 this is movies you can learn from. And today we're gonna review the Netflix series, Alexander. And I said, deep dive into the classical times. It's a deep dive into how things worked at the management level. And in all the wars they had and the successions from king to king and pharaoh to pharaoh and how you got to be in charge. And you know what? When you study this, you learn so much about our current geopolitical situation. So it's a documentary, but it's also a docu-drama and there are various historians on it. And today Rupemati Kandakar, Dr. Rupemati Kandakar who is also expert in movies and in classics is gonna help us understand Alexander and the movie and understand where Cleopatra fit in this before, during and after Alexander's life. Okay, so wow. Why don't we hear the story in general as covered by the series Rupemati? Aloha J. Thank you for having me on this because it's such a lovely foundation to all our geopolitical talk. This happens, this series on Netflix. Again, I'll thank you and then I'll start again because a double thank you this deserves. So this is a six part series on Netflix and we go back into the ages of 300 BC, okay? And Alexander is a 20 year old boy Macedonian prince. He is prince to the king of, King Philip of Macedonia. And Prince Philip was not such a well-known king. He was, he came after the Spartans had the famous 300 movies that we see that had happened before Philip had come into prominence. And Philip has this boy king waiting to succeed him. And when Philip is assassinated on his second wedding reception, you know, Alexander's mother Olympias who's a very, very prominent figure in this episodic life of Alexander, she takes charge and pushes him to be the king. And, you know, a 20 year old has the understanding the spirituality of that caliber who takes over as the king of Macedonia, a small, small king. And Jay, this series is so wonderfully put together because this boy has become one of the greatest kings ever in the, he's immortalized in the pages of history. And that was what he was seeking. I'll let you know, come on this a little bit later. But when Olympias puts her son in the front, she puts divinity in front of him. And she calls him that he's the son of Zeus. That is the king, Greek king. And Alexander holds the ambition to conquer the Persian empire. Now Jay, we are talking of a period where the Americas wanna discover Asian, you know, we were talking of the civilizations which were there, the Persian civilization, Chinese civilization, the Indian civilization, the Hellenistic Western civilization. And it's a small world. And Alexander is a small entity in this. He's a non-Indian. And he wants to be king of Asia. Now at that point of time, the Persian Empire, Darius II, he's the king of Persia. And he holds a mighty Persian army with the loyalties of every Satrap. Satrap is the province that they have. Such a province that even the Egyptian culture, civilization was a Satrap of Darius. Now you can imagine the whole that Darius has. And many years that this boy king, Alexander, he wants to come to conquer. He sends his generals to fight with him. He thinks it's just a mutiny. He'll catch him at the doorstep. But Jay, Alexander, his greatness isn't his warfare. He's direct. He is sharp. And he's fearless. You know, every episode of war that they have shown, he holds one-fourth, one-sixth of the army that faces him. And he is such a king who has always led from the front. Now Darius is surrounded by his troops. But Alexander goes forth. And he is the one who decides the strategy. So the first war that he has with the Persians, he goes to visit the tomb of Achilles. And that shows you the spirituality that he has. He picks up Achilles', what is that? His shield and his jacket. And he wants to wear that into the, he thinks that, you know, he's invoking the gods. He's invoking the strength of spirituality. And he's taking it on the battlefield. When he takes it inside, you know, he's easy to spot on. And one, at that point of time, they've shown that point very nicely. Historians have seconded that. Alexander could have died on the battlefield that time because he's prominent. And his clitius general, he saves. So he has a very narrow escape at that moment of time. And he wins it, Jay. And he's the 18-foot pipe that the Macedonians, Prince King Philip had introduced, was, and the cavalry that they had, the sharp cavalry that they have, were such an advantage to the Greek side that the Persians did not know how to tackle them. So this viking starts from the coast. And instead of going head on into Persia, and that is his center Babylon, he goes and takes a detour to Egypt. Why? Why? Because he is the student of Aristotle. And Jay, Aristotle taught him about cultures. And we see that Alexander is a king. When he enters any culture, he assimilates the culture into him and he puts himself into the culture. That we see in that very powerful scene when he's at the doorstep of Egypt and his troops are waiting for him to attack and he kneels down before Egypt. He's not kneeling down before the people. He's kneeling down before the greatness of the Egyptian culture. And Alexander himself, he knows by taking Egypt, he would have conquered two civilizations, Jay, the Persian civilization and the Egyptian civilization, the bread basket and the gold provider of the Persian empire would be his. And Egypt, I mean, anything in the world, Jay, has a life. I believe that. So when the Egyptian culture saw such a benevolent king, it has literally, you know, hugged him back and made him Pharaoh. It was difficult thing for a Macedonian king to come and declare himself Pharaoh in the Egyptian land. But that is the Egyptian culture welcoming him, the Egyptian civilization