RIFLE RANGE BOY

We Want Justice! A thing or two came up on my radar recently. Firstly, yet again, the unending saga of 1MDB took another court  postponement. The deposed Malaysian PM has not finished disposing of his cases. This time, he has excruciating knee pain that needs hospitalisation. When told to be wheeled into the courtroom, the defence lawyers quipped that since he would be on opioid painkillers, he would not be in the correct frame of mind to follow the proceeding. They said their client must be seen to be given a fair trial. So be it, said the judges.  Across the Straits of Malacca and Bay of Bengal, over in Kalkota, demonstrators are screaming that new legislation must be passed to expedite trials on rapists and impose the death penalty on them. The West Bengal Legislative Assembly even stipulated that investigations into sexual assault and rape must be concluded in 21 days. Are we overdoing it in the haste to right the wrong, punish the wrongdoers, and set an example to potenti...

It is said that ancient Indians had certain ethics in war. Fighting can only be done between dawn and dusk. So, a pre-dawn surprise attack is technically wrong in their book. Their code of conduct also dictates that a warrior of a certain stature could only engage in combat with someone of the enemy of a similar calibre. That is a foot soldier duels with another foot soldier, a warrior on the elephant battalion with another one on an elephant and so on. The commander does not watch the battle on the sidelines but gets his hands dirty by being in the thick of things. By convention, come dusk, both warring factions would lay down their arms and continue in natural light the following sunrise. The Kurukshetra War (circa 3000 BCE, dates debated) is said to have ended all the codes of war. When cousins and uncles go for each other's carotids, niceties are expectedly put aside. As the cyclical nature of time was pushing to Kaliyuga, anarchy is what one just expects. With battles sometime...

The Incredible History of India's Geography Author: Sanjeev Sanyal 2023 seems to be the year when India showcases to the world that it has arrived. With the euphoria of the moon landing still lingering on every Indian psyche, the G20 summit put India and its leaders on a pedestal. Seeing Modi walking bare feet, shoulder to shoulder with foreign leaders reminds Indians that they have come a long way since they were looted of their prized collection and left out in the cold as a basket case struggling as once the world's most impoverished countries.   It is interesting to note that throughout the history of the world, India (and China) have not been considered a poor nation. In fact, before the Industrial Revolution and the Great Game, these countries combined provided more than two-thirds of the world's GDP.   The exploration and Western understanding of world geography changed the history of the East and the world at large.   Sanjeev Sanyal, an economist, a Rhodes scholar...

Sansho the Bailiff ( 山椒大夫, Japanese; 1954) Director: Kenji Mizoguchi At the outset, we are told the story occurred in "an era when mankind had not yet awakened as human beings." I pictured that time can any time in Man's history. We just have yet to awaken. We can scream all we want that all Men are created equal in the image of God and whatnot, but the fact is that people always try to dominate each other. Humans always try to be one up against their neighbour and, if possible, push him down an imaginary hierarchy. Even before the mass transatlantic migration of slaves from Africa to the New World, slavery was already very much alive in every civilisation. There was a penchant for white slaves as brown people (read Arabic) prospered. The Vikings and Barbers were famous for the trade of white slaves. Some were captured crew members of small ship-jacked vessels. Others were bundled up when pirates landed on shores to snap up unassuming bystanders. There are stories of pira...

Ancient Apocalypse (2022) Netflix, Documentary series Graham Hancock is an old hand at this. A veteran journalist prolific at this topic, he has earned himself the dubious reputation of being a pseudo-historian and pseudo-archaeologist. Many of his previous books have dabbled with the same issue. His premise is this: Even before mainstream history dated humans to be hunter-gatherers around the end of the Ice Age 11,600 years ago, Hancock's research posits that a far more advanced civilisation existed during this wave of hunter-gatherers.  The ruins he so skilfully shows in this series of documentaries depict the advanced skill of architectural marvel and skill that those people exhibited.  If Erich von Däniken had earlier suggested an ancient alien race to have assisted human civilisation, here Hancock does not invoke ancient intelligence. He instead suggests that we had already developed all these advanced levels of knowledge in building and astronomy but lost most of it to t...