic readings—Advaita and Viśiṣṭādvaita—each offering a distinct resolution to the relation between sound and silence.
Sundar Sarukkai
1. A Modern Recapitulation: Sundar Sarukkai on Sound and the Veda
In his recent book — “Homo Philosophicus: Discovering the Spirit of Philosophy in Everyday Life” —philosopher Sundar Sarukkai argues ( https://share.google/pOO8xIuMB5Qq3vXxS) that sound is a starting point for Indian metaphysics—not a mere physical effect but a foundational category of reality and knowledge. He illustrates this with the Chāndogya Upaniṣad’s claim that “even the smallest has the infinite within it,” showing how a sonic unit (a syllable, a mantra) can encapsulate a cosmic structure—an intuition that is already explicit in Vedic and Upaniṣadic thought.
What the ancients already said can be summarized in four postulates:
Veda as śabda-pramāṇam: In orthodox epistemology, Vedic testimony (śabda) is a primary means of valid knowledge; the Vedas are treated as apauruṣeya (not of human authorship) and thus ontologically weighty.
Universe as mantra-mayam / Śabda-Brahman: Later systems name the absolute as Śabda-Brahman or Nāda-Brahman—the cosmos as sublime vibration; mantras are syllables that produce specific resonances with spiritual intent.
Creation from breath and vibration: Vedic cosmogonies link origin to the breath (prāṇa) of the cosmic Person; the ṛṣis “heard” or “intuitively saw” cosmic vibrations (the “cosmic breathing”) and gave them to the world as Vedic mantras, so that chanting re-manifests creation.
Anaadi–Ananta continuum: The Vedas are anaadi (without beginning); creation is thus a cyclic manifestation grounded in an endless sonic continuum—shabdhamayam—rather than a single temporal event. In Vedic genesis, creation did not start with the “big bang” , or with fashioning of flesh and blood (Adam and Eve) in the “garden of paradise” … Creation itself has no beginning or end … It is a continuum … anaadi and Anantham…. And the continuum is endless sound …. Shabdhamayam … an endless cosmic-sonic vibration.
Sarukkai’s contribution is thus framing and audience, not a novelty of doctrine. He restates the classical position—that sound is ontologically primary and that Vedic mantra encodes cosmic structure—in contemporary philosophical language, sometimes gesturing toward physics (vibration, frequency) without claiming laboratory proof of Vedic cosmology. He also reproduces the traditional anatomy of vocal sound (navel → heart → throat → head → mouth) to show how subtle sound becomes manifest speech—again, a standard yogic/grammatical account.
A caution on “Vedic decibel”: Classical texts do not quantify mantra in decibels (a modern acoustic unit). They speak of nāda and śabda as vibrations that include but also exceed the audible range (roughly 20 Hz–20 kHz). Popular expositions that speak of “suprasonic power hidden in mantras” or “planetary frequencies” are interpretive overlays, not Vedic technicalities.
2. Two Words for “Vibration”: Nāda and Spanda
In Vedic and broader Sanskrit philosophical usage, the English word “vibration” maps onto two closely related terms:
Nāda (नाद) literally means “sound” or “tone,” but technically denotes the primordial sonic vibration from which creation arises; it is the resonant aspect of Śabda-Brahman, often described as the “Soundless Sound” (paranāda)—the first vibration from which all manifestation emanates.
Spanda (स्पन्द) is the subtle throb or pulse of consciousness itself—the divine movement by which the Absolute expresses, sustains, and re-absorbs the universe; in Kashmir Śaivism, spanda is the creative vibration at the “heart of God.” Classical texts even link the two, stating that “‘Sound’ (nāda) is the name given to the pulse (spanda) of the supreme level of Speech (parā vāc).”
Thus, where a passage speaks of “the primordial vibration from that breath,” nāda captures the cosmic sonic vibration, while spanda emphasizes the living pulse of consciousness that underlies it.
3. “Om, This One Syllable, Is Brahman”
The Bhagavad Gītā (8.13) crystallizes the sonic metaphysics in a single line:
om ity ekākṣaraṃ brahma vyāharan mām anusmaran | yaḥ prayāti tyajan dehaṃ sa yāti paramāṃ gatim ||
“Uttering the one-syllabled Om, which is Brahman, and remembering Me, whoever departs, leaving the body, attains the supreme goal.”
Here, Om or 🕉️ the Pranava is not merely a symbol but the sonic embodiment of Brahman—the one syllable in which the individual, the cosmos, and the Absolute converge.
4. Om as All This: Taittirīya Śikṣā Valli (8th Anuvāka)
The eighth anuvāka of the Śikṣā Valli declares Om to be Brahman itself and shows how the entire Vedic ritual and recitative life is structured around this one syllable.
om iti brahma | om iti idaṃ sarvam | om iti etad anukṛtiḥ | ha smāpy oṅ śrāvayety āśrāvayanti | om iti sāmāni gāyanti | om śo miti śāstrāṇi śaṃsanti | om iti adhvaryuḥ pratigaraṃ pratigṛṇāti | om iti brahmā prasauti | om iti agnihotram anujānāti | om iti brāhmaṇaḥ pravakṣyann āha | om iti brahmopāpnavānīti | brahmaivopāpnoti ||
“Om: this [syllable] is Brahman. Om: this is all this [universe]. Om: this is [the Vedic sign of] assent. Indeed, even now they say, ‘Om! let [the recitation] be heard,’ and they cause it to be heard. With ‘Om’ they sing the Sāma chants. With ‘Om! Śom!’ they recite the Śāstra (ritual hymns). With ‘Om’ the Adhvaryu priest gives the response. With ‘Om’ the Brahmā priest gives sanction. With ‘Om’ one gives permission for the Agnihotra sacrifice. When a Brāhmaṇa is about to begin his Vedic lecture, he says: ‘Om—may I attain Brahman (the Veda / the Absolute).’ Thus he indeed attains Brahman.”
