RIFLE RANGE BOY

http://www.familytrek.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/DI-I-offend-you.jpg I saw a video clip recently on the social media. It took place within the confines of an underground train. A mother was seen nursing her infant in a sparsely occupied coach. She was admonished for exposing herself in public. The man who accused her of public indecency insisted that his liberty of not wanting to see a naked lady had been denied. Slowly, the fellow passengers joined to support the lactating mother, but the man stood his ground. He accused her of not bothering about how others would feel seeing a naked breast in plain view. The argument went on for some time till it was time for one of them to disembark. A few months ago, a Muslim man is a Hindu-majority village in India was lynched to death when the village holy man announced that a particular occupant was in possession of beef. A mob, primarily vegans who thought that by controlling their cravings for blood and meat would be able to reach e...

Aligarh (2016) Young men flirt with young girls in the open (and vice versa) but most people in an urban setting would not think much of it. But when two consenting men decide to show their passion for each other in the secluded privacy of their home, the public agrees that it is their God-sanctioned duty to shame the deviant couple! They insist that it is against the norm of Nature and would go to great lengths to correct this, even if to kill, in spite of God's plea for the conservation of all of His creations. They are not interested in scientific and medical explanations for their aberrance.  They say "it is all crystal clear. He decreed, we follow. It is my duty to ensure that His law is carried out here on earth. Period." This, is the essence, is the story of a Professor in India's third highest ranking University, Aligarh Muslim University in Uttar Pradesh. Professor Shrinivas R. Siras,  a 62-year-old divorcee, six months from his retirement, heads t...

A Dangerous Method 2011 This is a classic piece that would probably appeal mostly to readers and students of psychology. As it is neither filled with action-packed scenes nor with cliffhanging sequences, it may excite only a niche portion of viewers. In essence, it tells the interaction between Freud and his student, Karl Jung, their correspondences and Jung's search for the meaning of life. Central to the story is Jung's Russian patient, a Sabina Spielrein, who he treats for hysteria and eventually becomes his mistress. Jung is a diligent Swiss psychiatrist who immerses himself in work, paying scant attention to other things in his life, including his pregnant wife. He receives a troubled Russian young lady (Sabina, Keira Knightley) as a patient. Jung treats her with his 'talking cure', a new technique learnt from Freud's writings. Through his psychoanalysis, he deduces that her tics and appalling behaviour can be related to her father's abuse of her. Ev...

I rudhi Suttru ( இறுதிசுத்த்று , Final round, Tamil; 2015) This flick which falls under the new category as far as the Tamil cinema is concerned, sports drama, was recommended by a long time connoisseur of Indian arts, music and performing arts. I decided to give it a go. I was floored by what I saw. It breathes a fresh of new air into an otherwise stereotypical exploitative misogynistic world of Indian cinema which pays more attention to the erotic female part of the anatomy rather than exploring themes of empowerment and positivity. For the outset, one can kind of predict the direction of the movie, just as most stories from this genre are. There are more things to see here than the mere storyline and eye-candy. It is the setting, the simple real to life acting and realistic boxing that are the selling points of the offering. Sorry, no glamorous, exotic looking Aryan beauties in psychedelic-hued garbs to savour, just sweaty girls from the fishermen's village in boxing short...

Unnal Mudiyum Thambi (உன்னால் முடியும் தம்பி, You  can do it Brother, Tamil; 1988) Direction: K. Balachander A young Brahmin boy is busy chanting hymns under his breath as he walks to the temple lake to perform his daily abolitions. He sees a blind, hungry beggar struggling to pick up a piece of banana thrown for her. He can see that she is going to fall off the stairs, but he does not help her. He does not want to break his ritual. Another beggar who sees the whole scenario helps her but admonishes the boy for giving more importance to rituals than humanity. Herein lies the dilemma that plagued the adolescent for the rest of his life. One one hand, his father, is a dogmatic stickler of Vedantic scripture and a classical Indian music maestro who would rather die than to have the age-old Hindu traditions desecrated. One the other hand, the boy, Udayamurthi (Kamalhasan), can see so much social injustice around him that his father, a big man in the society, is turning a blind e...

