The superficial veneer!

Paradise (Malayalam; 2024)
Director: Prasanna Vithanage

https://www.filmibeat.com/malayalam/movies/paradise.html

This is one of those movies that keeps viewers in a loop, wondering about the film's trajectory and guessing the message it is trying to convey. A tale of a loving young yuppie Malayalee couple celebrating their fifth anniversary in Sri Lanka, just as Sri Lankans muster the will to protest against widespread price hikes, is refreshing. Like most tourists, they indulge in a certain amount of poverty porn as they go on a peeking at the countryside during their Ramayana tour. Listening to the tour guide narrate the local folklore about what happened where and when, they cannot help but sneer at his explanation. As smart alecs often do, these IT professionals mock his outdated, condescending explanations of what transpired during the events surrounding Ravana's abduction of Sita. 

Their arrogance, particularly the husband's, becomes evident in the way he answers his phone during the tour and in his dealings with the guest house staff. 

The real story begins when a group of robbers break into their room and runs away with their laptop and mobile phones. The police are seen dragging their feet amid the ongoing citizen unrest, with no sign of their devices. The climax occurs when the relatives of a suspect, who dies after police brutality, arrive to seek vengeance. As the relatives throw stones and shranels, the police and tourists defend themselves. In the chaos, the tourist's husband is shot in the head by the wife, possibly deliberately — who can say?

Then everything falls into place. All the earlier ramblings about different points of view and women blaming when something goes wrong make sense now.

In the Sri Lankan version of the Ramayana, Ravana never died but remains in a slumber, waiting to spring forth when Sri Lanka needs help. Many versions of the Ramayana exist, but the one attributed to Valmiki is regarded as the authentic account. There is even a non-violent version in the Jain Ramayana. In some variations, Sita is not the demure maiden in distress waiting for rescue but a fighter herself. It all depends on who is telling the story. The hunt story would be incomplete without the lion's account.

After the robbery, the husband begins blaming his wife for possibly leaving the window open, which gave the robbers an opportunity to enter. That initiates a rift in their relationship. A few minor issues here and there cause them to drift apart to the point that the wife starts to despise her husband. That could have led her to shoot him. Sometimes, doing the right thing can push someone towards the wrong end. Under extreme pressure, the superficial veneer that protects a bond can shatter just like that.

(P.S. Thanks, JM, for the recommendation.)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Cycling and Empowerment!

Audax Kiara Bay Pink Ride 9.0 (2026)
Audax Randonneur Malaysia 100km.

As I turned at a traffic light, I was waved down by a group of fellow cyclists. From their accent, I could tell they were from East Malaysia.

"Is this the 100-km route?" one of them asked as I stopped.

"Yes, this is," I replied. "No worries. I've downloaded the GPS on my Garmin. 

Follow me."

They seemed relieved.

"Thank you. The organisers have not put up any markers to follow!"

We carried on with our journey. As I kept pedalling, my mind went into overdrive. I told myself, "These people do not know the essence of the Audax races..."

Cycling came into the mainstream in continental Europe in the late 19th century. Before the bicycle became widespread, people had to either walk or travel by horse, either in carriages or on horseback. As riding cycles became easier, more people, including women, took up cycling. Women found it easier to move around, eliminating the need for a man to prepare the horses for the ride. Women discovered newfound freedom to socialise among themselves, work, exchange knowledge, and discuss politics. The machines proved invaluable during the suffragette movement that secured women the right to vote. Women on bicycles famously went from house to house to spread political messages and distribute pamphlets.

Soon, men started cycling after realising it was an easy way to impress their sweetheart. Ladies' fashion also evolved, aligning with modern trends and abandoning restrictive styles. Corsets with petticoats were replaced by knee-length knickers and divided skirts. This is similar to how Indian girls today opt for salwar-kameez as their everyday outfit instead of sarees, as their grandmothers did, for better comfort and versatility.

Bicycles have been described as the one thing that contributed more to the emancipation of women than anything else in the world. Society did not take women's cycling lightly. The medical fraternity described cycling as potentially damaging to female reproductive organs. Cycling was viewed as unfeminine and a moral corruptor. The female cyclist was considered a troublemaker. Women were not allowed to participate in cycling races because it was believed they lacked the endurance, strength, and resilience to finish. In 1931, women were allowed in the time-limited category for the first time at the Paris-Brest-Paris Audax Randonneuring. 

From the outset, randonneuring was never about competing or reaching the podium. It was about endurance and teamwork. In earlier days, teams were given the route. Riders were expected to use a map or their navigational skills to reach point B intact as a team. Therefore, the organisers intentionally left out directions for this very reason. Now, with GPS, one can simply download the route to their bike navigation device and ride solo.

