Khanum jaan(Shaukat Kaifi, or 'Shabana Azmi ki mumma', as Lila Jha once called her) is the 'Madam' of one of the finest brothels in Lucknow. Assisting her is middle aged Husseini (Dina Pathak). What follows is one of those 'all in a day's work' kind of conversation between them where they discuss how depraved the times have become.
खानम जान: अब उस दिन का ही ज़िकर लो! सुल्तान बेगम ने अपने मीयाँ को एक लौंडी से बात करते देख लिया। सुना है उसे सीकचीयों से दाग दाग कर मार डाला।
हुसैनी: हाय, हाय, हाय! क़यामत के दिन मुँह काला होगा एसी बीवियों का।
And then it dawns upon you - once you're done laughing - how slimy a creature prejudice can be. As Shakal from Shaan would say 'बड़ा अजीब जानवर है ये'। अजीब indeed! Because very seldom does this जानवर make an entrance through the designated doorways of indoctrination. More often than not, it will simply slide in through the crevices created by company, environment, and of course, personal gain.
Here's hoping for an 'independence' from prejudice.

Lots of trending news about the achievements of ancient Indians. We have the great surgery, the Pythagoras theorm, and now, inter-planetary air travel.

It’s understandable - the all round mockery which these claims to greatness are attracting. It’s understandable because such claims, even when made in earnest, invariably contain traces of the syllogism “The ancient Indians were great. We’ve descended from the ancients. Hence, we’re great (or have in us the potential for greatness).” And God forbid that the syllogism be present in quantities greater than a trace! The whole thing then becomes evocative of Satyajit Ray’s ‘Shatranj ke Khiladi’. More specifically, the agonisingly comic scene where Sanjeev Kumar, hanging to the coattails of his allegedly  illustrious ancestors, remarks with a flourish “…unka kuchh khoon toh humari ruggon mein bhi daud raha hoga….”
But alas, there are facets to ‘humara khoon’ that we fail to fully appreciate. Facets more profound than air travel; facets which concern themselves with our very understanding of the universe; facets which quantum physics is still scraping the surface of.

Take for example the EPR(Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen) paper on quantum entanglement. In ‘entangled’ subatomic particles travelling in opposite directions, ‘spin’ of a particle acquires a value only when it is measured. Then simultaneously (faster than the speed of light), irrespective of distance of separation, the other entangled particle takes up an appropriate reciprocal value. And thus blends into unison the trinity of the observed, the observer, and the observation. Advaita anyone?
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Or take the more recent experiment where a sub-atomic particle was stripped from its inherent physical property. A beam of neutrons was so split that one beam was neutrons and the other beam their magnetic moment. A quantum Cheshire cat, if you will. It’s a new state-of-affairs where physical properties can be separated from their ‘carriers’; a state-of-affairs that force-alters our concepts of perception and consciousness. By illustrating that ‘quality’ and ‘physical property’ are not an inherent attribute of matter, the experiment hints at an underlying and all pervading substance of which everything is an attribute. It’s a substance of which both mind and matter are properties; a substance which manifests as both subject and object. Advaita again! And the Mundaka Upanishad. 

It’s of course possible to argue that juxtaposing the findings of Quantum physics with Vedanta is a case of reverse engineering. But we would do well to remember that be it Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrodinger or Einstein; the big daddies of quantum physics never shied from making public their Vedanta connection. It’s no secret that the ideas which gave birth to quantum physics were in fact incubated in a grounding of Vedanta.

And therefore, to the question pertaining to surgeries and air-travel, perhaps the most befitting reply is the one that was given by Niels Bohr to an aspiring physicist. ‘Your theory is crazy young man,’ Bohr had said, ‘but it’s not crazy enough to be true.’