ASURAMOZHI (the story)

ASURAMOZHI
SREEJITH

Asuramozhi; n., lang. Malayalam, the utterances of an Asura, the language spoken by Asuras, utterances of Asura language that when uttered by a non-Asura act as a invocation of the Asura that dwells in every living creature, (can be used in a sentence in any of these meanings or all of these meanings), e.g. used in a sentence: When the sword plunged into him the air was vent with the roar of his Asuramozhi.

The flow of the story
In 2056 the world order is very different from how it is now. China is the superpower and Europe and America have faded away. The Chinese have the strongest army, the largest information networks and most of the heavy industry too is controlled by them. They attacked India a few years back and have taken over large parts of UP, Bihar, Nepal and parts of West Bengal. Their dominion ends in Gurgaon now which is at the doorstep of Delhi. But the Indian army manages to stop them before Delhi. The various secessionists forces in India have declared independence in different parts of the country and the central government exhausted in repelling China has lost authority over the far flung states in the south and in the North east. Meanwhile the big western companies who have interests in India are also trying to make maximum profits out of this market before everything becomes irredeemably chaotic, they are turning the urban populace into meek workers who they fatten with junk, mind-numbing media and spirit crushing employment.

Inside all this chaos there is no authority to maintain law and order, the streets are a war zone. There are random bombings, sabotage of supply networks, spontaneous riots and terrorist propaganda channels spreading do it yourself anarchy. To make things worse the various interest groups has maligned news and information so much for their own requirements that the priciest commodity is reliable statistics, facts and figures and updated info. But even under these circumstances most of the people in the country are unaware of the state of affairs they don’t care. The economy is not dependent on the state of the government. Because of massive privatization most amenities required for the functioning of the cities are fulfilled unhindered. Products from china are dumped in huge quantities at cheap prices. The Chinese maintain India as a place to dump all their excess and waste. People can see through all this, but they don’t know why it’s happening, so they have stopped caring.

To control the nation there is a need to control the flow of media. So, all the networks of communication are banned to common people. Only the big businesses and the Chinese have the kind of money to buy licenses to access the networks in India. The exceptions to this rule are institutions of higher learning where the government permits the use of networks with limited bandwidths to facilitate research. These institutions run on the sponsorships of disparate interests groups as a result of which they are pretty much an independent entity. Their invulnerability is also because of the fact that these institutions are hot beds of newer and newer technological advancements over which the various blocs of power are trying to gain access. In this scenario, the university students and faculty of these institutions have clandestinely developed a counter network with the ambition of setting up a free floating open source network which can open up the networks to the general public. This organization is called the Asuras. They have so far escaped the detection of the powers that be, but they are being zeroed down by Indian Digital Intelligence Organization (Transgressions) IDIO(T), also known as IDIO(T)s by the public. IDIO(T) functions almost like mercenaries in keeping a tab on the illegal networks and network-abusers.

The university guys hack into sites and plant transmitters that makes it possible to access strategic information without getting into the network. There is a nexus of middlemen who supply such info to concerned parties while protecting the identity of the source, so the Asuras manage to keep funding their operations but till know they have only managed to make nuisance for the governement and western companies. In this maze of minds linking up with other minds deep relationships sometimes come off in the form of mind wave interceptions. Sex is no more putting your vagina over a penis, its more mingling of personalities. Drugs are no more chemicals, they are electronic wiring of the mind where the people get connected onto the surge of the online neural networks.. Clandestine cyber cafes in the downtown parts of the big cities become the hub for junky students, mercenary information brokers and corporate spies and plain clothes agents of the Indian and Chinese governments. The IDIOts primary means of cracking down upon the Asuras are these dens where the network is used for recreational mind altering.

At the central office of a high level governmental security meeting, Inspector Dayal is going through his report about the state of law and order in the country at a high level meeting. In his report we come across Bahadur, Meera and Damodaran for the first time. Dayal is a man caught inside a game that he has not much interest in playing but he has enough spunk to take up a challenge.

