A case quite bizarre

Indrani Mukerjea: Buried Truth (2024)
Docu-series, 4 episodes.

From the land of the Veda and the Arthashashtra comes an intriguing case of a missing person, which has remained unresolved to date. In the land that believes that every nasty action has a compelling reaction with the belief that no evil deed will not go unpunished in this birth or next, perhaps punishment could only be meted out in the next life.

In 2008, The Wall Street Journal hailed Indrani Mukerjea as one of the 50 ladies to watch, and India conferred her with the award 'Uttar Ratna' for her outstanding work in the art, media, and broadcasting sector. By 2015, she had her hands full fending off money laundering charges and fighting a murder charge.

Her past is blurry for a start. Born Pori Dora, her actual birthdate is queried. In her early teenage years in Guwahati, Assam, she accused her father of sexually molesting her. She went off to Shillong, Meghalaya, for studies, where she met her first husband, Siddharta Das, with whom she had two kids, Sheena and Mikhail. She soon left her kids with her parents to move to Kolkata in 1990. In Kolkata, she married her second husband, Sanjeev Khanna, to have her third child, Vidhie. Vidhie is the main narrator in the documentary. Somewhere along the way, there is even a mention that Sheena could be the product of Indrani's father's despicable act.

In 2001, Indrani moved to Mumbai, where she met Peter Mukerjea. Her recruitment company became a hit, and she dabbled in the media industry. Together with Peter, they climbed the corporate ladder to become prominent figures in Indian media. She was the CEO of a media mogul.

Her daughter, Sheena, appeared in the Mukerjea fold in 2006. Indrani introduced her to her new family as her sister! Sheena also got herself embroiled in the Mumbai corporate rat race. She apparently had a relationship with Peter's son from a previous marriage. Indrani's side was resistant to this relationship.

By 2009, Indrani was pretty much out of the media limelight as her corporate rule went south with accusations of appropriation and money laundering. She left India to live in the UK.

In 2012, Sheena disappeared without a trace. Everybody assumed Sheena had run away from her fiance and had probably gone incognito. Three years later, Indrani was arrested for the murder. Indrani's driver admitted to having helped her to kill and bury Sheena. The driver let her to the remains, but DNA evidence from the body was rejected for technical reasons. The case was twisted, and Indrani, Peter, and the driver got out on bail.

The docu-series is so twisted. It smells of sensationalism and trial by the media. Nobody shows sensitivity to the deceased or the family in the programme. I guess it does not matter as the accused is family (the mother killing her firstborn). The family gave the green light to tell their side of the story, having been in the media, knowing how well media can spin the truth, of which Indrani had been part and that the case is still ongoing; Indrani and the family should know better. Perhaps they are just garnering public sentiments before the case gets mentioned again.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Unsolved murder mystery

Auto Focus (2002)

Director: Paul Schrader

Hogan's Heroes used to be a regular feature on RTM's slot for late-night comedy. It did not leave much of an impression on our minds as it dwelled with something quite uninspiring, in our minds at least. It was about a wise-cracking American General and his staff who were imprisoned in a German POW camp during WW2. They tried to outwit their captors, spy upon them and sabotage their every move. It went on for six seasons. 

The main character, Robert Crane, or rather his death, appeared in one of the crime podcasts. Initially a family man and a church-going Catholic, he got the acquaintance of John Henry Carpenter. Carpenter was an electronic techie who introduced Crane to the then-nascent home videos in the 1965s or so.

As the film puts it, both developed a symbiotic relationship. Crane, through his good looks and contact with showbiz, got in contact with girls, and Carpenter would set the recording devices to record their sexual acts. Over the years, the sheer number of tapes in their collection hit the roof. 

Crane's offers dwindled after Hogan's Heroes. Money troubles crept in. His wife divorced him. He married his co-star, with whom he was already in a relationship. He moved around performing at dinner parties whilst feeding his sex addiction. Carpenter was his partner in crime, helping out in imprinting their trysts on tape.

Crane was found dead, bludgeoned to death and strangled with an electrical cord. Even though Carpenter was high on the suspect list, his crime was never proven. It is believed that they had a falling.

