Let's Fire Up Those Neurons!

He is the PK cameo dude! Cute chap..

 

:rotfl

(With that Laks, last flimsy chance of his ever returning you squashed!)
(laughing holding my tears back)

 

Ah the answer I was looking for!While I could pretty much name all the images, never came up with the answer and so searched and searched for the answer and that is what prompted my desperate color coded answer request :biggrin2: which was so quickly honored!

Love the explanations Gauri!

 

Hmmm, this is tricky. Keep in mind that the desert and the Buddha gave the puzzle away, right away (!) – after all, apart from the blast, one imagines the Thar as bereft of history, while for an Indian, the ‘Smiling Buddha’ is as resonant a phrase as ‘The Eagle has landed’.

As for the rest of it, I was free-associating. Let me see if I can recapture the associations:thinkingsmiley

I went with my memory; I did not look things up. For example, I did not know the ‘Prithviraj’ and ‘Nataraj’ code names. It delighted me to imagine that ‘Prithiviraj’ might perhaps have been a reference to omniscient spy satellites and the US as hegemon. I gave you many points for humor!

The Ardhanarishwara is a bit more complicated. I found it wonderfully allusive, but at first I was not sure whether it was deliberate or whether your convent school education had misled you to a random picture of Shiva (Prithviraj/ Nataraj/ Tandava/ Destruction), without realizing that you had chosen Shiva as Ardhanarishwara. Then I remembered that Pokhran-II was codenamed ‘Shakti’, so I decided that perhaps the nuns with their wagging fingers had not robbed you of your inner Durga after all! :biglaugh

My train of thought then ran something like this:

Shiva as destroyer and Shakti as generative power suggested the yin-yang of creative destruction, of the tension between ‘atoms for peace’ and M.A.D.

Indira Gandhi of Pokhran-I and Vajpayee of Pokhran-II became, in my mind, an Ardhanarishwara of their own, with R. Chidambaram adding yet another allusion to Shiva.

The Prime Minister’s name raises associations of its own. ‘Vajpayee’ means ‘one who has performed the ‘Vajapeya Yagna’.

This is a ‘Sakama Yagna’, one performed for specific material gain in the form of wealth and power (as opposed to a ‘Nishkama Yagna’, one performed for universal well being).

In certain traditions of the Bhagavata Purana and Shaiva Siddhanta, Daksha, the father of Sati (Shiva’s consort, before she became Uma and Parvati) performed the ‘Vajapeya Yajna’. He did not invite his daughter Sati or her husband Shiva. Like in all mythological tales, there is a back-story here, but we’ll save that for another time.

Sati goes to the yagnashala anyway, only to be disdained and insulted by her father partly for having married Shiva (an itinerant mendicant garbed in animal skins and smeared with ash!) against his wishes. One thing leads to another and Sati summons up from within her the forces of wind and fire to give up her mortal coil in smokeless effulgence.

Shiva in his anger summons up Virabhadra (in some tellings, Shiva is Virabhadra) who wreaks havoc on the yajna, killing Daksha. Eventually of course, all is forgiven. Daksha is brought back to life with the head of a ram, his ‘death’ symbolizing the death of his ego. He is restored as a Prajapati (Guardian of All Beings, one among the ten or fourteen offspring of Brahma, depending upon the version you read). The interrupted yajna is completed.

Sati is reincarnated as Parvati, whom Shiva marries again. This being Valentine’s week, let’s not forget that he then made love to her for a thousand years of the devas – and Kartikeya was born! And so we know them today, Shiva and Shakti, the two never to be torn asunder, each an eternal consort to the other, Ardhanarishwara.

In that yajnashala in the desert, I imagined our Parajapati Vajpayee as a Daksha for our times, vain in his quest for power and glory, intemperate in his disdain toward India’s daughter, unleashing forces well beyond his control with his havi yajna on the burning sands of the Thar.

It is now up to us to appease the Virabhadra. :rotfl

 

S is merely the finger that points. :coffee
Blame Satoshi Kanazawa. :bangcomp:

SK on Big Think.

 

Where are we today in the class with purple streamers ?

 

Dropped seeing the original ! Laks, et tu another Remy!

kneesmileyfaintingsmiley