Meanwhile in The Gandhi Institute of Biotechnology and Advanced Microbiology a chapter of Asuras have been working on creating psychological virtuality of single cellular organisms. They have researched deeply into this and have isolated pheromones that appropriate the mindscape of a unicellular organism in human beings. This state is very psychologically disturbing and it counters the homogeneity that the conglomerate of powers want to cultivate, excessive amounts of this type of activity causes mutations in people like different skin textures, dissolution of facial features and in some cases even limbs and the severest case is a slow transition into a plantlike state where the person starts behaving like a brain-dead person, such people can only be accessed on the network. Many dont care about these mutations and are actively trying to achieve such states.

One such student is Damodaran. He is a micro-biologist who is into reading books, reading books is a very rare hobby only practised by the super rich or ultra geeks. Damodaran is a geek. He manages to get hold of a book called Asuramozhi written by some guy in 2006. This book puts forward a theory about how Asuras are actually good guys and how Devas who are generally portrayed as the good guys are the bad guys. To prove his points he uses instances from folk practices of tribals and such traditions that have survived from before the vedic periods when Asuras were prayed to and celebrated. The book has lot of illustrations and motifs from these times and Damodaran totally trips on these designs and patterns while following the strange thesis of the book. The writer of the book is also longing for his estranged wife and the family he lost in his native land which he is revisiting for the purpose of writing the book. The book is written in the style of Claude Levis Strauss, but the writer is returning to a tradition he belongs to so his argumnents are less objective and more emotional.

The other half of the book is about a monk called Damo who had been driven out of a state in Southern India for practicing Buddhism. This man went to China and ended up setting up the Shaolin Self-defence theory which later becomes the basis for most of the martial arts forms coming out of china. We trace the journeys of Damo as he seeks inner peace through Japan and China. At the end of his days he longs for his land but realizes that he is not really the master of his destiny. His martial arts theory was just a means to overcome obstacles in his path, which was treating the symptoms without curing the disease. To resolve this conundrum Damo goes into deep meditation at the age of 80 and he gets lost, his body remains but his soul escapes. Damo is said to have lived for a few years longer but nobody knows much about that period. These two stories from the past will be woven into the story of Damodaran as he shift from the real time to the network's virtual world.

Dmodaran while accessing the network one day meets Meera whom he finds intriguing and fascinating, but something happens to him and the bandwidth bringing in information into his brain swells and becomes detectable to the IDIOTs. A Chinese bounty hunter called Li Hu also lands up to catch the man who has forced the bandwidth to expand, he was after Damodaran and to freeze his quarry he cuts off the network connection to the place, Li is a half robotised chinese soldier with great abilitieties in martial arts. He is an expert in the shaolin style of Kung Fu, the same asrt form that had been initiated by Monk Damo's meditations. In getting cut off in tjhis manner Damodaran lapses into a sort of mental paralysis. He goes into a coma that resembles the braindead.

The Asuras send Damodaran to Bahadur in Rampur where he runs a centre for training the village youth to use networks and crack codes. He has been working on fusing yogic meditation practises to influence the electromagnetic fields and thereby influence the electronic hardware producing those field. His aim is to decentralise the power and information and bring in the networks into the villages and bridge the huge disparity between the cities and villages. He is in many senses a revolutionary but in the crazy times that he lives in you can mistake him for a mercenary. In the good old days before computers and everything Bahadur was a good-hearted though slightly right wing and upright mufthi officer who did his best to maintain justice and help the citizenry. (This is the Bahadur of Indrajal comics) Bahadur is supported by money by a Punjabi real estate baron in Honk Kong. This man is filthy rich and he has set up a lab which is working on a suspension of nano-particles that can become both virtual and abastract, in other words a susbstance that can be both the hardware and software. The Asuras want to use this substance to take over the servers of all the governements and companies and crush everything from the inside. The hitch to this plan is that they need a carrier to plant the substance inside the network and this has to be done without the use of any kid of hardware, that is the carrier will have to tune into the magnetic vibrations of the networks without plugging in in any way and release the substance as waves into the the network.