In this passage, Om is not merely a symbol but the sonic Brahman itself—the one syllable that is both the means and the substance of Vedic ritual, recitation, and realization.
5. Einstein, Vibration, and a Common Misattribution
On social media, one often finds lines such as “We are slowed-down sound and light waves” or “Everything in life is vibration” attributed to Albert Einstein, as though modern physics had independently rediscovered the Vedic idea of a sonic cosmos. In fact, these quotes do not appear in Einstein’s writings, letters, or recorded speeches, and are absent from scholarly collections of his sayings; fact-checkers and reference sites list them as unsourced or dubious.
It is provocative to claim that the universe is not a machine, not merely a gaseous Big Bang, not just quantumquarks, not a myth of Adam and Eve—and perhaps not even a “thought” in any human sense. According to the Veda, it is something more primal: a divine sound-byte, the one syllable in which Brahman speaks itself into being. Physics may analyse the waveform; the Veda declares that the waveform is the world.
Einstein’s genuine contributions that touch “vibration” are technical—mass–energy equivalence, wave-like behaviour in quantum theory, and gravitational waves in general relativity—not metaphysical claims that the universe is fundamentally sound in the Vedic sense of śabda, nāda, or spanda.
The authority for a sonic origin of creation therefore rests not on modern physics or misattributed Einstein quotes, but on the Vedic and Upaniṣadic texts themselves: the Gītā’s “om ity ekākṣaraṃ brahma” and the Taittirīya Śikṣā Valli’s declaration, “om iti brahma, om iti idaṃ sarvam.”
6. “From Which Words Turn Back”: The Apparent Paradox
An intriguing question arises from the Ānanda Valli of the Taittirīya Upaniṣad:
yato vāco nivartante | aprāpya manasā saha | ānandaṃ brahmaṇo vidvān | na bibheti kadācaneti ||
“He who knows the bliss of Brahman—from which words turn back, along with the mind, unable to reach it—fears nothing whatsoever.”
If the Veda is the very breath of the Veda-Puruṣa, and its sonic timbre emanates from there, why does the Veda itself confess to its inability—as the sound of vāk—to plumb the true nature and identity of Brahman? Isn’t there a paradox here, a mixed metaphor that doesn’t quite convey what it intends to convey?
7. Advaita Resolution: Sound Sublated in Silent Awareness
In the Advaitic reading, there is no contradiction, but a hierarchy of levels of speech and knowledge. The tradition distinguishes four levels of vāk: parā (transcendent, unmanifest), paśyantī (seeing, pre-verbal intention), madhyamā (mental speech), and vaikharī (articulated sound). The Veda as ritual mantra and cosmic vibration operates primarily at the level of vaikharī and its subtle counterparts; Brahman, however, is parā vāk—the unchanging substratum in which all levels of speech arise and subside.
Thus the Upaniṣad does not deny the sonic metaphysics; it completes it. Sound is the means (upāya) and the medium of creation, but the end (upeya) is the silent, non-dual awareness in which even “sound” as an object disappears. The Veda speaks in order to show where speech ends. Sound is the beginning of Vedic metaphysics as the first manifestation of the Absolute; it is also the end, in the recognition that the Absolute itself is beyond all manifestation—pure ānanda, pure consciousness, the silence from which all sound emerges and into which it returns.
8. A Viśiṣṭādvaita Counterpoint: Sound Fulfilled, Not Sublated
The formulation that “sound is the means and medium of creation, but the end is silent, non-dual awareness in which even ‘sound’ as an object disappears” is classically Advaitic.
In Rāmānuja’s Viśiṣṭādvaita (qualified non-dualism), the metaphysics of sound is re-centred around a saguṇa Brahman—a personal Lord (Nārāyaṇa/Viṣṇu) whose very nature includes real, eternal attributes such as knowledge, will, name, and speech. Here, the Veda and the praṇava (Om) are not provisional pointers to an attribute-less reality; they are the Lord’s own self-revelation, the authoritative means (upāya) by which the soul knows, worships, and draws near to him.
For Viśiṣṭādvaita, language and sound inherently presuppose difference; words denote realities with distinctions. Accordingly, śabda cannot reveal a completely attribute-less, difference-less Brahman. Instead, it reveals Brahman as qualified by real attributes and by the eternal plurality of souls and the world.
Liberation (mokṣa) is not the merger of the individual self into an impersonal silence where sound vanishes; it is the soul’s release from karma and its establishment in eternal communion with the personal Lord in his abode. In that state, the divine name, praise, and the reality of the Veda remain ever-meaningful; sound is not sublated but fulfilled in unbroken knowledge and love of the Lord.
