Some watery details

A huge line snaked up to Castro Theater, waiting patiently to see Deepa Mehta's "Water." This is an hour before the show started; we found our spot in the line after walking what seemed like a mile.

Met some new folks; we talked about a peace project taken up by Yumi, a young philanthropist, of getting 100,000 Indian and Pakistani children to write love letters to each other. She did something similar in Darfur, Sudan. But the most amazing Yumi factoid? She doesn't have health insurance, despite all this risk.

Anyways, finally came "Water," that shows how Hindu widows were/are mistreated. Mehta said incensed Hindu fundamentalists destroyed the movie's original set in Varanasi because they conceived it as a potshot at the Vedas and Hinduism.

Angry, she moved ship to Sri Lanka to complete the movie, according to a K. K also pointed out that many movie extras looked unmistakably similar to South Indians.

"Water" took me back to my Indian schooling days, where I learnt that leaders like Gandhi and Raja Rammohan Roy promoted equal rights for Hindu castes. Water digs deeper and explores what seems amiss from those history lessons.

Going solely by the movie, it seems like my Indian history lessons reveal lots of misinformation and cover ups by the teachers. Not for a second do I believe that Maratha king Shivaji escaped from a Mughal sweetmeat basket -- that seems like a legend for children, unless someone proves it to me. Movies like Water seem to break such stereotypes.

Water seemingly lags like Terrence Malick movies, so patience please! If you've reached this far in the blog, you certainly have patience enough to see the 2-hour long Water. I won't reveal any more watery details, watch it if you want more of the interesting movie.

Continuing with teaching, wasn't there a teacher who called Bush a war criminal? In retrospect, I disagree with his teaching style. Fill a child's curiosity with fact, not fiction, misinformation or cover ups like I got sometimes as a student in Indian schools. Some of that information remains ingrained in my head, and I'm still trying to shed it off.