RIFLE RANGE BOY

George Bernard Shaw is said to have said, "whenever you wish to do anything against the law, always consult a good solicitor first." At a time when the law is often called upon to decide the appropriateness of the action of one in power, doing the right thing in the eyes of the law is more important than ever. It used to be that wars were planned by generals and executed by soldiers with the national leaders as their chief commander. Not anymore now. Over the years, it is increasingly evident that members of the legal fraternity play an ever-important central role in the targeting and other military operations. They are known as war lawyers. Since after World War 2, the world started looking at how badly humans treat each other in the name of defence of ideology. They realised the dire need to dictate how to act 'humanely' in the face of conflict; how to behave with civility looking at the mouth of impending death! Law was applied for this purpose. The War Lawyers int...

If Beale Street Could Talk (2018) If we learn anything from the biography of Ruben 'Hurricane' Carter and the 'Innocence Project', one thing is clear. There is no justice. The act of upholding the law and maintaining peace is just a facade to dupe everyone into believing that everything is hunky dory. Well, it is far from the truth for the voiceless and the economically deprived. They always get the short end of the stick. The slum dweller, the coloured, the illiterate and the poor invariably end up as part of the statistics for society to brag about the progress they had made. The elites and the haves more often than not escape punishment. Like it or not, the world is not fair. Justice remains only poetic to sooth the romantics and a promise to the helpless in the afterlife. Set in the 1970s, at a time when racial discrimination still reared its ugly head despite what The Civil Rights Act and Martin Luther King Jr's death made us believe, the film is a love...

Innocent Man (2018) Miniseries S1E1-E6. This documentary series is an engaging one. It is based on John Grisham's sole non-fiction book based on two murders that happened in a small town in Oklahoma named Ada. Through two unrelated cases that occurred in this place in the years 1982 and 1984, the author tries to highlight the weakness of the American judicial system.  Debbie Carter was raped and killed in her home in 1982. Denise Haraway was allegedly kidnapped and murdered in 1984. Two men each were convicted for each crime. There were striking similarities in the handling of the cases - a common witness and the same prosecution and investigative team. The docuseries with Grisham's investigations and a separate team of journalists with a little help from 'Innocence Project', managed to illustrate how the system is so rotten to the core. Up to 4% of prison inmates in American prisons that accounts to 90,000 of them are wrongly convicted and are spending term for...

The Ramayana R.K. Narayan (1972) We all know the story of the Ramayana. The original epic poem contained 24,000 verses and 500 chapters, written by Valmiki in 4 BCE. It has many versions as it had been translated into many Indian languages and non-Indian languages. As the Hindu influence spread over the archipelago, Ramayana had been narrated in Thailand, Malaya. Indonesia and Burma. The version that was written by the Tamil poet, Kamban, is said to give plenty of weightage to Ravana's courts' proceedings and Sita's predicaments after the well-fought war against Lanka.  The discourse that went on among the Asura brothers on the days before the Northerners' attack is worthy of mention. It tells us a lot of how civil servants or any member of an organisation would ( ‽  or should) react in a case of a moral dilemma. When Raavan summoned his brothers to help him out against attack from Rama's Army and his band of monkeys, each of them responded differently....