The Odyssey and Fragile Human Bonds

I watched Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey yesterday. It kept me engrossed because of my curious interest in Greek mythology and its characters. I was familiar with most of the names and some of their deeds. Watching the movie gave me clearer notions about them. The conclusion kept me totally hooked.

“We’ve broken the fragile bonds between men,” Odysseus tells Penelope towards the end. Throughout the movie, “the laws of Zeus” find mention like a motif. The conclusion makes it perfectly clear that Zeus’ laws are not any written legal code but the divinely sanctioned moral order that governs how human beings should behave towards one another including strangers.

I was instinctively reminded of the classical Indian injunction: Atithi Devo Bhava – Treat your guest as God. A stranger is welcomed before being questioned in the tradition of Zeus. Food, drink, and shelter had to be offered. The guest had to be treated with respect and given a parting gift.

India had a similar tradition. At least in its written scriptures.

Neither Odysseus’ Greece nor India of any time ever put such great ideals into practice. Today’s India treats everybody as enemies. Even young students who demand the justice they rightly deserve are treated like enemies. The Muslim citizens are enemies. So are the Christians. Even the Dalits who are assumed to be Hindus!

Only those who support Narendra Modi and his extreme right-wing notions are welcome now in India. Even among them, those who are not useful to the Party may be defenestrated at any time. [I like that word ‘defenestrate’ because it has a lot of visual impact: throwing someone out of the window.]

Odysseus has to defenestrate a lot of people, his own citizens, in the end.

I mentioned Rama and Sita of India’s great epic yesterday along with Odysseus and Penelope. When Rama returned home after his long exile and war against evils, Sita became a martyr for the sake of his personal glory and honour; she is worse than defenestrated. But in The Odyssey Penelope becomes a greater heroine. The worthless men who were all trying to woo her are defenestrated, literally. Thrown out of the window.

Those who have broken the laws of Zeus, those who have brought the eternal moral codes to dust, should be defenestrated – not sitting in the Parliament and legislating for the nation.

The real villains in The Odyssey are not Cyclopes and sea monsters. They are the invisible forces that slowly erode trust, memory, affection, and hope. The epic finally reminds us that the most heroic act is not slaying monsters but remaining faithful to those we love despite absence, suffering, and uncertainty.

If someone in the lewd crowd questions your wife’s chastity, you don’t throw your wife to the fire to test the durability of her hymen. Odysseus senses Penelope’s heartbeats. He has already checked on the men who had invaded his palace. He understands their heartlessness: how they have broken the eternal laws of Zeus.

Who are the virtuous and who are the villains? I left the cinema hall feeling that we in India never understood that difference – right from the Treta Yuga.   

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