RIFLE RANGE BOY

Joseph (Malayalam, 2018) Director: M Padmakumar This movie gives another twist to how man's greed hijacks a noble intention like organ donation. Good virtue has been held in high esteem and is said to be the raison d'être of man’s existence. The sound of one man’s death knell signalling another's beginning of life sounds cruel, but that is how life is. Death and tragedy in the goat family are signs of survival and satiety in the tiger family. As creative as a man can be, he knows about demand and supply, market forces and the electrifying power of the currency. Money, a lubricant in most transactions, eases this. The desperate seeker calls these middlemen God-sent. The mourners find solace in knowing they had done one good deed before the last call. The observers call it unscrupulous when they see the donors donating before their time is up and the deserving recipients are bypassed for the highest bidder.  Man has converted everything into businesses, invented creative sche...

Love, Death & Robot  ❤️☠️🤖   (Adult Scifi Animation; 2019) Season 1-2 (2019-2021) It used to be that animation (called cartoons back in the days) were for children. It was an outlet for mindless personification of cute animals doing impossible stunts in gravity-defying postures. It was quite acceptable if a bomb explodes right in front of the character's face. It would just get off with a bandaid on its forehead. Or it could be thrown off into a mile-long deep ravine just to would crawl back up to fight in another snippet. That was entertainment back then. Those days are over. Now animation productions are of big budgets and delve into difficult life questions. No, adult content is left to manga series for the Japanese to deal with their men's fixations in wanting their sexual partners or dolls to have round big blue eyes like their favourite manga heroines. We are talking philosophy, the future of mankind and armageddon. Since much of the presentation is animated, t...

©  Asleep at the Wheel, New Yorker cover by Frank Viva We think that we do not have self-driving cars because the technology is not perfect. Furthermore, we heard of Uber experimental driver-less car crashing. Hence, the whole exercise had been put into cold storage. Jack Ma, in one of his interviews, was quoted as saying that we should wait for a perfect system before introducing it for human consumption. He suggests that we should present it anyway and make changes as we go on, as we encounter obstacles and bumps. I think that is a businessman talking. Capital ventures usually sell an idea, get everybody excited, convince them that it is the best thing since Adam, create an illusion of demand, make loads of money starting the venture, selling the business, going for a kill and split the scene to begin another venture somewhere else. The idealist would, however, ponder and yonder till the cows come home. Nothing new would see living daylight. Every endeavour wou...

Allah, Liberty and Love (2011) Author: Irshad Manji Thanks to the religious authorities of Malaysia, this book received free publicity after the seizure of its Malay translation. This author was almost unknown when the English version was out in the Malaysian bookstores. The moment the Malay version hit the shelf, all hell broke loose. That, in turn, drew many a curious mind to delve into her work. Manji is an unabashed Muslim lesbian who drew many a flak from professors of the religion. She is quite comfortable with her sexual orientation and has no qualms in practising her belief as she sees fit. The purists, however, are up in arms, literally with her as they believe that unconventional sexual practices are condemned to the highest order in the scriptures. As the sole purpose of conjugal relations is procreation, to them, same sex relationships are a no-no. Period. Based on this point alone, all her intelligent arguments are rejected wholesale. Manji is one the preachers ...

You contract something that smells like a sexually acquired communicable disease. You get it treated by your trustworthy friendly doctor, and you get back into the hype of things. As a responsible modern meterosexual individual, what is expected of you? Your moral conscious would bug you to rummage through your old faithful little black book to sieve through the contact your ex-es to inform them of your predicament and advise them to sort out the issue. Perhaps they had caught a bug or two during the good old days, they way we were! Sometimes, your duty does not end there, but you may be needed to arrange an appointment with your doctor and even accompany her to such a visit. Imagine the awkward scenario where you accompany your ex into the doctor's consultation room, and you feel like a fly on the wall whilst the doctor rattles off enquiring about your ex's recent extra-curricular activities, and he is not talking about her training for next half marathon! Sometimes, yo...

Back in early 90s, whilst I was still a green horned newbie at the art of healing, I was approached by a lady who despite her outwardly ultra conservative appearance of being dressed in a hijab, looked straight in the eye and asked whether there was any way that her 3-month fetus could be screened for Down Syndrome. From her dressing, it did not require a rocket scientist to guess her views on prenatal screening and termination of pregnancy. After a protracted discussion, I discovered that her previous child was a Downs and needed multiple surgeries for heart septal defects and Hirschsprung's disease even before he was one. Seeing the puny one cut open and pricked repeatedly was just simply too much for her to stomach. And the monthly follow up the Capital City just drained here physically and financially. Even before she could recover from the trauma of having a special child, in rolls in another pregnancy (through an act of Man and The Divine Powers) in came the ensui...

Le Genou De Claire (Claire's Knee, French; 1970 ) Continuing into the journey French culture, I ventured into Éric Rohmer's fifth movie in the series of the Six Moral Tales. I am still wondering how it was voted as the year's best movie for the year. Maybe I am ignorant or overlooked something, pray tell. It tell of a 30 something old diplomat (Jerome) who is spending time in the beautiful French countryside, trying to sell off his bungalow before he settles down to a fellow diplomat who is away on tour of duty. By chance he bumps into his old friend, Aurora. Through Aurora, he catches the acquaintances of Madame Walter, a widow and a divorcee who is about to marry for the third time as well as her daughter, Laura and her step daughter, Claire (who appears later). Even though, Laura is just a teenager, Jerome seems to be unable to resist his attraction for her because of her complex character. Laura just puts a damper on his feelings after initially teasing him. Then,...