Man's (and women's) curiosity about the forbidden probably started from their stay at the Garden of Eden. Voyeurism must have ensued moments after their banishment from there when Adam became curious about Eve's appendages. As more offspring sprung, rules had to be laid, adding curiosity to the young minds. The subtle art of voyeurism found its place in society. What started as yellow literature in print and illustration has morphed to capture more minds through CCTVs, tapes and now hand-held devices. 

Apparently, there is no shame in viewing it on the sly. Due to its ease of access, everyone is watching it anyway. But God forbid if someone is caught consuming or assumes the role of performer, willingly or otherwise, the whole shebang of shaming and victimisation befalls upon them. It is now perfectly healthy to have a wedded couple in their birthday suits as part of their wedding photoshoot package. YOLO.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Only theories, nothing more.

MH 370: The Plane that Disappeared(2023, Netflix)
3-part Documentary

"Good night, Malaysia 370!" Those were the last words before Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah disappeared with his Boeing 777, 227 passengers from 14 nations and 12 crew members into thin air in the early hours of 8th March 2014 en route to Beijing.

Nine years later, the world is still clueless about how an aircraft as big as a building could disappear without evidence. In an era when we may be at the cusp of discovery of the Higgs boson (God) particle, and we can convict a politician with denatured DNA from semen deposited three days previously, we are still unable to make head or tail to a Boeing plane's whereabouts. All the satellites and tracking devices that monitor our every move simply failed to comprehend its fate after it went off the radar after 0130hrs. External communications and transponder signals simultaneously disappeared after entering the Vietnamese air space.

This documentary series has yet to shed any new information on the disappearance of MH370. We know now that all communications went kaput after reaching Vietnam before the Vietnamese ground control could get in touch. A telecommunication tower on Penang Island picked up signals from the co-pilot's mobile phone hours after the vessel went missing. The incompetent Malaysian Airforce towers picked an aberrant signal in the Straits of Malacca. Unfortunately, they could not make head or tail on the origin or meaning. They could not confirm whether it was a flying object at all. I remember reading from the local dailies that a junior officer who noticed the signal decided not to disturb his superiors from their beauty sleep, fearing retributions.

Then somebody suggested seeing a possible satellite image of an aeroplane in the South China Sea. Nothing was found by patrolling Navy ships. Imersat telecommunication satellite opined they may have had pinging cues from MH 370 somewhere along the Indian Ocean. The trouble was that they could pinpoint its exact location. For all they knew, it could extend from the Arabian Sea all the way to the turbulent South Seas. None of the observation towers in Indonesia, Singapore, Myanmar or India had reported the passing of an unaccounted Boeing 777. Apparently, the policeman of the world, the USA, and Boeing are also in the dark about its locale.

Its black box was never discovered. Neither was any debris found despite extensive combing of oceans and beaches. Almost 15 months after the mishap, large chunks of plane parts belonging to the ill-fated plane made their presence in Reunion Island and Mozambique. The fact that a shady maverick in the vein of Indiana Jones found it and not a single boatman sighted it at sea raised suspicion about whether the evidence was planted. I remember there were some mysterious deaths of officials around the time of these discoveries.

As it stands now, there are only wild conspiratory theories to explain the whole fiasco. Still, none of them manages to correlate all the shreds of evidence we have so far. Then there is a question of which of the findings is indeed credible. Occam's razor principle suggests that when one encounters a problematic crossroad, the more plausible explanation is, the simpler one. As they say, "when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras." The problem is that all clues are equally compelling and are backed with scientific or pseudo-scientific convincing explanations.

 

Science and logic go out of the window in the modern world. Facts are sometimes stranger than fiction. The 6-tonne elephant in the room has yet to speak. Despite many of the victims being Chinese, China decided to play silent.

MH370 disappeared in Vietnam, a China vassal state. Search parties have searched a vast area, minus territories, under the umbrage of the CCP. There were talks of suspicious cargo on the plane. It was once mentioned to be mangosteens, even though it was off-season. Then there was talk of people travelling with fake Pakistani passports. At that time, the murmur was that the cargo was drones from Afghanistan meant to be delivered to the Urghurs. Another mention was some high-fi computer technology in the aviation industry. The passenger lists also included high-profile personalities of interest to the USA attending a computer conference in Beijing.

