RIFLE RANGE BOY

Aonang Beach First there was nothing.... Krabi was just another sleepy hollow in the malaise evoking town in the Kra Isthmus. The Hollywood doyens looking upon an exotic location to shoot their next money spinning movie remembered such a place on their tour of duty to Vietnam. Their mission (The movie: The Man with the Golden Gun, 1974) was a great success. Suddenly everybody wanted to be James Bond and would not sleep until they had seen the exotic location where the baddie operated! Everybody knows Bangkok (with its golden temples, bars, the massage parlours...), Chiengmai, Hatyai, Phuket but Krabi... Leo does not necessarily refer to lion lineage. Here it is a short form for Leopold! The businessmen got excited. Boom came the highways and the travel tour agents. Since everybody could fly, swoosh came an international airport plying routes to include lands whose occupants could pronounce 'Kr' as easily as kroner and to those where the alphabet 'r...

Something in the evolution of mankind cannot be altered. The need to communicate and travel has made the world indeed a smaller place. With the advent of communication technologies like the internet, this need just got a further gigantic push forward. If those days, man needed horsemen and the pony express to relay messages, now with a fragment of the time required to wink, information travels further than the mind can imagine. Man, however, instead of blending with the rest of the people to live as one, choose to subdivide themselves to groups of same intentions, ideology or ethnicity. People use the technology to rekindle old sentimentality to revive ancient languages, old mega plans forgotten by history, instigate animosity and further subdivide people who have been finally united under the same flag after so many years of tribal fighting and bloodshed. Is it the fate of man to head for self-destruction? Is it in our DNA?