A scene from the movie |
In the 1980s movie, The Gods must be crazy, a Coke bottle
dropped by the careless pilot of a helicopter upsets the lifestyle of a
community of people in the Kalahari desert.
Xi, a bushman, finds the bottle falling from the sky and he takes it
home. For him as for all his people, the
bottle is a miracle dropped from the heavens. They begin to use the bottle for various
purposes like grinding food, producing music, and creating artistic patterns. Suddenly everyone wants the bottle for one
purpose or another.
The bushmen had hitherto
lived a very contented and happy life with the little they had. They used to think they were blessed by the
gods with whatever food and water they could get in the desert. They thought
they had everything they needed. But the
bottle, descended miraculously from the heavens, becomes a bone of
contention. Everybody wants to possess
it. Jealousy and rivalry enter the
community. Discontent mounts. Xi thinks that the gods were crazy to give
them such a thing which was destroying the harmony that existed among them. He decides to get rid of the bottle and goes
in search of “the end of the earth.” His
journey will take him to lands where the “civilized” people fight with one
another for all kinds of reasons. Xi initially
assumes that these men are gods and tries to hand over the bottle to them. Since they do not accept it, he will continue
his journey to the end of the earth, but not without contributing his valuable
service in the fight between the good and the evil in the civilized world. He is given some money for his services. Xi cannot understand the meaning of
money. Moreover, one gift from the gods
has already wreaked much havoc in his little world. He throws the money to the winds as he walks
toward a cliff which is the end of the world for him. Having thrown the heaven’s gift into the
clouds that floated beyond the cliff, Xi returns home to be welcomed back by
his happy people.
The movie is a hilarious
comedy at one level, but a profound philosophical thesis at another. The savage bushmen are far superior to the
civilized people. The bushmen have few
needs and are happy with whatever they have.
Anything extra may bring discord and has to be thrown back to where it
belonged. The ‘civilized’ people have
more than what they need. But they are
not happy, never contented. Their
desires have no limits. They must be
crazy indeed.
This craziness led to a
lot of violence. There has never been
any time in the history of human civilisation when there was no war at
all. Some civilised human beings always
tried to grab something from some other civilised human beings. The more civilised we became, the more
violent we became.
But there were some ‘less
civilised’ people who denounced this acquisitive spirit of human
civilisation. In the words of Yann
Kerninon, “The entire artistic, political and philosophical history of the 19th
and 20th centuries is essentially that of the struggle against the
bourgeois spirit. Nietzsche, Artaud,
Baudelaire, Marx, Heidegger, Freud, Rimbaud, Dada, surrealism, situationism,
punk – all said or screamed the same thing: we had to crush the bourgeois
spirit! The entire artistic, political
and philosophical history of the 19th and 20th centuries
is also the history of their failure...”
[An Attempt to assassinate my inner
bourgeois, New Delhi: Full Circle, 2011, page 39-40]
Our own 21st
century has only aggravated the situation.
We have reduced the entire value system into two values: wealth and
utilitarianism. ‘Create wealth and more
wealth’ is the professed motto of Globalisation. Wealth at any cost. Profit before people. Development.
Progress. For what? To buy more apartments and villas, better
mobile phones and cars, more grandeur.
We razed down mountains and raised up valleys in order to construct
cities. Mountains of plastic and
electronic waste grew large and larger like the monstrous phantoms in Hollywood
science fiction movies.
Worst of all, we have forgotten
that we are human beings. We have
forgotten to smile though we learnt to laugh louder. We sold our songs and our love to reality
shows. We stifled the child within us
and put on different masks to conceal the grotesqueness of the successful
pragmatic adult. Tree plantation
ceremonies and animal protection societies became rituals that testified to our
love for the planet and its other creatures.
We clipped the wings of our imagination with these and other contemporary
rituals.
No, we can’t return to the
innocence of Xi and his bushmen. But we
can liberate our imagination, our dreams.
When our dreams learn to fly, our mountains will generate new flowers,
our rivers will sparkle with new life, and our valleys will throb with
vitality.
We can live our life at
the level we choose. But the choice has
to be of the majority. Universal enough
lest it be crushed by the might of those who cannot dream.
[Happened to
watch the movie, The gods must be crazy,
yesterday. This is the result.]
I hav seen the film. its a really fantastic comedy entertainer
ReplyDeleteIndeed, fabulous comedy. The underlying philosophy is a great bonus too.
DeleteWe can't go back to the bushman's world anyway..That's tragedy.
ReplyDeleteYes, tragedy indeed. We need not go back to that world, in fact. We can bring that world to ours. We can bring more cheer to our world, real joy instead of the cheer that bubbles in beer mugs!
DeleteYour philosophical write makes me interested in watching this otherwise a comic film...
ReplyDeleteYou'll love the movie, I'm sure.
DeleteHave you ever thought of compiling all these philosophical posts into a book. If not, do give it a thought. It can be real food for thought for many.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the suggestion. I think I should write a book.
DeleteCompletely agree,, the underlying message is so important in this movie.
ReplyDeleteYes, it's a very powerful message.
Delete