We were meeting after 30 years and what do we talk about? Hair. Understandably, many had lost their crowning glory or their beauty mane. In the place of David Starsky's luscious fluffy hair and John Denver's mop hair is Kojak's shining scalp. Comparing each other's tonsorial assets was the order of the day. In the land of baldies and the receding hairlines, emerged a man with assets of Samson proportions. Standing steadfastly defiant against his wife's tirade and Delilah-like threats of trimming his lock, Samson stays adamant not to part with new found interest in trichology. Amongst the crowd also stood a gentleman with a scalp thick of Sultan Azlan-type of majestic thick silvery hair and another with a heavy white beard to compensate a somewhat bald head. Samson justified his penchant for keeping long hair to the same reason why sages and philosophers stay unshaven. It is same justification for psychiatric ward policy of shaving patients with serious mental i...

BBC Four: Genius of the Modern World (Part 3; Sigmund Freud) The way I look at it, nothing much was happening till about the Industrial Revolution. Human beings were just vessels to live, work and make the number to ensure that the powerful remained in power. Science and technology not only shook the status quo, it also revolutionise people's thinking. Three individuals who contributed to the revolution of the mind are covered in this set of documentaries - Marx attacked social and economic order, Nietzsche on Christian morality and Sigmund Freud questioned the essence of our mind and existence. Growing in the cosmopolitan Vienna in the Habsburg Empire, he was exposed to law, philosophy and finally pursued the Natural Sciences. Initially fascinated with Charles Darwin's work, he gave it up for a medical research and later for medical practice. There was a time when Freud, joining the bandwagon of practitioners who thought that cocaine was the panacea of all ailments, co...

BBC Four: The Story of Maths (2008) Part 1: The Language of the Universe If one were to look at the history of the world, there was never a time there was peace on Earth. At every moment, there was some turmoil somewhere. In spite of all that upheavals, destructions and loss of lives and civilisations, we as a human race, have progressed on the long run. In the time of peace, people start becoming curious about their surroundings and start trying to understand its intricacies. They try to explain its pattern and perhaps try to predict its recurrence. Attacking forces usurp this knowledge as theirs and try to improve this further when the dust settles after their inquests. Slowly, learning from to count numbers with our digits, we developed formulas and managed to calculate unfathomable numbers of gargantuan proportions. Mathematics is said to be the language of the Universe. Marcus De Sautoy, a Mathematician, takes the viewers on a journey of discovery of how Mathematics changed ...

Son of Saul (Hungarian; 2015) Just how far would you go to maintain cultural and religious practices? Even went your life is in danger? In a World War 2 concentration camp when Jews are shovelled into incinerators by Nazis? Well, this is what Saul does. In this disturbing Hungarian movie, set over two days in one of those camps, Jews are lined up, 'processed' to be killed, burned alive, shot and buried in mass graves, emptied their coats of their belongings, and have their ashes spread unceremoniously by the river. It is just a banal activity that goes on there. Saul is a sonderkommando, a run-around helper of the Nazis, who is threatened with death if they do not help the German soldiers in their nefarious act. Probably to avert his attention from the stresses of yells, screams, and cries of dying people around him, he goes around looking for a rabbi to do the last rights of a young Jewish whom he tried to help and died. His search for a rabbi amongst the ca...

During the era of the Soviet Union and Mao China, the farmers had great pride in toiling the land to showcase their produce to the prosperity of the Motherland. The steel workers in Stalin gleamed from ear to ear when the steel yield reach yet another annual record. The musician bleeds his fingers to give another mesmerising performance in the name of music. To him, music did not die with Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens with the plane crash, but it lives on. The Bharatnatyam dancer grimaces as she executes another gravity defying posture to honour the spirit of the blissful union of Nataraja. Detractors vilify the dance as a glorification of the decadent lifestyles of the courtesans, but she would like to imagine it as the immersion of Divine powers of Siva and Shakti. Performers of the visual art do not mind shedding their tunic and ignoring the first sensation that man felt as they were outcast from the Garden of Eden, i.e. shame, all for the glory and developme...

