RIFLE RANGE BOY

The First Omen (2024) Director: Arkasha Robertson Recently, I heard about a mysterious case of a missing teenager in Rome, Italy. She was 16 in 1983 when she was allegedly abducted. Her father was an administrative staff member in Vatican City. 40 years into her disappearance, the Italian Police never found her. Along the way, there were allegations of abduction by international terrorists, murder by serial killers and many more. Pope John Paul II was also heard to have appealed to the perpetrators to no avail. The Holy See was not spared of accusations. Conspiracy Theorists accused a convoluted union of the mob and the Papacy, a collusion between the Italian Police and the Vatican, as well as the possibility of an unmarked grave in the Vatican. It is not the best of times for the Roman Catholic Church (RCC). At a time when many from the developed world had strayed away from Catholicism, stories of deviance and malfeasance spread quickly like wildflowers.  This movie is set at a ti...

The Conformist (Italian, 1970) Director: Bernardo Bertolucci With rhetoric like "you're either with us or against us!", there is a pressure for most of us to conform. The daily bombardment of an overdose of information in the social media puts its followers in a quandary. The urgency to submit to the flavour of the moment and to be on the right side of history is quite confusing.    No man is an island. Living in a society, we are all interdependent. When one's own survival is dependent on goodwill and patronage of the others,  he would not want to offend the others' sensitivity; he would just conform or at least appear to.  In the current world climate and the country's political scenario, the need to follow the majority is very real. Merely following the tide is, of course, less tiring. Fighting back and arguing your stand may sometimes be an act of futility. Arguing with stupid and zombies is never easy. It takes a certain kind of resilien...

The Prince Author: Niccolò Machiavelli (1532) Think Machiavellian politics and what comes to mind are Robert Mugabe and even Dr Mahathir. Many miniseries addicts, especially of 'House of Cards' would recall the Kevin Spacey character of Senator Francis Underwood and his modus operandi which are similar to one propagated by the Master himself, Niccolò Machiavelli. At a time when altruism and fear of God were the order of the day, Machiavelli's writing must have been a controversial one. It remains a pioneer scripture in the field called political philosophy. What Machiavelli propagates may not appear just or 'Christian-like', but a leader to stay in power, it must be the divine. A true leader who is convinced is the best one for the nation, whether elected by force or popular demand, has to follow rules laid out by the man himself. He has to remember that he is alone. The only people that he can depend on are general citizens. He must always keep the genera...