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Showing posts with the label cyberspace

Lynching in the 21st century!

Our world has become one which is ruled by mobs. We thought we had cancelled mob behaviours when we started engaging in intellectual discourses and discarded our weapo ns for civilised dialogues. We were made to believe so. The muffled undertones of passive- aggressiveness were always there in the background. It never really disappeared. In those days, the dominant ruling forces called it resistance, reformation or revolution. We learnt that numbers matter and recruiting the masses worked best to overthrow a seemingly impregnable and cruel regime. Most new religions came about through these ways - show the unthinking inebriated public the virtues and purpose of existence, riled their emotions to unite them against a particular cause, sometimes a self-serving one. The major Abrahamic religions began thus, creating a sense of fear, perpetually assuming that they would be besieged. Fast forward to the present time. We thought that in modern times, with the ease of information at our ...

Nothing is what it seems!

C U Soon (Malayalam; 2020) The human imagination has no boundaries. Even at a time when all of the movie-making industry has come to a grinding halt, storytellers still managed to squeeze out a full-length feature film. Who cares if there is a lockdown or a need for social distancing? There are smartphones and all the drama online in social media. Why look far? Necessity is the mother of all inventions and desperate times spur innovations. This Malayalam offering was made utilising the i-phone and screens of the computer. The whole film was shot in two rooms and with minimal human contact. The storytelling involves a lot of reading off WhatsApp messages, Facebook posts and emails as well as eavesdropping on video calls. Kudos to the director who managed to keep the attention of the audience. At the same time, they maintained the suspense of the story. Jimmy, a bank executive in Dubai, hooks with Anu on Tinder. They get along quite well and even contemplate marriage in such a...

A field day for the dark triad!

The Hater (Hejter, Polish; 2020) It is not something that we do not already know. The cyberspace has become where everything is made possible; a false narrative can be oft-repeated the gospel truth. Truth can be bent to suit the flavour of the day. A non-issue can be made the next game-changer. Deepfakes can change the path of one's career or fate. Destiny is determined by the trolls and influencers. There is a concerted effort by news spreaders to mould one's thought process in sync to the agenda of their paymasters.  The modern world, it seems, is divided into the right conservatives who yearn for the good old times when the world was a place of milk and honey, where politicians were honest, policemen cared for the public (not look at them as perps) and outdoors were healthy. At the red corner is the leftist who basically plays devil's advocate aim for anarchy and pushes the boundary to the point of entropy.  The leftists, outwardly seem to have the dow...