Basic (2003) This is a John Travolta - Samuel L Jackson collaborated movie that did not stir much of attention and did not hit it big at the box office. Their first one was of course Pulp Fiction (1994). The story is told in such a complicated way, in a Rashomon manner but with characters changing names that most viewers lost it. The story finally makes sense at the end but by then it appeared too far-fetched. It tells the story of US Army Rangers who are training in Panama. A hard talking strict trainer is killed. Tom Hardy, a DEA Agent with a shady past, is called in to help out to get to the bottom of the problem. Two Rangers, who are rescued from the hurricane hit jungles of Panama where the crime took place, have different versions of what happened. Further investigation opens the can of worms of racial discrimination, camaraderie, back-biting, factions, conspiracy and smuggling of illicit drugs into the US using army vehicles. Despite the confusion, the storyteller m...

Macbeth (2015) It is amazing that a writer in the 16th century can pen out such a play so intricate in its emotional interplay. This is, of course, the work of a particular man of commoner stock from Stratford-upon-Avon. Playing the main character of this play seem to the lifetime ambitions of many an actor including Orson Welles, Patrick Stewart, Sean Connery, Richard Burton and Lawrence Olivier. Michael Fassbender reprises the role of Macbeth in this 2015 production. Perhaps the only people in the world who do not have a sense of guilt are the psychopath. Otherwise, most of us are drilled upon us to build a wall of guilt within us that sometimes makes us lose our balance. The guilt that we are made to feel eventually eats us up. Despite the urge to survive and need to outdo and overrun others to succeed is there, most of our upbringing makes it mandatory for us to fell guilty. Sometimes, we dig our own graves, and our actions themselves push us in.  The evil that lurks...

Yuddham Sei (யுத்தம் செய், Wage War, Tamil; 2010) Nathuram Godse, in his appeal, stated in a very articulate and verbose manner, his justifications of gunning down an icon who is considered the Father of the Nation in a most violent way. He said that violence has been rife throughout man's history to change his path of his journey of life. Nature is also not a bed of roses but a path paved with thorns. It is cruel and does not give preferential treatment. Its fury has no boundaries and its purpose unexplainable, from a practical viewpoint.   Like that evil lurks amongst us. In every corner we turn to, there is potential danger from Nature or from people itself. It is just a matter of being at the wrong place at the wrong time, by chance. The tide rises to all the ships, not selectively. Or is an elaborate scheme of things in a dice throwing game of the puppet master? When bad things happen to good people, we say it is an act of God, karma, fate or plain un...

The eyes, window to the soul! Just the other day, my home cat went missing. It was a good eight hours before he was to be seen again. Typically, he is confined to the confines of the house. His urges to explore had drastically reduced after he was neutered. On the occasional instances that he ventures outside the house, he can be seen gazing at the flying birds, moving cars and aimless stares into oblivion whilst rustling his hairy ears to focus. He returned unceremoniously with his catwalk just aloof to all the excitement that happened in the household during his disappearance. I wondered what he must have been up to. I just wished that I could somehow read his mind to know exactly what he experienced and what were the adventures and misadventures that he experienced. I wanted to know whether he was a hero, a valiant cat who saved a fellow feline kind or was he just a scaredy cat who ran away at the first sight of danger. Oh, maybe I should just let things be as it is. Perh...