Thus, from a Viśiṣṭādvaita standpoint, sound is indeed the beginning of Vedic metaphysics as the medium of creation and revelation, but it is also the end—not as silence, but as eternal divine speech and name in which the liberated soul participates. The Upaniṣadic statement “yato vāco nivartante” is then read not as the negation of all speech in the absolute, but as the limit of finite, human speech before the infinite reality of the Lord, whose own “speech” is perfect, real, and everlasting.
This vision finds its quintessential expression in a famous Ṛk from the Viṣṇu Sūkta of the Ṛgveda (1.22.20):
तद्विष्णोः परमं पदं सदा पश्यन्ति सूरयः । दिवीव चक्षुराततम् ॥
“The wise ever behold that supreme station of Viṣṇu—spread out [and self-luminous] like an eye across the heavens.”
In the Viśiṣṭādvaita reading, this is not a vision that ends in attribute-less silence, but an eternal, direct sight of the personal Brahman in his supreme abode (Vaikuṇṭha), where the liberated souls (nityasūris) continuously see, praise, and serve the Lord. The “sound” of the Veda thus culminates not in the cessation of speech, but in the ever-resounding chorus of liberated souls who “ever behold” Viṣṇu’s parama-pada with unblinking eyes.
9. Coda
Whether one reads the end as silent, non-dual awareness (Advaita) or as eternal communion with a personal Lord whose name and speech are ever-real (Viśiṣṭādvaita), the Vedic-Upaniṣadic vision remains consistent on one point: sound is the primary metaphor—and perhaps the primary reality—through which the cosmos is conceived, worshipped, and known. The movement from om iti brahma to yato vāco nivartante is not a collapse of the metaphor but its maturation: from sonic origin to sonic fulfilment, or from sonic origin to silence beyond sound, depending on the Vedāntic lens one adopts.
(Concluded)
Postscript: Sundar Sarukkai
Sundar Sarukkai is an Indian philosopher trained in physics and philosophy (PhD, Purdue University), whose work spans philosophy of science, philosophy of language, phenomenology, and Indian philosophy. He has served as Professor of Philosophy at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, and as Founder-Director of the Manipal Centre for Philosophy and Humanities. He is also the founder of Barefoot Philosophers, an initiative that brings philosophy to children and wider publics. Among his books are Translating the World: Science and Language, Indian Philosophy and Philosophy of Science, What is Science?, The Cracked Mirror (with Gopal Guru), Following a Prayer (2023), Water Days (2025), and Homo Philosophicus (2026). In his recent work, he argues that sound is a starting point for Indian metaphysics, restating classical Vedic-Upaniṣadic intuitions in a contemporary philosophical idiom.
This 370-page biography presents the life and work of Sri Mukkur Lakshminarasimhachariar through a narrative enriched by illustrations and photographs.
Readers will encounter:
• His formative years and spiritual formation • His Vedic scholarship and Vedantic exposition • His memorable public discourses • His performance of yajnas • His devotion to Sri Narasimha • His association with Mattapalli • His impact on devotees and the wider Sri Vaishnava world
Available in a coloured paperback edition and a black-and-white hardcover edition.
Mankind universally resents flawed Authority or Authority-figures. We all fight it, tolerate it, work around it, undermine it or run away from it.
But what if there is a 6th way?
Discover how a clinical psychiatrist uses ancient Vedantic psychology to help a stressed corporate executive completely dissolve boardroom anxiety.
Act I: The Universal Friction
The clatter of stainless steel trays and the rich aroma of sambar floated across the university faculty cafeteria.
At a corner table near the window, Dr. Anand, a practicing clinical psychiatrist, set down his coffee cup, looking across at Professor Ranganathan, a senior professor of Vedantic philosophy.
Dr. Anand leaned back, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “Ranga, I’m exhausted. The number of people I see every week who are just fundamentally miserable because of a boss, a parent, or a system is staggering. It makes me realize that it is an inherent, almost inalienable part of human nature to resent authority.”
Professor Ranganathan smiled gently, stirring his tea. “It’s a universal theme, Anand. From the moment we are born, aren’t we?”
“Exactly,” Anand nodded. “Sons and daughters growing up smarting under stifling parental authority. Students in your own university constantly at odds with academic administrators. And in the corporate world, across every rank of the hierarchy, there is this silent, simmering resentment. Even in the military, where rank demands absolute obedience, it’s not always given without a quiet murmur. Authority is universally resented. The degree of resentment varies, but the prevalence is an undeniable fact of life.”
Ranganathan took a sip of his tea, adjusting his spectacles. “It is undeniable. But here is the paradox, Anand: we hate it, yet we cannot live without it. Human societies consistently build these structures. We need them for coordination, safety, predictability, and resolving conflicts. So we are trapped in this friction between wanting to be entirely free and needing order.”
Anand smiled, tapping his spoon on the table. “You know, in my practice, I’ve noticed that people generally cope with this trap in four distinct ways. It’s like a four-fold map of human behavior.”
“Tell me,” Ranganathan said, leaning forward.
Act II: The Illusion of Freedom
“First, there’s “Frontal Confrontation”—open defiance, shouting matches, or in larger society, violent revolutions. It’s the classic ‘fight’ response to Authority.
