RIFLE RANGE BOY

CTRL (Hindi, 2024) Director: Vikramaditya Motwane A toddler looks at a portrait on the wall and automatically swipes his hand, expecting to see another picture. Every child from every crook and nook of the house burrows out the moment the WiFi router is turned off, blurting, in their weary red eyes, “The WiFi is not working!” Never mind that the house is burning! We have become digitally addicted. Social media is closely linked to this connectivity. So gratifying has this media interaction become that people would rather communicate via their devices than in person. It simply simplifies things. One can do away with the customary curtsies and communicate when necessary and on the go. The serotonin infusion given by likes and thumbs up has reached such alarming levels that children have been known to have bitten off the hands that fed them. Mothers have been bludgeoned by their children in tantrums. Never in human history have people been scrutinised so minutely as in Instagram and Faceb...

Sajini Shinde ka Viral Video (Sajni Shinde's Viral Video, Hindi; 2023) Written & Directed by:  Mikhil Musale People who profess that humanity is very much alive have not been trolled on social media before. Just because they are behind the cloak of anonymity, perhaps with a fictitious name or a fake account, they have the fortitude to bait users into a vicious argument with the intent of causing hurt to an intended person or parties. It is a cyberbullying. The problem is sometimes it is self-made. We put too much information on our social media; sometimes, we need to think. Not everyone out there is going to laugh with us with our goofiness. Many create mountains out of molehills. And not everyone is going to handle criticism kindly. Pew Research Center reported in a 2022 survey that 46 % of U.S. teens aged 13 to 17 have experienced some form of cyberbullying, which may include trolling. Amongst adults, what goes online is scrutinised by others and made a big deal, and soon, ne...

Jexi (2019) Director:  Jon Lucas,  Scott Moore There is nothing groundbreaking about this movie. It reminds me of at least two films which dealt with the same theme. In 1984 'Electric Dreams', a desktop computer, Edgar, falls in love with the protagonist's crush. After successfully wooing his beau with the help of his computer, his life turns into a living hell. His computer controls most of his home devices and goes hyperdrive to sabotage the protagonist's work and love life. In 2013 'Her', the protagonist falls in love with an Operating System, AI. All three films show us how hooked we are to our digital devices. We avoid human interaction and feel most comfortable left to our devices. Furthermore, interaction with the same kind becomes increasingly more difficult. Even though we were told that we are social animals who thrive on human dealings, somehow, it becomes more and more an uphill battle. People demand. They want to be treated special. They demand the ...

Crime Scene: The Vanishing at Cecil Hotel (S1 E1-4; 2021) Netflix Docu-series. This case shows how information in the wrong hands can create a lot of unnecessary tension and can sometimes be potentially dangerous. With the ease of access to an ocean of information literally at their fingertips, everyone goes around with a halo thinking that they are better than the professionals who spent half their lifetime learning and doing the things they are trained to do. In 2013, a 22-year-old Canadian girl, Elisa Lam, goes missing in Los Angeles (LA), where she went for a short holiday all by herself. The police were alerted when the girl failed to call home daily as promised. Three days into the investigation but the police were at a dead end. They knew she stayed in Cecil Hotel, and the hotel had a CCTV recording of her acting bizarrely as she was entering a lift. Even the sniffer dog could not locate her. All investigations revealed was that she had a personal blog on Tumblr, where she pour...

Our world has become one which is ruled by mobs. We thought we had cancelled mob behaviours when we started engaging in intellectual discourses and discarded our weapo ns for civilised dialogues. We were made to believe so. The muffled undertones of passive- aggressiveness were always there in the background. It never really disappeared. In those days, the dominant ruling forces called it resistance, reformation or revolution. We learnt that numbers matter and recruiting the masses worked best to overthrow a seemingly impregnable and cruel regime. Most new religions came about through these ways - show the unthinking inebriated public the virtues and purpose of existence, riled their emotions to unite them against a particular cause, sometimes a self-serving one. The major Abrahamic religions began thus, creating a sense of fear, perpetually assuming that they would be besieged. Fast forward to the present time. We thought that in modern times, with the ease of information at our ...

The Hater (Hejter, Polish; 2020) It is not something that we do not already know. The cyberspace has become where everything is made possible; a false narrative can be oft-repeated the gospel truth. Truth can be bent to suit the flavour of the day. A non-issue can be made the next game-changer. Deepfakes can change the path of one's career or fate. Destiny is determined by the trolls and influencers. There is a concerted effort by news spreaders to mould one's thought process in sync to the agenda of their paymasters.  The modern world, it seems, is divided into the right conservatives who yearn for the good old times when the world was a place of milk and honey, where politicians were honest, policemen cared for the public (not look at them as perps) and outdoors were healthy. At the red corner is the leftist who basically plays devil's advocate aim for anarchy and pushes the boundary to the point of entropy.  The leftists, outwardly seem to have the dow...

Don't F**k With Cats (Netflix 3-part documentary, 2019)  Hunting an Internet Killer I just happened to bump into this as I was on the treadmill and I was hooked. It was not much of love at first hello, but I liked the quite convoluted storyline. It illustrates the twisted nature of human behaviour, but at the same time, there are people who, through their actions, show that humanity has not died. But life, as it is, is never straight forward. In life, Occam's Razor states that 'e ntities should not be multiplied without necessity'  does not solve all puzzles. Things are more complicated than they seem. Simple answers may not be the correct one.  It is not an easy watch and is not for the faint-hearted. Few viewers could pass beyond the first 20 minutes of the show as the subject matter is unpleasant. It is based on a true story that happened between 2010 and 2012. It involved many countries, including Canada, the UK, France and Germany. But I guess when it consi...

The Erotic Engine:  How Pornography Has Powered Mass Communication from Gutenberg to Google (2011) Author: Patchen Barss Pornography has always been frowned upon as the destroyer of civilised societies. It has been put in the same decadent basket of other vices of man including cheating and gambling. On the contrary, the idea of voyeurism goes back as far as our cavemen ancestors. They had been so fascinated with human anatomy, like excited schoolboys and toilet graffiti, that they decided to draw what they saw during the day on the wall of their dwellings. The early human civilisations were quite liberal with sexuality and nudity. Ancient sculptures of couples in various stages of undress and in acts of copulation are general knowledge. The Indian book of Kamasutra is the living proof of this. Even as late as the European Renaissance, the human body was immortalised in paintings. Science and technology propelled the human race forward to meet various challenges. It helps ...