RIFLE RANGE BOY

Naalu Policeum Nalla Irundha Oorum (4 Policemen and a peaceful town, Tamil; 2015) Directed by N. J. Srikrishna This full-length comedy came and went without creating much of a storm. Naturally, it received little rave review. All the actors were very green, except for Yogi Babu, who did not play a vital role here, anyway. The story is a comedy of errors, poking fun at how the police's assertion of their importance screws up the peace of an already peaceful village. The small township of Porpandhal is so peaceful that it has received Best Village awards for years. There is no crime, and the police station sees no need to open on Sunday. The four policemen there lead cushy lives, working from 9 to 5 and playing board games all day. The police HQ takes notice. It plans to shut down the station and transfer its staff to Ramnath, an area notorious for serious crimes. The policemen panic. They try to justify their presence by creating petty issues here and there. Little did they expect ...

Escape from Mogadishu (Korean; 2021) Director: Ryoo Seung-wan We go to bed at night knowing jolly well that we will get a good night's sleep. We can get up the next day to go to work, self-assured that our workplace will still be standing. We queue at the checkout counter to pay for our goods because it is the civil thing to do. We do not go around breaking into premises because we know that the long arms of the law will finally catch up with us. This peace of mind is what we, as a society, gave up for law and order. The powers-that-be promised to care for us, and we, in return, would sacrifice some of our liberty to suppress our inner desires to do what we wanted. When the government loses its grip on power, all hell breaks loose. The evil side of mankind surfaces. The respect for law takes a backseat, decorum disappears, and mayhem will ensue. All special privileges vanish into thin air. The law of the jungle takes over where the rule of law fails. The diplomats of two warring na...

Bure Baruta @ Cabaret Balkan (Буре барута @ Powder Keg, Serbian; 1998) Director: Goran Paskaljević I learned about this director when I watched 2016 'Dev Bhumi, Land of the Gods'. This film is another of his many highly acclaimed directed movies. Made in the heady times of the 1990s when the Balkan country, Yugoslavia, was on the cusp of disintegrating, and every ethnic group was embroiled in conserving their dominance. Slobodan Milosevic's Army was terrorising, and the economy was in the pits. This era even brought a new English word - 'Balkanisation'. Like Yugoslavia, which was synthetically united by the winning political powers of the Second World War and their own as six sovereign nations, Balkanisation is the term given when a few provinces want to gain autonomy from a country. The film's first dialogue reminded me of a recent conversation at a dinner table with a friend.  "This is a goddamned lousy country; why would anyone want to come back?" T...

Malik (Malayalam, 2021) Written and Directed by Mahesh Narayanan The recent Pew survey on religious and cultural attitudes revealed that most Indians respected each other's religion and took pride in their Indian identity. The only sore point was that they showed reluctance to having a person of a different faith as their neighbour. This point must have been exploited by politicians to usurp and stay in power. They try to create animosity between neighbours of other beliefs, use the arm of administrative and policing machinery at their disposal, and continue the legacy left behind by their colonial masters, divide and rule. On the evolutionary scale, it is natural to go from homogeneity to heterogeneity, not backward. But no, not the leaders (and the press too), that is bad for business. The socialist and the generation who have been suckered into the woke culture will not rest till society collapse is complete and anarchy is the flavour of the day. 'Malik' tells the tale o...

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (2018) Jordan B. Peterson Life is easy when you are living it with your eyes closed. For an idiot, life is a bliss. He does not analyse or overanalyse things that happen to or around him. He lives for the moment. There is in the now and the past; no future to worry about. In his eyes, everyone is good, and they mean well. In reality, life is not so straight forward. Inherently, we build a hierarchical pyramid. The occupants at the top perpetuate their positions by merely being there. Their positions ensure continuity of power and status, much like the analogy of lobster that Peterson often quotes. The hierarchical order in any society is exemplified by our crustacean friend. The lobster, a remnant of our ancestral past, illustrates how any societal structure works. The higher up a hierarchy a lobster climbs, this brain mechanism helps make more serotonin available. The more defeat it suffers, the more restricted the serotonin supply. Lo...

The Equalizer (2014) Suddenly, somebody I knew blurted out, "Hey, Equalizer 2 will out soon!" Not really remembering anything about the first Equalizer, I inquired, "Was it any good?" to which he babbled something to the effect of as if I had committed a cardinal sin. So I made it a point to view the film myself, and I am not impressed. Appa used to be hooked to a TV series with the same name where a team of do-gooders went around helping desperate. I never went around watching it as I had many other pressing deadlines in my life then. Appa had a cult following for it, but I would not say he was a die-hard fan. Halfway through the episode, he would be in Slumberland, especially after his long hours spent in the bank working with other people's hard-earned money. So much for being an ardent fan! The TV series This 2014 movie based on the TV series defies logic. So many of the executed plans are too far-fetched and bends reality so much that it...

The first day on the road trip told me all, that there is order in chaos. The haphazard needling and swerving of 'auto' vehicles with the constant blaring of car horns just complemented the irate of the impatient road users stuck at the railway crossing at the heat of high noon. Nevertheless, my host tells me later, there had never been a fatal road accident in Cuttack, the second biggest town in Orissa (rebranded Odisha). It precisely describes the dynamics of how the system works in the greater part of India. On one hand, you have the poorest of the victims of globalisation, scrapping the barren barrel of hopelessness whilst the end sees the shakers of global conglomerates. You have the victims of caste segregation deprived of basic amenities, decency and opportunities. Then there are the heart-wrenching tales not much different than of Ambedkar's rise from rags to fame. There are minions who find contentment in living a whole life performing menial repetitive...

Hava Aney Dey (Let the Wind Blow; Hindi; 2004) This Franco-German of a Hindi film co-production had too much on its plate. No doubt, it had won many global independent awards the world over but the fact remains that its storyline is too ambitious to cover in one and half hour of screening. It tries to deal with so many things without going deep into any of the issues it tries to invoke. The protagonist, Arjun, is an 18year old youth, is at the crossroads of his life. On one hand, he sees his widowed mother working day and night trying to put food on the table after his gambling father died early. The mother is putting all her hopes on her only son to make it to university. In her eyes, that would be the panacea for all the poverty woes. Arjun is disillusioned by all these. He sees his blue collared friends struggling so hard with no hope ever hitting it big in life. He also sees the rich just loafing around enjoying life and spending (wasting) their money without a care. The linge...