Bahadur is desperately searching for someone with such will power that he can manage this feat, as of now all the people he is working on are very far from this ultimate goal. When Bahadur meets Damo he recollects how Bela his wife had been killed by Li Hu during the war as she was browsing the network to gather information against the chinese. She too had lost her mind and over the network she has become a little child whom bahadur often visits. When hooked onto the faux network costructed for healing such cases Bahadur finds a similar childlike boy in Damo who is shy and seems too sanguine for his age. Bela the child and Bahadur become this kid Damodaran's friend and they become guides for him. Bahadur starts feeling that Damodaran is the carrier. Though no one else is ready to bet on Damodaran Bahadur tries to convince the Punjabi Businessman to give a chance to Damodaran, so the Punjabi sends Meera his daughter to Rampur. She meets Bahadur and then Damodaran and in their interactions Meera feels oddly familiar with Damodaran's handle on the network. Anyways she too feels like Bahadur that there is something in the boys eyes that promises things.

Monk Damo in his last days would sit inside the temple which was the sanctum sanctorum of the Shaolin monastery he would dream himself back onto the tuft of grass by the river where he was initiated into buddhism by a woman monk. The peace and tranquility there was the only thing he needed and it was the point in time on which he meditated. The author in 2006 trying to trace the buddhist temples in south India stumbles upon an old abandoned little cove by the riverside where he falls asleep. Through him Damo revisits the same spot entering him through a dream he has of an ancient buddhist monk with very un-brahminicl symbols and motifs appearing in his dream. The author gets convinced after this event that these ideas which he thought of as his biases and prejudices are actually much more than that. Its an ancient tradition of wisdom that has somehow travelled over ceturies to survive in him. He realises that pull of the ethics of another time are geting employed over problems of his present and that somehow there is some kind of sense in that.

Meera who goes over the belongings of Damodaran comes across the book and the point at which Damodaran had stopped reading. She decides to convey the story to the little kid inside the network that Damodaran had become. In his world there strange patterns that are seen in the earlier part of book Asuramozhi. It is obvious that the book had some kind of impact on Damodaran. Meera searches inside the network into which Damodaran mindscape had opened up and comes across strange symbolisms and the little boy keeps playing hide and seek with her, apparently irritted by her prescence. Eventually she manages to corner him on a riverside where there is temple.

In the real time space the area where Damodaran is hooked onto has become a zone of extremely strong EMF(Electro Magnetic Field and hence detectable to the IDIO(T)s. Bahadur is alerted when this field becomes dangerously high, the whole scenario looks like the time when Damodaran had blown his mind the first time round. Once again the IDIO(T)s are alerted and Bahadur realises that this situation may expose his Rampur facility which none of their enemies knew of till now. This time Bahadur does not pull the plug on Damodaran and Meera. Bahadur escapes the facility in a specially designed van that contains the bodies of the Meera and Damodaran, and the hardware of the network that Bahadur had built to contain but the two of them get trapped inside the infinite space that Damodaran had spilled out into that limited network till Bahadur can find a legal network into which he can connect them and then unplug them when the network connection is live.

Meanwhile Li Hu, the chinese bounty hunter has already been dispatched after Bahadur who is known by the Chinese smelling something big happening if he is venturing out of Rampur, because over the years Bahadur has become quiet a recluse. He is tracing their movements from the moment that Bahadur had driven out of Rampur.

Now Meera and the kid Damodaran are at the edge of an abyss and the kid becomes happy and beckons Meera with a familiarity before he leaps into the abyss like bird taking flight. She too follows and they fall through space together even as the van hurtles into the deserted and thinly populated wilderness of south central India (the northern parts of Karanataka). There is no means of quick transport in these areas, it is still very hard trace people in this zone because electronics has not come into these areas, most areas dont even have electricity. Bahadur travels deeper into the forest and manages to find a high tension electric line; he uses this pole to hook on to the network and pulls out Damodaran and Meera. But in doing this he exposes their co-ordinates to the inspector from IDIO (T) on their trail.