Is it possible that the whole thing is a nicely executed perfect crime by the CCP? Once MH 370 entered Vietnam airspace, it took control of the entire aeroplane, disarmed its connectivity to the outside world, brought it down to a safe space in its territory, dismantled whatever it needed to and cleaned up all pieces of evidence. With increasing curiosity, it simply fed the world with elements of evidence to confuse everyone.

That is what we are left with, only conspiracy theories. In a world of information overload, no one is sure of anything. With MH17 being shot down by Russia-sponsored Ukranian terrorists so soon after the MH370 fiasco, there is a question of whether there is a Russian hand in this mess.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

When you see the light, you may wish you did not!

Agatha Christie's Poirot (S13E05) Curtain: Poirot's Last Case
(Final Episode, 2013)

This must easily be the saddest of all of Hercule Poirot's episodes. Throughout this episode, the tone set is sombre, and a tinge of melancholy hung around every scene. Times have changed. Poirot is quite ill, arthritic and is wheelchair-bound. He is physically challenged, but his mind is not. His sidekick, Captain Arthur Hastings, is aged, recently widowed and has an adult daughter. 

Hastings is invited to the Styles, the place they had solved their first case together. Poirot needs Hastings to be his ears, eyes and legs to complement his razor-sharp 'grey cell' to 'prevent' an imminent murder. The identity of the murderer is only known to Poirot but is kept away from a frustrated Hastings.

David Suchet

Many deaths still happen during their stay, and together the identity is known only much later, after Poirot's demise! Yes, this is the last case of Poirot, and the fictional detective dies in a way that can be construed as suicide. 

Agatha Christie wrote this story during World War II and kept it safe for thirty years and was published in 1975. It was the last novel published before her death. The book was both anticipated and dreaded by fans for it contained Poirot's death. Many of Agatha Christie's fans refused to read it. For old time sake, this 2013 TV adaption brought in the initial duo of David Suchet and Hugh Fraser, who appeared as Poirot and Hastings respectively, when the first episode of the series came out on ITV in 1989.

This episode is heart wrenching one. Here, we see Poirot using his grey cells to crack the case and trying to answer some philosophical questions about life, death, and doing the right thing as he approaches the tail-end of his career and his life, which we will see at the end. Poirot puts himself in a precarious position in the end, but with the hope of forgiveness from the Almighty. In the end, he realises that a wrong must be done for the greater good. 

Au revoir, Poirot. Goodbye, till we meet again!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

A brilliant sequel

Drishyam 2, The Resumption (Malayalam; 2021)

Movie buffs would generally agree that sequels of hit movies rarely do well in the box office, more so with Indian movies—the sequels of 'Koi Mil Gaye', 'Dhoom' and 'Munna Bhai'comes to mind. Somehow, the magic of the original film is lost. 

Six years previously, Drishyam, a murder thriller, was released. It was then something of a revolutionary in storytelling where all the loopholes which are usually overlooked were patched and viewed had a chance to appreciate expert movie making at its best. Poetic justice was served when a peeping Tom, son of a high ranking police officer, meets his end at the hands of an outraged mother. The crime is concealed, and the victim was never found, leaving the deceased's parents with no closure. Georgekutty, then, had buried the victim in the place least suspected by the police - under a newly constructed police station!

Meanwhile, Georgekutty is now an owner of a movie theatre and plans to make a movie, much against his wife's approval. Life is not all hunky-dory as his daughter suffers from PTSD and seizures whilst the villagers still gossip about the murder. The victim's parents are still in mourning, and the new Inspector-General takes renewed interests in the case.  A newly released criminal professes that he saw Georgekutty living the then building site of a police station. Unbeknownst to Georgekutty's family, a husband-wife neighbour close to Georgekutty's wife is actually undercover cops.

