RIFLE RANGE BOY

The RSS: Roadmaps 21st Century Sunil Ambekar Imagine a time 20 years ago. We were all fed with a single narrative. The government-controlled media or media barons churned out cable news will tell us 'the truth'. There was no counter-narrative to argue this. The world accepted this one version. The fringe publishment that aired an alternative perspective of the event is labelled a rabble-rouser and scorned. Now with the availability of all the information at our disposal, we are still unsure of many things. For every piece of news churned, there is an immediate contradictory explanation just to shoot it down at its inception, making us none the wiser. I have always been given the impression that RSS is terrible news. My brother-in-law, who spent much of his formative years in India, and his wife, an Indian citizen who gave up her citizenship for her newfound love and land, Malaysia, have no qualms that RSS is synonymous with bigotry and fanaticism. Any piece of news from RSS ( R...

Fools, Frauds and Firebrands, Thinkers of the New Left Roger Scruton (2015, reprint) I was always under the impression that the input from the academics and intellectuals is the one that is propelling the world forward in the right direction; averts hegemony by a certain group and tries to create a sort of utopia where fairness and justice is handed to all. With a single stroke of his pen, the author puts all these thoughts to the bin. He paints them all as troublemakers, who promised utopia but what they offer instead is dystopia, mayhem and destruction. For a start, he defines the leftist as the group of people traditionally seated to the left to King Louis XVI, the despotic monarch whose reign ended with the 1789 French Revolution. The members of the Estate and Generals usually were placed to the left while the nobelties occupied the right. Of course, it is all perspective which is right or left depending on whether you are an audience in apalace or looking from the monarch...

2016: Obama's America (Documentary; 2012) Director: Dinesh D'Souza, John Sullivan What is the hallmark of a mature society? Is it the ability to agree in unison to everything that is charted out by the forefathers? Is it the ability to assess, reassess, argue and substantiate all assertions with facts and figures? And that too without resorting to our primal elements of anger and violence. The member of society must be free enough to express his opinions without fear of persecution by decerebrate members of the community who are in the realm of power not by intelligence or erudite stature but by accident of birth. The society must be allowed to think. Creativity cannot be curbed or forced upon. Many of Man's most significant achievements come about by our ability to think outside the box, outside the conforms of the norm. Remember Star Trek. Just 50 over years after it fascinated our imagination, all the devices that were seen in The Enterprise are a reality, includin...