RIFLE RANGE BOY

The Real McCoy, of course. I have my own cruel way of being mean. Just as much as it boils inside to see a toddler running around in a designer branded jeans, tshirt and sneakers to match, it amuses me to see them wearing real watches! Yes, the ticking ones, not the fake stationary ornamental ones. The twisted mind in me sometimes jocularly tease these helpless souls (?really) by asking them the time! Invariably they would turn the face of the watch to me to read the time myself. During my tour of duty in the border town of Kota Bharu, wearing branded watches was considered normal. Nobody would give a second look, be awed or second guess your watch. You see, genuine looking fakes are easily gotten for a song from a street peddler. The same wearer would raise eyebrows and earn admirers just as he leaves to another town. The latest craze among plebeians now is watch watching. Whenever a public figure is photographed with full view of his chronograph, the general public with th...

It was a cool German June morning. SS still had her bearings all wrong. She is still jet lagged. After all, she had just arrived at Leipzig University to present her paper. Today is a special day. It is the day she turns 50. Yes, the big scary Five-O! Wow, there used to be a time when she thought 50 was the age where people plan for retirement to play stupid little games with their spoilt brat grandchildren. But, hell no! She has so much to achieve. The last things she feels now is old. Sure, a little aches here and there, breathlessness, extra pounds around the mid-riff but old, no way. Not bad, she told herself. Coming from humble beginnings in a household where melancholy was the tone everyday, she has come far. Her childhood was plagued with chronic asthma which she kept cursing her paternal side of her family as they were the carriers of that gene. Every member of his family had one thing to boast about - asthma. It was like a family heritage. She spent many days crouched bre...

The question is whether an occurrence can solely be put on one event is questionable. It appears that our national pastime is playing the blame game and to shame the alleged perpetrator(s) in the hope that if someone can be pinpointed to have caused the gaffe, we can put closure to a catastrophe. And they hope to prevent the shortcomings in future. It all sounds noble but unfortunately life is not so simple. Not every bad incident has a simple etiology. Most often than not it is multi factorial. Like in Murphy's Law, when something is doomed to go wrong, it will go wrong. Airline industry have considered a 'no blame' policy but to identify the precipitating events and to take a collective approach to improve safety. On the other hand, is a leader culpable to take the brickbats if his subordinates faltered? Should he be made to answer or just take the easy way of saying, "it wasn't me. It is not easy to control so many people's actions, you know!"? ...

Malaysian Heritage and History Club  https://www.facebook.com/groups/malaysian.heritage.and.history.club/ Closer to home....

Dil Dhadakne Do (Hindi, Let the Heart Beat; 2015) Everyone looks at something and sees what he wants to see. On surface, it looks like a usual Bollywood fare of forced marriage, forbidden love with the take home message of love conquers all. Scratch a little deeper, you would realise that there are more that meets the eyes than the eye candy costume, beau stars and the catchy hip gyrating foot tapping songs. DDD is a story of a self made entrepreneur, Kamal Mehra, his wife, Neelam who are both celebrating their thirtieth wedding anniversary on a Mediterranean cruise with their friends and relatives. The celebratory function is an avenue to showcase their wealth to show people that they have arrived. The wife feels that the marriage is nothing more than an empty shell. Kamal is busy making money and have other ideas about social life. The daughter, Ayesha (Priyanka Chopra) is trapped with a husband (Manav Sangha, Rahul Bose) after the love of her life (Sunny Gill, Farhan A...

Cinema Paradiso (aka Nuovo Cinema Paradiso, Italian, 1988) There was a time when nostalgia was a bad word. Individuals stuck in the memory of the past were considered medically unsound. Soldiers returning from the Great War who suffered from what we now term as post-traumatic stress disorder (PPSD) were said to be suffering from a disease called 'nostalgia'. On the other hand, many industries thrive on the memory of the past. Of late, there is a concerted effort to rekindle the memory of the past for economic reasons and to generate business. Even yours truly have been told not to be trapped in the past but to come out and smell the flowers. To them, I say, history repeats itself, and one who does not know where he came from will not reach where he is heading to! Anyway, this blog kind of glorifies the past and tries to rekindle memories of the bygone era. This is precisely what the story in this film is NOT advocating, in a way, at least. The movie starts with a mother...