welcoming him. And onwards, he chases the rise, that is. So he comes to this point where he has to face, that is, at that point, again, he goes to Siva. Now, Siva is in the desert. It had engulfed and destroyed one king before that. But this Alexander wants to pray and invoke maximum spirituality before he goes towards Darius. And Darius doesn't understand what is happening. What is this? Why is this person not focusing on whatever they think he does the opposite? And he's unpredictable. But when he goes to this, the oracle tells him that he is the son of Amun. Now, what his mother had told him, that he's the son of Zeus, a prophecy in Egypt declares him as the son of God. You know, there has to be some connection that his greatness was seen through by the philosophers or by, you know, Aristotle accepting him and teaching him about these stories. There is inherent greatness to Alexander. And it is shown so, there's no setup to this series J. It's plain and simple. But the kind of points that they put forth, they're showing the greatness of the king as an individual. The way he deals with Darius' wife, when he captures her, she calls him barbaric. But he treats her with respect. The way the Persians were dealing with the women in war was totally different from what Alexander was dealing. He won her over. I mean, Darius is the king of Persia's wife and daughter were with Alexander. He had won, not only the king and his empire, he had won over his family. So that is a big thing. He could have easily treated them as enemies. And Jay, one big thing is he was setting up fire to those cities which do not obey him. But after he, you know, comes to Egypt, from a small village, he builds a city known as Alexandria. And Alexandria is one of the greatest cities of all antiquity, which has survived, you know, the science of time. So this man was not only architect, planner, construction, how many people do you need to build a city? He just visualized, his vision was so amazing to build a city at the port, which would serve as a knowledge center, which would serve as, you know, as a meeting point, you know, center for people. Alexandria was the center of the ancient world, one of the wonders of the world. So that kind of bringing Macedonian culture into Egyptian and, you know, accepting Egypt as his own land, this is the greatness of a king, Jay. And while we are talking of the king, king, king, we are saying that he, on a parallel note, he's also showing himself to be a god. If a god that what he could do, nobody could have done. The visualizations that he has, the visualizations as a person that he thinks that no person would have thought that he can defeat the person now. He puts Darius on the run. And when Darius is defeated by his own generals, he gives him a funeral befitting a king, means he gives importance to dignity even to the enemy, Jay. And that's what held him very high. So, Alexander was kind of one of the greatest things. Well, you paint a beautiful picture in the sense that here's the boy king and within six years of, you know, being known as the boy king, he controlled an empire all the way from Greece to the border of Pakistan, that is India, as we know it. Huge. It was even bigger than the Persian empire that preceded it. And he was, he became famous and revered and powerful. And he had all kinds of new strategies. And you're right. He did the unpredictable. He always faked Darius out. And he had military strategies that Darius couldn't follow. And at the end of the day, he took down the most powerful ruler in the world at the time, that is the ruler of the Persian empire. But my question to you, with all of that, you know, and looking back at the way things worked in antiquity, the way things worked with these empires and emperors and gods and pharaohs, what have you, was he a nice person? Jay, the king, he achieved so much, you know, the achievements make him, to be a nice person, you have to just be kind. And a person can't be kind all the time. There will be, you know, waves of anger and everything. But when you're kind to a maximum extent in your life, I think you are a good person. And I think he has been kind to his enemies in war also, outside war, you know, in ethics, he was ethical. He did not, and even when he died, he showed to the world, put one hand out to show that you go without money and all these things, you go without anything. So these kind of things, which he had, he had a very comprehensive aspect of, he didn't go and destroy cultures. When, you know, you have other kingdoms come in, they actually destroy the places of worship. Have you heard anything where he's destroyed a place of worship and build his own? So that kind of makes him a benevolent king. His soldiers were tired because they wanted, they thought the campaign would end at some time. They did not expect Alexander to get victory on victory and victory on victory to come right across to India. So that was the only roadblock for him was the tiredness of his troops. But as a person himself, I think fantastic. And unless you have a good heart, you're not rewarded with kingship day. Yeah, well, you know, nice guys don't necessarily build the largest empires in the world. But I think he understood about how to deal with his troops. He wrote, as you said, he wrote out front. He took, he took chances. And when he spoke to them, he spoke to them personally. Darius didn't do that. It was a new marvel. He was inventing a new model and dealing with his troops. So they followed him even though he was outnumbered in so many of those battles, multiple outnumbered. And then finally, when he went to Egypt and elevated himself or had other people elevated him, however that worked and became the pharaoh, the