Second, there’s the “Work Around”—bypassing, outwitting, or manipulating the system. The corporate types love this one; they follow the letter of the law to break the spirit of it.
Third, you have “Undermining”—subversion, non-cooperation, or what we nowadays call ‘quiet quitting.’
And finally, the most common: “Suffering Authority”. People just grin and bear it, internalizing the stress.”
Anand paused, his fingers resting on the edge of the table as he picked up the thread of his own thought. “In our world, authority is always flawed, so the ego naturally rebels to protect itself.
“Think about it. Every earthly authority figure we encounter—a father, a school principal, a corporate CEO, even a political leader—is just another human being. They bring their own baggage, their insecurities, their blind spots, and their biases to the table. When a boss micro-manages a team out of their own fear of failure, or a parent dominates a child to satisfy their own unfulfilled ambitions, the authority stops being about order. It becomes about control.”
Ranganathan nodded, listening intently as Anand continued.
“From a psychological standpoint, the human ego possesses a highly sensitive radar for that unfairness. The moment the ego senses that an authority figure is flawed, incompetent, or acting out of self-interest, it perceives it as a direct threat to its own dignity and survival. Rebellion, then, isn’t just bad behavior; it’s a defense mechanism. The ego throws up a wall of resentment—whether it’s open defiance or quiet non-cooperation—simply to protect its own boundaries from being crushed by an imperfect system. We fight because we instinctively know that no flawed human being truly has the right to own our will.”
“Exactly,” Ranganathan chimed in, his voice softening. “And that is precisely why the worldly mind is caught in a perpetual loop of conflict. You are always looking at the flaws of the person holding the stick.”
He continued: “Right…But you missed one, didn’t you? What about the absolute rarest mode? The total Exit.”
Anand smiled, gesturing with his hands.
“Exit? Well, physically quitting a job or running away, yes. But they usually just walk into another system with a new authority figure.”
Act III: The Metaphysical Border
“Ah, but in our Vedantic psychology, we call the true Exit sannyaasa,” Ranganathan said softly. “And it’s not just about running away to the Himalayas. True sannyaasa is a total dissolution of the inner framework that makes authority and the exercising of it possible in the first place.
You see, your four modes all depend on a battle of wills: my ego versus your power. Sannyaasa steps completely off the chessboard. By dissolving the false sense of ‘I’ and ‘mine’—what we call the ahamkara—there is no surface left for an authority figure to scratch.
The atheist does something similar on a cosmic scale, right? Atheism is an Exit mode from the religio-philosophical authority of God. The atheist exits by claiming the Master doesn’t exist. The sannyasi exits by realizing that their true, deepest identity is beyond the reach of any earthly master.”
Anand chuckled, taking a bite of his dosa. “Brilliant. So the atheist declares the throne empty, and the sannyasi realizes he isn’t the slave standing in front of it. But let’s be honest, Ranga, modern psychology still grapples with this. We try to help people ‘sublimate‘ that resentment—channeling the anger into exercise, art, or career ambition—but the core friction remains. We just help them manage the ego.”
Ranganathan’s eyes lit up. “And that is exactly where the tradition of Vishishtadvaita Vedanta offers something completely unique. It introduces a concept that shatters all five of these modes.”
Anand raised an eyebrow. “Oh? How so?”
“It speaks of a state called ātma-svarūpa-jñāna—waking up to the soul’s true and inherent nature. In this framework, the soul realizes it is a dasa-bhutha, an eternal servitor of the Divine, with no separate egoistic will of its own. Here, the ultimate authority of the Divine is accepted absolutely. But it doesn’t fall into any of your modes.”
“Wait,” Anand interrupted, setting his fork down. “Absolute submission with no will of your own? To a psychologist, Ranga, that sounds like the ultimate version of Mode 4—just suffering and submitting to a tyrant. It sounds deeply dysfunctional.”
“I knew you’d say that!” Ranganathan laughed. “But look closer. Suffering requires resistance. If your hand moves because your brain commands it, the hand doesn’t ‘suffer‘ the authority of the brain. It is simply fulfilling its organic nature. In Vishishtadvaita, the universe and our souls form the literal ‘body’ of the Divine. When a person realizes this, they don’t feel dominated; they feel a state of absolute harmony and bliss. It is the ultimate paradox: finding total, boundless freedom through absolute servitude.”
Anand sat in silence for a moment, watching the students outside the cafeteria window rushing to their next class.
“I see what you mean,” Anand said slowly. “If the ultimate authority is not a flawed, external boss imposing rules, but the very source of your own being… the radar of the ego has nothing to fight. The resentment doesn’t just get managed or suppressed. It dissolves entirely because the ego realizes it doesn’t need to protect itself from its own source.”
“Beautifully put, my friend,” Ranganathan smiled, draining the last of his tea. “Instead of a behavioral problem to be cured, the resentment becomes the very catalyst that drives us to look deeper, until we find where we truly belong.”
Anand checked his watch and stood up. “Well, speaking of authority, the clinic clock is a harsh master, and my 1:00 PM patient awaits. Let’s walk.”
