RIFLE RANGE BOY

The Conformist (Il conformista, Italian; 1970) Director: Bernardo Bertolucci People are like sheep. They flock around each other, following their shepherd, not knowing that their shepherd has only one thing on their mind. That is, to protect the herd from the wolf, to fatten them and nicely line them up to the slaughter. The one thing that differentiates people from animals, their minds are so quickly malleable. With a bit of persuasion, they will bark, sing, bleat, dance or croak to the tune of their masters. Plato’s Cave Allegory, described in this movie, succinctly tells how we behave. In Plato’s original example, he told of prisoners who had never seen the outside world, tied by their hands to face a wall of the inside of a cave. From the silhouette that appears on the wall of human activity, of people playing and children eating ice cream, they imagine how the world is without ever setting foot outside their prisons. It is an imagined outside world that he imagines may be far from...

The Conformist (Italian, 1970) Director: Bernardo Bertolucci With rhetoric like "you're either with us or against us!", there is a pressure for most of us to conform. The daily bombardment of an overdose of information in the social media puts its followers in a quandary. The urgency to submit to the flavour of the moment and to be on the right side of history is quite confusing.    No man is an island. Living in a society, we are all interdependent. When one's own survival is dependent on goodwill and patronage of the others,  he would not want to offend the others' sensitivity; he would just conform or at least appear to.  In the current world climate and the country's political scenario, the need to follow the majority is very real. Merely following the tide is, of course, less tiring. Fighting back and arguing your stand may sometimes be an act of futility. Arguing with stupid and zombies is never easy. It takes a certain kind of resilien...

That is the danger of self-teaching oneself of philosophy. One tends to garble everything up and develop his own 'brand' of philosophy. It cannot be such a wrong thing, on the contrary, since no two philosophers can completely agree with each other. Whatsmore, even students and masters have parted ways upon minor disagreements. Think Plato and Aristotle, Freud and Jung, you know what I am talking about. Even with time, a particular interpretation can morph, perhaps as an afterthought or in keeping with the flavour of the era. The scope of the field of philosophy itself has evolved over time. If before it used to encompass everything under the sun and beyond, mathematics, grammar and sciences included, it is now agreed that it covers knowledge, life and existence. Since the journey of life does not come with a preset map, I guess that it could be sailed anyway we like as long as we live and let live. Let everybody navigate his own route.  I always thought Plato ...

After attaining such a stature in life, there is nothing that excites him anymore. He is now looking for that elusive eudaemonia. He is following the footsteps of Plato to reach the state of eternal bliss, but the path to Nirvana seem to be paved with uneven pebbles. After visiting Greece, he is fascinated with the Greeks and their forward thinking philosophers, particularly Plato. He has started thinking more, asking the meaning of it all, of life and the baggage that comes with it. He is trying to self-explore himself, with the hope that he can identify his strong and weak points. He yearns to engage in Socratic discussions with his ever cynical colleague who think that he is blasphemous by questioning the orders of the Universe. They tell him that he is too feeble to ask, let alone to understand, the purpose of it all. He heard that Plato has advised to one seeking fulfilment to reach out to find a lover who can change him and ease him in goal. Unfortunately, that is not a vi...