On Chanakya, Gautam Buddha & Upanishad Ganga

@ Ashutosh: Yes, I think it is…

@ Kedar: Shall I put you on the mailing list for our monthly pol meetings?

From God is in the details:
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In times of instant gratification, here is a director who thinks of posterity. In times of glossy quickies, here is a creative soul patient enough to peel the layers of past so that the present generation could have something worthwhile to cherish. His filmography may not be daunting, but even the cynics will agree that Chandraprakash Dwivedi is a force to reckon with in the entertainment world.
After being out of the limelight for quite some time Dwivedi is returning to the small screen with a big project, which attempts to simplify Upanishads for the layman. Produced by Chinmaya Mission, the 52-episode “Upanishad Ganga” will unfold on Doordarshan in March.
“Upanishads or Vedanta deal with the issues, the quandaries that we face even today. Questions like what is happiness, what is true love still trouble us. We live with all the material trappings and towards the end of the life ask ourselves: were we loved or not? It is this contemporary appeal that makes them relevant. Also Upanishads don’t belong to one religion. They help in understanding the idea that is India. Like ‘Chanakya’, it is going to have a lasting academic value.”

Dwivedi says the challenge was how to make it visually exciting as Upanishads deal with concepts. There are no stories to justify those concepts and even if they are they are too thin to make a 22-minute episode. “So initially, I told the producers that this could be a theme for documentary not drama but after long hours of contemplation I realised there could be a way out if we use stories from our rich past to explain the thought but for this I needed a narrator.” Dwivedi relied on Sanskrit theatre to make the narrative coherent and cohesive. “It is perhaps the first time that somebody is using the two media. Every episode opens with a travelling Sanskrit theatre with a sutradhar and a vidushak. They put forward a concept and then go back in time to explain it through a story and then come back with an inference.” So if the story of Yama and Nachiketa explains the conflict between materialism and knowledge as Nachiketa asks for enlightenment of soul instead of material goods, the story of Akbar and Birbal is used to elucidate the concept of henotheism. “After visiting a number of temples, Akbar asked Birbal why he worships so many gods. Birbal took the help of Upanishads to explain the idea of one god in different forms. Similarly the concept of true love is explained through the story of sage Yagnavalkya and his two wives Katyayani and Maitreyi.”
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A trained doctor, Dwivedi, popularly called Doctor sahib, says he has chosen creativity over medicine but his medical training has helped him look the world through a microscope. “That’s why you find detailing in my work.” Dwivedi adds his training in medicine also help him win confidence of his crew. “I am available for them round the clock. “During the shooting in Benaras, my crew brought a breathless crane attendant to me. After asking three four basic questions I realised that he is suffering from angina. I asked him does he know that he is a heart patient and should not lift heavy weight; he said yes but added that he has no other option to make the ends meet. I immediately referred him to a cardiologist friend and impressed upon his senior that he should be allowed to work with cables instead of weights. These are simple things but we seldom do simple things right.” A prescription worth heeding!