RIFLE RANGE BOY

Churchill's Secret Wars (2010) (The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during WW2) Author: Madhusree Mukerjee In 1952, Nehru appeared on BBC TV in his first ever TV appearance. He was invited to the UK to partake in the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. As the head of a former colony of the Crown, Nehru was there, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Winston Churchill, gracing the event. By that time, Churchill had descended from his intense contempt for all races except whites. Churchill must have been brimming from ear to ear as India and many other former colonies had consented to stay under the umbrage of the Crown under the title of the Commonwealth. If two hundred years of looting of wealth from India was insufficient, now their subjects have agreed to make their wealth common!  It is ironic that Nehru and the bulk of the Congress leaders spent crouched in jail all through the most pivotal years before Indian independence, during World War 2. It was the time all the wheel...

Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-Clapped Star, Bengali, 1960) Screenplay & Direction: Ritwik Ghatak I saw him brought in earlier in handcuffs and was attended to by my seniors. I noticed that everyone was looking at him with judgemental looks. So as not to embarrass him further, I just immersed myself in work. Still, from the corners of my eye, I did notice that he looked too intelligent to be wearing prison attire and be shoved around like a common criminal. He must have seen me clerking the patients all through the afternoon, and there I was, still attending to patients at 10pm, as the first frontliner and the most junior of the staff. I must have looked gullible enough for him to quietly signal me to come beside him as I passed him by. . So, when he called me, I was curious. He complained he had chest pains that could be a heart attack and needed a certification letter that he had a massive myocardial infarction. I was scratching my head. At most, he could be having some musculoskele...

Churchill's Secret War (2010) Author: Madhusree Mukerjee Besides participating in the Boer War and WW1 personally, as a Prime Minister, he spearheaded the Allied Forces in World War 2; Winston Churchill made it his life ambition to destroy India. His handling of the 1943 Bengal famine is equal to genocide. Instead of being responsible colonial masters taking care of their colonies that helped to propel their economies, he chose to blame the shortage solely as the natives' fault for choosing to breed like a rabbit. In his same tone of contempt, he verbalised, "Why isn't Gandhi dead yet?" At the heights of the Second World War, the British had its hands tied all over the place. It was trying to act as the biggest superpower. In reality, it was bleeding. India was supplying all its credit needs. In essence, on paper, the British bought India's produce with a promise to pay later. And later was after WW2 when Britain was in dire straits and had to let them go. Bri...

Stories by Rabindranath Tagore Netflix (26 episodes; 2015) Even though Tagore wrote these stories more than a hundred years ago, it remains fresh and relevant to today.  Rabindranath lived at a time when India, as well as the rest of the world, was rapidly changing. His motherland, after missing the bus of the Industrial Revolution, thanks to the British East India Company and the British Empire, was doing catch up. Starting with the First Indian Rebellion @ Sepoy Mutiny in 1857, India had awoken. After being plundered by foreign forces repeatedly, it tried to make social and political changes. Many leaders emerged. Some approached them through political means, others through armed hostility and yet some via passive aggression. Tagore infiltrated the minds with his literary work. This collection of twenty stories in twenty-six episodes cover a range of issues. The stories were authored by Tagore between 1890 and 1941, just before his death. They talk about the mistreatment of young...

Encountering Kali  (In the margins, at the centre, in the west) Edited by Rachel F McDermott, & Jeffrey J. Kirpal To the uninitiated, like the Europeans who arrived on the Indian shores to encounter its natives paying homage to a gory angry looking dark imaged Goddess with weapons of destruction hanging from her multiple arms, wearing a necklace of human scalps, skirt of human limbs and protruding tongue, it must be the image of Devil itself. For the non-believers, it must have appeared like devil worship and a warped sense of divinity of the tribal people. To the natives, however, it is their expression of the embodiment of how the world is to them. The world is a cruel place. Man's survival is paved with the daily struggle against the elements of Nature and is a constant combat against various atrocities. It is not easy, but life has to go on. Civilised people in India had apparently realised these long ago, even before the spread of Brahmanic and Vedic teachings. The ...

Parineeta (2005) May be the Indians are very sentimental people. They like to reenact events of the past and reminisce it again and again. This, is quite evident in this film. More of these later. This love story was penned by a contemporary of Ravindranath Tagore, Bengal's another favourite son, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay in 1914. It made its entry into the Indian silver screen in 1953 through its namesake acted out by Ashok Kumar and Meena Kumari. It boasts of being a classic with memorable dialogues. Like in most romantic dramas, especially an Indian one, it revolves around what appears like a love triangle but within the confines of Indians' one man one woman tradition! A woman or a man who have accepted the other as life partner stays like that till death do them apart, may be in not so dramatic way. It is a story of a the main characters Sekhar (Saif Ali Khan) and Lalita (Vidya Balan, debutant) growing together as neighbours and close friends. Lalita's name here...

Agatuk (Stranger; Bengali, 1991) Director: Satyajit Ray Satyajit Ray, like Hitchcock, must be one of those who never made a bad movie. This is evident in his swan song, which morphed a simple story of a stranger coming into a household into a philosophical discourse on religion, man and civilisation. And attention-grabbing one, at that! It is a display of simple storytelling with an array of traditional music and tribal dances minus the skilful special effects gadgetry and unrelated pointless visualisation of the human anatomy. The story mocks the modern society, which is perceived to be suspicious of others and is selfish itself. Anila and Sudhindra Bose are a middle-class couple with a preteen son, Satyaki. One day, Anila receives a letter from a long lost uncle who left the country some 35 years earlier. He announces his stop-over in Calcutta before leaving off to Australia. Being a gracious guest, he stated in his letter that his host was not obliged to receive him but hope...