God. Okay, that was really not consistent with Macedonian Greek culture because the ruler wasn't supposed to be a God. But I think there was a reason for Alexander to make himself a God. And that is that that's the way it worked in Egypt. So he was playing, can I use the word propaganda? He was playing to the people. He did things that he knew would ingratiate the people he needed to ingratiate, whether that be his army, whether it be the Egyptian people or for that matter, the Persian people. He managed to play to them in such a way so that they respected him and gave him power. And that was in my view, that was the signs of his brilliance and the signs of his ascending to be this great ruler. In only six years, he managed to do this. Now, one thing is of interest. You know, I went and looked it up after the movie and he had blue eyes and he was blonde. And I went to look that up. What happened here? This is a Greek. He's a Greek. He's the son of Philip II. He's a Greek. Why is he have blue eyes and blonde hair? It might have been some recessive gene in Philip's lineage. But I think it made him special and people saw him as a physical person that was different from the other Greeks. And then he took that from his mother. Was it Olympia? She was really a character in the series, wasn't she? She was giving him advice and helping him become a God. And by the way, Cleopatra did the same thing with her son by Julius Caesar. Caesarian was his name. She elevated him. And so what we have with Alexander is that he studied. He was an intellectual. He was ready to do things that the average person, the average general, the average leader wasn't capable of doing. And he understood the value of knowledge, of education and he capitalized on that all the way through. What a guy. But you know what? I think we should take a little time and just examine how these things play out now. Does education mean a lot for a ruler? Does propaganda mean a lot for a ruler? Does talking to the troops? Does playing to the crowd? Does that work the same way? Or is it different? How much can we learn from these experiences and antiquity? And finally, the whole thing about Persia. Now, this is a Persia between 300 BC and maybe, I don't know, sometime after that when all this played out. It was not long after that that Alexander was in charge. But we know about the Persian character. We know that the Persians had a huge empire and we see their character. And we have to back out the whole thing about Muhammad and the Koran and Islam because Muhammad wasn't born until 600 years later in 300 AD somewhere. And the Koran wasn't written for another 300. That is 600 AD. So if we look at the character of the Persians, we need to compare that with how it changed when Islam came around 600 or 900 years later. Can you talk about that? Yeah, Jay, the Persian empire was Zoroastrian, Zoroastrian civilization. They had their own religion where they prayed to the fire. The fire was their God. So now Islam comes in this area. So it's like it accumulates, picks up from the neighboring religions. It will do something opposite what Hinduism is doing. It will pick up something what they're seeing from Persia and they will make it their own. The mosque and the praying style was never what was found in Persia. So there were never mosques in Persia. We don't see them praying five times. There is nothing of that Islamic character anywhere in Persia. The Persians were very close to nature because Jay, any of these empires, these kingdoms were dependent on the nature for their conquests and their accomplishments. So always the gods would be like the God, God of Ra is the sun god in Egypt. They prayed to the sun for other Nile, you know? They prayed for their agriculture, for their prosperity. These kind of things were the gods. You know, you have Zeus, you have the gods of lightning in the thunder like this, something which connects with nature. Mohammed was a prophet and he's known as the son of God. He was never the God, but the Quran that was written, I think it came in much later and it was a more violent version of religion. Zoroastrian was quite mild and Islam succeeded to overtake and destroy Zoroastrianism by the sword. So they always, if you ask any Zoroastrian person, they will say they were conquered by the sword, never by love. Interesting. And that must have changed things or refined them in some way. You know, there had to be a kind of shift over that in the Persian character and culture. But let me say that, you know, Alexander got way east. He came to the end of the Persian empire and went further. He went into India and he went into what is now Afghanistan, and matter of fact, that's how far he got. I don't know if he could hold that territory, but he was pretty good at taking it. And in fact, he established a city. He did a lot of cities. Alexandria in Egypt wasn't the only Alexandria, you know, there were 20 of those scattered around his empire that he built. As you said, he was a real builder. One of the cities he's built was called Kandakar. And I wondered if any really, could you be a descendant of Alexandria and Zendah? They always misplaced the name of Kandakar as Kandah. That always happens, even I do that, but Kandah had enough Afghanistan. That's right. The series about Alexander. How real is that? It's a documentary, but it's also a docutrama and you bounce back between a half a dozen historians who are studying antiquity and they can tell us what it really means, but then we see it played out on the screen. What did you think of that technique? Was that effective? Was it accurate? How did it affect you? Did that point when they're talking of the historians and the archeologists pitching in with every scene or they're talking of the