 Do you hear about the guy who got arrested for stealing Mortadella, Provolone, Salami, and other meats? Yeah, he was arrested for a deli crime. Intros get worse. Hey, welcome back to our stupid reaction to Ediths! I'm Coremen. I'm Rick and you can follow us on Instagram, Twitter, Instagram, Twitter, Instagram, Twitter, Photon and the Blender, you get some personal YouTube channels links in the description. Today we are reacting to a song called Swades, A Journey of Self-Discovery. So we've reacted to a couple of videos from this channel, the actors one, the anatomy of an actor. Right. And then the behind the scenes of gangs, gangs of wasps. So this is Swades, A Journey of Self-Discovery. So this is the whole SRK Swades journey. Whoa, my stars. This is a very, very long thing. No, just do this. This video explores how Ashutosh Gaurakar, director, explored servant leader characteristics, a term coined by Robert K Greenleaf in 1970. Yeah, if you don't know the term servant leadership, it's batted around a lot within anyway. In Shahrukh Khan's character in this movie, it shows how SRK discovers himself in the course of this movie and becomes a servant leader from just being a leader. And servant leadership is a really common theme throughout a lot of the Protestant Church. And I'm sure within the Catholic Church in terms of true leadership is servant leadership, not just dictatorial pontification, but leading by example. So, and we talked about the two videos we've seen from this channel. So they very much, they seem to like cinema a lot and we liked Swades a lot. Yes. Outside of the ending, I prefer to end it different way. Yeah, I didn't, I liked it. But here we go. As the Indian population grew in the West, a new market to sell Hindi movies opened up. This led to a flurry of movies that played on the themes of nostalgia, preservation of Indian culture. Emotional return to the motherland. Oh, and Shahrukh Khan. A lot of Shahrukh Khan. Swades made in the same way present the similar emotion in disparate narrative. Loosely adapted from the stories of Bapakuti, Swades resembles that of Gandhi's early life. In fact, the character Mohan is named after Gandhi himself. Also, both of them study outside India, both go through a personal change after returning to India and eventually devote themselves in welfare of Indian people. Swades may be categorized amongst the very few subjective Hindi films. The film follows the plot, but the story is told from Mohan's point of view. Hence, to understand film's narrative, structure and flow, we have to understand the character's motive and how his quest to reunite with his past evolves into a journey of self-discovery, with him becoming a servant leader. Servant leadership is a leadership philosophy presented by Robert Greenleaf in an essay called The Servant as Leader. Traditional leadership evolves in accumulation and exercise of power by one at the top of the pyramid. By comparison, the servant leader shares power, puts the need of others first and helps people develop and perform as highly as possible. According to Greenleaf, there are two extremes of leaders, servant first and leader first. Between them, there are shadings and blends that are part of the infinite variety of human nature. When we meet Mohan, he is a project manager in NASA, a more leader first. He is haunted by the guilt over his inability to take care of his childhood mania. He sets out to correct his mistake and travel to India to bring her back to the US. In India, Mohan is looked up as a guest from a foreign nation, an outsider who once was an Indian. This is reflected in this scene when he is reminded of his nationality. And again during this scene. Goharikar portrays rural Indians as upholding a hierarchical understanding of leadership. There are moments in the film demonstrating the traditional view that the members of the highest class have an obligation to live up to their status by leading. Mohan's transformation from a hierarchical leader to a servant leader challenges his own and the village's perception of leadership. During one conversation, he is questioned about racial and economic injustice in the US. At the same time, he becomes increasingly aware of the oppressive gender and caste system at work. Mohan condensed these traditional practices and backwards, but then is questioned over his own right to criticize. Even Gita is good to challenge Mohan's right to judge Indian people over their lack of progress. Throughout the movie, the characters are involved in a conflict where the validity of traditional values in a local context go head to head with the contemporary values in a global context. Mohan realizes that if he has to achieve his intended motivations, then he has to let go of his hostile and judgmental views of Indian social order, at least temporarily. So for purely selfish reasons, he decides to help Gita recruit students for her school and mend his relationship with her. This is the first time Mohan displays the characteristic of a servant leader, that is healing and awareness, more specifically self-awareness. As the movie progresses, Mohan displays more and more servant leader characteristics, such as listening, persuasion, and community building. The turning point in Mohan's personal journey comes when he is sent to collect the rent from Haridas. Haridas laments the devastation in his life caused by the drought on the one hand and by the rejection of the community on the other. After listening to the misery he has been and his inability to feed his children and parents, Mohan cannot hide the empathy he feels towards Haridas. He is visibly disturbed and deeply moved by this encounter. A farmer who lives as an outcast in his own community, Mohan treats him with a great deal of compassion and gentleness. By sending Mohan on this journey, Kaveri Amma plants an important seed of self-doubt in Mohan's mind towards his own purpose in India and his personal growth. In a subsequent confrontation with the village elders, Mohan engages in an enough struggle over the meaning of misery and injustice he has witnessed. During another power shutdown, Mohan accuses villagers for their attitude of living in the town, both literally and metaphorically. With the help of villagers, he decides to build a hydropower plant that would generate electricity for the entire village. This is a key event where Mohan is finally transformed from a judgmental outsider to a productive member of the community and a servant leader. His efforts empower the villagers and help them take their needs in their own hands. But this personal transformation comes at a personal cost. Both Kaveri Amma and Geetha, who may eventually fall in love with, refuse to leave the village and Mohan returns to the United States alone. He