Women and cycling in the late 20th century shifted from empowerment to urbanisation and activism, driven by safer infrastructure and ecological awareness. Women's cycling also became an Olympic sport in 1984. Women have proven their endurance capabilities. Any exclusion clauses are cultural, not physiological.

https://britishonlinearchives.com/posts/category/articles/
509/from-the-archive-cycling-to-equality

For almost a decade, the Audax franchise in Malaysia has been organising long-distance cycling events for amateur cyclists. This time, one of the newest members of our weekend warriors' group wanted to get his hands dirty in one such an event, especially after hearing that the rest of us had completed a 200 km event two years earlier.

As with their previous events, ladies could attend for free, whereas male participants had to pay. In other words, the men were sponsoring the ladies. It must be a paradoxical business strategy to encourage greater male participation, since more men would be attracted by the free entry for female cyclists.

The race began promptly at 5am, cloaked in darkness. Cycling along the narrow roads from Kepong, we made our way to the Ulu Yam area, renowned for its notorious climb, which was the steepest part of the 100km ride. By the time we reached the top, we were already a fifth of the way up, and it was still dark. As we coasted down into Ulu Yam town, famous for its popular kopi tiams, it was too early to stop for a cuppa. Passing through Batang Kali, a town long in the news for the indiscriminate gunning down of Malayan citizens by the British Armed Forces in 1948, daylight was gradually breaking, and gliding through the misty country roads was an experience money cannot buy.  

Pedalling along the monotonously straight roads towards Bukit Beruntung made me realise the excellent network of highways that Malaysia has, or rather, the ones the British initiated before Merdeka, and we have the wisdom to upgrade every now and then. It also dawned upon me that Selangor is actually a large state. We were to do a 100km route, and that only covered half the state!

After Bukit Beruntung and Rawang, it was down past the old North-South Highway, which I had not used for ages. I was surprised by how wide it was and how it had been expanded. The road passed the park named after the High Commissioner of Malaya, who legalised the placement of ordinary citizens in concentration camps (in today's terms) and 'winning their hearts and minds' in the name of psychological warfare against the Communists in 1948, Gerald Templer.

By around 10am, five hours after starting, we reached the starting point, where we were treated to ice cream and a cold Milo drink. The finisher's medal made it all worthwhile. 

 

P.S. Audax Randonneuring is a popular, non-competitive, long-distance cycling sport in which participants ride fixed routes (usually 200km or more) within specific time limits.

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Scary at the top?

Succession (Miniseries, 2018-23)

S1-4, 39 episodes. 

I was given the impression that I had been living under a rock for not having heard of a miniseries called 'Succession'. I was also made to believe that 'it was so good', as if missing it meant I had lost my purpose in life. My compulsion to watch this built up, and sitting through all forty episodes (because one has to finish what he starts and never take a back foot), my conclusion is this. One can still have a full life, giving this one a miss. 

Something that could be summarised in a season is dragged out over four, to keep viewers intrigued by the lives of the rich and famous, especially when it comes to someone as cutthroat and controversial as Rupert Murdoch. The media mogul who made his mark in the late 20th century had always been in the limelight for all the wrong reasons. 

His company was at the centre of a massive phone-tapping controversy in 2011, which led to major payouts and the closure of one of his UK papers. He is also believed to have wielded substantial political influence in the UK, the US, and Australia, swaying public opinion and magnifying or burying news. 

Towards the later stages of his life, the Murdochs had to deal with a taunting succession issue. While Murdoch Sr did not want to relinquish control of the business to any of his kids, whom he thought were not worthy of the top chair, the children were competing to outdo one another to capture their father's attention.

The miniseries is a dramatisation of what could have happened behind closed doors during the later years of the media empire. Logan Ray, the toxic, foul-mouthed patriarchal figure who mirrors Murdoch's character, is a very sick man. Despite his ailing condition, he is adamant about clinging to the helm. He is connivingly undermining his children and making them fight among themselves to undermine their confidence. 

Even though Rupert Murdoch is alive in real life at 94, the filmmakers decided to kill him and make the adult children fight for control of the empire.

If viewers do not mind being bombarded with 35 hours or more of profanity-laced script, cussing and character-hurling abuses at each other, giving graphic descriptions of bizarre acts of loving and self-gratification, coitus and what a perverted mind would perform on his reproductive anatomy, be my guest and watch this miniseries.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

A language war!

