RIFLE RANGE BOY

Like clockwork, not even dust had settled after the Earthquake measuring 7.7 on the Richter scale hit Myanmar; numerous announcements have emerged over the new social media outlets of well-meaning organisations offering services to collect donations for its victims.  We have had all these so many times before. The earliest of these must surely be the Great Tsunami of Boxing Day 2004, which measured 9.1. The world saw a plethora of bodies going hyperdrive, bending backwards, trying to extract money from the well-meaning but unassumingly naive public. The collection, it seemed, was quite overwhelming. Ten years down the line, a documentary was made about the towns hit by the tsunami. It revealed that only one pledged housing project saw living daylight amongst all the broken promises; that too by the personal effort by an individual, the world-famous singer Ricky Martin. The same thing happened in Haiti following its devastating 2010 hurricane. The Clinton Foundation jumped in to hel...

The House of the Rising Tikam. A ruin of many a poor boy. It was 1972, and we were excited to be back in school. Unlike the previous years, our Standard Three class was in the afternoon session. But like the year before that, we also had a fierce-looking master as our class teacher. It was just the second day into the schooling year. Formal teaching had not started, and everyone was so excited about seeing each other after the long end-of-year break. As in the previous year too, OBK seems to be the most popular student in the class. Like ants to sugar, everyone was pulled to his table between lessons. The loud conversations and the exclamatory remarks naturally drew me to OBK's corner. I was wondering what tall story was he up to this time. There he was, collecting coins and returning the balance. Naturally, I was drawn in, curious in wanting to know what all that money translation was about. In between pocketing the money and answering to his 'clients', OBK brief...

American Greed Season 4 (2010) After immersing myself in murders and death with Hitchcock and Tarantino, I decided to dwell on another of man's favourite desires—greed. I managed to watch the whole fourth season, 12 episodes of American Greed. It is the same story again and again. As long as there are suckers, they will always be cheaters. This is just one season I watched; imagine what will be shown in the 8 seasons! Looks like the whole of America is sprawling with cheats and conmen. Everywhere you see, people are so gullible. It is always the same modus operandi, the end point is always money. The gullible victims are not just mere laymen. In one episode, we even see Bill Clinton introducing a so-called philanthropist, Raffaello Follieri, who had pledged half a million dollars for a vaccination project in South America. Follieri even hooked up with actress Anne Hathaway. He turned out to be a fraud and a dropout from Italy who failed in many business ventures till he finally...