RIFLE RANGE BOY

There was a time when I developed a compulsion of wanting to know everything about Bhagavadgita. I was told that the holy book had all the recipe for a meaningful life. And I heard about a volunteer at a local temple who was conducting a series of lectures on that subject. My acquaintances were all praises about the speaker and the contents of his classes.   I was drawn in. I decided to give it a try. In the first lecture, all that I heard was that I was nothing. I was smaller than the smallest of the speck in the Universe. I did not matter to the greater scheme of things. Hence, the last thing I needed was my ego. I had to crack my hardshell called ego, following which enlightenment would flow in like an eternal fountain of knowledge. Like how Arjuna had to clear his head of all his doubts to receive the unlimited erudition from the Lord himself. I thought to myself, "I do not need these people to tell me that I am nothing; my wife tells me all the time that my ego is bigger ...

I heard that the human race is redundant. The race is useless. They are dispensable. They are more of a nuisance. Putting a small segment of the population aside, the majority can be done away. We need to propel the human race forward with its knowledge, advancement in sciences, development of the arts and exploring of the spaces beyond the confines of our Milky Way. The way we act, we tend to create animosity and thrive on separating ourselves under banners of race, religion, skin colour, social class and what not. Workers are not reliable. Like Neanderthals, we fight, squabble over trivialities influenced by our animalistic instincts.   Lost in Space "It does not compute!" The world is changing, but the only thing that holds us down are people themselves. Despite the easy access to a plethora of information at their fingertips for them to peruse, judge and form their opinions, we opt to stay ignorant and behave like zombies, wandering aimlessly to the wand of thei...

Inside Out ( Animation; 2015) Wow, Pixar is going cerebral now, dwelling into the realm of neuropsychology! After telling stories about toys, cars, sea creatures, bugs and monsters, there are literally playing with emotions now. Their latest offering is about the going-ons of traits in the mind, the little voices in the head that control our final action! It shows this through the eyes of an 11-year-old girl as we see her grow from a baby. Life was bliss, all about joy and learning till her parents decide to migrate from icy cold hockey loving Minnesota to sunny San Francisco. The new environment, school, friends (lack of) and the shoe box townhouse proved too much for Riley, the protagonist, to handle. We learn that the brain is controlled by 5 basic emotions - Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger. Then there is core memory which stores up thoughts for the long term. The child’s brain builds islands of personality based on her everyday learning and other life input. O...

I remember one of my classmates, KT, asking a teacher when we were in Form 2. It was a Malay language class. And the guy had a coarse way of demanding an answer to his question. He asked,  “Why are the people so stupid? Why do people say, ‘ jatuh hati ’ when you fall in love, ‘ patah hati’ when you are heart-broken or falling out of love?” trying to sound like a smart alec. “We think with our brain, not liver!” ( Hati  is liver in the Malay language) Sounds like a simple question but believe me, it is not. Greek philosophers have been arguing that the soul a person is in the heart or the mind. It was Galen who first proposed the tripartite division of souls; the rational one in the brain, the spiritual one in the heart and appetitive one in the liver. As love and lust are forms of desire just as appetite satisfies the culinary desires of an individual, they must have bundled to arise from the liver. So, the message is, do not listen to heart, do not rational...