RIFLE RANGE BOY

Joseph (Malayalam, 2018) Director: M Padmakumar This movie gives another twist to how man's greed hijacks a noble intention like organ donation. Good virtue has been held in high esteem and is said to be the raison d'être of man’s existence. The sound of one man’s death knell signalling another's beginning of life sounds cruel, but that is how life is. Death and tragedy in the goat family are signs of survival and satiety in the tiger family. As creative as a man can be, he knows about demand and supply, market forces and the electrifying power of the currency. Money, a lubricant in most transactions, eases this. The desperate seeker calls these middlemen God-sent. The mourners find solace in knowing they had done one good deed before the last call. The observers call it unscrupulous when they see the donors donating before their time is up and the deserving recipients are bypassed for the highest bidder.  Man has converted everything into businesses, invented creative sche...

Vadhandhi: The Fable of Velonie (Rumours; 2022) Writer & Director: Andrew Louis Everybody talks about wanting to know the truth. That the truth should prevail. That the truth will punish the wrongdoer. That the truth will eventually come out, sooner or later. There is a pressing need to discover the truth so that things can be put right so that man-made law can mete justice. Really? Firstly, truth is a double-edged sword. One man's perspective of the truth can be another's blatant lie. Seeing is not believing. How often our senses have played tricks on us. So often, we have been convinced by suggestion. The police can tell that eyewitness accounts can only be believed so much. We are prejudiced by appearance, race, background and stereotyping. Then some are so cocksure about something. Perhaps they have a vested interest or want to be in the limelight, to feel important. Maybe they like to steer the investigation the wrong way because they are involved somehow.  Remember th...

Rambutan Kisses - Poems (2022) Author: Malachi Edwin Vethamani If the illustration of the cover is not provocative enough, the poems will definitely do.  This is a sampling of the many thought-provoking poems, old and contemporary, found in this collection. Enjoy. This work is licensed under a  Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License . Follow Follow Follow  

Beef (Miniseries, S1E1-E10; 2023) Netflix This convoluted drama reveals the whole message behind its story only in the last two episodes of the season. Suddenly everything made sense. It tries to show how fragile we are as a society, to maintain peace and to fit in. We pull up a front to portray an image of Zen to the outside world, but deep inside, we hate the person beside us. We wish we could just wring their necks. Unfortunately, civil society does allow this. So we suppress that urge. As we did in our cavemen days, we yearn to be part of the pack to hunt together. Our strengths lie in our numbers. We exhibit specific behaviours in front of people but let our hair down and show our true inner demons under the cloak of anonymity. In public, we are expected to utter certain pre-ordained niceties. When somebody mentions death, the automatic response is, "I am sorry!" irrespective of whether he died as a national hero or OD'ed. We are expected to put a smiley face in publ...