Just for the Love of it (Popular Music in Penang 1930-1960s) by: Paul Augustin and James Lochhead The picturesque outlay of the book, resembling a coffee table book with plenty of pictures and trivia information.  From top: Penang Road, Jimmy Boyle and Runnymede Swingtette, Ruby Rozells (aka Catherine Tejummal), Bashir Ahmad and Syed Agil.  When you are at the lowest rung of the social ladder and have the burning desire to unshackle the chains of poverty, the arts and leisure industry is last on your priority list. All you are interested in is the particular time tested fast-track way to wealth, hoping that that would be the panacea of all of their problems.  Furthermore, with an ancestor who singlehandedly squandered his family wealth in a single generation by over-indulging in partying, fun, leisure and merrymaking, going anywhere near this industry was a no-no when we were growing up. In not so many words, the words of Animals' 'House of the Rising Su...

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) Many Australian movies which dealt with mysteries of the nature have been hits at the box office. And this 1975 flick is one of them. We are advised to be outdoors but these unanswered questions tells us that there are many mysteries of Mother Nature lurk among us. The aboriginal cultures had a mutual respectful relationship with nature which unfortunately, modern thinking man tend to take for granted. The appreciation of the splendour and greatness of things on Earth is slowly on the decline evidenced by the resurfacing of many of its age old landscapes and pillage of its resources. This Ozzie flick generated many interests over the years. It story was based on a 1967 book. Even though it is supposed to a fiction, it has become a source of many discussions and arguments on the possible explanation of the reported mysterious loss of the teenage school girls at a park on Valentines' Day of 1900. The film starts with in a all girls boarding sch...

The Party 1968 Director: Blake Edwards Can you imagine, 99% of percent of the show was shot in a party? Hence, the title. Maybe, in 1968, it would have been quite alright to feature an Indian as a bumbling misfit with an exotic aura behind him but still somewhat a sub-human to showbiz but it would not politically correct in this early 21st century. Globalisation had spread Indian diaspora the world over that Indian delicacies have became national cuisines of some Western countries! This film is bring together, yet again, the genius pair of Peter Sellers and Blake Edwards after their many successes after the 1963 Pink Panther blockbuster comedy. Here, a brown faced Peter Sellers acts as Hrundi V. Bakshi, a bumbling minor side actor, who is a walking disaster in the set. He earns the ire of the director who curses him and told him point blank that he would not get any acting part in Hollywood and he would make sure of that! He contacts his contemporary of this Bakshi character but hi...

Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014) When a virus enters a body, the body core temperature increases to kill off the invading offender. In that tussle, either the host or the virus dies. So when the world becomes over-populated, Mother nature tries to maintain equilibrium. She causes global warming and significant catastrophes. In that manner, people are killed, and homeostasis is preserved. That is the basis of a mad internet billionaire developing a SIM card which he distributes free to everyone. He preselects a set of people for his new world, and he then activates the SIM card for the rest of the world to whack the living daylight out of each other and virtually self destruct each other. In the end, the mad man plans to start a human civilisation all over again. The storyline sounds outlandish. Well, it is cartoonish too. It reminds you of the 1996 flop 'Mars Attack!' Kingsman is a brand of a custom-made man clothing line which also has a band of suave secret agents w...

Senyap (The Look of Silence, Indonesian, documentary; 2014) Director: Joshua Oppenheimer This well deserved multiple award winning documentary film is actually a follow-up to 2012 ' The Act of Killing ' by the same director. Both documentaries look at Indonesia's marred history with the handling with supposed communist sympathisers in 1965/66 era. An estimated one million people perished then. In the former film, the narration was from the perpetrators who carried out the so-called justice of the rulers of the land. In the sequelae, the approach is from the victim's perspective. Adi, an optician, had an elder brother who was killed during those tumultuous times. Adi himself was born about 3 years after the episode. Adi, a father himself of 2 young kids, tries to subtly interview the past militia men who carried out the murders under the guise of offering free optical consultation. The presentation managed to draw in the emotional aspect of the interviewer (i.e....

Migrating to Australia, good meh? Authors: Ken And Michael Soong. In the typical conceited Malaysian fashion complacent with his comfort zone and would not lift his finger to help his helpless neighbour, most of my friends who saw the title of the book were quick and forthcoming with their unsolicited advice, went on a with unpunctuated liberal last words. "You don't need read a book to know that, come here, I'll tell you!" they said. Sure, it is easy to go on a rant on the merits and demerits of migration, the push and pull factors, of political and economic refuge. Sure, our forefathers took the bold step of giving up they had, which is what they never had, as times were bad then. It was a question of whether staying for a saviour to turn up to save the day, to become a statistic or plunge into the pit of uncertainty. Those were different times with different needs. We have come a long way from living to survive to living to prosper. This book, in my view, g...