RIFLE RANGE BOY

Malu apa bossku? Apparently, all the things I may have learnt from childhood may be wrong after all. Sometimes, I wonder whether I thought the wrong thing or may have been hoodwinked to believe obviously wrong things. Perhaps values changed while we were napping. I always assumed that when one loses any of his properties via public auction, he is said to have lost not only his wealth but also his dignity. The mark of a true man is his ability to acquire wealth and provide for his dependents; his inability to retain his finances is a colossal failure. At a time when pride was everything, abscondment and suicide were standard outlets. My legal eagle friends remain nonchalant about their clients or opponents declaring themselves bankrupt or their properties auctioned off. To them, that is a cost of doing business. Overlooking the inconveniences of bankruptcy, it remains a legitimate 'get out of jail' sort of card. Nothing Earth-shattering, they say, and definitely no shame. ...

Maverick School, Malaysia. I am amused by how some establishments have probably wrong choices of names. In my mind, their names have negative connotations. Or it was intended to be so. As they say in business, any publicity is good publicity. Anything that would stir the readers' curiosity or turns any head is good for business. Recently I came across two such instances. A private school called' Maverick' was set up in the Klang Valley. I always thought a maverick always has something up his sleeves. He has a scheme, a sleight of hand, that would benefit him. I perceive a maverick as someone like Artemus Gordon of 'The Wild Wild West' (1965), a secret service spy with tricks up his sleeves to protect the US President. Apparently, over the years, the term maverick had evolved from giving a negative connotation to something positive. People are no longer expected to be conforming and obedient but to think outside the box to be innovative. Correspondingly, students sho...

Gehraiyaan (Depths, Hindi; 2022) Director: Shakun Batra The democratisation of movie-making has  led to this - an Indian fairy tale movie  made in the vein of a soft porn Western movie  just to lure in India's Anglophile liberal English  movie-going viewers. The only thing remotely  linked to Indianness is the spoken language;  otherwise, it is just like any garbage c hurned out of the factories in Hollywood,   sex, lies, murder, and obnoxious flaunting of wealth.  The following are the few lessons I leant from this  movie: It is perfectly alright to have sex with your best friend's boyfriend without having a second thought or an iota of guilt; It appears to me that wealth is the justification for everything. After all, living life is for the experience. Doing the morally right thing does not fall anywhere near the equation; Two-timing is perfectly within your rights; Consuming alcohol is your birthright; indulge even when you are pregnant; D...

It was a dark, humid night, and as I was traversing a back alley making it to my car, I stumbled upon a meowing or rather a weak yowling. It turned out to be that a tiny kitten, all drench in muck, was straddling to wherever it was heading to. My heart felt for that tiny creature. No, I did not take the pitiful animal home to nurse it back to health and send it out to the wilderness with a glint in my eye. It is too much responsibility. What went through my mind was what someone told me (or maybe overheard) long ago; that our existence is just a freak accident of Nature. We, the products, have to fight it out to survive to preserve the entity called Consciousness. The consciousness that probably also happened via the accident of Nature. Life as we knew it was just going on without care as simple organisms with hermaphroditical abilities. We dragged on our existence with self-propagation without care. As life became more complexed, there was a need for variation. Nature dictated t...

Outliers, The Story of Success Author: Malcolm Gladwell (2008) Life had never been easy. Now it has been made more complicated. Kids all around the world had been fed with the idea that if you put in the hours and do as you are told, your future would be bliss. Nah, don’t buy that! The secret to success still remains an enigma. Many factors affect the success of an individual. The author goes through the lives of a few successful people and a few who had the potential but did not quite make it. One has to be born at the correct time. Sometimes the window of opportunity only comes once. One has to be of the proper state of mind and of the right age to grasp it. At the spur of the time when it happens, he must be willing to put in the long hours. That indulgence itself, an awful lot of hours, would determine your future success. The examples of Beatles and Bill Gates are mentioned here. Beatles' acid test was in Hamburg in 1962 when they took the challenge of playing long hou...