RIFLE RANGE BOY

Bramayugam (Era of Madness, Malayalam; 2024) Story, Direction: Rahul Sadasivan Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. That is the takeaway. No matter who holds the helm of control or the intoxicating concoction of power, life can never be a level playing field. Invariably, one tries to supersede another regarding idea, physical prowess, endowments, or wealth. For every robust individual, there is always another who is slightly better, faster, or stronger. And the eternal duel to be the supreme leader of the tribe goes on.   Set in 16th-century India, when the   Portuguese were out hunting for Indian slaves to spur their intercontinental slave trade, two men escaped from their captive ship and hid themselves in the jungle. One of them falls to the lure of the jungle temptress spirit, Yakshi, and is killed by her.  The other, Thevan, makes it to an abandoned mansion in the middle of the jungle. Hungry, he helps himself to some coconut, but he is admonished ...

Civilisation does not assure civility! So, what is it that makes someone great? Is he the one who has conquered all his animalistic desires and knows that his real needs are beyond the realm of physicality and materialism? This man seeks knowledge and is satisfied when the lock of the meaning of life and the hidden secret of the Universe is unlocked. Such a man is fiction. Nietsche described him as Ubermensch; Hindus referred to him as Rama or Krishna, as the revised 2.0 version of a complex man. Another version of understanding how life works is to look at Hinduism's representation of the Universe - Trimurthi, the Trinity - Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva and their consorts. Brahma, the creator, has to work in tandem with his consort, Saraswathi. Saraswathi is the Goddess of education and creativity. The take-home message is that one must have enough knowledge and creativity to create anything. Once the creation is done, life does not just go on unabashed. It has to be preserved and preserv...

Born to Fly (Chinese, 2023) Written, Directed: Lin Xiaoshi The ending says it all. Anyone who invades Chinese airspace will be resolutely shut down. Some will label it as China's reply to Hollywood's 'Top Gun' and 'Maverick' while others would brush this movie as another of the CCP's propaganda projects. Thanks to the USA's brilliant plan to outsource, China has leapt by leaps and bounds. Trying to save on their budget, it appeared then that getting China to handle  military networks was a bright idea. In 21st-century China, she can send a rocket to the dark side of the Moon and match the US fighter and stealth planes. Hence, the silver screen is the best avenue to showcase their prowess in the sky. Hopefully, the offspring of the one-child policy families would be impressed to lose their sons to become fighter and test pilots. Surprisingly, after an initial screening, which drew record box office collection, CCP decided to withdraw the permit for its sc...

The all-embracing loving Maa It is that time of the year when everybody publicly displays their undying love and gratitude for their mothers. No matter how strained their relationships with their mothers had been, at least now is the time to mend fences or to reignite the long put out flames of love and affection. Together with tweets and postings on social media, we are also inundated with many Tamil songs that glorify maternal love. Ah, there are too many Indian movie songs at their disposal that put mothers high up on a pedestal, quite rightly so. It is unimaginable how much a mother sacrifices for her offspring, starting with the many discomforts of early pregnancy followed by the image alternating insults. The puerperal period is no walk in the park either. The sleepiness nights, the constant demand for attention and care of an ill child are just the beginning of many more of the unending saga of nurturing to follow. The wrathful protective Maa All these are fine and good, but in ...

Untouchables (2019) The start of the fall of something big is always the same. The journey to the top must have been an arduous and an honest one. It would have been avant-garde or revolutionary then. Everyone would have liked it. Given the herd mentality that we all subscribe to, the response would have been palpably obvious with praises and felicitations that would rocket them to high heavens. The fame would have gone to the head of the progenitors. They would think that they are God-sent avatars beamed on Earth to change Mankind. They could do no wrong.  Those suppressed demons suddenly spring out. The rapacious appetite which was instrumental previously in launching their earlier fledgeling career now seems to have been diverted to satisfying their own primal decadent desires. The unabated admiration showered to them now is used paradoxically against the very people who put them up on a pedestal. Everyone can see their nefarious activities but are fearful of ...

