‘Holy Smoke’ is a movie-adaptation of a novel by the same name, written by sisters Anna and Jane Campion.
It tells the story of a 20 years old young Australian woman (Kate Winslet) who on a trip to India has a spiritual experience at a Guru’s discourse, an experience that changes her life and she decides to stay back in India. Her parents, when they come to know about it, want their daughter to return to normal life.
The daughter is brought back to Australia and isolated with a ‘de-programming professional’ (Harvey Keitel) to rid her of her fascination with the Spiritual life. However what starts off as an exercise in de-programming ends up in a game of seduction, with the girl bringing the professional down to his knees begging for sex.
I had been intrigued by the movie ever since I saw it at an International Film Festival in Mumbai 5-7 years ago. Perhaps it explored the relationship between the Intellect, earthly passions, and the Spirit, in a quest for a fresh new kind of Intelligence. You need to actually see the movie yourself from start to finish to draw your own conclusions.
A New Intelligence
A few days before Christmas, I ended up in a bookshop looking for a book I wanted to gift to a 14 year old. The shop owner wondered if the boy would be interested in reading what I was buying for him. We both lamented the declining interest in books among the younger generation.
However, as I look back, I wonder if it is all that wrong anyways. The previous generations, so occupied with intellectual intelligence went on to build a world which we see today. So much so, we divided the world into morons (low IQ) and people with average or higher IQs.
All through my childhood I placed a lot of importance on learning from books. Today I am trying to unlearn much of the things I learnt over the years and undo most of the reactions and prejudice that I built into my system, relying on an intellectual storehouse of memories and information. (For e.g. ideas about Monogamy, right and wrong, how to lead life etc.) In recent years, I found that life turned out to be a series of repetitive mistakes, as I operated from the same ideologies and expectations over and over again, only to find that they did not work for me anymore. I was growing more and more frustrated. People I came across didn’t adhere to any standard roles which I thought they were supposed to play. The rosy world of know-all books was entirely different from the actual world. Philosophies were just opinions, and scientific reasoning too insufficient to measure the vast spectrum of human experiences and relationships.
Howmuchever I tried to find security in the knowledge that I had gathered from books all these years, they failed me. I had to allow myself to get out of the limit of my mind’s certainty into the unknown real world where each moment is an exploration and needs 100% innocence to grasp an entire new way of living.
I have to leave the certainty of my baggage and learning of over the years, to start with a clean slate, relying not as much on my Mind, but an entirely new kind of intelligence. However even the freedom from the Mind can be quite a task, as it involves shifting base to rely on an entirely different understanding and intelligence.
