The Dreams Of Tipu Sultan

TIPU: And a defeated General! Poornaiya, you are a Brahman.
You ride a horse and lead a battalion, but you think like a pedant.
You do not understand a soldier. This man Cornwallis - he led
the English armies in the Americas and he lost the war! To a
farmer called Washington! And his Government sends him to India -

POORNAIYA: Let's pray that he understands Peace, Your Majesty.

TIPU: He understands nothing but the ignominy of defeat,
of surrender. Can't you imagine the whispers, the sly smiles,
the nudges that must have greeted the Lord in London? Even
if no slights were intended, he would have imagined them. He
must, if he is a soldier!! Can't you see him tossing and turning
in bed, thinking only if refurbishing his honour? And he
knows - and I know - that to get the stain off his reputation he
needs to vanquish one man in India - only one - Tipu Sultan!

The Dreams Of Tipu Sultan

TIPU: No, no, no. We must have someone from there. We
need new ideas. Two gardeners. From the garden of Versailles.
They'll work in our Lal Bagh.

The Dreams Of Tipu Sultan

KIRMANI: I forgot all about the letter. Naturally, with all
that followed. Next day, I found it in my pocket. Reluctantly,
I broke open the seal. Inside was a paper on which he had
recorded the dream he had had the previous night. His last
dream. With that my history ends. Yours begins.

Bali

QUEEN: You're not ugly, you know. You are lonely.

Bali

People mock at mahouts. Call us 'low-born'. But where would
all your princes and kings be without us, I want to know. What
would happen to their elephants? No elephants. No army. No
pomp and splendour. No processions. No kings! Ha!

Bali - Preface

The dialectic found some resolution when the Brahmins
renounced blood sacrifice. Miniature figurines, made of dough,
were substituted for live animals, a practice that continues
to this day. Still, the Jains argued that this was no solution.
Although no animals were slaughtered and no meat consumed,
these figures of dough, mimicking the forms of real animals,
clearly carried the original violent impulse within them.
And why dough rather than, say, mud or chalk? Because an
offering makes sense only if it is meant as food for
gods and is, therefore, cooked and consumed by the devotees. Thus
the priests had merely replaced actual violence with violence
in intention, which, said the Jains, was no less dehumanizing.
This argument gave the debate a much more complex ethical twist.
The Jain position raises the question: if intended violence
condemns one as surely as actual violence, that is, if one is
morally responsible for merely intending to commit an
act one has not actually carried out in real life, is one not shutting
oneself up in a solipsistic world, a bleak, guilt-ridden existence
with no hope of absolution?