Avengers: Infinity War (2018) The first thing that I noticed was that there were too many superheroes and I had a difficult time trying to identify them. Some of them even look somewhat similar to my eyes. To me, one who is a slow learner of this genre, Captain America and Star-Lord has the same face-cut. Black Widow and Scarlett Witch look almost alike. Even Bruce Banner without his Hulk outfit and Iron Man seem to share a similar exoskeleton. Anyway, one gets the gist of the story as the story, which could have easily been plucked out of the Indian mythology. Thanos, the protagonist, who wants to destroy half of the world's population to put things right. To do this, he needs to have in his possession some precious stones which are implanted in some superheroes. Just as seen in Hindu mythologies when an Asura is given a boon and he terrorises, all the Devas have to join forces to set order in the Cosmos, here the Avenger and the Guardian of the Galaxy teams put their ...

The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives Zbigniew Brzezinski (1997) Everybody wants peace on Earth. The political leaders wish for peace in their land. Believers of all faiths, without fail, include in their daily prayers call for eternal peace on Earth. We all know this type of bliss, smiling from ear to ear without an iota of worry in their minds, stays only as a figment of our imaginations. Like in the narration of Kali and the state of the world, life is a constant battle without the weak and the mighty. It is a continual flux of turn of tides of the interplay between the powerful crumbling down to become weak and the downtrodden rising from the ashes. Empires may crumble, and slaves may turn emperors. This book is the perspective of President Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor. Written in 1997, when the USA was the lone superpower, Russia and China were weak, and Islamic Jihadism was unheard of, some of the strategies that made ...

"Don't ask too many questions, sometimes it is better to just let go and follow the pack. Follow the people who are experts and know more than us!" At the end of our intellectual discourse on religion, this is the best my friend could tell me. I think that aptly explains the current situation we are in. There was a time in our civilisation, we were all clueless about the things around us. One blind leading another, we all used to grope around making sense of things as we moved around in an environment that never failed to awe us. Initially, simple explanations sufficed to satisfy our curiosity. Answers begot more questions and our thirst for knowledge and desire to know the Truth never got doused. Then a group of self-appointed beholden of the race came to the fore to claim of direct communications with the Maker. They claim to have obtained fresh rolls hot out of the oven! Our answers are answered and that we have reached the zenith of our understanding. That, ...

The congregation all nods in unison. They hail the young preacher's view of life. It appears all too easy; that we should be contented with what we have, that there is no limit to human desires, that the world has everything to meet all our needs but not our greed, that a happy man is one who makes the best of what is available around him. A man who finds joy in the simplest of things is a happy man! The congregation go all agape with his simplistic outlook on life even though none could complete a single day without the comfort of their air-conditioning and the nimble, agile limbs of their ever-obedient servants. If only the place were right, they would raise their hands in awe as if they were at a qawwali performance. It all sounded like Epicurean teaching to me, but the sceptic part of me went overdrive. Is it not human nature to always strive for something higher? Our ancestors, the caveman, must have yearned to explore the green strip of land across the wavy blue sea. He wo...

Ibn Khaldun Heard about a study in psychology by a celebrated psychologist, Dr Dacher Keltnar, from UCLA recently. He stated that empathy and all the values traditionally viewed as virtuous are the things that propel a person to hold power. He is given the power to rule over them by the people who sees these noble qualities positively. Once, the leaders are perched at the top, they somehow lose the same values that brought them to the top. The humility, the patience and the empathy that made them leaders do not apply to them anymore. This, he called 'power paradox'. This fact was shown by him by a simple social experiment. At a road crossing, smaller cars belonging to people of the lower rung of the society tend to slow down and stop for people to cross than bigger powerful cars of the rich. He proposed that the poor and the powerless look out for each other, whilst the powerful feel disdain. Well, perhaps that is why most organised religions look at the rich with...

Sultan (Hindi, 2016) There is really nothing ground shattering to blog about this film. Perhaps the pre-release media shenanigan by Salman Khan would be talked about longer than the memory of the movie disappears from the public mind. I reckon this memory would not be long.  This is just another predictable flick of a guy who finds joy in loafing around playing pranks and indulging in age-inappropriate activities who steers his life around to win over the love of a girl. As in most Indian movies, the firebrand cracker of a girl just turns jello at the sentimental self-sacrifices of her Romeo. This time, the theme of the film is the good old traditional Indian sport of 'gusti' or wrestling. Together the couple goes on a medal-winning spree all around the world till tragedy strikes. Aarfa (Anushka Sharma) becomes pregnant only to be left behind for the world championships. The haughty Sultan (Salman Khan) whose fame went to his head finds out the hard way that...