RIFLE RANGE BOY

Our world has become one which is ruled by mobs. We thought we had cancelled mob behaviours when we started engaging in intellectual discourses and discarded our weapo ns for civilised dialogues. We were made to believe so. The muffled undertones of passive- aggressiveness were always there in the background. It never really disappeared. In those days, the dominant ruling forces called it resistance, reformation or revolution. We learnt that numbers matter and recruiting the masses worked best to overthrow a seemingly impregnable and cruel regime. Most new religions came about through these ways - show the unthinking inebriated public the virtues and purpose of existence, riled their emotions to unite them against a particular cause, sometimes a self-serving one. The major Abrahamic religions began thus, creating a sense of fear, perpetually assuming that they would be besieged. Fast forward to the present time. We thought that in modern times, with the ease of information at our ...

The Hater (Hejter, Polish; 2020) It is not something that we do not already know. The cyberspace has become where everything is made possible; a false narrative can be oft-repeated the gospel truth. Truth can be bent to suit the flavour of the day. A non-issue can be made the next game-changer. Deepfakes can change the path of one's career or fate. Destiny is determined by the trolls and influencers. There is a concerted effort by news spreaders to mould one's thought process in sync to the agenda of their paymasters.  The modern world, it seems, is divided into the right conservatives who yearn for the good old times when the world was a place of milk and honey, where politicians were honest, policemen cared for the public (not look at them as perps) and outdoors were healthy. At the red corner is the leftist who basically plays devil's advocate aim for anarchy and pushes the boundary to the point of entropy.  The leftists, outwardly seem to have the dow...

The Erotic Engine:  How Pornography Has Powered Mass Communication from Gutenberg to Google (2011) Author: Patchen Barss Pornography has always been frowned upon as the destroyer of civilised societies. It has been put in the same decadent basket of other vices of man including cheating and gambling. On the contrary, the idea of voyeurism goes back as far as our cavemen ancestors. They had been so fascinated with human anatomy, like excited schoolboys and toilet graffiti, that they decided to draw what they saw during the day on the wall of their dwellings. The early human civilisations were quite liberal with sexuality and nudity. Ancient sculptures of couples in various stages of undress and in acts of copulation are general knowledge. The Indian book of Kamasutra is the living proof of this. Even as late as the European Renaissance, the human body was immortalised in paintings. Science and technology propelled the human race forward to meet various challenges. It helps ...