records that are there, it gives the authenticity to the entire episode, the serial and a series. And when you see Alexander, this entire series is focused on the individuality and every part brings out his character step by step. You see him mature, you see him, you see him bulge in his ambition and you see him come out with such a, there is a lot of ambition, but it's never arrogant. He just knows that he can do this. There is a willpower rather than arrogance. He has never said, I will be able to do it. There's a aim in him. He is very single-handedly focused. He wants to kill Darius and show him that pair to pair to pair, they could defeat each other. He doesn't want somebody to assassinate. He could have easily sent his soldiers behind Darius, but he goes behind Darius. He wants to have a confrontation and he regrets that he could not have a confrontation and defeat him. So you see, each part of the series builds on his character and that one scene where, you know, the Gordian knot, which is the knot built by the king of Gordian, whoever. When Alexander comes, instead of untying it, he knocks it off with one sword, a swish. So that kind of, you know, regal, at his, regal, what do you call it? Creativity. Creativity. In his mind, in his mind, it is never that can, will I be able to do it? It's mine and I did it. It's that kind of rawness in Alexander that is brought up in the series. There is no fancy, there is no set. It's just the man that they have shown in the series that is so appealing. And you see the king. You see how Alexander becomes a king and every maneuver of his is his own. And he takes responsibility for himself. He leads in warfare. He leads in personal relations. He leads in his friends, are his, because when a person becomes king, he may forget his friends. But you see him having loyalty also in every stage. And loyalty towards his, hmm. He's playing for history. I don't know if you know, but Alexander always had his historian with him writing down, writing down, what happened? Writing down about the Gordian knot, which is the stuff of which legend are made. And those legends are really popular with anyone who hears them. It's a great story, you know? And the historians wrote down the battles, the locations, the generals. So when you go and look this part up, when you look up Alexander, you find that we have, we, the world has a huge amount of data about what he did, what he conquered, how he did it, who he can sort it with. I mean, it's amazing how much information is available and how many communities and cultures used his name. You know, he is everywhere. The word, you know, Alexander is just filters through our whole global society. And that's because he had his historians with him and he understood he was playing for the, for history and he was playing for the world and making himself a legend all the way through all this in six years, I would call that truly amazing. Really, I mean, it's really, there's a divinity in his kingship. Nobody could have done this other than Alexander. And you become a fan of his kingship because the kind of, you know, regality in him, Jay, there is no throne, there is no castle when he sets out. What do you see when he is on his horse? He looks like a king. So that is brought out very well in this series. And imagine the real Alexander. There were no trains, there were no drones, there were no, there was nothing to account for any surety in life. He threw himself to the elements. He walks through the desert. He doesn't know the distance he's traveling. He was coming towards India because he knew he thought of yogis to have immortality. But this man, through his deeds, through his warfare, through his conquest, through his assimilation and mark that he had a Hellenistic Western society on the entire world. Just imagine if Alexander would not have been there. The Persian influence on the world would have been much, much more than what we have. The modern Hellenistic Western society, international system has a large influence of what Alexander did at that time to conquer the existing map, Jay. Otherwise we would have a Persian map. That would have been difficult. Well, when you look at this series and when you read up on Alexander and other Hellenistic characters, you find that the names they had are still around. People named their children. The influence was just huge. Their influence was huge on Rome. And in turn, Rome's influence was huge and is huge today. But you know what? The most interesting thing about this, and I'm sure you were thinking about it when you watched the series, is about power, about the transfer of power, about the succession of power, about the connection between power and military and power and propaganda and power and marriage and children, all that. They didn't, you're right. They didn't have any money technology. And they spent all their time talking about power. And I would say, and see if you agree with me, that although power, we say, corrupts, and absolute power often corrupts, absolutely. I don't think it corrupted him. He was on a mission. He was on a mission. But what can we learn from him? This is really an important discussion. What can we learn from him about power in the human condition? Jay, power, hungry, is one of the greed and wants of man. And the more power that you have, the more that you want. But like you said, Alexander never wanted more power. He went always on the next mission. Next mission. So it was never, I have done enough and I can, he could have easily sat as the king of Persia, Macedonia, and sat in his castle. And he didn't need to go back towards India. I mean, that kind of raw power corrupts. But this man had, you know, ambition, which was always overpowering his power. And