RIFLE RANGE BOY

Mandela Long Walk to Freedom (2013) That is the problem with biographies. Squeezing 70 over years of a man's life into a 2hour saga does not do justice. It feels as though as seeing a floater sucked into the eye of a whirlpool. Swoosh! Off it goes. Some how you do not the feel the pain that the characters.  The first hour of the movie just went on by leaving much of an impression. We come to know of a young Madiba as a kind of woman's man and a wife beater. This reluctant politician join the ANC and got himself into loads of trouble with the law and his marriage. His second marriage to Winnie heralds the duo with similar visions for the country go head on with the ruling Government. Before his imprisonment in Robben Island, he is a testesterone filled boxer, guerrilla, freedom or terrorist.  The film gets interesting after his after Mandela's 27 years of incarceration with the acting improving and intense.  It comes with a few powerful lines. Just before the fr...

The Eichmann trial had often been critiqued for being a witch hunt, looking for a scapegoat rather than trying to get to the root of the problem. A problem far more significant than Adolf Eichmann transporting prisoners to Auschwitz, more than just sending the lambs to the slaughter! Hannah Arendt, writing for the magazine New Yorker, herself a Jewess who suffered imprisonment by Nazi, was expecting to see a gruesome-looking mean dude at the trials. She was quite surprised at the simple-looking civil servant who was more interested in completing his given task at the dock. He was oblivious to the sequelae of his actions. Arendt coined the term 'banality of evil' and proposed that evil done unknowingly by an unthinking person is the worst kind. That got me thinking... Again and again, history has shown people choosing a leader and following his directions blindly. The Germans elected a monster through the legal means who rocked the whole world to realise his megalomaniac dre...

The First Phone Call from Heaven Mitch Albom (2013) I picked up this book during a long wait at the airport. You fly low-cost, your time is also low-cost (cheap), and they expect you to come early and wait. After reading all his books thus far, it is only natural for me to lay my hand at once. His books deal mainly with important things in life like death, heaven and Godly matters. This time around, too, he dwells on 'life' after death and incorporates Alexander Graham Bell's invention, the telephone, as the means to receive a call from the heavenly world! Interestingly, we learn a few snippets here and there about Bell's journey to his invention, which is still being contested by the original discoverer. His invention almost did not make it to the forefront, thanks to the Brazilian King who worked with Bell and the hearing impaired, who insisted that his device be seen. Despite all the hurdles, it has stood the test of time. In fact, in its infancy, there were sug...

Heard on WYNC Radiolab the other day on something revolutionary. Somebody researched on the inside of exoskeleton of the coral. Understandably,  the inside of the coral had about 365 grooves depicting the days in the year and the change in the tides. Some smart professor decided to go one step further and looked into prehistoric corals. To his astonishment, he consistently found 400 to 410 grooves in them. The great minds started wondering... Is it possible that the year was longer in the prehistoric days when the Earth was in its 'infancy'? It turned out that there is a plausible explanation to this end. The Earth, just after the Big Bang was devoid of a moon. In its place when just meteorites, hence the mass that was rotating the sun was following a different orbit (longer). When the meteorites coalesce to form the Moon, the gravitational force of the Moon slowed Earth, hence shortening the number of days in a year! The things that you learn.... limitless!

Jai Ho (2014, Hindi) I thought the overused formula of one man's fight against a corrupt country is so yesterday, so 1990s and only works for South Indian movies involving new faces. Obviously, I am wrong. A Bollywood veteran thinks it will work and eavesdropping on the response of the contented praises from the viewers after the show, I guess it is going to be another cracker for Salman Khan! Half of the crew of Ham Saath Saath Hain (1999) teamed up for this movie. (+Salman Khan, there are Tabu and Mohnish Bahl) It is actually a remake of a 2006 Telugu film (Stalin) which had its idea from Hollywood's 'Pay it Forward' of 2000. The unbelievable saga of a unceremoniously dismissed army officer go around righting wrongs of a corrupt society and in the process endangering his helpless family members is nothing new. Every time, we watch such a movie, the public tend to think a new dawn will come where society would be courteous and politicians would be honest. Dr...