In the IDIO(t)s HQ Dayal is hooking up into the network, we see him remember his wife and kids before he goes in, for the IDIOts to hook into the network is an occupational hazard that they best avoid. In the network Dayal handle is a very blurry figure with IDIOt emblazoned on his chest. He is plotted into the co-ordinated obtained from tracing Bahadur's van. In side the network he confronts not Damoadarn ut the author from 2006 who explains the whole Asur conspiracy theory. This conspiracy has been on for a few 100 centuries to wipe out the asura element, as a result of which the asuramsham (the quality of being an asura) in our culture has become dormant. A talisman for the awakening of the asura in people is required, with its magical power it must overturn impositions that its other makes on it to suppress its energy. From the asura point of view brahmanical tendencies align with white capitalism, this conglomerate remains unstable as long as there is anything that keeps rejecting to fall in, asuramsham seeks to invoke this disturbance. The asuras will not be allowed to exist in this system with their asuramsham. Hence to maintain their individuality is by itself subversive to this system. Dayal argues with the suthor that be that as it may the world has always been dictated by the dominant cultures. At this the author smiles and lead him into the temple on tyhe riverside where Dayal cofronts monk Damo, when he opens his eyes and blinding flash of light blows him off. He was inside Damodaran's makeshift mind and something had happened there.

This time when Bahadur unhooks Damodaran, he is out of his brain-dead state and he recognizes Meera because her handle on the network is pretty much like herself. Their love blossoms there and they are both sitting at the same temple where the author had dreamed of the monk Damo, Meera and Damodaran both realize this as they sit by the river bank and a breeze blows against them. There is a look in Damodaran's eyes as if he has resolved something.

During monk Damos time he had come here once. He is inebriated with a head full of wild arrogance and an over flowing impudence. He had just killed a whole fort full of people and his lust for blood was still not satiated. He turns to the moon which he sees through a patch in the forst canopy and starts abusing it in the worst possible manner, taunting it to make move on him. As he does a voice speaks back to him and confronts his arrogance. Damo reacts by taunting the moon to come in front of him and talk with a weapon. And in that moonlight a beautiful woman monk appears and with her radiance thoroughly overwhelms him. She dares Damo to sit up and look into her face and Damo staggering manages to stand up and look into her face and he saw a peace which so overwhelmed his violent mind that he fainted. In the morning when he woke up he was a changed man, his eyes had lost their violent edge. This look was pretty much like the look on Damodaran's face as he sat on the same river bank with Meera many years later.

Damodaran tells Bahadur that he is ready to put the suspension into the network. Bahadur turns to Meera, but she does not say anything. When Bhadur still doesn't get it she says hook me up. Bahadur doesn't get it still but the determination on their faces puts all doubt out of his mind.

Meanwhile in 2006 the author inspired by his dream of the monk starts tracing out the story between the Asuras and Devas. This search sends him down the cultural history of India in times when there was no archiving. Before the Aryans came to India there were cultures here, cultures that were powerful and profound. Through the form Asuras we tried to bury all that, but in his search he finds the real heroes were actually the Asuras, we will meet Asura characters like Mahabali and Ravan who were great men of immense scholarly capacity and of repute even among the Brahmins of their time. The devas controlled, they who were primarily gods of an agricultural race liked to settle and maintain their control over things, they even controlled the elements of nature, on the other hand the Asuras had a nomadic quality ever looking for newer places, never staying anywhere to establish their control long enough. This was misinterpreted as inability to accrue power and thereby a sign of weakness and evil in the eyes of the early Aryan settlers. It was a case of two different thinking colliding and possibility thereof of interesting new forms of thought; but not for the devas, for them it was always a case of one against the other on a battlefield, they were not even on the same page of evolution as the asuras. In all the books and stories that we hear, we hear that the Asuras were destroyed by the devas. The author in his search discovers how untrue that is and decides to relive his Asura form.