The clinic door closed softly, shutting out the muted hum of the city. Dr. Anand gestured toward the comfortable armchair across from his desk. His 1:00 PM patient, Nitin, was a high-flying vice president at a global tech firm.
Today, Nitin looked completely spent—his tie loosened, his shoulders slumped under the weight of an invisible exhaustion.
“It’s the new regional director, Doc,” Nitin said, burying his face in his hands. “The man is a toxic micro-manager. He shifts goalposts daily, takes credit for my team’s wins, and publicly humiliates us when his own strategies fail. I wake up every morning with this heavy, burning resentment in my chest. I feel trapped. I want to fight him, but I can’t risk my career. I feel like I’m slowly losing my mind.”
Anand leaned back, folding his hands. He decided it was time to deploy a completely unconventional therapeutic gambit, borrowing the very framework he and Ranganathan had parsed over lunch just an hour prior.
“Nitin,” Anand began, his voice calm and grounding. “What you are experiencing is the universal human tax on living under authority. In my practice, I’ve realized that almost all of humanity copes with flawed authority through fivedistinct modes. Let’s look at where you stand on this map.”
Nitin looked up, listening.
“The first mode,” Anand said, ticking a finger, “is Frontal Confrontation. You storm into his office, call out his incompetence, and trigger an open war with the tyrant-boss. The cost? Dysfunctional relationships or career suicide.
The second is the Work Around—you outmanoeuvre him, manipulate the corporate politics, and use the compliance handbook as a shield. It takes massive mental and moral energy out of you.
The third is Undermining—quiet quitting, doing the bare minimum, sabotaging his initiatives from the shadows. Makes you feel like a weasel not a winner.
The fourth is what you are doing right now: Suffering Authority. You internalize the toxic pressure, grin and bear it, and let it erode your mental peace because your ego is desperately trying to protect its dignity from a flawed boss.”
Nitin nodded slowly. “I’ve bounced between suffering and wanting to undermine him every single day. What’s the fifth mode?”
“The fifth is the Exit mode,” Anand replied. “You resign. You walk away from the chessboard entirely. But let’s be honest—if you move to another company, you might just walk right into a different version of the same boss. Because in our world, human authority is always flawed, and your ego will naturally rebel to protect itself.”
Nitin sighed, staring at the floor. “So that’s it? There’s no way out? I’m just stuck in this loop?”
“No,” Anand said softly, leaning forward. “There is a light at the end of this tunnel. But to see it, you have to look past Western psychology and step into a sixteenth-century philosophical breakthrough called Vishishtadvaita Vedanta. It introduces a Sixth Mode, and it turns the entire power dynamic on its head.”
Act IV: The Boardroom Gambit
Nitin looked intrigued, the corporate cynicism momentarily fading. “A sixthmode? How does that work in a boardroom?”
“The ancient sages spoke of a realization called ātma-svarūpa-jñāna—waking up to the true, inherent nature of the self,” Anand explained, keeping the language intentionally functional. “They argued that our deepest identity isn’t this fragile ego that needs to protect its turf, but a dasa-bhutha—an organic, eternal part of a grander, divine whole. Think of it less as religious dogma and more as a profound shift in alignment.”
Anand leaned in closer. “Right now, Nitin, your psychological radar is entirely locked onto your boss, the director’s flaws. Your ego is fighting his ego. But what if you change the source of the authority you answer to? The sixth mode is the “Integration Mode”. It’s the realization that you do not ultimately belong to this corporation, nor do you belong to this flawed boss. You belong to the grand design of life itself. You are an organic cell in a cosmic body.”
“If you can anchor your sense of duty, your kainkarya, not to satisfy a toxic director’s insecurities, but as an offering to that higher, universal flow, something incredible happens. Your work stops being about corporate survival and becomes an expression of your true nature. When you execute your duties with that inner alignment, your boss’s shouting matches lose their power over you. Why? Because your hand doesn’t resent the brain when it moves; it just performs its function. By realizing your svarūpa-jñāna—that you answer to a much higher, perfect authority—the egoistic friction dissolves. You aren’t submitting to him; you are staying true to yourself.”
Silence fell over the consultation room. Nitin sat perfectly still, letting the words settle. For the first time in months, the tense line of his jaw began to relax. The realization that he could psychologically detach from the corporate hierarchy without physically leaving it was a paradigm shift.
“So,” Nitin said slowly, a faint glimmer of understanding in his eyes, “when he yells, I don’t need to throw up a wall to protect my ego. I just filter it out because my true boss isn’t sitting in that cabin, after all!.”
Anand smiled warmly. “Exactly, Nitin. You do your job flawlessly, but you offer the results to the universe, not to his ego. That is the light at the end of the tunnel.
“Let’s spend the rest of our session charting how you can practice this inner alignment tomorrow morning.”
Act V: The Echo in the Cafeteria
The afternoon sun filtered through the same window of the university faculty cafeteria, casting long shadows across the table. The lunchtime rush had cleared out, leaving only the faint clink of glasses from the kitchen.
Professor Ranganathan sat turning his empty tea glass in his hands, looking up as Dr. Anand slid into the chair opposite him, carrying two fresh cups of filter coffee.
“You look significantly lighter than you did a few weeks ago, Anand,” Ranganathan observed, taking a cup. “Did the clinic clock finally grant you a truce?”
