RIFLE RANGE BOY

Shutter Island (2010) Director: Martin Scorsese Back when India was a newly independent nation, its Prime Minister, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, was officiating the opening of a psychiatric hospital in New Delhi. As part of his visit, he did a walkabout. All its inmates were excited to have a PM visiting them. All of them were standing smiling, waiting for Nehru to speak with them, except one. He was sitting in a corner, looking away, staring into space. Nehru approached him.   "Hello, how are you?" told Nehru. "I am the Prime Minister of India. How do you find this hospital?" The man slowly turned around, lifted his head to look at the Premier, and replied, "Yeah, that is what I thought when I first arrived, too. Don't worry, they will give you medicine, and you will be alright!" That is how it is. There is a thin line between reality and insanity, which is detachment from reality. It is all about perspective. Imagine telling the world that someone is wat...

More than enough people are quick to sneer at India after Vikram's successful soft landing at the Southern Pole of the Moon. On one end, people were quick to say that the whole exercise was a hoax. It is an illusion. Then, others blurted that a country that cannot provide toilets to its citizens and whose population mostly live below the poverty line should not be sending rockets to the Moon (and playing with nuclear bombs). One even threatened to stop monetary 'aid' to India, conveniently forgetting any discussion on repatriation monies after years of looting from India.  Firstly, everyone knows there is no way for everybody to prosper in sync before society moves up one notch higher. Things happen in tandem. There will be people who will have to do catching up, and there will be those who will lose out in the race for prosperity anyway. The only people who believe that the world needs equity are communists. Again and again, it has been proven that human greed surpasses an...

Split(2017) Director: M. Night Shyamalan Identity means different things to different people. For some, it is all about religion. No matter which part of the world they practise their religious rituals, it remains uniform. They wear their similar-looking tunic on their sleeves as their badge of honour.   On the other spectrum, a new generation of society swears by the gender they identify with. It is immaterial to them the chromosomal makeup they carry and how they look phenotypically. In fact, they also believe that gender is so fluid that they may decide to don the gender they feel at the drop of a hat or the side of the bed they get up from.   Identity sometimes overlaps, too. People who identify themselves as great outdoors enthusiast may also click with bibliophiles. A person in one group may be a member of another. Businesses have long known this, and they sell their products under the guise of lifestyle choices, e.g. targeted mechanise to meet their so-called lifestyle....

There Mohammad was all up cheery in the morning. One more week, and he will be off back to his hometown. His sister was to get married, and he needed to earn extra cash to spend with his childhood friends back home. Off he went answering the requests as the e-hailing app requested. The Klang Valley sun was getting hotter as the day went on. By 2 p.m., he thought he had enough. He would do one last delivery and call it a day. For his latest job, he had to ride to Shah Alam to deliver some foodstuff. “Waze sends me through Elmina to reach, okay!” He told himself. “After that, I can call a day! After all, it’s his childhood friend Amin’s birthday.” He was just reminiscing all his times from kindie to adulthood. After losing Amin to the many gruelling challenges in life, they rekindled their friendship through a mutual friend. They just did not have enough of each other. Stories of so many years cannot be completed in a single session. Tonight they plan to continue where they had stopped. ...

Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa To see Praggnanandhaa, an 18-year-old chess whiz from Tamil Nadu, proudly posing in front of the international press with a big white ash stripe spread across his forehead as a symbol of his faith for a photo shoot reminded me of the numerous times I felt ashamed of wearing vibuthi in public during my childhood.   Coming from a country where my ancestors were bought in as bonded labourers, I did not have many role models to follow, I was ashamed to be an Indian. The fact that many fellow Indians in my neighbourhood were loud and boisterous and had many rows with the laws did not help my perception of the race of my parents. The sing-song undulating tone of my mother tongue was a point of mocking and sneering by many. The behaviour of the few who make it a point to be noticed with their loud colour, unmistakable scents, and high-decibel speeches in buses made me want to disappear.   Mother's eyes say it all! The elaborate display of my religiosity was ...

Maaveeran (2023) Written & Directed by Madonne Ashwin  "I am not doing it; it is the voice in my head. It is telling me all the time to do things. I am sorry!" says the hero.   "You are telling me someone is telling you things," says the crooked badass politician as he slid the throat of his political manager. "This guy (pointing to dead man) has been nagging for 22 years. Don't do this, do this, not like that..." That pretty much gave a perspective to the message hidden behind the movie's story.   We are inundated with commands all the time. As toddlers, voices told us to watch our steps, be careful. As school children, we were warned not to forget to finish our homework. As teenagers, we got an earful for lazing around. Then we were told to get our lives together. Yet another forewarning that we are marrying the wrong person, and it goes on. Not to forget the inner voice that keeps harassing us that we would be punished for wilfully doing som...