RIFLE RANGE BOY

Maharaja (2024, Tamil) Director:  Nithilan Swaminathan If you are fed up watching the same old-time-tested formulaic Indian movies, this one is for you. The story starts as a comedy, but as it goes on, the storyline gets twisted.  Just when you think you know how the story will go, it takes a tangent and yet another. And it goes on and on until it ends with a final twister.  Maharaja, a mild-mannered barber, leads a simple life with his wife and a little daughter. Right in front of his eyes, he sees a lorry, with its driver obviously off its rails, crashing into his house, killing his wife instantaneously. His ‘daughter’ is miraculously saved by a metal dustbin.  Maharajah continues life as a widower and a doting father. One day, his house is broken into, and the metal dustbin that saved his ‘daughter’ goes missing. Maharaja makes a police report.  What happened afterwards is a series of flashbacks, parallel storytelling, police brutality, and police power abuse...

  Oru Pakka Kathai (ஒரு பக்க கதை, One-page Story @One-sided Story, Tamil;  2020) If I learnt anything from Jurassic Park, and specifically fictional scientist Ian Malcolm, I remember a dialogue about how Nature has a way to deal with survival. When the mad scientist in the park only bred female dinosaurs to control the population, Malcolm warned that when species are on the brink of extinction, Nature makes necessary changes for an organism become a hermaphrodite! Reproduction may occur by asexual means. These observations have been reproduced in laboratory conditions in certain snakes, fishes and rats. Parthenogenesis happens regularly in plants, where an unfertilised egg combines with the haploid polar body to produce a diploid offspring that is not a clone. The offspring should be a female if I understand well, since there are no Y chromosomes to go around. The scriptures are bountiful with tales of virgin births and immaculate conceptions. Kunti is said to have been impreg...

Forensic Files (S1-S7) Netflix Collection After spending over 50 hours binge-watching 100 over Forensic Files episodes on Netflix, all I say is the idea of a perfect crime is just a pipe dream. With the ever-changing field of forensic sciences, a crime can be solved even without the presence of a body. What used to be science fiction will soon be bread-and-butter stuff in day to day police work in time to come. If the records and specimens of a crime are left intact, the sky is the limit how distant in the future perpetrators will have to do time for their crimes. I think the most crucial determinant of whether crimes will be solved is the country's financial standing. If one were to look at most of the cases presented in this series, there were cold cases. These are cases where initial investigations hit a stone wall, and the investigators had no more clues at their disposal. They had the resources to set aside time, money and manpower with a fresh set of eyes to look into cases t...

Marriage Story (2019) You start a family appointing yourselves as the nucleus and the other appendages as equal partners and essential requirements of the cells. You do your part thinking that they would do the same. You assume that even though the nucleus is the first pre-requisite, the others would take their place and do their part for a balanced multifunctional cell.   You think that everything is fine until it hits you one day. The nucleolus, which is an integral part of you starts telling you that you are evil. That you are gaslighting her. That you think that you are the only one that matters.   Before you can realise what hit you, you are bamboozled with examples of your so-called ‘misdemeanours’ as if you did it for your own selfish reasons. You thought it was for a harmonious internal milieu, but it did not appear so. You thought every organelle was in concert with that - to maintain zen. Suddenly your every action is against you like you are some kind of...

To all my friends who ask me not to think too much, please ponder upon the following. We think we know everything and there is nothing more to learn. How wrong we are? I have come to realise that every living day is another fresh day to acquire knowledge. At the end of the 19th century, investigative officers thought they had a full-proof system to track down criminals. Anthromorphological features as described by witnesses and evidence at crime were sufficient to convict suspects. We all know how unreliable are accounts by bystanders or witnesses.  This arrangement worked fairly well when it was practised in the West where individual variations in hair, eye colours and other obvious physical were there. The British Colonial Police had a tough time policing as the natives all looked the same in their eyes. That is when fingerprinting techniques became the state-of-art avantgarde armamentarium in crime-busting. For some time, the method was thought to be so unique that it could...

Rosalind Franklin: Biography & Discovery of DNA Structure Rosalind Franklin: Biography & Discovery of DNA Structure By Mary Bagley, LiveScience Contributor | September 19, 2013 Rosalind FranklinCredit: National Institute of Health. Many people recall that the structure of the DNA molecule has the shape of a double helix. Some may even recall the names of the scientists who won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Medicine for modeling the structure of the molecule, and explaining how the shape lends itself to replication. James Watson and Francis Crick shared the Nobel Prize with Maurice Wilkins, but many people feel that much of the credit for this world-shaking achievement should rightfully go to someone who was absent from that stage, a woman named Rosalind Franklin. Rosalind Franklin was born July 25, 1920, and grew up in a well-known Jewish family in pre-World War II London, and was known in the family for being very clever and outspoken. Her parents sent her to St. Paul...

Two stories got me thinking this week. A paraplegic found out that humanity had not died. He was surprised to see that people went out of their way to appease his less fortunate self even though the last thing that the paraplegic wanted was self-pity and pittance thrown at him. Still, people obliged. It was much like the blind man who was forever taken over to the other side of the road just because he was standing at the edge of the road, not intending to cross or worse had just crossed the road. Then, there was another chap who had been taking care of his stroke-stricken mother for the past twenty over the years. In the initial few years, he was so high-spirited to give his mother all that modern technology could provide. Things were looking brighter until she was stricken with another episode of apoplexy, paralysing her so bad snatching away her motor and vocal abilities. What is left of a once robust chatty lady is just a faded rose, responding sluggishly to stimuli. Carin...

No Fire Zone: The Killing Fields of Sri Lanka (2013, Documentary) Director: Callum Macrae One of our lecturers (RS) back in university told us that the more we tried to hide something, the more people would want to see. And at that time, he was referring to the then sudden urge to preserve modesty or at least put a show of, by university students after 1979 Iranian Islamic Revolution. Once it is bare open, people would lose interest. Words of wisdom, come to think of it! I decided to watch this award winning documentary which was aired last before the CHOGM meeting and Sri Lanka was to head the association that carries no real power but to remind (haunt) Britain of their glorious past! It only came to my attention after reading about its ban in Malaysia and the ongoing court case where the organiser of a public screening is charged.  Just when you thought there was hope in humanity, comes this graphically disturbing images of people systematically eliminating a certain...