Anand laughed, taking a long sip of the hot coffee. “Not the clock, Ranga. But I did run a clinical experiment based on our last conversation, and I’ve been dying to tell you the outcome. Remember my corporate patient? The one drowning in resentment toward his toxic boss, the regional director?”
Ranganathan’s eyes twinkled behind his spectacles. “Ah, the young man trapped between your four modes of coping and the desperate urge to exit. Did you deploy the gambit?”
“I did,” Anand nodded, leaning forward, his tone turning reflective. “During his session that very afternoon, I laid out the five modes for him. I showed him exactly how he was oscillating between suffering and wanting to undermine his boss, and how it was systematically destroying his mental health. And then, I took a leap. I introduced him to the sixth mode. I explained the concept of ātma-svarūpa-jñāna and the idea of being a dasa-bhutha to a higher cosmic order, rather than a slave to an imperfect corporate hierarchy.”
Ranganathan leaned in, deeply intrigued. “And how did a modern corporate vice president receive a sixteenth-century Vedantic paradigm shift?”
“At first, there was this profound silence,” Anand said. “You could almost see the gears shifting in his head. The breakthrough came when he realized that his intense anxiety wasn’t actually caused by his boss’s behavior—it was caused by his own ego constantly throwing up walls to defend its dignity against a flawed man…. Let’s say, a bit like how the human auto-immunity system is known to overreact to physical imbalances within us caused by allergy and releasing an overload of antibodies to fight it. By reframing his daily corporate tasks not as submission to a toxic director, but as a form of kainkarya—a dutiful offering to the larger universe—he completely re-anchored his psychology.”
Anand took another sip of coffee, a smile spreading across his face. “He came back to my office yesterday for a follow-up. He told me that earlier that week, the director launched into one of his typical, loud public tirades during a regional strategy meeting. Usually, Nitin’s blood pressure would spike, his jaw would clench, and he’d spend the next three days simmering in silent rage—classic Mode 4.”
“And this time?” Ranganathan asked.
“This time, Nitin said he just sat there, looked at the man, and felt an overwhelming sense of calm. He internally detached his ego from the situation. He recognized that the director was just a flawed, insecure actor playing a temporary part in a worldly system. Nitin told me, ‘Doc, I realized my true boss wasn’t sitting in that cabin. I did my job flawlessly, presented the data objectively, and offered the day’s work to the universe. When he started shouting, the words just slid right past me. There was no ego-wall for them to hit.’“
Ranganathan let out a soft, appreciative laugh, nodding slowly. “Wonderful. He moved from the horizontal friction of wills to the vertical alignment of reality. He didn’t change his job, he didn’t change his boss, and he didn’t even run away. He simply woke up to his true nature while sitting right there in the boardroom.”
“Exactly,” Anand said. “From a clinical perspective, his stress markers are down, his sleep has improved, and his cognitive clarity is back. But more importantly, he has cracked the secret code on how to survive a toxic environment.
“Modern psychology always tells patients to ‘set boundaries‘ or ‘assertthemselves‘—which just reinforces the ego’s fortresses. Visishtadvaita Vedanta showed him how to dissolve the fortress entirely by aligning with a perfectauthority.”
Anand smiled, clinking his cup against Ranganathan’s. “I just told him the truth, Ranga. Once you realize you belong to the grand design, the small tyrants of the world lose their power to make you suffer.”
Prof. Ranganathan, the philosophy department faculty member smiled and said to his colleague, the psychiatrist , Dr Anand :
“Well … Anand , all’s well then that ends well . But I’m not going to let you have the last word. The last word always must be found in the Bhagavath Gita”.
Ranganathan’s eyes drifted to the window for a moment, a look of profound satisfaction settling on his face. “You know, Anand, what you did in that clinic room is the exact psychological translation of the ultimate counsel given in the Bhagavad Gita. When Arjuna was paralyzed by his own internal conflicts, Krishna didn’t tell him to run away from the battlefield, nor did he tell him to build an ego-fortress. He gave him a deceptively simple formula in the ninth chapter, verse twenty-seven.”
Ranganathan closed his eyes softly and recited the timeless verses verbatim, his voice dropping into a rhythmic, steady chant:
“Yat karoṣi yad aśnāsi yaj juhoṣi dadāsi yat / Yat tapasyasi kaunteya tat kuruṣva mad-arpaṇam”
“‘Whatever you do, whatever you consume, whatever offerings or sacrifices you make, dedicate it all as an offering unto Me.’
“And right in the very next verse,” Ranganathan continued, opening his eyes, “Krishna promises the exact psychological liberation your patient experienced: śubhāśubha-phalair evaṁ mokṣyase karma-bandhanaiḥ. He tells him that by shifting the destination of his actions, he will be completely freed from the bondage of results, whether they are good or bad.
Your patient stopped working for the fruit of his toxic boss’s approval and began offering his daily effort to the cosmic design. The moment he did that, the chain of resentment towards Authority simply snapped.”
Ranganathan raised his coffee cup in a gentle toast. “It seems, my friend, that you successfully translated ancient theology into a highly effective therapeutic tool. Ramanuja would have been proud of your psychiatric gambit.”
