RIFLE RANGE BOY

Civilisation does not assure civility! So, what is it that makes someone great? Is he the one who has conquered all his animalistic desires and knows that his real needs are beyond the realm of physicality and materialism? This man seeks knowledge and is satisfied when the lock of the meaning of life and the hidden secret of the Universe is unlocked. Such a man is fiction. Nietsche described him as Ubermensch; Hindus referred to him as Rama or Krishna, as the revised 2.0 version of a complex man. Another version of understanding how life works is to look at Hinduism's representation of the Universe - Trimurthi, the Trinity - Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva and their consorts. Brahma, the creator, has to work in tandem with his consort, Saraswathi. Saraswathi is the Goddess of education and creativity. The take-home message is that one must have enough knowledge and creativity to create anything. Once the creation is done, life does not just go on unabashed. It has to be preserved and preserv...

Donbass (Russian/Ukrainian; 2018) Written/Direction: Sergei Loznitsa The other day, a day after Putin's army invaded Ukraine, posts on many Malaysians' social media posts read, 'Pray for Ukraine'. One should not have sleepless nights thinking of 'writings on the walls' like this, as it has become almost like a knee-jerk reaction to any world event. Nobody wants to ask why should we pray to an omnipotent God who was in a position not to let it happen at all in the first place. But yet, they convince themselves by alleging that great things are willed by Him, but the follies are only ours. His Grace will save us. Hey, don't the Malaysians have a bone to pick with the Ukrainians? After all, it is above their airspace that our national carrier MH17 went down in 2014? Ukrainian pro-Russian freedom fighters allegedly shot the MAS plane with Russian firepower as determined by the multinational Joint Investigative Tribunal. So Ukrainians are not all at fault but Put...

Mohammed & Charlemagne Revisited, The History of A Controversy (2012) Author: Emmet Scott. Warning: For mature readers only.  Discretion advised. The conventional wisdom about the antiquity and the medieval eras of Europe is the Roman empire collapsed upon his own weight, Europe went into the Dark Ages only to be shown the light by the Muslim liberators. When culture and science were being developed in the Muslim land, Europeans were barbaric and were in the dark about philosophy and technology. Emmet Scott (see here ), the controversial writer who argued against such a straightforward timeline to the evolution of civilisation in Europe, here uses the findings of Belgian Historian Henri Pirenne together with the results of archaeological discoveries to argue a different narration of European history and the terrible course that it took because of ruthless riders from Arab land. During the 1920s Belgian historian Henri Pirenne came to an astonishing conclusion: t...