The rest of the story is about how Georgekutty is arrested for his crimes, but all the collected evidence indicates no wrongdoings on Georgekutty. Even the body excavated from station premises was forensically reported as belonging to someone else.

Someone sent me a presentation about leadership qualities that one can learn from Georgekutty's way of handling the whole imbroglio. He took charge; he kept an eye on the pulse of things while assuring his down lines. He never assumed or left things to chance. He never rested on his laurels. He thought out of the box, strategise and execute effectively. He kept secrets close to his chest - secrets that can easily crumble the gameplan if too many people have access to them. He had no qualms about engulfing new technologies to his advantage. The most vital tool that was useful to him was his networking skills. He had contacts at different levels, and he knew how to keep felt needed. He spent time to gain trust.

 Please listen to the said Youtube below: 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Still searching?

Unsolved Mysteries (Documentary, Season 15; 2020)

Netflix (12 episodes)

People always pacify the grieving party to be strong. The truth is out there, and it will eventually surface, they say. That truth will prevail, and the perpetrator will be caught sooner or later. To keep mourning quiet, to give closure, we tell them that justice will be meted eventually; that the long arm of the law will catch up. Nah, these are all stop-gap measures to coo a wailing baby. Some things remain unanswered forever.

The parties featured in this series will be a testimony to that. Many of the tragedies that happened to them occurred long ago, but nothing has come their way to put an end to the many questions that have plagued minds. The family members and friends involved in the few cases depicted in the 12 episodes would probably carry their sorrow to their graves, hoping that they would know everything when they reach the Otherside. Disappointed they would be if there nothing on the other realm- just void, no heaven or hell, just nothing!

The 'Unsolved Mysteries' documentary series is a long going show that tries to highlight cold cases and paranormal activities that has been around since 1987. This particular offering from Netflix was released in two batches of 6 episodes each in July and October 2020. 

Many unexplained things are found in the first episode 'Mystery on the Rooftop' where a writer is found missing from home and later found dead decomposed in a hotel conference room after jumping or pushed off a building. How he went up on to the roof and where he jumped from and why remains the unanswered questions. The funny thing is that his associate refused to divulge any information and was gone hush with the help of lawyers.

In '13 minutes', a likeable salon owner goes missing, only to be found almost 2 years later. The secret of her disappearance lies in the 13 minutes, where there were no activities on her mobile phone. Her husband, an abusive stepfather to her son is a suspect. Another serial killer admitted to murdering her but it turned out to be a false lead.

One of the most gruesome murders narrated here happened in Nantes, France. It involved a mother, her four children and two dogs of the Dupont de Ligonnès family. The father, Xavier, is the prime suspect and is said to have escaped the country and his whereabouts is unknown. We learn about the French aristocrats here and how some have failed over the years as the country became more socialistic in outlook. The whole episode is in French.

'No ride home' is a reminder that the Western world is no more civilised than the rest of the world. They are equally quick to react to people who look and dress differently from them. Alonzo Brooks, a black boy, fails to return home after a party in the deep white country of Kansas. Police and FBI fail to locate the boy, but his body appeared in plain sight when the family and friends conducted a search party. The whole imbroglio reeked of police cover-up and community concealment of a hate crime. Lynching never stopped; it just continued in other ways.

In 1969, there was an alleged UFO sighting and alien abduction in Berkshire County, Massachusetts. Diehard fans of 'X Files' would be quite familiar with this. Unfortunately, nothing is found online about this incidence. The episode is an account of the narrative of a few who viewed a bright light in the sky. Two of them experienced being beamed up into the skyship. Radio DJs who were working that night admit receiving calls from listeners. These were pushed aside as pranks, and there are no reports of it in the local newspapers as retrieved from archives.

In one twisted episode, 'Missing Witness', a daughter helped her philandering mother to kill her stepfather. When the case somehow ended up in the court, the witness, the daughter, goes missing. Everybody hunch is that the mother made her daughter disappear, but according to her mother, she had found a man and had moved to another state with no forwarding address. The stepfather and the daughter were never found. Hence, there is actually no case to try.

