RIFLE RANGE BOY

Top Gun (1986) Director: Tom Scott I never really had the chance to view this movie when it came around in the mid80s. My wife and her friends went gaga watching a topless and muscular Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer on that one. I think that was the reason they thought the film was darn good. Viewing it now after acquiring the wisdom conferred by the School of Hard Knocks of Life, it is quite as plain as day. The movie is nothing more than a US propaganda tool deployed by Hollywood to showcase the might of the world's policeman to the rest of the capitalistic world. It was like Rambo singlehandedly ending the Afghan War in Rambo3. It was a time when the world was convinced that Americans were saviours with altruistic intentions.  There is not much of a story here. It is more like a prospectus to showcase how an elite select group of US Marines are handpicked to compete in a fighter jet dogfight tactical competition.  All through, I was squeezing my brain, trying to fathom the purpo...

Body Of Lies (2008) The talk about this film came about after the recent catastrophes in Christchurch and Colombo. What started of possibly the work of a lone wolf disillusioned wacko or deviant religious groups may actually be hiding the deep-rooted tentacles of international psyops. In the case of Christchurch shooting in a mosque, it may not just the work of a lone wolf going on a shooting spree because he cannot stand what he sees around him, but cannot do it in his home because of tight gun laws but in New Zealand instead. He may be just a pawn in a greater chess game involving players at very high levels via remote control. And the bombing of the churches in Sri Lanka is not just due to vengeance to the Christchurch mishap. A disgruntled Sri Lankan Muslim did not suddenly decide to be a human bomb to settle a score. Investigations slowly reveal that the perpetrators originate outside the country and gleam in joy seeing the devastation, creating anarchy and benefitting f...

All it takes is for someone to snoop around to look for another destination. A place where people lead an idyllic life living in symbiosis with the elements of nature, with the divine forces as their guiding light. Venture capitalists move in. They show them the carrot and the lure of what money can do to enrich their 'impoverished' lives. They influence the elders who steamroll all oppositions who want to maintain the status quo. The general public thinks the opposers are just spoiled sports, reminiscing the old times, living in the past and not moving with times. The time to live, the new kids on the block say is now, and they do not want to be left behind. So builds a frenzy, to join the bandwagon to draw sightseers to see what they had to offer. The natives were willing to play dance monkey to the tune of the first world revellers. Slowly, the natives' lives change. Their age-old tradition of caring for humanity rather than worldly materialistic things is but a thin...

The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives Zbigniew Brzezinski (1997) Everybody wants peace on Earth. The political leaders wish for peace in their land. Believers of all faiths, without fail, include in their daily prayers call for eternal peace on Earth. We all know this type of bliss, smiling from ear to ear without an iota of worry in their minds, stays only as a figment of our imaginations. Like in the narration of Kali and the state of the world, life is a constant battle without the weak and the mighty. It is a continual flux of turn of tides of the interplay between the powerful crumbling down to become weak and the downtrodden rising from the ashes. Empires may crumble, and slaves may turn emperors. This book is the perspective of President Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor. Written in 1997, when the USA was the lone superpower, Russia and China were weak, and Islamic Jihadism was unheard of, some of the strategies that made ...

Stealing a Nation (2004) Written and Directed by John Pilger Before the mysterious disappearance of the flight MH370, never had I heard of the existence of a military base in the Indian Ocean named Diego Garcia. With the power of the web, we now know so many things about this piece of coral island, out in the middle of nowhere, in the Chagos Archipelago with Diego Garcia as the main island and its neighbours are Mauritius and Seychelles. Some time now, the story of the imposition of inhumane displacement of its indigenous inhabitants of the isle by imperial superpowers, namely Britain and America had hit the headlines in the UK and Mauritius. Around 1965, the British foreign office clandestinely falsified a document stating that the Chagos Archipelago was an uninhabited piece of land only occupied by seagulls. They did this to justify the selling  of this island, which they had held since the 19th century, to the US in exchange for modern military equipment. The US, in...