RIFLE RANGE BOY

For Sama (Arabic :  من أجل سما ‎  ‘min ajl sama‘ ) (Syrian Documentary; 2019) Recently I read of a young mother with her 4-month old infant participating in a civil objection against CAA and NRC at Shaheen Bhag in Southern Delhi. Soon after being in Delhi for a couple of days, the child fell ill and succumbed to pneumonia at the protest grounds. The mother said in a TV interview that she was not saddened by the demise. In fact, she felt proud that her son gave his life for the future of the country. Deep inside, she must be feeling like 'Mother India'. Given another chance, she would do it all over again. Now, would you call that bad parenting or patriotism? This is the same question the maker of the documentary 'For Sama' seems to be asking. Waad Al-Kateab, who started filming her life experiences as a university student in Aleppo, realised that her country, Syria, was slowly plunging into civil war. She started getting involved with students' resistance f...

HyperNormalisation (2016) Written and Directed by Adam Curtis Before the infamous 2004 tsunami hit Phi Phi Island in Thailand, there was a kind of an eerie silence. The shoreline receded and thousands of fishes were washed ashore. The cockle collectors had a windfall. Everyone was in a quandary on the bizarre turns of events. Then it hit them, the towering waves and destruction. www.spectator.co.uk That is what is happening in our world. Many strange and damaging thinks are happening right before our eyes. Our leaders are telling us that everything is okay and it is business as usual or rather life goes on. However, everybody knows it is not alright but still nobody wants to do anything because things are too complicated. This, in simpler terms, is the essence of the meaning of the word 'hyper normalisation', a term coined by a Russian writer (Alexei Yurchak  in 2006 book, 'Everything was Forever, Until it was No More: The Last Soviet Generation') referring...

Aylan Kurdi at Bodrum Beach It was just a picture to don the morning papers to say what reporters do best. Some of their photographs become international icons of a bygone era. Every living soul would be instantly aware of the American atrocity in Vietnam at one look of the picture of napalm struck confused girl running aimlessly with burnt clothes. This picture the dead toddler by the Turkish beach may one day be the reminder of the danger of stirring of a hornet in the highly volatile region of Middle East. For the perpetrators, the US, it is a European problem, not theirs. No rubber dinghies would traverse the Atlantic to reach their shores. You think a picture is just a picture, but you would be amazed at the dynamics and rhetoric that goes through before and after it goes to print. A dead body polluting the beach of a bourgeois beach resort. The child has no life. Death has engulfed him, but the picture is subtle enough not to appear gory. The violence and unc...