'Washington Inside Murder' tells the case of a powerful man amongst the inner circle of Capital Hill, John Wheeler III, whose body was found in a dumpster in Delaware. With the help of digital tracking of his mobile device and later with the use of CCTV footage around town after he allegedly lost his phone, investigators had a patchy outline of his activities before his death. Afflicted with bipolar disease, his behaviour appeared bizarre. He was involved in many high-level deals. There is a suspicion that he could have been at the wrong end of a deal gone wrong.

'Death in Oslo' has much resemblance to the Isdal Girl, about a girl found in the icy cold mountainous area of Isdalen Valley in Norway in 1970. One glaring similarity between the Isdal Girl and the girl in this episode who apparently shot herself in a suicide bid in an exclusive hotel in Oslo in 1995 is the cutting of labels off her garments. It is said to be the practice of undercover agents to cover their tract. There were no gun residues on her hand and DNA which was extracted years later did not reveal much. 

In 1965, Lester Eubanks, a sexual predator by today's standards, abducted and killed a 14-year-old girl. He confessed to the murder and was sentenced to die by electrocution. His sentence was commuted to life imprisonment after the State of Ohio stopped the death sentence. Eubanks was an apparently reformed prisoner and was recruited in a reform programme. He was tasked to do Christmas shopping with a few other inmates and is on the run since 1973.

Another exciting episode is on the Tsunami that devasted a remote eastern coastal area of Ishinomaki, Japan, in 2011. The tragedy killed over 20,000 people. Following the event, many people there, family members and even taxi drivers started seeing apparitions. Many had nightmares, others saw bizarre creatures in the distant and shadows in the water. To an outsider, the Japanese seem to appear too religious. Their spirituality actually runs deep. Much like Hinduism, the thin veil that separates life and death is pretty flimsy. Life and death is a continuum. People who have said their proper goodbyes before dying or had close relatives who have had a closure to their loss need spiritual guidance to put people at peace. Japanese also underwent the same turmoil during Hiroshima and Nagasaki mishaps.

'Lady in the Lake' tells about a Michigan church-going lady going missing in 2010. Her body was found two months later in Canada. Police classified it as suicide even though there were family members who had a bone to pick with the deceased. The final episode discusses missing children and possibly child abduction rings.

We can wait till the cows come home (and go back again to graze) for the Truth to surface. We can waste our lives cracking our head trying to prove our point. We can make it our life long ambition to right the wrong, or just move on.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. 

Sometimes the truth stays buried

Malaysian Murders and Mysteries 

(A Century of Shocking Cases that gripped  the Nation)

Authors: Martin Vengadesan and Andrew Sagayam; 2019

This country has its many murders mysteries that could be a basis of many novels or even movies. Sadly, they just even up as conversation pieces at parties or as we group up for our daily fixes of sweetened aerated tea (teh tarik) at the Mamak's.

As most journalists in Malaysia are expected to be not too inquisitive but to act as mere scribes, we are intrigued when crime-reporters with their treasure trove of inside information decide to write a book about murders and mysteries. These stories hogged the newspaper headlines not too long ago. As the dailies were the only portal of information those days, most of us had to make a composite picture of crimes as it is reported or as court cases proceeded at a snail's pace. Besides that, there were tall stories told by individuals who seem to know everything about everybody and every incident. In Malaysia, however, these coffeeshop talks would eventually be proved to be true.

This short 230-odd page book gives an excellent rundown of many of 42 famous murders that occurred in Malaysia since James Birch's notorious death in Pasir Salak in 1875. Birch's assassination is viewed as the first evidence of resistance to foreign rule in the Malay Peninsula. In contrast, others look at it as frustration to loss of income as the British impose tighter controls on slavery. It ends with the 2019 mysterious deaths of the indigenous people of Northern Peninsular Malaysia. It could be classified as murder as the powers that be failed to preserve their traditional way of living and forgetting to include them in the wave of development.

