RIFLE RANGE BOY

We were told to be ready for dinner by 6 p.m., so we had one and a half hours to kill before gathering at the lobby. My varsity mates and I, fourteen of us, on our regular bromance outing, had decided to embark on a six-day tour around Sri Lanka. Colombo was our last stop.                                       https://borderlessjournal.com/2025/01/14/not-quite-a-towering-inferno/ This work is licensed under a  Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License .

Ram Setu (2022) Director: Abhishek Sharma If I tell you today is Thursday, how do you really know that today is indeed Thursday? It is not good enough because yesterday was Wednesday, and tomorrow is Friday, as today is no different from any day. As we know, during the era of Pope Gregory, the Church realised it was missing a few days. It had overlooked the leap years and had to erase 10 days in 1752. So, for all you know, Thursday today could be a Monday. Well, the Hindus have the bragging rights to say their calendar says we are in the year 12,000, and they did not have to correct for errors and had had remarkable ways of calculating events. Even when the world was scared of venturing too far off on sea as they thought they would slip off at the edge of a flat earth, Hindu scriptures knew the planets were spherical structures. Scriptures say that Varaha, Vishnu's avatar, saved Earth from massive floods by placing the spherical planet on its snout. When it comes to stating events ...

Madras Café (Hindi, 2013) Director: Shoojit Sircar It all started with the British and the Christian missionaries. The colonial masters decided to modernise their colonies. The British evangelists took charge of the South of Ceylon while the Americans built schools in the northern half. The American preachers, who were assigned a predominantly Tamil population, emphasised Science and Mathematics teaching. The schism started there. The people from the North were more well prepared to meet the challenges of the new world. After independence, the ruling majority from the South imposed affirmative actions to balance the scale. In came Solomon Bandaranaike, a Singhalese with an illustrious family background which even included a knighted father and a British godfather. Solomon, an Anglophile, an Oxford graduate, was more white than Snow White. He could not speak the local lingo and did not practice Buddhism. He served in the Ceylon legal administration after his return from the UK in the m...

Dheepan (Bilingual; Yaalpaanam Tamil and French; 2015) When refugees are given space to stay in a vicinity, it is not just physical space they need. They would need social and psychological support to carry on life. After all the push factors that drove them from their comfort zone, the devastations that they had endured, the love ones that they had lost, PTSD is a real problem which needs to be handled tactfully. They do not come alone. With them come the baggage of young ones who need to be paved for a future where they can fend for themselves. There are bound to be people who are non-conformists and natural fighter-cocks who would just  rebel without a cause. Bad apples are everywhere. Crime and social disharmony amongst themselves and with other communities may strain the policing duties. Refugees and immigrants, who are usually in the prime of the lives, will have dreams and desires, be it for the future or for carnal gratifications. Hence, sexual and rep...