In Hong Kong breaching through the security of a mansion built in the sky a flying object crashes. The security guards turn up the entire armor on the building. In the lawn overlooking a cloud is a prone figure. Its Li Hu and he has arrived to kill the Punjabi business baron, cutting through the security men he finds the Businessman and asks him to hand over the nano-suspension, and when he is not able to do that Li HU kills him, Li sees the picture of Meera in a hologram inside the house.

In the IDIOts HQ they get info from the Chinese that the Punjabi baron's lab has produced the nano particle suspension and the Asursas plan to release it into the network and the inspector immediately sets up high bandwidth connections and tries to block anyone accessing the network from the coordinates where they had last located Damodaran, meanwhile using the high tension lines Damodaran is meditating into the network, his little boy handle is walking through muck like a swimmer in hell. Meera hooks up in Bahadur’s portable satellite hook up, she too enters the network. Meanhwile the IDIOt officer is remote operating massive firewalls around the area from which Damodaran is operating.

In his meditation Damodaran reaches a space where the muck gives way and in a white space he meets Damo the monk. He finds the author and Monk Damo all converging at this point beyond the constraints of space time, neural electro magnetic pulses cut across simple space time continuums and monk damo sits with his eyes closed and a his hand making a mudra. Damodaran confronts the Asura elements that he had supressed in himself over flowing in the spaces around him, multiplicity, differences, chaos and peace reign around him and he fixes his eyes in the stare of both the men there, they find that the asura feeling is something beyond comprehension, its just a revelation that makes all the difference without really making any difference. It’s a return to the primitive but with a deeper understanding of the relationship with life nature and the other. In their silent way the three generations find peace in each other. When Damodaran comes out of this experience into what looks like a plush lounge he takes on a handle for himself that is just like himself in real time. He meets Meera and they have sex. The suspension which is inside Meera's body can only be accessed out of her and then released into the network; it was Meera's cheeky way of ensuring that the suspension does not get into the wrong hands. As they have sex the suspension emanates from Damaodaran's body into the network. Bahadur's screens start receiving info and at the IDIOts HQ the firewalls start breaking down and their systems start collapsing.

When Damodaran is unplugged Li who has traced them to this point breaks in to attack. In the climactic fight sequence Damodaran makes the gesture that he had seen Damo make and summons the ancient knowledge of Damo to defeat Li Hu in a fight, his kung fu is very different from Li's style, it is older and closer to the martial arts from South India. Damodaran, using the access of the network for information in real time as if it is part of his brain defeats LI quiet easily but refrains form killing him, Bahadur decapicitates Li's machinery.

Epilogue:
Three different stories are weaved together in the epilogue.

Strand 1
We read the unfinished final chapter of the book Asuramozhi written by the author guy, it details his experience of revelations. He writes it in the style that Philip K Dick writes his book the EXIGESIS. In a flash back within this story we see how progressively the writer loses himself to the so called real world and delves deeper into the world of Asuramozhi, we hear this story through the words of the author's wife. She tells of one such seizure the author goes through where he had met Damodaran and Monk Damo. We leave the book with this man telling his son a story about a man who will fight evil. His wife watches on as the father and son sit against the sunset and talk. The writer is now confined to a mental hospital and is being treated for schizophrenia.

Strand 2
Parallel to this we see inspector Dayal looking unkempt and hippy-ish in a dense library looking through books. We realize that he is in hiding and has become an Asura himself. We see in him distinct signs of mutations starting to take shape. He escapes the detection of some IDIOts and enters a buddhist meditation camp and takes his position and meditates and the image of monk Damo envelopes him and this creates a emf around him. We see a glow in a wire passing by him. He too has managed to tap into the power that Monk Damo has discovered and passed on through Damodaran. The virus grows and the Asuras are rising against the other, but this struggle is eternal. it will never end all that matters is which side are you on.

Strand 3
Damodaran and Meera are out in the wilderness, they have no modern amenities, they are living in hut like encampment in the forest that looks very temporary. Atop a tree we see a platform where Damodaran is meditating. He is inside the network and in a pristine place, he comes across Dayal and they both get together and walk down towards the riverside temple. where the sun is setting.

