RIFLE RANGE BOY

White Squall (1996) In my teen years, I remember helping an older teenager to organise a religious outing for a group of children. We were to arrange for a bus to get the kids to the other side of town for Sivarathri prayers. As it involved overnight event, somebody thought that verbal consent was not sufficient. Each participant was asked to get their parents to sign a release form. We got the replies promptly from all except one. It seemed his father, an Army man, refused to sign the consent form and wanted to see the organisers. That was the first time I was exposed to an unreasonable person who thought that the whole world out there was just out to kidnap his child. His coveted son did not make it to the prayers as we could not convince his father. Later in life, the calculating father must have miscalculated his drinking habits and succumbed to the effects of the bottle. The obedient son was also devastated much later, in an unrelated event, when he woke up one fine morning t...

Wild Rose (Scottish; 2019) Sure, they say it is possible to lead a balanced life. One should be able to have a fulfilling life juggling between having a family life and pursuing your dream, whatever it is. After all, that is all the stars are doing having a fantastic experience moving seamlessly from work to pleasure to being cosy with their loved ones. Having children is no problem, just another cap in the feather. At least, that is what the media seem to portray. Shuttling between being a mother, a creative, a star, a public icon is easy peasy. In reality, it is far from it. Sacrifices need to be made. It is not possible to have the cake and eat it as well. It is a constant struggle between a good parent and achieving life's ambition. Are we selfish by putting our goals before the kids? Is the parent-child bond too self-defeating? To get the creative juices flowing adequately, do we have to sacrifice householders' life?  This is not your usual happy ending movie of an u...

Lady Bird (2017) This coming of age movie is made by a debutante director. Bringing up children may not be so gratifying after all. After the initial awe of the wonder of the Universe to create a body within a body, reality soon hits you. You do not mind all the sleepless nights and backbreaking chores to keep the little one breathing. All the lethargy somehow vanishes at the sight of the little one carving a slight smile at us. Devious devils soon reveal their dormant selves quick enough. As they hit puberty, they metamorphose. Blame it on growing pains, changing hormones, undeveloped pre-frontal cortex or dopamine cravings, they view the hands that feed them as aggressors. They feel that the parents suffer from a siege mentality. Their obsessions with thrift and stickling to time are utterly too stifling. Growing up sheltered, the chicklings perceived the whole wide world as gentle as their domestic guardians. The peer pressure to conform to the...

Mom (Hindi; 2017) Legend has it that a swan gives a melodious song before its demise. Even though this fact has been disproved scientifically, somehow the romantic imagery of a female swan, a pen, rendering her last vocalisation before her final breath sounds poetic enough. Sridevi, in her swansong, gives a sterling performance here in the role of a scorned mother. She yearns for the approval of her late teenage stepdaughter to accept her as 'Mom' whilst struggling to find justice to punish her daughter's rapists. Even though the storyline is riddled with holes and is relatively predictable, it is compensated by the excellent acting shown by Sridevi. There are many non-verbal cues that are pivotal in any good filmmaking; here it is in abundance. The director manages to keep the audience glued to the edge of their seats with suspense. DK, the interesting private investigator who  provides some light comic relief. Another character, DK (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), ...

The Talwars: Behind closed doors (HBO Asia, Documentary; 2017) It all started with Fr Martin Luther pinning his thesis on the church door some 500 years ago. He posited that people wanted to know and experience the truth for themselves. They want to read the scriptures in their mother tongue. They do not want the Truth to be exclusive to the few in power. The elitists reiterated that the general public cannot handle the truth. Some things are better left to the experts to interpret. Fast forward to the Industrial Revolution and Internet era, people's thirst for the Truth had escalated to phenomenal heights. Still, they feel inadequate, devoid of comprehending most of the Universe's secrets. Media practitioners took the bold stop of mongering news right into their living rooms. They even televised real-time combat scenes as it happened as seen during Desert Storm. This documentary which is a summary of a real-life case that happened in 2008 shows, among other things,...