Movie buffs would remember Batte Davis' 1942 film 'The Letter', which is based on a possible steamy crime of passion that happened on the grounds of Victoria Institution. The Batang Kali massacre where British troops mercilessly killed 24 unarmed villagers in the pretext of eradicating communist terrorist. As it was an event that occurred too long ago in history, the UK Courts refused to hold a public inquiry. Also happening during the Malayan Emergency Era were the assassination of Sir Henry Gurney and the trial of Lee Meng, a communist guerrilla. 

The mysterious disappearance of Jim Thompson is discussed. Many conspiracy theories surround his vanishing. In the heady decade of the 1970s, the IGP was assassinated, but to date, the case remains unsolved. That was also the time when Botak Chin @ Robin Hood of Sentul captured the headlines. 

In Malaysia's history, five aviation mishaps caught our attention - Tun Fuad Stephen's plane crash in Sabah; Tanjung Kupang crash where a Malaysian (not Japanese Red Army) was the hijacker; Ghazali Shafie's miraculous escape from a crashed Cessna plane in Janda Baik; MH370 disaster and MH17 slaying.

Forty over years after the slaying of a Miss Malaysia runner-up, Ms. Jean Perera Sinappa, her case remains unsolved. Politicians hit the daily headlines a couple of times in recent times for wrong reasons (as they often do). A Cabinet minister, Mokhtar Hashim, was found guilty of killing an assemblyman. Mazlan Idris, a UMNO politician, lost his life to the cruel antics of the nefarious witch Mona Fendy and her henchmen.

Before 1MDB hit our shores, the news of siphoning of money off the national coffers happened once before. Jalil Ibrahim was assigned to investigate the irregularities in the Hong Kong branch of Bumiputra Malaysia Finance (BMF). He paid dearly for the prodding. The real mastermind behind his killing was never identified.

In the late '80s, rumours were flying around that small communal violence in the Chow Kit area of Kuala Lumpur was hushed up. Little by little tiny details emerged; that an amok serviceman was out on a shooting spree avenging his dead brother; that his brother was clubbed to death by a royalty and how easily he was gunned down. It seems that it is not valid. It was a case of temporary insanity.

tête-à-tête with the author

Every now and then, particular news would grab the nation. In the 90s, a slew of cases of child abuse came to fore. The sad fact of Baby Balasundram, born to prostitute mother and drug addict father, gripped everyone. Baby Bala died without gaining consciousness but did spur the legislation of the Child Protection Act.

Besides that, the book also covers the activities of Mamak Gang, Bentong Kali, Al Ma'unah, conman extraordinaire, Elie Youseff Najem, and many more.

Many of the murders and mysteries remain unresolved. One wonders whether these cases were indeed thoroughly investigated, had succumbed to pressures from above, lost in the bureaucracy of the time, unskilful prosecution, or an all-accommodating crooked justice system. 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

The devil in us?

Murder at Orient Express (2017)

What was supposed to be an Agatha Christie's whodunnit turned out to be highly philosophical one. Sure, we all, by now must be quite familiar with the quirky Inspector Hercule Poirot and his peculiar ways of solving crimes. Here Mon. Poirot carries with him a baggage of a melancholic past and tries to make sense of the actions of mankind; his penchant for criminal activities, his failure to follow the path acceptable as the correct one should be.

A single action has many repercussions. A single turn of event that goes against our desires strains our relationships, changes our perspective of the future, increases anxiety, induces phobia, shatters confidence, brings psychosomatic maladies, destroys families literally and metaphorically as well as destroys the whole community in more ways than we realise.

All after all the generations of our existence, we still succumb to our primal desires to be blinded by anger and emotions. At the crucial time of reckoning, our hearts (and other organs) dictate our next moves. The decisive and critical mind is kept shut from the equation. Bypassing rational thinking, we are left to deal with the after-effects of our mindless actions. Pretty soon, we would realise that the hole that we have dug soon metamorphose into a rapid quicksand which engulfs us.

Is forgiveness an option to start a clean slate? Unfortunately, it is not so simple. We never learn from our mistakes. We only turn wiser, not to repeat our earlier that got us caught in the first place. We jostle, we snake, we burrow, and we squirm to deny all wrongdoings. We blame the devil in us that control our sense and hope to get a get-out-from-jail card.

