RIFLE RANGE BOY

Paava Kadhaigal (பாவ கதைகள், Sinful Tales, Tamil, 2020) Netflix Miniseries S1, E1-4. From a movie-making, storytelling or cinematographic point of view, this anthology of four stories hit the nail and gets an all-star rating. It also deserves an A+ for the attention-grabbing edge of the seat type of suspense in my books. It is all hunky-dory for entertainment value, but somehow, I could not help it but compare it to the novel 'Mother India' which came out in 1927 when the heat of self-rule was very much in everybody lips. It can be described as a polemic book that attacked the practices, religion and every fibre of Indian society. Katherine Mayo, the author, a historian by training, thought that India was not fit for self-rule and independence looking at India's treatment of India's women, animals and the untouchables. What do you know? Despite all the leaps and bounds that the society had bounced, the storytellers decided that the old formula of societal discrimination...

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 ...