is now haunted by the images of time he spent back in Charenpur, stirring an inner struggle to the point where he decides to leave the already successful and comfortable life in the US and return to India. So this depicts a transformative journey in a story that is profound in his humanity. It deals with themes of social injustice, social change and personal transformation. Goarika uses water and life as metaphors for unifying human needs, technology and nature for unifying global perspectives with local. But the film is hardly free of loss. So this suffers mostly due to its inconsistent pacing. The misplacement of certain songs, certain it doesn't help. Cinematography at times feels sluggish. The subplot involving Mohan falling in love with Geetha does more harm to its narrative focus than good. And for the movies set in early 2000, some of the dialogues sound straight from the 80s melodrama. But despite his technical downsides, Sodeh flourishes due to his strong focus on characterization. Just like Goarika's previous film, Vagan, Sodeh's tells the story of good triumphing over evil. This time, however, evil has no face but is equated with a regressive ideology. The enemy lies within in the form of passive acceptance of ingested by those who suffer and ignores by those who witness it. Mohan Varga helps the villages of Charanpur in identifying this enemy, teaching them to fight it while at the same time learning from them how to fight the enemy within himself. I don't think the aim of the movie was to lure and analyze back to India with the bait of nostalgia. Goarika did want to engage them in a dialogue where they were forced to rethink the notion of a good life. But at no point in the movie, Goarika argues that serving the nation of your origin should be the only way of living a good fulfilled life. Neither is he using Mohan's decision to come back to India as a shame in device. In a country where we are delusional to his greatness, Sodeh's tried to give a reality check. In a time when Hindi movies are consumed and forgotten in no time, Sodeh's had managed to stay relevant for a lot of Indian audience. This goes to show the values Mohan fights in the film are still lurking under our collective consciousness. Maybe then it is time to shape the role of a passive judgmental consumer and become an active contributor. What do you think? No, I like his narration. I think he especially coming from and it's obviously different coming from us stuff that we would appreciate about the film is different than somebody who's native to India and knows all the cultural nuances that the film was trying to say. Whereas we are just looking at mostly it's like a film right that's more teaching as opposed to us imposing what we think the film is telling. Even though we do pick up on some stuff we're not going to pick up as much as no a native indeed. No and I too I agree the majority of the stuff that he was pointing out I thought was very insightful and on the money. Yeah. My you know my I my only disagreement is first of all I think I think the songs are great. I think they're great. Yeah and I think the love I don't think that the love story was a distraction. I think the love story isn't is the essential. I think love I don't think he comes to the realizations that he articulated here unless he falls in love. I think the love he has for her and which allows him I don't think he would have been teachable by her or anyone else in that village if he hadn't allowed his heart to open up through love. I don't think he would have loved that man if he hadn't first felt the love he had for her and I think the love for her is the door that opened up everything the love of the people the love of India realizing he wasn't doing a job that he loved which is why it makes his saying goodbye at the end and her giving him that representative box of everything that he has found he loves she's she's the fulcrum she's the reason I think he finds that I don't think she's an ancillary side story that's just there to give you some kind of romantic thrill I think it's freaking foundational. There's some debate. I can't remember it's been so long since I watched it I remember I wanted it to end when he was driving away I think that's what I said when he left India I think yeah yeah and I didn't I needed him to come back I think that's what I wanted I think I was like I life happens yeah I needed him to go back to the woman he loves and the place that was home and get back to him pursuing what really matters in life not the ideal he had when he was a young man and was like I'm gonna leave India and I'm gonna go get this career and I'm gonna make money he was alone and empty pursuing all of that and she got him reconnected to all the things that really mattered in life not just for him I absolutely agree this thing will stand the step to test the time because it's university has yeah it's what 30 years now almost it's speaking about the universal experience of people and universal truth of what what really matters it's why it is for me I mean my favorite performance of his is my name is con yeah but my favorite film of his is is this one I have to think yeah it's it's this one for me I know you don't like it that much Devdas is really high for me but this is if someone was to say to me you know my favorite acting to look at his acting chops it's my name is con but as far as my favorite film the one I would watch over and over again the movie has more flaws and my name is con than this movie than this one yeah my name is con is more has more flaws correct than this film correct um but this film is also I believe a lot longer well it's like three hours right director of laghan what do you expect it's like three hours right yeah I remember yeah um but yeah great analysis like this very good analysis I would love it'd be interesting because I have always people that ask like would you ever like collaborate with other people I would actually love to in in some of our views actually have an Indian with us I would too that that can one give us a different perspective and also we can see because like obviously and like we said a native Indian will pick up so many things that us as an American won't that we have not grown up with and I would love it regionally too because for example like I then Durrani was here yeah she's an Indian woman yeah but she's Bengali yeah so her perspective and her life experience is definitively Bengali Indian yeah versus somebody who came from South India yeah or from the north yeah you know somebody who's who has seen life through the eyes of a psalm is not going to be the same as someone who saw it over in uh Roger's you know you name the place yeah so yeah really cool uh let us know what other videos we should react to down below