From the greatest mystery writer!

And Then There Were None (1945)

After watching S. Balachander's Nadavu Iravil, the 1965 Tamil movie based on Agatha Christie's story (And Then There Were None, Ten Little Niggers, Ten Little Indians), I decided to go for the Real McCoy.

For a movie made in older times, it was quite well paced. Even though they were many characters, all ten of them, all appeared different - all with different traits and idiosyncrasies. They could hold the suspense despite the dearth of colour, gore and loud, frightening musical score.

The story starts with eight visitors reaching a secluded island bungalow for the weekend in the middle of nowhere at the invitation of a certain Mr and Mrs U N Owen. The peculiar thing is that the hosts do not show up. Two temporary servants serve them. These ten people are left with the company of each other and communication to the mainland was cut off. All ten visitors, at one time of their lives, were privy or responsible for somebody's death. A judge had sentenced an innocent man to death. A doctor had operated a patient under the influence of alcohol to cause his demise. A lady had tormented her sibling to hang herself and so on.

Just like in the lyrics of the satirical poem, Ten Little Indians, the guests die in the same circumstances, one by one. The cat and mouse game of guessing who the murderer goes on. No, the butler is not the killer!

An exciting watch with witty dialogues as well.

More questions, not answers!

Mulholland Drive (2001)
Story and Direction: David Lynch

I remember my school teacher telling the class a story about art and artists. A painter once smeared paint over his toddler's bare buttock. He then made him sit a white sheet of paper. What resulted was the silhouette of a perfectly shaped apple. He went on to exhibit his masterpiece which spurred rave reviews and stimulated great literary discourses. What he was trying to say was that behind a masterpiece, there is a story and that sometimes people are fooled by artists!

I watched this David Lynch's film with the same thought. This movie was initially intended to be a pilot for a TV series. Unfortunately, it was rejected by the TV company, but they decided to make out a feature film out of it. I think that is why there are many unrelated gaps and seemingly unrelated characters infused into the story. Or am I missing something? Still, these are very reasons this film attracts many interests, spurned multiple viewings and appreciated as a symbolism to our modern daily lives - so multilayered, an enigma, filled with mysteries and role reversals. The two disjointed parts of the movie are viewed as parallel stories, one in real life and the other in a dream but which is which, the first or the second? Maybe it is just the pilot was made with the subplots within which had to be trimmed away to cut into a 2-hour plus offering. Perhaps, it was intentionally left behind to give the flick a noir feel to it.

A happy goody two shoes Betty (Naomi) arrives in LA, hoping to hit it big in Hollywood. She comes to stay at her aunt's home, herself an established artist but is away on a trip. Just a hill away, a lady is attempted to be murdered by hoodlums but by a twist of fate, the car he is travelling in is hit by racing teenagers. The assailants are killed, but she escapes unscathed. She roams aimlessly amnesiac and lands in the same apartment that Betty stays.

That starts the cat-and-mouse routine which tries to establish the lady's identity while Betty attends her acting audition. It gets more intriguing when the woman, now calls herself Rita (after seeing Rita Hayworth's poster) has flashes of memory coming back. It becomes even murkier when a dead body turns up, and they land up in a Spanish speaking past midnight theatre where the performers perform brilliantly only to be found out to be lip-syncing! One has to watch it make his own impression. One will be left with more questions, not answers.   

The Lady Vanishes

http://m.historyextra.com/feature/weird-and-wonderful/mysterious-disappearance-agatha-christie?utm_source=Facebook+referral&utm_medium=Facebook.com&utm_campaign=Bitly

The mysterious disappearance of Agatha Christie

The Guinness Book of World Records lists her as the best-selling novelist of all time, and according to her estate she is outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. But what Agatha Christie is perhaps best remembered for is her mysterious disappearance in December 1926.
Submitted by: Emma Mason

At shortly after 9.30 p.m. on Friday 3 December 1926, Agatha Christie got up from her armchair and climbed the stairs of her Berkshire home. She kissed her sleeping daughter Rosalind, aged seven, goodnight and made her way back downstairs again. Then she climbed into her Morris Cowley and drove off into the night. She would not be seen again for eleven days.