Parasakthi (Tamil, 2026)

Director: Sudha Kongara

https://letterboxd.com/film/parasakthi-2026/watch/

2026 is an election year for Tamil Nadu. The year started with a bang with two Tamil movies with explosive political themes. The highly anticipated Vijay of the newly minted party TVK, and his alleged last film, Jana Nayagan, is stuck with the censors for unknown reasons. Some insiders reckon that the dialogue is highly spiced with political innuendo or outright condemnation of his opponents, such as the DMK and the BJP.

The second movie, which did not pose a threat to Vijay’s heavyweight, not surprisingly, was cleared easily. This movie, starring Sivakarthikeyan, the game show host who found fame through sheer grit, is a historical drama based on the 1965 riots in Tamil Nadu against the imposition of Hindi as the national language. This film turned out to be a propaganda movie through and through, putting DMK and their former leaders as the sole defenders of the Tamil language. As DMK controls the whole of Kollywood, movies are and have been the mouthpiece of the ruling class. By controlling movie distribution, production and theatres, they maintain cultural and political dominance in Tamil Nadu. Through this movie, the ruling party hopes to present a false narrative to new voters, the Gen Zs, that only DMK can keep the Tamil language 'alive'.

DMK and its predecessor, DK, have been thriving on the same ‘divide and rule’ policy that the British employed to quell Indian resistance. DMK makes the Northerners their bogeyman. They subscribe to the now-defunct Aryan Invasion theory and create an aura that the Hindi-speaking people from North India are out to wipe out the Tamil language and culture. Within the state, they also accuse Brahmins of usurping others' opportunities with their perceived oppression of the rest of Tamil Nadu with Brahminical ideologies. 

The scenario for the 2026 state election is like this. With the spate of BJP wins in recent state elections, increasing the BJP’s popularity and the entry of actor Joseph Vijay into politics, are making DMK stakwart Stalin feel hot under his tall collar. His party has promised to eradicate Sanathana Dharma, but continues to be seen performing poojas for blessings. 

Recently, the perennial issue of teaching Hindi in schools resurfaced. DMK, the self-appointed defender of the Tamil language, had categorically put their foot down to deny compulsory teaching of Hindi in government schools. 

With the same rebel yell that they shrieked in 1965, DMK is entering the latest elections, and this movie lays the groundwork of their campaign.

Resistance to the introduction of Hindi into the Tamil Nadu school system has persisted for the longest time, even when the region was under the Madras Presidency. In 1937, under British rule in India, the Indian National Congress ruled this region, led by Rajaji. Congress, in preparation for self-rule, was toyying the idea of Hindi as the National language. The issue came up again just before Independence and again when the Constitution was drafted in 1950. Nehru promised Tamil Nadu that a grace period of fifteen years would be given before Hindi was made the official language. 

EV Ramaswamy, revered by DMK as the champion of Tamil, is also affectionately known as 'Periyar' (the Elder) and is anything but a bastion of the Tamil language. He had once condemned the language as barbaric¹, and it is not compatible as a modern lingua franca or for scientific purposes. 

It is ironic that in the 1930s and throughout the 1960s, the Dravida Party was hell-bent on opposing the Indian Congress Party over the language issue. Now, it has joined forces with Congress and is opposing the Central Government led by the BJP. Regardless of which party is in power, the DMK will oppose the Central Government. Remember, in the years before Partition, the Dravidian Party wanted to accede to Pakistan? And EV Ramasamy declared 15th August 1947 as a day of mourning.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IndianHistory/comments/1qcmlrf/1
965_tamil_student_protest_against_hindi/

This movie tries to retell events that led to the 1965 Hindi imposition riots. Nehru died in 1964, as the deadline to make Hindi the official language of the country approached. University students, instigated by Annadurai and Karunanithi, initiated demonstrations in multiple cities. The story tells a romanticised version of a docile elder brother who tries to save his young brother from harm. The elder brother has a violent past that resurfaces as a vengeful IPS officer who wants to squash the Tamil rebellion once and for all. In the midst of all this, a few figures from the past are shown, painting a DMK-friendly picture of them saving the Tamil language and its culture from being overrun by enemies from the North.

Historians and people who lived through the 1960s vehemently oppose the movie's alternative history of what actually transpired during that time. Others, including the Youth Congress group, are 'up in arms' about the negative portrayal of their former leaders. They scream for the film's banning.

(P.S. In the modern world, people are expected to learn as much as they can, including all the languages of the world. Alternatively, use Google Translate! Also, language is not everything, as seen in the later years. Andhra Pradesh, which was created along linguistic lines, was divided into Andhra Pradesh and Telangana because of economic imbalances.)

