RIFLE RANGE BOY

Fair dues warning: This is a spiritual post. Please leave if you are easily offended.  Krishna demolishing Kansa I heard a talk from a Hindu scholar recently. He was narrating the story of Krishna and the troubling times he was born into. Rather, the Protector of the Universe, Vishnu, manifested himself as Krishna to maintain law and order. Too many influential people were abusing their positions to create chaos, which needed to be curbed. Krishna 's immediate duty was to defeat Kansa, his uncle, a demonic King. Trouble started when Kansa married off his sister, Devaki, to Vasudeva. Deep inside, Kansa intended to usurp Vasudeva's land. At the wedding, a prophecy was heard that Devaki's eighth child would be the reason for Kansa's defeat. Kansa imprisoned the couple, and Devaki's seven children were all killed at birth. Why all the other births, too, not just the eighth? Somebody alerted Kansa that the seven siblings could rally behind the eighth to attack him. When ...

The Kerala Story (Hindi, 2023) Written & Directed by Sudipto Sen   This movie is kicking a storm in India right now. It is outrightly banned in West Bengal by the ruling party. In Kerala and Tamil Nadu, the courts have allowed screening for the time being, but the case is due to be reviewed in the Supreme Court soon.   Some cinema hall operators have voluntarily decided not to screen the film for fear of reprisal from angry mobs. They cite not wanting to offend Muslim sentiments and the possibility of property damage. This only shows the schizophrenic nature of society. On the one hand, people talk about freedom of expression; simultaneously, there is a need to control the narrative. The controversy stems from the story's theme - love jihad and forced conversion. A Malayalee Hindu nursing student tells her life story. A bubbly student dabbles with Islam and is lured into marrying a Muslim man after inadvertently getting pregnant. She is brainwashed to hate her roots and fa...

Mentega Terbang (Butterfly, Malay; 2021) Writer, Director: Khairi Anwar This release was released about two years ago and won international awards for its efforts. Unfortunately, it became famous in Malaysia only after the local artists guild decided to make a police report about it as they deemed that it offended the sensitivities of Malay Muslims in Malaysia. Many of its dialogues appeared like they were ridiculing Islam, it is alleged. The Malaysian certification board had no control over Malaysians viewing it as it was broadcast online on a webpage. Since the recent brouhaha, even the said screening platform decided to stop havi ng it on its accord. We all grew up wondering about death in our formative years. With all the cultural-religious rituals associated with funerals and the stories related to the soul and the afterlife, we naturally assumed that God and religions give a kind of shield to protect us from untimely death. This internal squabble to choose the 'right' rel...

The Lady of Heaven (2021) Directed by Eli King (pseudonym) When a controversial figure like Sheikh Yasser Al-Habib writes the script of a movie, one can be pretty sure that it will kick up some dirt. Just for the record, Al-Habib, a Kuwaiti Shia cleric, was imprisoned in Kuwait for 35 years when he insulted the companions of the Prophet back in the early 2000s. After obtaining a royal pardon from the Emir of Kuwait, he resided in the UK. He lost his Kuwaiti citizenship in 2004 when he stated in his speeches that the Prophet died not because of an ailment but after being poisoned by His wives! Al-Habib apparently has made a hobby out of insulting Sunnis. In the UK, he continues his controversial stance and has been accused of being a divisive figure and one-minded in creating a rift between the Shia and Sunni denominations of Islam. As a head of the Shia community, he regularly appears in the media for all the wrong reasons accentuating the Shia-Sunni divide. This movie is pregnant with...

Mookuthi Amman ( மூக்குத்தி அம்மன் , Nose-ringed Goddess, Tamil; 2020) This movie is obviously a bashing against BJP's imminent entry into Tamil Nadu politics. Since the 1930s, Tamil Nadu politics had been secular (read anti-Hindu). From the time of EV Ramasamy and subsequent leaders of the state, they have always claimed to be atheists. They all fell prey to the British's devious 'divide and rule' strategy. They also subscribe to the now-defunct 'Aryan invasion theory'. They believe that the story of Ramayana is the story of Northerners (Aryans and Brahmins), of King Rama, colonising the Dravidians led by Ravana. What they fail to realise is that Ravana actually hails from the region around modern-day Uttar Pradesh, hence from the North too. He usurped the Lanka kingdom from his half brother, Kuberan. EV Ramasamy had always been sceptical of the Hindu hierarchical order. His idea was the Brahmins were out to aggrandise themselves and vilify the lower castes. Be...

Credit: topdocumentaryfilms.com We all know the drill - that up to 70% of our body is filled with water; that 70% of the Third Rock from the Sun is covered by water and that it is the elixir of life. We also accept oxygen and hydrogen molecules could be alien visitors who landed on Earth via meteorites that reached here. Scientists agree that water is indeed a strange chemical. With its composition, it should be in a gaseous state, not liquid as it is. Unlike other solids, water in a solid state is less dense, encouraging lifeforms to live and prosper under an iceberg. Capillary action ensures that water reaches the highest leaf of the giant redwood and the minuscule of the body organs. I will not do justice to the WhatsApp that my childhood friends and I share if I do not divulge some of the new things that were brought to my attention through them. Water has memory. Having been around for so long on this planet, it only makes sense. The same water molecule that was drunk by a...

The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise Muslims, Christians and Jews under Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain Darío Fernández-Morera (2016) My understanding is that Islam experienced its zenith of growth in Andalusia (Al-Andalus, Islamic Spain). It was the time of the golden age of Islam where everyone lived happily, believers and non-believers alike. I thought Jews and Christians lived in harmony in mutual respect as the 'people of the book'. But, wait! This book by a contemporary historian will burst that bubble. Darío, armed with archaeological evidence from scripts written in Spanish and other European languages, has set a 200-pages bibliography to showcase the extent of his research. He claims to have access to scripts of Christians who fled the tyranny of the marauding Berber horsemen. He describes our present knowledge of Andalusia akin to learning about America from the life and times of Hollywood actors or about the Arabs from the Saudi royal family. The real situati...

X Files Season 10 (E1-E5) More than 10 years after their tour of duty, the last the two renegade FBI agents are still at their conspiracy theories. They are still keen to expose to the world of their employers’ devious plans to hide major secrets from mankind and their attempts at hastening the annihilation of mankind as we know it. Many things have happened since their last outing. The paranormal department had been closed. Fox Mulder is on medication for depression. Dana Scully is working in a hospital, minding her own business. There is a mention of Scully having been abducted by aliens before. They (Mulder and Scully) have an 11-year-old child whom they have given away for adoption for security reasons. They have reason to believe that the child must have been infused with alien DNA, hence the secrecy. The smoking man is still around! The last time I saw him, he had laryngeal cancer. In the first episode, he is seen with a tracheostomy but still smoking via his tracheal ...