RIFLE RANGE BOY

  From Berita MMA, September 2024. This work is licensed under a  Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License .

It looks like we are still immersed in the euphoria of our recent close to 500km ride from Srinagar to Leh, Ladakh. Friends and well-wishers continue wishing their felicitations and, in not so many words, tell us to thank our lucky stars (or the Almighty) that we were still able to complete the crunching climb of 7,000 metres at this age. One of the fellow cyclists in the group did not take kindly to that phrase. He had put in so much effort throughout his life to keep fit. After leaving school and leading a more sedentary life, he decided to go back to his active ways after seeing his father suffering from various complications of diabetes. From someone who jogged around the housing estate, he graduated to running long distances, hiking, and cycling. By a twist of fate, he found other fellow ‘madmen’ who shared his eccentricity amongst his neighbours. Hence, he started the weekend sorcery of commitments to hiking, running, and cycling. The avalanche in the weekend noradrenaline rush w...

The Lost City of Z (2017) It was a time when wealthy British aristocrats would amuse themselves with risky expeditions to savage lands to examine the lesser beings in 'uncivilised' territories. They would study them like guinea pigs, record their habits for future references and in the process rob them blind of precious metals and of a rich civilisation. It was a time just before the onset of World War One and Major Percy Fawcett is seconded to the Royal Geographical Society to do some surveying work in the interiors of Bolivia. Fawcett does his work and returns but not without realising that, unlike his contemporaries who think that the Amazon natives are anything but civilised, he feels the land holds the remnants of an advanced culture. After a failed return trip to discover the lost city that he calls 'Z', his life gets embroiled in the Trench War. Injured, he is refrained from pursuing any further expeditions. The calling proved too strong. On the insistence...