Note:
The story is spread out over twelve volumes of 25-30 page booklets. The style of the art will have to vary for each of the strands, also in keeping with the various themes that each booklet will raise within the requirements of its particular story requirements.

Following is the pilot episode of the comic book.

ON THE STREET

to deba
02/06/06
Meanings of words are as crude as grunts and growls.

Nothings spectacular about life, it’s mostly composed of stuff that repeats itself over and over again. That is what I was feeling looking at the dogs on the street foraging the garbage drum.

I met this guy who was an old friend of mine. Since the both of us work in movies conversation centered on the movies. Both of us seemed to want to make movies.

We were happy to meet each other after such a long time and did a lot of catching up. The subjects were the usual, what movies we watched, what music we listened to, what books we are into and whatever philosophical and political stances we were taking lately.

Sometime in between my wife called me, she wanted to know when I would be coming back and I realized that she was miffed to be alone. But I didn’t want to think about that too much. I told myself that she will be OK and I really believed that.

We watched a movie called One night on earth. It’s about strange meetings in taxicabs in different parts of the world including New York, Los Angeles, Rome, Paris and Helsinki. About two people who met for the first time in taxis, one of them in every story is the taxi driver and the others are the fares.

I got quiet involved in the movie’s world. When the movie got over and I regained my senses I was full of remorse at the fact that my wife would be sleeping all by herself, probably still shifting from side to side, irritated and disgusted at life.

I remembered how while talking about things I was talking to my friend about how most of my friends were on the street. In common parlance someone is “on the street” would mean that that person does not have any place to stay and hence lives on the street. So my friend asked me if I really meant that. I realize that this figure of speech needs to be better defined.

I had to explain to him what I meant by “on the street”. I started telling him about a friend of mine who whenever I met him he was in some sort of serious emotional, financial or philosophical crisis. I have often gone through it.

When my mother ran away from home and married some younger guy, I remember sitting with my grandfather and hearing him advice me on how to beat up my mother and her new husband. When I did not react or show any signs of taking his advice he asked me to leave his house if I don’t avenge the disgrace on his family. As I walked away from my home for almost the whole of my 21 years of life, I realized that it wasn’t really mine. All these people I had called my family watched me walk away from the house, all these people whom I had always loved and considered my own and didn’t bat an eyelid, I thought I heard someone sigh, but that’s about it. At that point I realized that my mother is all the family I had and she had abandoned me for the moment. I was in a state that I had never experience before.

Anyways that day I ended up going out to get drunk. All my friends were there and they seemed to think it was a good time to get drunk, if I didn’t go with them I would be left alone at night in the deserted city.

After I made that decision the next thing I remember is dropping guys off at their homes with another friend of mine around the break of dawn. When the guy driving asked me where to drop me off I realized I have to get off. In front off an ATM counter that had these bright white tube lights and bluish walls, I stepped out and stood on the pavement watching the taillights on my friend’s car.

I was quiet drunk and tired and I was wondering what to do. None of my relatives would be too happy to see me right now, especially since I am drunk and I couldn’t deal with any more scorn from people.

With aching bones and a tired body that hung on to me purposelessly I felt so much like sleeping on the street that I lied face down on the pavement. When my body relaxed the release of muscle strain made me free to feel sorry for myself. With my face on the ground I saw the street from the floor getting clouded by tears. I remembered all the unfortunate, homeless, madmen, bums, stray dogs and beggars I used to feel sorry for when I was a kid seeing them as I passed by sitting behind my father on his motorbike. I realized what it meant to be on the street and I was on the street.

“I am on the street, man.” My friend whose life is always messed up used the term often. Its not an evil of society or mankind that we feel like we are on the street, its just the character of some people. My class teacher in 9th standard once wrote on the blackboard “Character is destiny”.

At night moving through the city I had this feeling that I would have to face my wife who would get hysterical thinking what kind of character/destiny she had.

Probably she would not be bothered, she would just be glad that I am back and maybe the feeling I am having will help me write a story or make a film.

But for now the dark tarmac passes by and I am on the street.