RIFLE RANGE BOY

Civilisation does not assure civility! So, what is it that makes someone great? Is he the one who has conquered all his animalistic desires and knows that his real needs are beyond the realm of physicality and materialism? This man seeks knowledge and is satisfied when the lock of the meaning of life and the hidden secret of the Universe is unlocked. Such a man is fiction. Nietsche described him as Ubermensch; Hindus referred to him as Rama or Krishna, as the revised 2.0 version of a complex man. Another version of understanding how life works is to look at Hinduism's representation of the Universe - Trimurthi, the Trinity - Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva and their consorts. Brahma, the creator, has to work in tandem with his consort, Saraswathi. Saraswathi is the Goddess of education and creativity. The take-home message is that one must have enough knowledge and creativity to create anything. Once the creation is done, life does not just go on unabashed. It has to be preserved and preserv...

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...

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...

All Quiet on the Western Front (German, 2022) Director: Edward Berger Ancient Chinese philosophers, Lao Tze in particular, used to say, 'In War, everybody loses'. But on the other hand, Sun Tzu, the author of Art of War, the military treatise of the 5th century BCE, noted that amid chaos, there is also 'opportunity'. In 1913, Henri La Fontaine obtained the Nobel Peace Prize for his outstanding work in peaceful internationalism. He asserted that the world, in the 20th century, had done away with wars and destruction. Believe it or not, the following year, Europe went into an essentially civil war which snowballed into a World War when the European colonisers sent their subjects to die in the greatest battle to end all wars. Clive's plunder from  Battle of Plassey (Palashi) Auctioned at £3m World War 1 never put an end to anything. Its effects are still felt today. In essence, Ukrainian War can be said to be an effort to end loose ends that were never resolved. As we ...

The Saraswati Civilisation. (2019) (A Paradigm Shift in Ancient Indian History) Author: Maj General Dr GD Bakshi In secondary school history class, we were taught to believe that civilisation developed circa 1500 BCE around the Indus River. Then came mighty learned men from the Steppe Land on horsebacks to bring knowledge and wisdom to this region. The original inhabitants of this region ran helter-skelter, crossing the Vindhya Hills to root themselves in the Southern part of the subcontinent. We vaguely remember being told about the Aryan Invasion Theory and the clear demarcation between the Northern part of India and the South. . Later in life, we were exposed to Mahabharata, Ramayana and Bhagavad Gita. What was taught as mythological tales, we later found out, was actually backed with scientific facts. For starters, the birth dates of specific icons could be fact-checked as their birthdates were described in relation to astronomical positions. These scriptures also illustrate a lush...