Two days after I watched EAT PRAY LOVE I came across this DVD.This is a Marathi movie about a gusty lady Sindhutai Sapkal who lives life at her own terms.
She too eats,prays,and loves and in an amazingly different way.
Elizabeth of EPL has imaginary issues with her life and tries to recover from them.
Sindhutai has a difficult childhood and a tormented youth.
Elizabeth walks out on her husband.
Sindhu is thrown out of her house.
She is accused of bearing another man's child in her womb.
None of her problems are self created.They are presented to her by society but she never loses her will to survive.
Elizabeth prays to find solace for herself.
Sindhu prays for the world.
Sindhu goes to the temple and changes her name from Chindi (meaning a tattered rag) to Sindhu;the name of the mighty river.This is highly symbolic as now she magnifies her existence from a mere rag to a mighty life giving force.
Her prayers are for inner strength that will reach out not just to her but to a multitude of people.
Elizabeth loves selfishly for herself
Sindhu loves selflessly and loves everyone.
Sindhu becomes MAI to all including her husband who turns to her when he has nowhere to go.
Elizabeth has all the money backing her.
Sindhu has nothing with her .............
but the clothes she is wearing and a day old child when she leaves home.Thrown out by her own family, she is helped by people who don't know her.They take no money to assist her.She rebuilds her world helping and aiding poor hungry kids.
Elizabeth struggles to discover what she wants.
She is stingy and keeps to herself.She can't think beyond herself.
Sindhu helps others discover what they want.
Sindhu opens her heart out to the universe and it reciprocates multifold.Sindhu stops thinking about herself.She thinks about the children she is rearing.
Elizabeth is left all alone.
Sindhu has the world with her.
This link gives an interview with the lady herself.
http://cms.boloji.com/index.cfm?md=Content&sd=Articles&ArticleID=6497
1 comment:
I agree with you that Elizabeth of 'Eat Pray Love' and Sindhutai Sapkal, the founder of various NGOs housing orphans, have different orientations towards life and its inadequacies. While Elizabeth attempts to find a tangible solution to fill the gap and saunters across the globe and yet finds none, Sindhutai resolves the problem by not fretting over her personal misfortunes generated by the gap that she feels deep within. Instead she invests her thoughts to generate constructive solutions to solve the practical problems of the destitutes whom she shelters. The satisfaction earned from this act of benevolence serves as a compromise for the impossible-to-be-resolved emptiness deep within Sindhutai. So she is happy and thus she attains her Nirvana.
But Elizabeth fails in this regard because she is yet to realise that the feeling of void that torments her from within is a gap that is impossible to be stitched or sutured by any material object, be it food, be it the act of praying God mechanically [not knowing that the true purpose of praying is to establish connection with our inner self where the void originally brews] or be it loving our target object of love—husband, friend or family. Since Elizabeth fails to realise the real cause of her emptiness and unsuccessfully dissipates her energy by trying to fill the gap with material objects, she remains disturbed, troubled and unhappy.
We all evolve through time and begin our journey as Elizabeth and later metamorphose as Sindhutais. Like Elizabeth we take baby steps by losing ourselves in the very act of eating, praying and loving. But with changing time, we learn to face challenges one after the other and gradually emerge as the colossal Sindhutai. Life is indeed about Eat, Pray, Love but the act is merely the trigger that should set our mind to think and find out what we truly seek through eat, pray and love. We ultimately realise though that as humans we are all structured to feel a void within ourselves and search only that which we cannot get or not entitled to get. Once we get what we want, it loses its value and then our search continues for yet another object that is impossible to be attained. And life moves on… We are all Ulysses— we strive, we seek and never yield to what we have. However, Sindhutai did not yield to this bait as she knew better.
Excellent selection of topic and a pertinent comparative study, Priya! Happy Musing!
Regards
Sarbani
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