Sultan (Hindi, 2016) There is really nothing ground shattering to blog about this film. Perhaps the pre-release media shenanigan by Salman Khan would be talked about longer than the memory of the movie disappears from the public mind. I reckon this memory would not be long.  This is just another predictable flick of a guy who finds joy in loafing around playing pranks and indulging in age-inappropriate activities who steers his life around to win over the love of a girl. As in most Indian movies, the firebrand cracker of a girl just turns jello at the sentimental self-sacrifices of her Romeo. This time, the theme of the film is the good old traditional Indian sport of 'gusti' or wrestling. Together the couple goes on a medal-winning spree all around the world till tragedy strikes. Aarfa (Anushka Sharma) becomes pregnant only to be left behind for the world championships. The haughty Sultan (Salman Khan) whose fame went to his head finds out the hard way that...

Udta Punjab (Punjab on a High; Hindi-Punjabi, 2016) The world is a stage, and we are all actors, or rather we are puppets whose strings are tightly spun around by the puppet-masters. The masters here are people in power who control one thing that everything is clamouring for - money. The people are the big business magnates and conglomerates who work in cahoots with the politicians to put forward their agenda - more profit. They do not care it causes decadence of the society or that it brings social inequality or problems. They do not care if it breaks down families or wreck marriages. They do not care if those productive years of a youngster go down the drain. People all over the world are miserable and yearn for a way to be happy. The entrepreneurs have a way. Ever since Columbus and his jolly men found the happy Aztecs climbing the high plains of Andes to build temples for the Gods, whistling like the Seven Dwarfs marching to the mine, things were never the same. The Coca p...

Kalai Arasi (கலை அரசி, Queen of Arts, Tamil; 1963) Even when extra-galactical adventures, wars of astronomical proportions and extra-terrestrial visits in vimānas are mentioned in the Hindu scriptures, somehow, science fiction movies never really had a following at the silver screen level. A 1952 Hollywood collaborated film 'Kaadu (Jungle)' is the first Tamil sci-fi movie. Many alien visitation film ventures have failed, including Satyajit Ray's effort. 40 years before 'Koi Mil Gaya' burnt the silver screen hailed as the first successful Indian science-fiction flick, Kollywood did indeed release an epic saga of alien visitation, flying saucers and alien abduction. Keeping with the interest of viewers of that era, the elements of romance, songs, dances and swashbuckling scenes were kept very much alive. This movie almost did not make it to theatres. The project was apparently started in the last 1950s as evidenced by choice of leading actors. MGR and Bhanumath...

Anbe Sivam (அன்பே சிவம், Love is God; 2003) Another of Kamalhaasan starred film filled themes of communism, God, social justice, realism and atheism. This time around, it was done on a story based on Hollywood's blockbuster, 'Planes, trains and automobiles' where the Steve Martin character is stuck with an annoying fellow traveller as he is held at New York airport which was closed due to worsening blizzard. In this film, an eccentric communist sympathiser, Nallasivam, is stuck with a capitalistic minded advertisement executive, Anbarasu, in a flood-hit airport in Orissa. Their adventures and misadventures travelling all the way from Bhubaneswar in Orissa to Chennai via various modalities of transportation aid them to understand and empathise each other, especially the scarred faced, limping and hemiparetic Nallasivam. In this almost 3-hour long story, we get to know about Nalla's communist afflictions, his fight for increased minimum wage for workers, his tiff w...

BBC Four: Genius of the Modern World (Part 2: Friedrich Nietzsche) They say life is the single most precious commodity that one can receive in his lifetime. We are expected to embrace it with gratitude and hold it close, well, to our hearts. Ours is not to ask its purpose and its meaning, they say. Philosophers are a strange kettle of fish. They think when people indulge head-on together with their herd. Historian Bethany Hughes continues her journey into exploring geniuses of the modern world. This time, it is Friedrich Nietzsche, a Prussian philosopher who dared to question the authority of the Christian church. Times were changing. Development in the sciences in the 19th century opened man's eyes and questioned the existence of God. Nietzsche was primarily thinking of man's behaviour in a godless world. He was thinking of where Man would get guidance if he were to disregard the scriptures. Life started so blissfully for this son of a Lutheran preacher. His memory ...