RIFLE RANGE BOY

All Quiet on the Western Front (German, 2022) Director: Edward Berger Ancient Chinese philosophers, Lao Tze in particular, used to say, 'In War, everybody loses'. But on the other hand, Sun Tzu, the author of Art of War, the military treatise of the 5th century BCE, noted that amid chaos, there is also 'opportunity'. In 1913, Henri La Fontaine obtained the Nobel Peace Prize for his outstanding work in peaceful internationalism. He asserted that the world, in the 20th century, had done away with wars and destruction. Believe it or not, the following year, Europe went into an essentially civil war which snowballed into a World War when the European colonisers sent their subjects to die in the greatest battle to end all wars. Clive's plunder from  Battle of Plassey (Palashi) Auctioned at £3m World War 1 never put an end to anything. Its effects are still felt today. In essence, Ukrainian War can be said to be an effort to end loose ends that were never resolved. As we ...

Squid Games (오징어 게임, Korean; 2021) Screenplay & Direction: Hwang Dong-hyuk Childhood games prepare us for what is in store for us ahead in our lives. Failures are inevitable, and winners take it all. It is not and was never a level playing field, and some get favours merely by starting with an added advantage. Life is no bed of roses; deal with it. The players may claim fair play, but deep inside, we can sense insider collusion. We are taught about the need to be fair to others. They tell us about 'one good turn deserving another' and our past karma haunting us until the end of time; hence, the need to do good and be fair. But, just look around us. Nature does not give a fair crack of the whip to all. The floods terrorise the poor who can ill afford the expensive real estate on higher grounds. The pandemic intimidates the economically challenged layer of society where living space is a challenge. We always fight for equality for all. We want the system to be fair for all. W...

Insignia of Apollo 11. It all started as squabbles between brothers. Much like Kane and Abel, both brothers thought their respective brand of economic reforms was the way forward. One believed in freedom and liberty whilst the other insists that discipline and order bring the best in people. The world soon became divided into two blocks - the vibrant capitalists and the red communists.  Who said competition is terrible? Did it not surge to dominate over the other? Both tried to showcase their achievements; USA and USSR became the leaders of their respective sects. Industrialisation was viewed upon as the clear proof of success, and soon, the craze of space exploration became the next in-thing. At one time, it appeared like the Russians were winning with hands down. They had managed to send Laika, the space dog to outer space in 1957. Soon they managed to send Yuri Gagarin (1961) and Valentina Tereshkova (1963, a female cosmonaut) to orbit Earth. View of Earth aboard Apo...

Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (Documentary; 1980) Creator, Presenter: Carl Sagan It all probably started over 13 billion years ago. A mammoth explosion which sent energy expanding across the universe gave light and mass. This expansion of space after the blast, by all accounts, is likely to be still ongoing as seen by the Doppler effect visible in the telescopic visualisation of distant stars. In cosmic terms, time probably started at that juncture. Then there was nothing for a very long time. Slowly with the cooling of the system, galaxies and stars came around. The earlier stars had short shelf lives. Their burning out of hydrogen fuels gave rise to other heavier atoms and supernovas that became the seed of our existence. With carbon and oxygen came the blueprint of existence, water. By trial, chance and selection, the seed of life began. Slowly unicellular, then multicellular and complex creatures formed. DNA was found by Nature for continuity of life. With time a primitive reptili...

Se7en (1995) We are always told to avoid the seven deadly sins that damage humankind. Invariably, because of our inert weakness, we are lured into it. The motivation to stay clear of these temptations is the promise of eternal bliss in the afterlife. We get the chance to pass go, avoid purgatory, get the jail-free card and head straight to heaven. After all, our time on Earth is a fragment of our existence of our consciousness, which is forever. This film describes the tale of 2 mismatched cops who are called in to investigate a series of unrelated murders which later turns to be one done by a religious lunatic serial killer. All his crimes were based on the theme of the seven deadly sins; starting with a brutal murder of a morbidly obese individual and the word 'gluttony' scrawled on the wall,  followed by the killing of an attorney and the word 'greed'. Slowly, the background the cops are slowly unveiled as more bodies pile up, and they lose their patience. ...

One of the most significant drawbacks in the manning of a human-crewed mission to Mars is the mental strength (or rather lack of) of astronauts in being able to stay sane over extremely protracted times in solitary confinements. After all, can one stay for 4 years in the company of the same boring company? They say that Man is a social animal and he needs friends and company to live. Deprive him of the ability to interact with his fellow kind and be sure that he would hit the loony bin. They fight, they laugh, they cry together, they loathe each other, but they need each other to survive! So say the scientists. A man needs to compete with each other or emulate each other to come out with a newer protocol for the next generation to improve so that they can continue surviving as the most dominant species on the planet. Perhaps,  they would remain as the only species as they annihilate other 'less' intelligent ones. Once they have done that, they would step into an intra-specia...

Thanks RS for contribution. http://www.theatlantic.com/static/infocus/wwi/introduction/ One hundred years ago, in the summer of 1914, a series of events set off an unprecedented global conflict that ultimately claimed the lives of more than 16 million people, dramatically redrew the maps of Europe, and set the stage for the 20th Century. Alan Taylor APRIL 27, 2014 A century ago, an assassin, a Serbian nationalist, killed the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary  as he visited Sarajevo. This act was the catalyst for a massive conflict that lasted four years.  More than 65 million soldiers were mobilized by more than 30 nations, with battles taking place around the world. Industrialization brought modern weapons, machinery, and tactics to warfare, vastly increasing the killing power of armies. Battlefield conditions were horrific, typified by the chaotic, cratered hellscape of the Western Front, where soldiers in muddy trenches faced bullets, bom...