Event
Reason is an 8 part documentary. We will break half-way through the film for dinner and discussion.
Saturday Dec 1st, 4:00-9:30
Arch 108, 3601 Locust Walk UPenn Campus
FREE
Sponsored by Radical South Asia Collective and South Asia Center
RSVP here.
Trailer:
https://www.tiff.net/tiff/reason/
Director:
Anand Patwardhan was born in Mumbai and studied at the University of Mumbai and McGill University. His documentaries include In the Name of God and Father, Son and Holy War, as well as War and Peace and Jai Bhim Comrade. Reason is his most recent film.
Synopsis:
Those who witnessed the scientific spirit fostered by the Enlightenment would scarcely have believed that more than 400 years later, Faith would have an upper hand over Reason. Today as technologically advanced nations still debate the merits of Creationism and Evolution, the developing world falls prey to blind faith and religious war.
Everywhere privatization and a rush to corner ever-depleting natural resources, has catapulted crony capitalists and their extreme right wing storm-troopers into power. With the collapse of egalitarian values, democracy itself is under siege. That we, the temporarily comfortable, rarely notice, is because an embedded media controls both information and entertainment. Not only do we see what they want us to see, we quickly tire of seeing anything that matters.
Reason takes us to a macrocosm - India, the world’s largest democracy. Its eight chapters are a chilling account of how murder and mind control are being applied to systematically dismantle secular democracy in a country which once aspired not just to Liberty, Egalite and Fraternity, but to lead the post-war world out of its mindless spiral of violence and greed.
And yet the battle for Reason is not lost. Even as Brahminism (a priest ordained caste hierarchy that withheld knowledge from the working castes) drapes itself in the national flag and sends out its hit squads, resistance has not ended. For every brave rationalist gunned down or driven to suicide, many more take up the mantle.
Reason is then both a warning and a promise.