Shakha Prosakha (Branches of the Tree, Bengali; 1990) Story, Screenplay, Direction: Satyajit Ray This is one of Ray's swan song. It is a layered tale questioning the meaning of life, intergenerational priorities and the pressure of growing up to live up to peoples' expectations. Ananda Majumdar is a 70-year-old retired industrialist who raised the rank and files from a worker to the position of partner in a big company, honoured by the town for his philanthropy work. He is highly respected by the community, and his biography had just been written. He is a widower with 4 sons. He lives with his senile father of 90 years old and his second son with had a head injury during his university days and had to discontinue his studies. The second son, Proshanto (Soumitra Chatterjee in his subdued supportive role, in most of Ray's movies he is the leading actor), is living in his own world oblivious of the surroundings, talking only occasionally, somewhat coherently, someti...

Joi Baba Felunath (The Elephant God, 1978; Bengal) Satyajit Ray's Sherlock Holmes of the East strikes again! This time around, he (Feluda, who was seen in Sonar Kella; Soumitra Chatterjee), Jatayu (the writer) and cousin/assistant Topshe are summoned during their vacation in the holy city of Benares to investigate the missing Ganesha statue.   This simple case becomes complicated as the people get killed, everyone in the household becomes a suspect, and Feluda and friends are threatened by a local businessman who is also a no-good antique treasure merchant. Along the way comes a sage, Machlibaba, named so as he allegedly swam from Calcutta to Benares and gives fish scales as blessed tokens! I sense a sense of cynicism on the part of the director. Even the meanest villains have pictures of Gods decorating their walls, even when he has a gun pointed at Feluda! He is trying to depict the fakeness of the holy men and the supposedly holy people of Benares!

Ganashatru (Enemy of The People; 1989) Director: Satyajit Ray When it comes to obligations to God and religion, somehow man forgets all the common courtesy towards fellow mankind and has no qualms in creating anarchy, the exact opposite thing that religion is trying to propagate - Peace on Earth! No amount of rhetoric will change what had allegedly been carved on stone by divine forces. When one argues using scientific arguments to save mankind, he is accused of mocking religion and is being a non-believer. People forget that believing in God is different from believing in a religion! Dr Ashoke Gupta noticed that many of his hospital and private patients have been down with infectious hepatitis. He suspects that this could be due to a leakage in the sewage pipe. He fears that many devotees to the nearby may also be infected as they are usually given to drink holy water which is from the same source. Dr Gupta (Soumitra Chatterjee) puts forward this proposal to his brother, Ni...

Rabindranath Tagore (Documentary, 1961) Written, narrated, directed: Satyajit Ray It is said that Ray is related to Tagore. The Tagores were initially from the Banerjee clan but over time they became to be called Thakur as they were Brahmins and headed the society. Thakur became Tagore. Born in a wealthy family in Bengal, he was born with a silver spoon as the thirteenth child to a 45year old mother. He did not really shine in his childhood and even in adulthood, he did not complete his tertiary education. Gradually wisdom came to him in his late twenties and the turning point came when there was tragedy in his family - 3 deaths in family; his wife, his daughter and his son. His fame spread worldwide when his poem 'Gitanjali' was praised by Yeats which made Tagore the first non-European recipient of Nobel prize for Literature. He was also knighted by the Queen which he renounced after 1919 English massacre of Indians in Punjab. Rabindranath's influence went beyond poe...

Sonar Kella (Bengali, Golden Fortress; 1974) Director: Satyajit Ray This colour film deviates from his Ray's usual fare as this is more of a children feature film which involved thriller, suspense, adventure, comedy of errors and mystic rather than his typical social messages. It also looks like a feature film made to show the splendour and beauty of Rajasthan as well. It starts with the startled parents whose tween son, Mukhul, who keeps on waking up every night to draw and describe a particular golden castle that he grew up in and vividly describes of treasures and precious stones. The parents' concern becomes the talk of the town, articles in the newspaper and the interest of 2 small times crooks (Burman and Bose) when the mention of treasures come in the limelight. A parapsychologist, Dr Hajra, interested in the boy's case volunteers to take Mukul to Jaipur to locate the said castle (even though nobody actually knows the exact the location). He was hoping that M...

Asani Sanket (Distant Thunder; 1973; Bengali) Director: Satyajit Ray In 1971, George Harrison and friends including Ravi Shankar, did a mammoth concert to garner support to feed people affected by a civil war as well as a cyclone in 1970. In 1943, 5 million people from the Bengali subcontinent died due to its most significant man-made famine. This story essentially is about this. It is not a docu-drama about the devastating effects of or the hopelessness of the calamity but rather a saga about human emotions and reactions to adversity. Gangacharan Chakravarthy (Soumitra Chatterjee, a regular star in many of Ray's films) is a poor Brahmin who stays in the shack by the edge of a village. He gets on with life with his loving young wife, Ananga, teaching in a village school, treating villagers' ailments and performing religious rituals in return for villagers' respect and food supply. Ganga is respected for his intellect and his high caste. The sight of flyi...