RIFLE RANGE BOY

Black Widow (2021) Everybody talks about wanting to be free, free from any encumbrances, free to say and do as he pleases, free as a bird to move around. The caged dog looks at his stray counterpart on the other side of the fence with contempt for the freedom that he enjoys. On the other hand, the stray longs for the time when he does not have to scratch his head looking for his next meal. We think we are free by living with our loved ones or within communities that we find commonalities. Sad to say that even within societies, certain norms and mores exist that one is excepted to conform to. Challenges are bound to happen with the members in the spring of their youth; the young feel restricted with educational exposure. They want to be free of any restrictive chains that bog them down. Like it or not, it is not easy. Wilfully or not, we are tied down. A society is paved towards a particular direction by the instructions laid down by the majority. To reach greater heights, these laid la...

The Story of God (Documentary, Seasons 1 - 2; 2016-17) Hosted by Morgan Freeman I do not think nobody will think differently after watching this documentary which was released by National Geographic. Everybody is too entrenched in his belief system to be swayed away just seeing the singular purpose of all religions as seen here. Perhaps, cognitive dissonance would come in the way. I think the moderator took a very unbiased and non-condescending approach when it came to extracting knowledge from various other non-dominant world religions. Kudos. He goes discussing many life questions that have no answers. Topics on death, the end of the world, the beginning of all, the mysterious God, the creations, the genesis of evil, divine miracle, the concept of God's chosen representatives, the notion of heaven and hell as well as proof of God comprise the nine episodes in two seasons. The fear of death must have given the fear of death in humankind. Even with the available advances...

traveldigg.com Everybody yearns to be free. They want to be liberated. They dream of eudaimonia. Sadly, their search for bliss is anything but fulfilling. When we are young, we long for the time when we are adults and do not have to play to the whims and fancies of our parents or to bow to societal pressures. We thought we had to conform, as a payback measure to our parents to all the food, accommodation and care rendered in our teething years. Then we get our keys at 21, and we thought that is it - our path to unleashing the caged animal within us. With education came conformity and decorum. With a life partner came mutual respect, reciprocity, tolerance, empathy till death do us apart. With the expansion of the family tree, came commitments, responsibility and leadership by example. The elusive freedom and liberation just slither us by. We tell us that is just the circle of life. We still bear hope of release from the shackles in the horizon, and we straddle along. Cor...

I have the urge to laze around all day on a Sunday because I know that my services are not needed. I convince myself that I should reward myself by patting myself at the back and tucking myself to sleep. After all, I have been on my feet all week long. Even God who created the Universe rested on the Sabbath. Fine. I pamper myself on my rest day. My regular activities and clockwork-like demands of duties kind of puts my biorhythms in place. That is, I know I will need to do this and that with the satisfaction that whatever I am doing serves a certain purpose in continuity of life; of my life, my progeny, my lineage, perhaps the next generation and wishfully mankind on the whole. I shudder to think what will happen when I am given the standing orders or 'privilege' to stop doing all these. No more deadlines to meet and no more compulsions to present myself in person to perform my one thing I am given the pleasure of! What happens next? Am I going to slide down the pat...

They say the earth is everyone to share. That we are just temporary residents here, holding fort for the next generation who would preserve it for their descendants. That we own nothing, do not owe anybody anything, come with nothing and go with the same suit we came with, except with memories, good or bad, a legacy or a nightmare, hailed or cursed in our graves. That they say that richness handed to us by Mother Nature is for all her children. That there is no country, no borders, we are all one and no religion too! So when our brethren come a knocking, we should share our daily bread with them. The deep basket of charity would never stay empty. But then, I realise that life is never so easy. Why do we invest so much in security system to protect our hard earned possessions. Should we not just practise open-door policy in the true sense? Why bother with immigration and border control.The trouble is we have taken pains to improve living standards after going through the mills ...

After the demise of Singapore's founding father, LKY, the question of personal liberty and freedom versus the need for Big Bro to oversee things for the nation's greater good made its rounds.  Proponents of human rights and individual freedom would argue that the Government has no business barging into personal lives and tapping into our telephone calls. After gruelling all the wrong decisions in the past and paying dearly, the West could no longer trust their governments. Instead, they would let their elected leaders mess up all people's (Third World) future than their own. The leaders are elected servants, and they are there to serve. On the other end, paternalistic leaders feel that human beings are just brainless blind invertebrates with a herd mentality. They just follow their peers without much thinking or analysing! This was proposed by Sayyid Kutb, the Egyptian school inspector who earned a scholarship to the USA. In his daily dealings, he discovered that people ar...

Now how often have you heard, "Stop controlling me, let me be free!" "I just want to be me. Me with my own desires." It is actually nothing new. This kind of mantra seems to have been around since the turn of the 20th century for the generation next. Everybody wants to be left alone to do things at their own freewill. Just like an indoor pet who rushes through the front door whenever it is ajar, human beings (whether they like it or not, they are still animals) always crave for something that they do not have. Without savouring what they already possess, they yearn for the unattainable or the utopia that only exists in their imagination. Can people really be free? Is freewill really free? Can people ever be free to be and do anything as and when they feel free? Are our thoughts really free? What dictates our will? Is it not a sum of all the indoctrination given to us via our parents through their upbringing, the teachings that they learnt from their el...

Shubun (Scandal, Japanese; 1950) Director: Akira Kurosawa The theme of this movie is still relevant today. The talk of the need for the public to know everything versus the space for citizens and people in authority to safeguard their secrecy is an ongoing debate. Where the line should be drawn on the Truth is anybody's guess. With the recent leakage of supposedly private intimate poses of celebrities to the media is proof of this ongoing debate on this debacle. The boundary of what is indeed trash and what is news is progressively blurred as the public gets all excited with trivial unimportant happenings or smut that happens to people in the limelight or are the people in the press simply sensationalizing these trivial non events? Again, Kurosawa had chosen a modern looking post war Japan with a Western outlook. People are dressed in Western clothes, jackets, pants and dresses and the ladies were donning cropped modern hairstyles. The recreational activities mirror their Weste...

Growing up in RRF, Amma tried all the ways that she knew that could impart the values that could mold her son into a knowledgeable individual. One of the ways that she carried off her duty was reading aloud the proverbs and quotations printed on the daily leaf of a Tamil calendar. This calendar had daily chart of good and bad astronomical times together with daily saying of the day. The leaf of the calendar is torn daily and viola, another gem comes out. Mother read me about JFK's 'Ask what your country has done for you...' long before I knew about American foreign policy, about 'turning the other cheek' from Gandhi and Jesus, and Socrates' call to think critically and question intelligently. I would then in turn rebut with some wise crack ridiculing the sayings but must helped in thinking outside the box. In the growing and trying age of teenage, quotations were a big deal. Teachers' autograph on annual school magazine were treated as gems. LHS' ...

Another pastime that I occasionally indulge in is T-shirt watching. Some of the things written on them could be quite entertaining. Of course, some of them could be construed as sexual harassment if uttered by an individual. As it only written and not uttered, nobody gives a second look. Actually it is meant to be looked again and again! T-shirts with messages like 'Wish these were brains', 'Hammer says "You can't touch these"' would fit this bill. My favorite must be 'My girlfriend went to Vegas and all she got me is this lousy T-shirt'. Not to forget the abbreviations of the word ' F ornication U nder C onsent of the K ing' purposefully spelt as the abbreviations of ' F rench C onnection U nited K ingdom' to  give a false sense of grandiosity to its wearer. Grandiose feeling by its wearer who is awed by his the fact that he is not wearing a garment but a statement. A statement that he dares to be different and fight against t...