RIFLE RANGE BOY

Kottukkaali (The Adamant Girl, Tamil; 2024) Director: P.S. Vinothraj What do you do when your young daughter becomes catatonic, refuses to speak or eat, stares into oblivion and is hellbent on marrying her equally young boyfriend? You tell her that her choice of boyfriend is inappropriate and that she is way too young to be committed. That she is destined to achieve much more in life; she retreats and refuses to respond and goes all silent; what do you do? Perhaps you would sit down as a family and reason with her. Get a mental health professional involved. Words like puppy love, teenage angst, stress and even bipolar disease would be thrown into the ring. What do Paandi, his sister, and the rest of the family members do when Paandi's sister's daughter, Meena, goes silent and says she is in love with her friend, who is not approved by the family? Paandi was supposed to marry his niece; it is legitimate in that part of interior Tamil Nadu. The whole family feels that Meena is un...

Outliers, The Story of Success Author: Malcolm Gladwell (2008) Life had never been easy. Now it has been made more complicated. Kids all around the world had been fed with the idea that if you put in the hours and do as you are told, your future would be bliss. Nah, don’t buy that! The secret to success still remains an enigma. Many factors affect the success of an individual. The author goes through the lives of a few successful people and a few who had the potential but did not quite make it. One has to be born at the correct time. Sometimes the window of opportunity only comes once. One has to be of the proper state of mind and of the right age to grasp it. At the spur of the time when it happens, he must be willing to put in the long hours. That indulgence itself, an awful lot of hours, would determine your future success. The examples of Beatles and Bill Gates are mentioned here. Beatles' acid test was in Hamburg in 1962 when they took the challenge of playing long hou...