On M.S. Subbulakshmi, the biopic boom, and the ethics of homage
byM. K. Sudarshan
September 18, 2026: Chennai, India
I wish today we lovers of M.S. Subbulakshmi would leave her spirit alone instead of every now and then resurrecting her from the dead only to serve some odd political and / or non-political agenda of certain sections of Tamil society or to invoke her in pretentious piety in the name of serving the arts of classical Carnatic music. M.S. has been awarded Bharat Ratna. Period.
She has been glorified enough in her lifetime and in afterlife too—and to go on glorifying her further, writing articles and books about her (T.M. Krishna et al.), building large misshapen statues for her right in the middle of city roads, or instituting sundry awards and institutional endowments in her name (the Madras Music Academy, which dragged the matter all the way to the Supreme Court of India in an unseemly, unsavoury legal imbroglio)—is not to enhance her glory but to reduce it to cheap brand-name exploitation.
All her life M.S. Subbulakshmi had been an extremely private and gracious person. She was distinctly uncomfortable under the spotlight other than when she was performing a kutcheri on stage. She was happy to live under the shadow of her husband, T. Sadasivam, who took full and masterly control of managing her public and media relationships and affairs, leaving her to concentrate on her art and devote herself to her personal spiritual pursuits.
Enter the biopic: “M.S – A Legacy On Screen”
Today, there’s now another attempt to glorify M.S. Subbulakshmi: a Bollywood-like movie biopic announced with gala fanfare and high-profile pomp and ministerial pageantry. On her 110th birth anniversary (September 16, 2026), the project was officially launched at the Music Academy in Chennai. Rashmika Mandanna will essay M.S.; Gowtam Tinnanuri will direct; Anirudh Ravichander will compose. Kamal Haasan gave the first clap. The title—M.S – A Legacy On Screen—says it all.
What is the real purpose, I ask? To pay tribute to her memory… again and again? For God’s sake, the tributes have already gone stale and pale— one only hears the same platitudes, the same rehashed inanities, the same vapid, insipid phraseology of praise and eulogy that have been repeated a hundred times before ever since the gracious soul departed! Enough, please, for God’s sake, enough!
Homage as instrument, art as afterthought
The unease I am expressing here with this continual glorification of MSS is not with remembrance; it is with instrumentalization.
Each new “tribute” risks serving agendas—cultural-political, institutional prestige, box-office positioning—more than it serves the music itself. When homage becomes spectacle, the artist’s inner life is eclipsed by iconography and hagiography. The private, spiritually oriented musician is recast as a brand, her name a banner under which present -day cultural institutions and industries … and haute couture aficionados and washed-up retired film-stars too … march.
Consider the ecosystem now assembling around the biopic: star casting, pan-India marketing, producers with deep industry clout, a launch at the very temple of Carnatic orthodoxy, and the ritual language of “legacy.” This is not merely a film announcement; it is a public-relations extravaganza dressed as devotion.
If homage must happen, let it honour the art
If the world of Carnatic music wants to pay homage to M.S. Subbulakshmi today, let it do so not by words, pageantry and public-relations extravaganzas but by emulating her artistry—by imbibing the lofty musical values she personified in her kutcheris; by respecting her paataantharam; her humility and self-effacing nature; her large-heartedness; her hard work; her penance in striving for excellence.
M.S. Subbulakshmi’s music deserved all the great accolades she received when alive and posthumously. Those awards were for her music and musical excellence alone. Not for her public persona, brand image, or “classical diva” status that got conferred upon her later without her ever hankering after it … or even being self-conscious of it.
Concrete forms of honour that would actually serve the art:
Performance-centred tributes: Kutcheris and lecture-demonstrations that foreground paataantharam, sruti-shuddham, and repertoire choices she championed.
Archival access and study: Critical editions of recordings, transparent sourcing, and pedagogical materials that let students engage her art without hagiography.
Restraint in iconography: Fewer statues and awards; more support for serious scholarship and for artists who embody her discipline.
The biopic’s promise—and peril
Biopics can humanize icons, but they also compress complexity into narrative arcs designed for mass appeal. Given M.S.’s discomfort with the spotlight outside performance, the film’s success as “tribute” will depend on whether it resists turning her life into a brand story and instead lets the music—and the ethics behind it—lead.
Today the true nature of the public adulation and all the razzmatazz surrounding her legacy seems less like a genuine tribute to an artiste and far more like media hype and cleverly packaged PR stunts. Fine by me , I won’t bother too much … but only with a caveat.
If that’s the grandstanding way the public mood today wishes to celebrate M.S. Subbulakshmi, I suggest that the biopic movie being planned for her ought to be a biopic on her husband, the inimitable and consummate Sri T. Sadasivam, whose management skills are what made the “M.S. mystique” what it became. Celebrate Sadasivam Sir if you have to. And please leave Subbulakshmi alone, for God’s sake—she’s very happy where she must surely be in the high heavens and she doesn’t really need your hallelujahs.
Postscript: On the same week as the Chennai biopic launch, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman was chief guest at a separate M.S. Subbulakshmi 110th-birth-anniversary music festival in Bengaluru, where she became emotional listening to M.S.’s songs and spoke of her contribution to Carnatic music.
