RIFLE RANGE BOY

The Conformist (Il conformista, Italian; 1970) Director: Bernardo Bertolucci People are like sheep. They flock around each other, following their shepherd, not knowing that their shepherd has only one thing on their mind. That is, to protect the herd from the wolf, to fatten them and nicely line them up to the slaughter. The one thing that differentiates people from animals, their minds are so quickly malleable. With a bit of persuasion, they will bark, sing, bleat, dance or croak to the tune of their masters. Plato’s Cave Allegory, described in this movie, succinctly tells how we behave. In Plato’s original example, he told of prisoners who had never seen the outside world, tied by their hands to face a wall of the inside of a cave. From the silhouette that appears on the wall of human activity, of people playing and children eating ice cream, they imagine how the world is without ever setting foot outside their prisons. It is an imagined outside world that he imagines may be far from...

The Conformist (Italian, 1970) Director: Bernardo Bertolucci With rhetoric like "you're either with us or against us!", there is a pressure for most of us to conform. The daily bombardment of an overdose of information in the social media puts its followers in a quandary. The urgency to submit to the flavour of the moment and to be on the right side of history is quite confusing.    No man is an island. Living in a society, we are all interdependent. When one's own survival is dependent on goodwill and patronage of the others,  he would not want to offend the others' sensitivity; he would just conform or at least appear to.  In the current world climate and the country's political scenario, the need to follow the majority is very real. Merely following the tide is, of course, less tiring. Fighting back and arguing your stand may sometimes be an act of futility. Arguing with stupid and zombies is never easy. It takes a certain kind of resilien...