RIFLE RANGE BOY

Kummathy (Bogeyman, Malayalam; 1979) Director: G Aravindan Most viewers would not have heard of this movie maker, mainly known as a legend in the Indian alternative cinema field. Unlike the masala Bollywood kind of logic-defying escapism that excites the masses, these artsy films only fascinate people who see beyond the story and what is shown on the screen. Some label this film as the best Indian movie ever made. The movie came to the mainstream's attention after Martin Scorsese's team restored the old, lacklustre copies found in the Indian film archives in 2021. Scorcese announced this movie was one of his f avourites at its restoration premiere in Italy.  The original cinematographer , however, still preferred the analogue version, as he thought it had more texture and character. It has been popularised as a children's movie and is usually screened on International Children's Day. The first thing one notices when watching this film is that he feels like a child. Reme...

Swatantrya Veer Savarkar (Hindi, 2024) Director: Randeep Hooda It is funny how names like Savarkar, Bhagat Singh and Subash Chandra Bose escaped our consciousness when we were taught Indian history in school. We were only told of Mahatma Gandhi, the Indian Congress Party and their brand of civil disobedience. Gandhi's passive demeanour, recurrent fasting, and imprisonment eventually won India's Independence. Oh, right! Savarkar and the gang were branded as terrorists and troublemakers, destroying the order, culture and modernity the highly evolved superior race brought to the lost natives.  Now, we are told of alternative narratives of events that may have happened during the 200 years of the Raj's rule in India. The victors control the narratives, but entertaining the other side of the story is worthwhile. Let us not forget that the immediate reason for the British's sudden exodus from Bharat was not just the bludgeoning British debt to India incurred during WW2 but th...

Emancipation (2022) Director: Antoine Fuqua This movie is about an Afro-American slave in Louisana who lived around the 1860s during the American Civil War. A man who never knew his ancestry, age or birth date. His master called him Peter, so Peter he was. All he ever wanted was freedom and to be with his wife and children. What he got was incarceration, and he was transported to slog it out as a manual labourer on the expanding American railway line. Even though he heard about a decree that freed slaves, all he got were abuses and beatings. The photograph of his bare back, laden with keloid-filled scourge-whipped scars, was a selling point for abolitionists. This graphical representation not only manifests the pains the slaves had to endure in the development of the country but also shows the gall a fellow human being would inflict on his own kind.  Parents tell their children to be kind and loving. The Book instructs us to love one another and that God created us in his own image...

Aftershock (2022) Director, Producer: Paula Eiselt and  Tonya Lewis In the 70s, active labour management was the craze in the Obstetrics circle, especially amongst the countries that looked at the UK as their point of reference. This kind of treatment was first tried out at the Royal Dublin Hospital, promising short labours, lower caesarean section rates and safer outcomes. It soon became the golden standard of managing parturient mothers in most labour rooms. There had been debates on whether Dublin's figures and definition of labour were only agreeable to some. Many argued that the system tends to over-medicalise something quite natural that people have been doing for aeons. Medical intervention tends to involve surgical intervention, it is alleged. Unfortunately, with eyes constantly scrutinising for clues to stir dirt when a medical outcome is not to their liking, medical practitioners tend to practice defensive medicine. Better be safe than be bogged by handling complications,...

Swathanthryam Ardharathriyil (Malayalam, Freedom at Night; 2018) In terms of world cinema, this movie not score high on the scale of creativity. As far as Indian cinema is concerned, at least one given to minute details to the storyline, this would be number one. Like Papillon and Shawshank Redemption, this film centres around the planning and the execution of a jailbreak.  The first quarter of the movie shows the circumstances upon which the hero gets imprisoned. In prison, he plots his prison break after recruiting his accomplices. There is not a dull moment as the storyteller managed to fill up the story with characters with compelling backstories. The props look real, and the actors are made scruffy and muscular enough to fit the bill of hardcore criminals. The fights look authentic and short enough to get the message. The music suits the situation, and the escape plan appears believable enough. There are a few failures and sudden changes of plan to hold the suspense.  The...

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...

http://www.familytrek.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/DI-I-offend-you.jpg I saw a video clip recently on the social media. It took place within the confines of an underground train. A mother was seen nursing her infant in a sparsely occupied coach. She was admonished for exposing herself in public. The man who accused her of public indecency insisted that his liberty of not wanting to see a naked lady had been denied. Slowly, the fellow passengers joined to support the lactating mother, but the man stood his ground. He accused her of not bothering about how others would feel seeing a naked breast in plain view. The argument went on for some time till it was time for one of them to disembark. A few months ago, a Muslim man is a Hindu-majority village in India was lynched to death when the village holy man announced that a particular occupant was in possession of beef. A mob, primarily vegans who thought that by controlling their cravings for blood and meat would be able to reach e...

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...

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...

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...