So the day finally came.... My iPhone 4 which had been patriotically serving me 24/7 over the past couple of years had given up on me. 3,2,1,...poof went the flicker and all the king's men and the king's horses could not put IP4 to tick again. This work horse served its purpose well through all the hard knocks and immersions (in sweaty conditions of the running environment, waterproof casing came in much later) that life had to offer. The passing of the patriot reminds me of the story of a national laureate's composition  'Matinya seorang Patriot', a critical assessment of the duel of the two greatest Malaccan warriors - Hang Tuah and Hang Jebat. We all know the duel, immortalised by P Ramlee's 1957 film. Usman Awang The bone of contention here is whether Jebat, the fallen, did the correct thing by avenging for his best friend against a corrupt and unreasonable monarch who had their own yes-men and plenty of cloud and power over the people. The eternal q...

The last few days have been relatively peaceful. The rudimentary contraption that I now hold, called mobile phone serves its purpose quite well. It is mobile, it is always on the go. Life is peaceful as the urge to gaze at the screen if there was anything new in the cyberspace or social media did not arise as it is not a very smartphone. It is from the pre-3G dinosaur era. My life is more serene without the frequent buzzing or vibrations as if a rattlesnake was curling around the inside of my pants. My friends, however, were under the impression that I had somehow recoiled into my own cocoon becoming an antisocial as all the Whatsapp messages directed to me had gone unanswered. I, however, miss indulging in my own magical world filled with podcasts from NPR and the like. Is it a boon or bane? Just like many things (and people) in our lives, we have to learn with it or around it. Priorities in life should be of paramount importance! My usually smart mobile phone is now in critica...

Full Metal Jacket (1987) Producer and Director: Stanley Kubrik Normally I do not fancy watching combat movies- people (on the enemy line) dying aimlessly but the Americans rarely do, and when they do, it would be a great deal which would beg for revenge! But this one is different!  It is an anti-war movie that looks at the Vietnam War from a satirical view. It highlights the contradiction of man, the duality of man, just like the main character who wears a 'PEACE' sign on his uniform and the word 'Born to Kill' on his helmet.  Another trigger happy soldier bears the words 'I am become death' on his helmet, apparently a quote from Bhagavadgita. The soldiers could not understand why they were fighting for the same people who hate their guts and presence there. The Americans go on a shooting spree targeting farmers, women and children from atop a flying helicopter with no qualms. The film shows the initial training of soldiers under extreme conditions with ...

When I was a kid Childhood stories by Boey We all had our observa tions about our parents' idiosyncrasies and things we hated doing but we still did them because... we were kids. We all had our moment when we hated our parents and were ashamed of them. And the jealous moments when other people's parents were so cool. Not to forget those sibling rivalry. Now you have this book that spills out all those suppressed thoughts, written by a Malaysian animator stationed in US. It is a scarily honest light read that reminds us Malaysians of the nostalgic and troubled times of childhood. The best thing about the book is that it is more of a comic book rather a text rich prose. It narrates different scenarios in the life of the author (Cheeming Boey) and usually ends in one or two pages with outcomes that would curve a smile, every time! The stories are not overtly 'rolling-on-the-floor' type funny but cute nevertheless. Sure, we all have all gone through what he had gone t...

http://blogs.denverpost.com/captured/2014/01/02/wounded-knee-1890-1973-photos/6496/ Wounded Knee, 1890 – 1973 in photos Posted Jan 02, 2014 On December 29, 1890 members of the U.S. 7th Cavalry Regiment opened fire on hundreds of Lakota  men, women and children, killing over 150 people. “The regrettable and tragic clash of arms at this site on December 29, 1890, the last significant engagement between Indians and soldiers on the North American Continent, ended nearly four centuries of warfare between westward-wending Americans and the indigenous peoples. Although the majority of the participants on both sides had not intended to use their arms—precipitated by individual indiscretion in a tense and confused situation rather than by organised premeditation—and although the haze of gunsmoke that hung over the battlefield has obscured some of the facts, the action more resembles a massacre than a battle. For 20th-century America, it serves as an example of national guilt for the ...