1. https://www.telegraphindia.com/india/nirmala-sitharaman-says-periyar-dismissed-tamil-as-a-language-his-was-a-push-for-reform/cid/2088564#goog_rewarded

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Christmas that Almost Disappeared!

https://borderlessjournal.com/2026/01/14/christmas-that-almost-disappeared/

Charles Dickens was flying high by 1842. His books, Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, and periodicals were selling like hot cakes on both sides of the Atlantic. With so many fans over in America, he decided to pay them a visit. What he saw in the second-largest fan base upset him for two reasons. 

Firstly, there was the issue of royalty. Publishers in America were printing his work left, right and centre. He received none of the returns due to him. Secondly, he was upset with the level of racism and their cavalier attitude towards slavery, even amongst the northern states.

https://borderlessjournal.com/2026/01/14/christmas-that-almost-disappeared/

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

All so Messi?

https://borderlessjournal.com/2026/01/14/all-so-messi/

Lionel Messi in Kolkata. From Public Domain

With the amount of information I am bombarded with daily, I often wonder, as one usually does, how all these changes will change society. Are we all going to be empowered, aware, and demanding what is due to us? Will our minds be so open that we can accept that there is more than one way to skin a cat? On the contrary, will we become more aware of the many ways we can be taken for a ride, and so paranoid that we cannot even breathe a breath of fresh air? What if it is contaminated with toxic effluents?

Three recent video clips steered my mind towards this end.

https://borderlessjournal.com/2026/01/14/all-so-messi/

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Sports unify?

Bison (Tamil, 2025)

Written & Directed: Mari Selvaraj

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15097358/

We have always been told that sports unite people. When Hitler was selling the idea of Aryan supremacy to the world, the Universe tried to shoot him down. It cryptically was telling him that his eugenics was bunkum. A Black American named Jesse James won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics to embarrass the Führer. 

When apartheid ended, Nelson Mandela believed that rugby and sports were the surest way to reconcile the fractured nation. He hosted the 1995 Rugby World Cup in South Africa. The ‘Springbok’ emblem, once viewed as an oppressive symbol of the white minority, suddenly became a source of national pride and joy. 

We are also aware that sports transcend all borders. It is a level playing field that puts aside politics, colour and creed, so they say. Quite early in life, I realised this was not true. If this were true, the world would not have boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics. The neutrality of sports went out of the window when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan a year earlier. 

Increasingly, whenever there is an India-Pakistan cricket match, there is a meltdown. The losing team would claim that the refereeing was biased. It ends up in fistfights or, sometimes, in something more sinister. 

In the Malaysian football scene, the governing body found it easier and more cost-effective to import fading professional footballers, give them fake identities and create fake family trees to secure citizenship than to invest in local talent. The disease of favouritism and discrimination in Malaysian sport is not something unheard of. It started with the authorities wanting to cash in on the public craze for football (and badminton, too).

In the 70s, when Malaysia was a football force to be reckoned with, we churned out player after player of high calibre. The players were amateurs, of different ethnicities, whose sole pride was to lay for the nation. When the state began meddling under the guise of advancing sports science, the rot set in. The ugly disease of favouritism and racial preference crept in. By the 1990s, the earlier 1970s teams, with varying ethnicities, came to be represented by a predominantly one race; talent no longer being the determinant for selection, but rather fulfilling politicians' agendas. 

During the British Raj, colonial subjects, awed by their master’s gentlemanly game of cricket, began playing it too. Unfortunately, they could only do so amongst themselves. The colonial masters thought that playing with the natives was not acceptable. It ended up with cricket teams formed along racial and religious lines. There were the European clubs for the whites, the Parsis, the Hindus, the Muslims and the rest. The interesting thing about the last group is that it is open to non-white Christians and those from the lower caste. The groups compete in the Pentangular Tournament. 

In the early 20th century, India had a legendary cricketer named Palwankar Baloo. He is considered the greatest cricketer in Indian history. Playing for the Hindu side, he helped them to defeat the European side. He toured England in 1911 and showed great performances there. Between 1910 and 1920, there was a great campaign to make him India's captain, but the efforts were thwarted by the Dalit caste system.

The movie 'Bison' is a sports drama about a boy from a kabaddi family who is obsessed with becoming a kabaddi player. His father, a former player, knows the hurdles and brickbats he faces to reach the next level. He is hellbent on keeping his son away from the game. Along the way, there are gangsters, clashes and overt discrimination of the boy because of the low caste he is from.

Kabaddi is an ancient Vedic self-defence and survival sport that started in India some 4,000 years ago. It is said that Krishna and Gautama Buddha also played this game in their childhood. Persians were also reported to have played it 2,000 years ago. In the 1936 Berlin Olympics, kabaddi was showcased on the sidelines as an exhibition sport. It has not yet become a regular feature of the Olympics, but it is an event in the Asian Games.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.