The whole nation has been hit by a spate of bullying, of late.Youngsters, without batting an eyelid, have no remorse to resorting to violence to assert their authority over the others whom they perceive as weak, disadvantaged or just different. perhaps, they are just apeing their role models, their parents or even leaders. In the latest incident, the nation is reeling from the death of a 19 old boy who never gained consciousness after being hit on and sodomised for being effeminate. Although the information is patchy, the gist of the string of events is that a quarrel ensued over a heckling which progressed to a lopsided fistfight and bashing of the victim and his friend by four other teenagers. Looking at the faces of the helpless relatives, one can just wonder at the meaning of this violence. Forget the fact that we should all live within our boundaries, live and let live.There are people that who are different from us for us to learn and appreciate but not to c...

Thirteen (2016, Miniseries; BBC 3) Thirteen is supposed to be a crazy age to be, especially if you are a girl. You are not a girl, but you are not yet a woman. This, together with the raging hormones, lack of dopamine and sub-optimal maturation of the prefrontal cortex, looks like a lethal cocktail for disaster. Nevertheless, through failures and mistakes, a girl becomes a woman. Just imagine that this transitional period is lost. How would she handle such a situation? How would the family handle such a situation? One day, the scriptwriter of the film was wondering as she was reading a newspaper article, "Whatever happens to all the girls who had been abducted and returned after all the camera lights dim on them? How do their lives continue?" With that thought, she penned this fictitious story. Ivy Muxom was kidnapped at the age of 13 from school and was kept captive in a cellar for 13 years. One fine day, she made a dash for freedom, and she created a media frenzy....

http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/459087/A-case-of-affluenza-The-drink-drive-killer-16-who-is-too-rich-and-spoiled-for-jail A case of 'affluenza': The drink-drive killer, 16, who is too rich and spoiled for jail IT'S the case that’s outraged America: a drunken teenager responsible for four deaths walks free because he’s a ‘victim’ too – of his parents’ wealth By:  Simon Edge Published: Tue, February 11, 2014 Ethan Couch from Texas, USA, killed four people in a crash while drink-driving [AP] It was shortly after 10pm on a hot June evening last summer when a bunch of teenagers from an affluent suburb of Fort Worth, Texas, stole two cases of beer from a Walmart supermarket. They had been drinking already and when an hour later 16-year-old Ethan Couch volunteered to run an errand to a late-night chemist some of them told him he was in no fit state. But when he insisted on it they all piled into his father’s red Ford truck, six in the cab and two in t...

Blame my Brain (the amazing teenage brain revealed) Nicola Morgan 2005 Had the honour of meeting the author of this book in KL recently when this Scottish lady was conducting a workshop for writers of teenage stories. Her passion to write ignited at the age of 9 but had to wait for 27 years to publish her first book. She has written books in many genres, fiction and non -fiction, mainly for teenage readers. It is an amazement how those cuddly lovable cuties metamorphose into a volatile piercing thorns, something in the line of gremlins when exposed to water. In the case of tweens, it is adolescence! They may be the next most difficult thing to analyse after the female brain! In this 200 odd page book, the author offers an reasonable explanation for this transformation. It can basically be blamed on nature, 3 main punching bags - genes, evolution, neuro-chemicals. The author's target group seem to be teenagers and those in constant contact with teenagers with the hope of givi...

Imp Again, I have become a listening ear and a shoulder to cry on for one of my old friends who had to deal with his rebellious teenage daughter. She thinks that he is a worthless piece of shit. At least this is how he perceives her to think about him and the impression he gets. I know the worse thing that anyone can do is to take sides in a family feud. I had had enough of melancholic tales in my lifetime but he seem to jump into talking about his sad tale every time I make a courtesy call to him. Maybe I look like a sucker and sponge for everyone's woes. So, I punctuated my replies with the occasional 'Oh?', Oh!', "Is it?'. There is always two sides of the story and I am listening to one side of it. He was telling about how his teenage daughter does not know the value of money and how friends take precedence over everything else in her life. She is forever on her mobile phone, either texting, emailling or speaking as if her dad is a telecommunication...