RIFLE RANGE BOY

MH 370: The Plane that Disappeared(2023, Netflix) 3-part Documentary "Good night, Malaysia 370!" Those were the last words before Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah disappeared with his Boeing 777, 227 passengers from 14 nations and 12 crew members  into thin air in the early hours of 8th March 2014 en route to Beijing. Nine years later, the world is still clueless about how an aircraft as big as a building could disappear without evidence. In an era when we may be at the cusp of discovery of the Higgs boson (God) particle, and we can convict a politician with denatured DNA from semen deposited three days previously, we are still unable to make head or tail to a Boeing plane's whereabouts. All the satellites and tracking devices that monitor our every move simply failed to comprehend its fate after it went off the radar after 0130hrs. External communications and transponder signals simultaneously disappeared after entering the Vietnamese air space. This documentary series has yet...

Plague of Corruption (2020) Restoring faith in the promise of Science Authors: Judy Mikovitz, Kent Heckenlively The domain of caring for the sick is no longer solely in the hands of medical care professionals. Policies of treatment, prevention strategies and cure are not decided by the doctors and policymakers with a medical background. In the modern world, businessmen, philanthropist and Big Pharma are the ones who determine what best strategies to lay for mankind and where the budget for health should go to. These people are the new saviours of the world and pledge to have only altruistic reasons for the heroic journey. There is no business interest, they say. For this, they employed the might of media, print and cyberworld, to spin and repeat the mantra of doom and gloom that only these people can avert. The paternalistic approach of doctors and nurses is so passé. The traditional advice of good food, fresh air and adequate physical activities is so archaic. Modern-day controll...

White Squall (1996) In my teen years, I remember helping an older teenager to organise a religious outing for a group of children. We were to arrange for a bus to get the kids to the other side of town for Sivarathri prayers. As it involved overnight event, somebody thought that verbal consent was not sufficient. Each participant was asked to get their parents to sign a release form. We got the replies promptly from all except one. It seemed his father, an Army man, refused to sign the consent form and wanted to see the organisers. That was the first time I was exposed to an unreasonable person who thought that the whole world out there was just out to kidnap his child. His coveted son did not make it to the prayers as we could not convince his father. Later in life, the calculating father must have miscalculated his drinking habits and succumbed to the effects of the bottle. The obedient son was also devastated much later, in an unrelated event, when he woke up one fine morning t...

Haider (2014) It turned out to be not a film depicting the plight of the Kashmiris but rather a retelling of Hamlet with the beautiful Kashmir in the background the internal squabble as the country as its backdrop. Even though the movie makes it appear as though there is just bloodshed, guns and terrorism in this snow-covered paradise on earth, much of its past history remains untold. People tend to assume Kashmir had always been a Muslim majority country where India is trying to exert its influence, but its citizens want out. There are much more than meets the eye. Kashmir was a revered place from time immemorial for seekers of knowledge and epistemology. It was the destination for many sages the world over. Hinduism, Shiva Taitrism,  planted itself firmly here as early as 3rd century BCE. The populace was considered highly literate and skilled. The turning point came in the form of invaders. A particularly Muslim ruler by the name of Sikander Bhutshikan (1394-1417), an ico...

Dark Legacy II: The Assassination of JFK Jr.(2014) This is a followup documentary film to the one released in 2009 which incredulously implicated George HW Bush in the 1963 assassination of JFK in the streets of Dallas.  It looks like the Bush-Kennedy animosity seems to continue into the next generation. George W Bush is said to be cited in the death of JFK's son. John F Kennedy Jr. I remember reading about his plane crash on 16th July 1999. The cause of his mishap was told to be spatial disorientation as he was flying at night and lost his bearings when he made a sharp turn near the coast on a dark night with no stars. At that time, I thought it was just a case of a rich kid crashing his new toy.  Now, this documentary shows many loopholes in the reporting, investigation, the search and rescue missions and even official statements from the authorities. JFK Jr was a licenced and experienced pilot who is said to be meticulous in the handling of his flight paths. He h...

Inventing the AIDS Virus (1996) Authors: Peter H Duesberg and Bryan J Ellison With all the controversies surrounding Coronavirus, whether it is a man-made virus or a naturally occurring one, the debate is just proving to be so convoluted. On one side, the Americans are accusing the Chinese of sending a bio-weapon out to the world to screw up everybody's economy. On the other end, the Chinese are alleging the USA sent the genetically altered virus to China, but the virus has come back to bite them. The situation becomes murky as the rest of the world are taking the Chinese government to court as they concur that Chinese underplayed the seriousness of the disease when it hit them. Throwing a spanner in the work of discovering the origin of the virus is the suggestion that the novel Coronavirus, COVID-19, could be a retrovirus, just the most famous retrovirus of all - HIV. For recollection, a retrovirus is a type of RNA virus that inserts a copy of its genome into the DNA of a ho...