the propaganda that he used to put forth was never of a king, a tyrant. There was, people didn't be with him for fear. His troops didn't support him out of fear. They were like, his mission is our mission. And they used to follow. When they saw him go on spiritual journeys, Jay, that spiritual journey, it clicks a nerve with you when you're watching the series because you see that this man is after all human and he is bowing down to the divinity. And he seeks his power through divinity. And he thinks he has, he visualizes himself brilliantly as a very powerful entity. So that's why when he sees the Persian army in front of him, he doesn't gauge how powerful the Persian army is. In his viewpoint, he's the ultimate power. And that's why he can tear across any, the visualization of power within you, Jay. I think he was the best form of meditation on warfare. When he thought of himself as, you know, in meditation, you kind of go towards your inner soul and you bring yourself together. This man had the power to bring himself together on the field in such a way, he thought of himself as over-empowering the entire army. So that visualization, Jay, is just a sign of, that's why he's immortal in his name because he has done the unthinkable, the unimaginable, the unattainable and the non-implementation of plans that a person has, he has done on the field. On paper, we would never have thought that this would have, he would have defeated, a Macedon prince would have defeated the Persian empire. Never. He understood humanity. It wasn't just propaganda and it wasn't just talking to his troops. It was appreciating the whole battlefield, appreciating what Darius's troops were thinking, appreciating what the Egyptian people were thinking. So he could relate to Lord Humber. He had an intuition, I would say, about what the crowd was thinking and needed from him and that's how he elevated himself, whatever the condition was. It's interesting when we consider this, but let me go a step forward. So we're talking about power and in this country we've had 200 years of democracy and the democracy is fragile. There are many people that think it's not gonna last that much longer and when you strip off the democracy and the rule of law that we got from Britain, essentially, and you look at the people who are in charge or want to be in charge and I guess Trump is a good example of this, it's not about the rule of law. It's not about democracy. It's not about written instruments of collective behavior. It's about power. And I think that what we learned from Alexander and from the series, it's still in play. It's about people who want power and how do they get it? Do you agree? Yes, it's so relevant in today's world, isn't it? Power, everybody seeks power. Everybody, and every leader has to, that I don't know the visualization that they have that they can be leaders of these people. You know there's a philosopher known as Frederick Nish who talks about the lamb, the lion and the child. So the lamb is the gentle public. The lion is the one who seeks to be a leader and when you go above that, you're a child who enjoys everything and who has the curiosity of a child and the enthusiasm of a child and if that fails, you go on to the next one. Alexander had reached that stage of being a child. He had gone across being a lion leader and he had gone to being a child. And in today's world, I don't think we go across the level of the lamb. The general society, the general term that happens, people go for it. Nobody is visualizing out of the box. Nobody is thinking of what we can seek to give to the community, to the society, to the world. It's just power, but liberty is at the cost of respecting the liberty of the others. Same way, power is attained by respecting the limits of the power that the other adversary holds. If you want to conquer him, there will be a friction. But when you come into the zone and you try to force yourself like it's happening in all the conflicts that we are seeing, we discuss every day, it becomes a wrong thing, unethical. And ethics is what is missing now, but it was present in the Hellenistic time, 327. Yeah, I agree, I totally agree. So I have a last question for you, very provocative question for you, Root Money. So if Alexander was alive today, what kind of a president would he make? And should he run? I think you and I would go to that country, immigrate to that country if Alexander was president there. But he had ethics and he ruled with logic. We have to not forget that he had Aristotle as his teacher. So we have the Greek philosopher who we still study in political thought. When we study geopolitics and all, he is a big foundation for all our thinking and he was his thinker. So imagine the administration that he has, the spirituality that he has, the respect for the other religion. And when he lay himself kneeled down in front of this Egyptian civilization, he could have conquered and hurt, but when you respect something as good as a civilization, it shows your inner goodness, Jay. And I think this president would have stopped all the warfare that we're having right now. If they didn't listen, he would have gone for the sword. The guardian nod, he would need right now. Just slash it and stop it because we're having such unethical propaganda and unethical wars here that you feel like you need some hero like this. He's not a hero. Okay, okay. I'm gonna vote for him. I'm gonna, I'm gonna do a right in vote. No, imagine- Alexander the Great. The making of a God. Rupani Kandekar joining me in the movies you can learn from and we have learned a lot from this discussion about Alexander, the making of a God, Netflix. Thank you so much Rupani. Thank you for having me, Jay. Thank you so much. Aloha. Aloha.