Srinivas Jammalamadaka

Organizations that combine strategic nous, professional expertise tethered to iHindu civilizational institutions of Guru, Shastra, Temple, Kutumba hold the key to our renaissance. We need thousands of such orgs that demonstrate that working for Dharma can lead to holistic artha and kama fulfillment as well. That needs leadersship that straddles strategy and custodianship. Commitment to vision, respect for customers, competitive wages, collaborative temperment, putting partners and vendor interests first, org culture, nurturing talent, creating learning resources, investing in research. We need all of this for the Cultural flywheel to kick in. Culture is upstream of both politics and economics.

Identity, Stability and Prosperity are the eternal concerns of any individual, nation and civilization. Modernity might have us believe that prosperity will lead to identity inevitably bu it is arguably the clarity around identity that leads to stability and prosperity. In India, we are seeing all of these debates happening simultaneously. As the quest for Identity deepens either as a result of economic prosperity or from a more primordial self agency perspective, we will see a fairly complex and chaotic public churn. In the age of exponential media that is just the norm. Wisdom is not in stifling or moral policing as much as directing the flow towards clarity. These debates will coalesce around a few key events every now and then and will especially hone in on creative endeavors that bring the dynamic between authenticity, fidelity vs creative liberty into sharp focus. The debate on Sita maa fighting scene is one of these moments. The creative challenge in depicting a living tradition is enormous. The west can show their myths and icons as heroes, cause their foundation spirit is one of pioneers and the creative culture is of 'authorial vision. For Hindus it is our Devatas and a living connection. Our creative culture is not authorial but revelatory. We don't claim authorship but hope to become eligible to receive a vision. This is a very subtle process and that explains why we have different rasa anubhuti for seemingly similar creative efforts. The HIndu society has an innate ability to understand when something is a function of Tapasya and when something is a claim to authorship in the name of creativity. The way to resolve this beyond individual events is to develop a deeper vision of 'Creative Fit' based on our knowledge traditions. This is what we do @brhat_in as Aucitya. To create the 'grammar of coherence' encompassing product design, communication, org design, creative story telling and even policy making. While the concept originates from poetics and linked to aesthetics, it is in fact a whole relational systems thinking approach that asks the right questions from creators and imputes the duty to represent the sacred in the correct way. Our tradition does not deny creative agency - It is called 'Pratibha' but Pratibha is bounded by 'Prabhandartha' - How its fits into the whole . Aucitya is the whole composition view that encodes time-place-truth-intent-language and many other dimensions. In our workshop we recently asked the same question of Aucitya in Odyssey. We examined the 3 positions that came out in public discourse. 1) The criticism of Chinese scholar Zhuge who asked Nolan if he was a "bard for a dying civilization" and why he was trying to Christianize a Greek epic. This is Sanskruti Aucitya - The fitment of something that belongs to a Culture and whether it is distorted when it taken away from that context. 2) Emily Watsons criticism - Which is a critique of the creative choices even within the set up chosen by the creator - The Prabandharta approach of seeing the composition within the whole. Nolan's Defense - The idea of Pratibha - creator's liberty. The ultimate test of all of this is rasa - whether there was rasanubhuti or it was a case of rasabhanga. The scrutiny will be a million times over when it comes to Hindu sacred culture with our Devatas. To understand why Sita maa's scene was not Aucitya and why instinctively (and also conceptually) audience are reacting against it, follow this excellent thread by @jamvasu garu - teapawt.net/jamvasu/status/2112233… Our acharyas will be our guides here but it will require us to be humble and seek, than declare. The difference between Katha and Itihasa that he explains is the way to analyze creative efforts of this nature.