Her disappearance would spark one of the largest manhunts ever mounted. Agatha Christie was already a famous writer and more than one thousand policemen were assigned to the case, along with hundreds of civilians. For the first time, aeroplanes were also involved in the search.

The Home Secretary, William Joynson-Hicks, urged the police to make faster progress in finding her. Two of Britain’s most famous crime writers, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, and Dorothy L. Sayers, author of the Lord Peter Wimsey series, were drawn into the search. Their specialist knowledge, it was hoped, would help find the missing writer.

It didn’t take long for the police to locate her car. It was found abandoned on a steep slope at Newlands Corner near Guildford. But there was no sign of Agatha Christie herself and nor was there any evidence that she’d been involved in an accident.

As the first day of investigations progressed into the second and third – and there was still no sign of her – speculation began to mount. The press had a field day, inventing ever more lurid theories as to what might have happened.

It was the perfect tabloid story, with all the elements of an Agatha Christie whodunnit. Close to the scene of the car accident was a natural spring known as the Silent Pool, where two young children were reputed to have died. Some journalists ventured to suggest that the novelist had deliberately drowned herself.

Yet her body was nowhere to be found and suicide seemed unlikely, for her professional life had never looked so optimistic. Her sixth novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, was selling well and she was already a household name.

Some said the incident was nothing more than a publicity stunt, a clever ruse to promote her new book. Others hinted at a far more sinister turn of events. There were rumours that she’d been murdered by her husband, Archie Christie, a former First World War pilot and serial philanderer. He was known to have a mistress.

Arthur Conan Doyle, a keen occultist, tried using paranormal powers to solve the mystery. He took one of Christie’s gloves to a celebrated medium in the hope that it would provide answers. It did not.

Dorothy Sayers visited the scene of the writer’s disappearance to search for possible clues. This proved no less futile.

By the second week of the search, the news had spread around the world. It even made the front page of the New York Times.

Not until 14 December, fully eleven days after she disappeared, was Agatha Christie finally located. She was found safe and well in a hotel in Harrogate, but in circumstances so strange that they raised more questions than they solved. Christie herself was unable to provide any clues to what had happened. She remembered nothing. It was left to the police to piece together what might have taken place.

They came to the conclusion that Agatha Christie had left home and travelled to London, crashing her car en route. She had then boarded a train to Harrogate. On arriving at the spa town, she checked into the Swan Hydro – now the Old Swan Hotel – with almost no luggage. Bizarrely, she used the assumed name of Theresa Neele, her husband’s mistress.

Harrogate was the height of elegance in the 1920s and filled with fashionable young things. Agatha Christie did nothing to arouse suspicions as she joined in with the balls, dances and Palm Court entertainment. She was eventually recognized by one of the hotel’s banjo players, Bob Tappin, who alerted the police. They tipped off her husband, Colonel Christie, who came to collect Agatha immediately.

But his wife was in no hurry to leave. Indeed, she kept him waiting in the hotel lounge while she changed into her evening dress.

Agatha Christie never spoke about the missing eleven days of her life and over the years there has been much speculation about what really happened between 3 and 14 December 1926.

Her husband said that she’d suffered a total memory loss as a result of the car crash. But according to biographer Andrew Norman, the novelist may well have been in what’s known as a ‘fugue’ state or, more technically, a psychogenic trance. It’s a rare condition brought on by trauma or depression.

Norman says that her adoption of a new personality, Theresa Neele, and her failure to recognize herself in newspaper photographs were signs that she had fallen into psychogenic amnesia.

‘I believe she was suicidal,’ says Norman. ‘Her state of mind was very low and she writes about it later through the character of Celia in her autobiographical novel Unfinished Portrait.’

She soon made a full recovery and once again picked up her writer’s pen. But she was no longer prepared to tolerate her husband’s philandering: she divorced him in 1928 and later married the distinguished archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan.

We’ll probably never know for certain what happened in those lost eleven days. Agatha Christie left a mystery that even Hercule Poirot would have been unable to solve.