A private eye to the world

Don't F**k With Cats (Netflix 3-part documentary, 2019) 
Hunting an Internet Killer

I just happened to bump into this as I was on the treadmill and I was hooked. It was not much of love at first hello, but I liked the quite convoluted storyline. It illustrates the twisted nature of human behaviour, but at the same time, there are people who, through their actions, show that humanity has not died. But life, as it is, is never straight forward.

In life, Occam's Razor states that 'entities should not be multiplied without necessity' does not solve all puzzles. Things are more complicated than they seem. Simple answers may not be the correct one. 

It is not an easy watch and is not for the faint-hearted. Few viewers could pass beyond the first 20 minutes of the show as the subject matter is unpleasant. It is based on a true story that happened between 2010 and 2012. It involved many countries, including Canada, the UK, France and Germany. But I guess when it consists of the cyberspace, these borders are arbitrary.

The documentary starts with a youtube clip that came out in 2010 of a couple of kittens which were brutally killed in broad daylight under the full view of netizen with a live recording of them being placed in a plastic wrapper and slowly vacuum sealing them! Concerned cat lover netizens, including the narrator, Deanna Thompson, a data analyst from Vegas, who goes under the screen name of Baudi Moovan, started discussing this heinous crime. Pretty soon, they started trying identifying the location as well as the maker of the clip. Everyone chipped in with their amateurish investigative skills. The need to apprehend the perpetrator became more acute as a second video appeared online. In that clip, a cat was fed to a python. 

The internet sleuths slowly browse through pictures over pictures online, scrutinised in between the images, with the help of Google Map and all, managed to pinpoint the crime to a Luka Magnotta. Now, to pinpoint who Magnotta was and his whereabouts, that was an enigma itself. It appears like he was a globetrotting celebrity. The armchair investigators also try to analyse the character. In midst through it all, to avenge the death of cats, an innocent man was wrongly accused. And he took his own life due to the humiliation!

Another problem with this type of crime is jurisdiction. Who is to investigate these crimes when nobody knows where it happened.

The issue became more problematic when the video maker made a chilling clip of a person being stabbed repeatedly with an ice-pick.

The documentary makers cleverly put in the element of doubt into the whole story. They inserted interviews taken with Magnotta's mother. She threw a spanner to the works. She told of a manipulative character named 'Manny'.

From then on, the pace picked up. Police forces from many countries became involved, and the suspect was an Interpol's 'Red List'. It all came to a dramatic end with words like paranoid schizophrenia and bizarre role-playing of movie characters thrown in. Disturbing.

With all the benefits that the internet offers in improving lives and empowering people, there is a dark side to it. It becomes a convenient playground for weirdos and the mentally deranged for their one moment of attention in the world stage and sometimes to create mischief under the cloak of anonymity.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

We shouldn't be here

It was a dark, humid night, and as I was traversing a back alley making it to my car, I stumbled upon a meowing or rather a weak yowling. It turned out to be that a tiny kitten, all drench in muck, was straddling to wherever it was heading to.

My heart felt for that tiny creature. No, I did not take the pitiful animal home to nurse it back to health and send it out to the wilderness with a glint in my eye. It is too much responsibility.

What went through my mind was what someone told me (or maybe overheard) long ago; that our existence is just a freak accident of Nature. We, the products, have to fight it out to survive to preserve the entity called Consciousness. The consciousness that probably also happened via the accident of Nature. Life as we knew it was just going on without care as simple organisms with hermaphroditical abilities. We dragged on our existence with self-propagation without care. As life became more complexed, there was a need for variation. Nature dictated that heterosexual reproduction was essential for variety. Together with that came oestrus, lust, copulation and orgasmic bliss.

Not all the outcome of these unions were received with open arms. Some are left to fend themselves against the forces of Nature. As the maturity of offspring became complicated, protracted care became necessary. Somewhere along trickled in Consciousness.

In fact, Consciousness has made Man evolve to such a level that they have become a threat to Mother Nature herself. They squander, slaughter, rape, destroy the environment and bite the hand that fed them in the first place.

Our birth, in that way, is a curse. We should not be here at all. Nature was here long before Man came to existence, and it will still be here without us. The trouble is that the way the world seems to be changing, there might not be a planet at all when this civilisation annihilates itself.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Like Karma Chameleon, you come and go!

Kedi (Turkish, documentary; 2017)
Director: Ceyda Torun

They gaze into the horizon without a care in the world. If a dog wags its tail and jumps around your legs for attention, it is because it thinks you are God. A cat, on the other hand, does not give two hoots to your presence. Cats have perfected the way to strut the posterior in front of your face in defiance in an art form humans call 'catwalk'. The cats do not think of humans as God but instead perceive themselves as the intermediaries to the Gods. Thanks to their ancestors who were placed on a pedestal by Queen Cleopatra and her band of rulers, as well as the unique place conferred to members of the Cat Family in ancient belief systems (Al Uzza with her cat and Durga with her Bengal Tiger), cats wander with a chip on their shoulders. With their eight other lives to spare, they roam haughtily with their snouts high in the air as if breathing on imported air. Like in Boy George's 'Karma Chameleon', they come and go as they please. Unlike other domesticated animals, they managed to convince Man that they need not be leashed.

With their alluring meowing and their fluffy, soft bodies, cats know they can get away with murder, but they only use their charm to cajole the gullible public to depart from some mouthwatering chow.

This Turkish documentary is an exceptional presentation that would melt the hearts of any cat-lover. Using low cameras to follow the path of the stars of the film, the cats, it manages to capture many fantastic close-shots of members of the feline species. It appears that the Turkish community is quite accommodating in having stray cats wander about their streets, cafés, roofs, and even homes. The shows mostly try to outline the daily routines of many street cats while taking many striking photographs of these sly animals. As it is mentioned in this offering, cats offer comfort to anxious and weak souls. It redefines the meaning of our existential presence. They may open our soul to accept life beings as a continuum of the Universe rather than treating animals as second-class lifeforms that do not deserve our respect or a kind of punishment for their doings in their past lives. Maybe their presence on Earth acts as a testing bed for us to place us in the karma cycle when we are done with this present life on Earth.

My cat is multilingual?

Felix (aka Ubi)

If my cat were human, I am sure that he would be a somewhat confused child. Probably, not to the extent of mental derangement, needing a veterinary psychologist but stressed out, no doubt.

My cat gets many earfuls (usually of the loving type) from many family members. Instructions in many languages are passed on daily. My wife gives her instructions to Felix (the cat) in Hindi; children converse in English and some kind of molly-cuddly gibberish language; a dose of Cambodian language and song is also thrown into the spanner! The surprising thing is that the feline-beings obey obediently to orders, sometimes. At other times, he does not give a damn. He just maintains visual attention and carries on his own life, unlike a canine counterpart who would jump in joy looking at your presence!

That just brought back to a time in 1982 when Rexxie, my dog, used to wander around our household in Penang. When my cousin visited us back, he was surprised that Amma spoke to him in Tamil. For him, animals only understood English!