RIFLE RANGE BOY

Fool Me Once (Miniseries, S01 E01-08; 2023) The thing that piqued my interest is the apparent class difference that happens in the UK. It is common knowledge that European societies were separated based on their professions. Pretty soon, the professions were imprinted on their surnames. Weavers became Webbers and Webster, clerks to Clarke, shoemakers to Schumachers, scholars to Scully, tillers to Tyler, and the various Smiths and Taylors. Specific surnames denoted aristocracy and privileged them to move around the royal family and stand a chance to pick a bone strewn by the monarch. Hanging around with the right crowd ensured prosperity and opportunities to venture out to exotic lands and further fatten the family coffers. Talking about making an overseas trip and coming back rich, besides the Pirates of the Caribbean, we have, from the East, Robert Clive. Robert Clive owes much of his existence to India, and he had appropriated the word India into his name. Clive of India had amassed ...

Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) Director: Martin Scorsese Based on David Grann's book (2017) Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI The narration is always the same. Again and again, history has repeatedly shown the same narration. The local population would live in harmony, in sync with their environment. The rambunctious mavericks from outside, with both eyes fixed on the wealth, would trickle in, peddle their snake oil elixirs and promise the moons and the stars. They would bulldoze their thinking into the local populace. The host would be cordial enough to accommodate the newcomers' wisdom, too. Once the shields are lowered, when the host treats the visitors as equals and gives them due recognition, they would zap.  The bottom line is all about wealth, money and control.  The Native Indians were nicely tugged into the New World, as 'discovered' by Europeans. The areas around Missouri and Kansas were occupied by a group that later be...

Asia Reborn (A Continent Rises from the Ravages of Colonialism and War to a New Dynamism) Author: Prasenjit K Basu The 21st century, especially the second half, is considered an Asian century. Still, no single nation is said to have successfully challenged the Pax Americana of the late 20th and early 21st century. A continent ravaged by events from the 18th through the 20th century, Asia is making a comeback. As they say, time is cyclical. From the Common Era (C.E.) to the 1600s, when Europe and the Middle East were pretty much in the dark ages, more than half of the world's GDP came from India and China. Both these countries were the world's superpowers and ruled the greatest oceans. Suddenly, there were either domesticated or decided to close their doors. The European and Arabic powers, who all these while were running around like headless chickens, morphed into a force to be reckoned with. They ushered in mercantilism, slavery and colonialism. They embraced Industrial Revolu...

At Charles III Coronation @ London BBC is in the limelight again. All for the wrong reasons. When the Bersih movement was on a roll in the streets of Kuala Lumpur and painting the town yellow, BBC was on a rampage screening the sea of yellow flood hourly, painting the idea that the whole country is in tatters. In reality, the following day, it was business as usual for Malaysians. When interest parties protested against the cut in Indian farmer subsidies in Delhi, BBC again had a field day. They were lamenting that the Indian public was prevented from expressing their democratic rights. Even though India's internal politics did not affect the British or the rest of the world one tiny bit, it took itself as the vanguard of the oppressed and the champion of the downtrodden. It did not matter that the protestors were not farmers but middlemen who tended to lose from the Government's move. Bersih Protest @ Kuala Lumpur But now, despite all the austerity measures taken in the UK to ...

I used to think that only isolated primitive tribal people practised cannibalism. Long before there was such a thing as headhunters, the employment agency, the indigenous people of Sarawak, were the original headhunters. They were fabled to kill their enemies, shrunk their skulls and wore them as ornaments. Even in modern times, consuming the human brain was a delicacy amongst the tribes in Papua New Guinea. We learnt about Kuru, the first human prion-linked disease, way before the world heard of Cruetzfelt-Jakob disease (CJD) or Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE, Mad Cow Disease). Kuru was transmitted when attendees of tribal funerals would consume the brain of the recently departed in their honour. I was made to believe that only primitive ‘uncivilised’ natives only had such practices. The colonial masters were quick to label anyone who had built the courage to oppose their rule as cannibal as they did to Thugees in India and Mao Mao people in Kenya. The Thuggees were the local d...

CASTE IS NOT HINDU 'Caste is a Construct of the Colonial Invaders' Authors: Guruji Sundara Raj Anatha, Aykshya Simrhen Raj, Pardip Kumar Kukreja. If anything life has taught us, it is this. People are narcissistic and egoistic. People try to understand everything but are unwilling to accept that things are way more complicated than an average man can comprehend. We are all guilty of cognitive dissonance and suffer from the Duning-Kruger effect, overestimating our competence. People always try to dominate each other and clamour for the joy and privileges of being in power and a leader. Those in the higher rung of the hierarchy are pretty comfortably perched high up, looking down at the mere mortals. Those stranded at the lower perch of the food chain are gaslighted to be convinced that they are there because of their own doing. Their leaders want to maintain the status quo to ensure their position and conserve their high status. A house cat, quite comfortable not needing to hunt...

©Elanour Tomlinson We are often advised to say only the nice things about the recently departed. Somehow, all the ill feelings and the wrong paths crossed are temporarily swept under the proverbial carpet. Everyone, including the ones who tend to benefit from the deceased's passing, is expected to carry a sombre outward appearance - wear a sad face, dress down and avoid merriment.  After the so-called mourning period, it will be pretty much no-holds-barred, I guess.  But now, even before the dead are laid to rest, the wokies are already at it. I am referring to the recent demise of one of the longest reigning monarchs of the once most enormous Empire of the world, where the sun never set. True, she inherited a bounty of loot from the world over. At one time, pirates scaling the Atlantic high seas were free to pilfer gold from Spanish vessels legitimately under the auspices of the British Crown as long as they paid their dues to the monarch. True, they went out with their impe...