RIFLE RANGE BOY

During the era of the Soviet Union and Mao China, the farmers had great pride in toiling the land to showcase their produce to the prosperity of the Motherland. The steel workers in Stalin gleamed from ear to ear when the steel yield reach yet another annual record. The musician bleeds his fingers to give another mesmerising performance in the name of music. To him, music did not die with Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens with the plane crash, but it lives on. The Bharatnatyam dancer grimaces as she executes another gravity defying posture to honour the spirit of the blissful union of Nataraja. Detractors vilify the dance as a glorification of the decadent lifestyles of the courtesans, but she would like to imagine it as the immersion of Divine powers of Siva and Shakti. Performers of the visual art do not mind shedding their tunic and ignoring the first sensation that man felt as they were outcast from the Garden of Eden, i.e. shame, all for the glory and developme...

Job well done smoking 'em out of their foxholes?  Wow, I just realised that my friends are getting just as twisted as me. I guess that is why they say that friends with the same mental illness flock together. When a naturalised Sikh Canadian gets elevated to the rank of Minister of Defence, normally the whole world would sing praises of equality, of globalisation and acceptance of multiculturalism. That the world is everyone's oyster and all one has to do is show allegiance to a flag, bravery and the zest to fight for the Truth against the tyranny of Evil forces. There are two forces in this world, the Good and Evil. The Evil one is hellbent on crushing something good that the rest of the world (i.e. Good) is trying to propagate. But, no! My friend looks at it as a betrayal to Sikh community. The Sikhs have always had a special place in the heart of the people of the world. Before the Partition, Sikhs were the minority in the state of Punjab, overpowered in numbers b...

6.5.2010 My brush with the Other side*…Mariska Hargitay™** Over the weekend I was roped in (probably by divine intervention) to be an interpreter to a pious man who was addressing a predominantly non-Tamil speaking congregation at a home cleansing (housewarming) ceremony. I arrived there with a lot of fanfare. As it was pouring cats and dogs en route to function, my family and I arrived fashionably late. Another faux pas moment happened here. I honked as I parked at the porch to get help to bring in the food and cutlery from the car, not knowing that the prayer was already in session! (Probably to the annoyance of the attendees, I suppose). Anyway, only after parking the car and entering the house did I realise the foot in the mouth moment. Upon entry to the abode, I was whisked in like some kind of VIP to sit beside the holy man to help him to address the audience. And the sacrificial fire started burning… The joist of the teaching of the day was (as interpreted by my unenlig...