The inclusion of such high-profile ministerial presence—across cities and formats—only sharpens the question this op-ed raises: when homage becomes state-adjacent spectacle, does it honour the artist or instrumentalize her memory?
Sudarshan Madabushi is a senior bilingual writer, author and independent blogger based in Chennai. He writes on literature, religion, philosophy, cultural history, and public affairs. He is the son of Sangitha Kalanidhi Dr Smt Mani Krishnaswami with whom M S Subbulakshmi shared a very close and warm relationship — both professional and personal.
For example, if one understands the word “soteriological” and the mathematical concept of “concentric circles,” it may still be somewhat difficult for lay readers to understand how the two are connected when they are presented together. This is merely my opinion.
Then, regarding the Śrī Sūkta, you asked about the following passage:
“I take refuge in that Padmā, who is radiant like the moon, who shines with splendour and fame, who is beloved by the gods, who is generous, and who is seated upon the lotus. I reject Alakṣmī, who is inauspicious.”
In a similar sense, Āḷavandār has also expressed the idea in the Catuḥśloki:
“Even the most capable among the gods cannot adequately describe your greatness, for it is beyond the power of the mind. Yet, having become your servant and surrendered to you, I shall praise you. O Queen of the universe, O Consort of the Lord of the universe, the wise know your compassion.”
At the end of that Catuḥśloki, after the four verses, we also recite the first verse of Rāmānuja’s Gadya-traya. All this concerns Mahālakṣmī. You already know this very well and have written a great deal about it—the way Mahālakṣmī forms an integral part of our divine conception. The first passage of the Gadya-traya begins with “Bhagavan Nārāyaṇa…”
After that, in the Tiruvāymoḻi, Nammāḻvār clearly speaks of surrender in the sixth centum, fifth decad, eighth verse:
“Remove my suffering; do not leave me to perish. I have no other refuge. O Lord who hold the curved discus, O great enchanter reclining at Kuḍantai, when my body weakens and my life begins to depart, do not delay—come and hold me firmly, and take me with you. You alone must do this.”
There is another prayer by Nammāḻvār in the second decad, in the verse beginning “Emmā vīṭṭu tiṟamum ceppum…” He asks:
“What is there that I can offer to my father? What knowledge do I possess? O Lord of the radiant, jewel-like form, O Lord who rides the great ocean-elephant, do not allow me to waste my time.”
There are many such passages. I have mentioned only two examples from Nammāḻvār.
Periyāḻvār also speaks in this manner. In his Tirumoḻi, in the final, fourth centum, the first decad begins with “Vākku-t-tūymai.” In its ninth verse, he says:
“O trustworthy Lord, O Lord praised by those who speak of you, O Narasiṃha, O King of the gods, O One who measured the seven worlds, O Eternal One, O Cause who churned the turbulent ocean, O Lord of the mighty eight-legged elephant—O my Lord, I belong to you. Remove the sufferings of this helpless person.”
I will give you an even more specific example. Periyāḻvār says:
“I have no other support except reaching those who possess the true refuge. Although I am unworthy, I have approached you. Please show mercy to me. When exhaustion comes upon me and suffering overwhelms me, I may not be able to remember you at that moment. Therefore, O Lord reclining upon the serpent-bed at Śrīraṅgam, I am making this request now, in advance, for that moment.”
This is his expression of surrender.
When we examine the subject further, we find that before the examples of Draupadī and Vibhīṣaṇa, the surrender of Gajendra is repeatedly highlighted by the great teachers. It is often said to be the most accessible and powerful example of surrender.
Kulaśekhara Āḻvār has also composed an entire decad of ten verses on surrender. It begins with “Tarutuyaram taḍāyē…” and forms the fifth decad. If you read it, you will see that throughout those ten verses he says that even if Perumāḷ appears to ignore us for a while, we must continue to belong to him and must surrender to him.
Tirumaṅgai Āḻvār also expresses surrender near the end of his Periya Tirumoḻi. In the eighth verse of the final decad, he says:
“O Lord of Śrīraṅgam, surrounded by beautiful groves, I have no other refuge apart from your grace. O my jewel, my precious gem, O Madhusūdana, tell me the way by which I may attain salvation, O Supreme Light.”
That too is an expression of surrender.
You have mentioned three works of Svāmi Vedānta Deśika, and all three are very appropriate texts. They are three hymns connected with the doctrine of surrender and the means of attaining refuge. Along with them, one may also mention the Tamil work Adaikkalappattu. In that Tamil work, Svāmi Deśika explains the subject of surrender in considerable detail.
There is also a verse in Āḷavandār’s Stotra-ratna which is recited during the daily worship:
“I am not established in righteousness. I do not possess knowledge of the Self. I am not devoted to your lotus feet. I have no possessions and no other refuge. O One who grants refuge, I surrender at the base of your feet.”
The proper method of surrender was first clearly indicated in this manner by Āḷavandār. Certainly, Svāmi Deśika later dealt with the subject in much greater detail. My suggestion was simply that, beginning with the Āḻvārs, you could refer to Āḷavandār, then Rāmānuja, and finally Svāmi Deśika.
This is only my personal observation. I made the suggestion because, if the subject is presented in an abstract manner—without referring to Svāmi Deśika—and only the general concept is discussed, it may not be as clear. That is all I wished to suggest.
