RIFLE RANGE BOY

The War Against Indians(2025) 150 Years of Betrayal, Suppression and Injustice in Malaya & Malaysia. Author: Suthan Mookaiah At the outset, the author does not claim the book as a literary work. He professes to merely inking his lived experiences. The sales of his books are a legitimate revenue source for him, as he funds upliftment programmes in Tamil Schools through his movement, Maatram. Sollayah grew up in Taman West Country, a former estate land in Kajang. He saw the estates in Malaysia flattened in the heady days of Mahathirism. In the rapaciousness to make Malaysia a developed nation by 2020 and produce mega-millionaires of a certain denomination, the country was in heat. There was a land rush. Apparently, nobody, including the Indian leaders who were meant to represent them, had the inkling to think of the millions of Indians who had at least two to generations of a family whose world only revolved around the rubber estates and their surroundings. Nobody thought of having t...

Kadhalikka Neramillai (No time to love,  காதலிக்க நேரமில்லை;  Tamil, 2025) Director: Kiruthiga Udhayanidhi https://www.moneycontrol.com/entertainment/kadhalikka-neramillai-ott-release- when-and-where-to-watch-this-romantic-drama-starring-jayam-ravi-a nd-nithiya-menon-article-12936421.html It would have been just another Netflix recommendation that I would have ignored. Having such an unoriginal name, which had been used before, did not excite me. For the ignoramus, in 1964, the Tamil cinema was taken back by Sridhar's superhit. Its psychedelic, picturesque Eastman moment came to be defined as Tamil cinema's first rom-com. The hit song. ' Visvanathan, velai vendum !' became to be sung as the voice of defiance of the oppressed. My interest was piqued when a YouTuber of a channel I follow went into a tirade trying to tear down Netflix and its moviemakers for thinking out of such a crass movie. Other Tamil movie reviewers were kind to the movie, praising it for its modern a...

Amaran (Immortal; Tamil, 2024) Director: Rajkumar Periasamy A Tamil movie of the same name was made in 1992. It was a full-scale gangster movie that was initially banned from Malaysian theatres but finally screened after the censors went on a snipping spree. It was deemed too violent. The film ended suddenly as the final showdown between the hero (Karthik) and the baddies had too much gore. The Malaysian Censor Board butchered it so much that I watched a movie that was left hanging with an abrupt end, and the hall lights turned on, much to the audience's confusion about whether there was an emergency of sorts. This time around, there was violence, gore and death, but it is a legitimate form of ending one's life; that is the government's sanction war against ideologies which are hellbent on destroying peace. We call this patriotism, not turf war. I think one particular scene in the movie highlights the whole business of war and the use of religion in justifying war. An India...

Indian 2(Tamil, 2024) Director: S. Shankar Even though his movie did not live up to its predecessor, which came out in 1996, there are a few instances in the film that make the Indian diaspora pause and reevaluate their behaviours. Forget what is happening in India. It would be irrelevant for a person residing in India to assess and enumerate the changes in India since the original Indian movie came out 28 years ago. Let a Malaysian of the Indian diaspora look at what has changed since. The theme of Indian 1 was to highlight how the system was broken because of rampant corruption and the lack of willpower of civil servants and public figures to change the status quo. It took a pre-independence freedom fighter to re-don his combat gear to highlight the rot to the public consciousness. In his own psychotic ways, Indian Tata (grandpa) brought the people in charge to task, even killing his own son approving the permit of an unroadworthy school bus, which killed many school kids. That is wh...

He had heard of it all. At every corner, the naysayers were there. They were free with unsolicited advice that he should not forget where he came from, that the pinky would only grow to the size of the thumb, and that a sparrow should not dream of flying majestically like an eagle.   As if the road ahead was not uncertain enough, these doomsday philosophers jumped on the bandwagon to sow the seeds of doubt.  Already in turmoil, trying to pull oneself by the bootstraps, the negative vibes are the last that anyone wants to hear. But they yak on... He was raised in an environment where he was told to respect others and not to tell somebody off on the face; he would just smile it off.   The element of doubt still lingered, however. The quandary was whether he was indeed doomed to fail. With perceived divine guidance, he persevered.  He had the grace of his family as well. The answer to his doubt must have been answered finally. Not only has he proved his critics wrong, b...

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 ...

Vetalam dan Vikramaditya (2020) Author: Uthaya Sankar SB  I remember a time when a newly married couple rented a room in our house. My sister and I, 4 and 6 years old, respectively, were dying to hear the wife's stories that she did tell without fail every evening, with our persuasion, of course. She had a peculiar way of making us glued to her stories. We affectionately addressed her as ‘Atteh’ (Auntie, father’s sister or maternal uncle’s wife).  Every evening, after she had her shower as she returned from work, it was storytime. Her stories usually carried a message, and many of them were Indian folk tales, including ‘Vetalam and Vikramaditya’.  ‘Vetalam and Vikramaditya’ stories always carry a moral dilemma that needs critical thinking. We were often disappointed as she never told us the answers to the questions she put forward. She would ask us to think carefully. That is the thing about these stories. Legend has it (it is probably a historical statement now) that Kin...