RIFLE RANGE BOY

You cannot fault me for thinking that when I am air bound, I am just a particle in the sky away the scrutiny of eyes of people who were supposed to be on a lookout for my welfare. From a person whose knowledge of projectile does not go beyond the problems I have solved in Mechanical Mathematics and understanding projectile vomiting, I cannot be faulted to think that if anything were to go wrong in stratosphere, I would be literally on a free fall. Nobody would know where I am and where to look for me. It is not paranoia or some kind of phobia of flying that drove me to think so. 10  months ago, our plane went missing and till date no one has a clue where it went, where to look for it and what came out the billions spent looking for it. And more recently, another one went missing. They had all the communication records and flight path at their disposal and yet 2 weeks into its disappearance, they are unable to put a closure to the mishap. So, when you are up there, you are re...

A dejected Sandhu Sr in Penang. As we straddle along the boat of life as it manoeuvres itself or we manoeuvre it along the river of life, we sometimes wonder why some things happen at all. Are they random occurrences or are they planned move made by the king chess-master?  Are they just chaotic activities which somehow coalesce to give meaning and pattern? Is it all a game by the dice thrower for the fun of it? Does the puppet master enjoy seeing His inventions cringe and wail to their heart's content? In 1983, when tensions were high across the Iron Curtain after USSR downed KAL007, a Korean civilian plane, Stanislav Petrov of the Soviet Union made the unconventional decision of not alerting his superiors when the warning alerts screamed  of a launch of US inter-continental ballistic missiles into Soviet Union. The SOP then was to launch missiles in retaliation. And time was of essence as every ticking second meant annihilation. At that crucial time, Lt. Col. Petrov dec...