RIFLE RANGE BOY

I can hear her words still reverberating in my ears like she said it yesterday. To catch a  big fish, always put a small fry on the hook. All through my childhood, this is the mantra that Amma preached upon us. She was unapologetic about her views about the nuns in the convent school that my sisters went to. Even though she was the one who insisted that my sisters should go to a missionary school, she was always sceptical about their true intentions. She told my sisters to learn what the teachers taught but not what the nuns preached. She was clear about that. In her mind, the school gave good education, for the other stuff, thank you very much. Whenever someone offers you a handout, be wary. Amma would always remind us that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Everything carries a piece of baggage. In simple terms, we grew up distrusting altruistic intention, minding only for ourselves. Maybe, these teachings helped us to pull ourselves by our bootstraps to greater heights. As ...

Vaxxed - From Cover-up to Catastrophe (2016) Vaxxed II - The People's Truth (2019) It must be difficult being educated in the 21st century. With the plethora of information at our fingertips, we are left not more well versed but on the contrary, more confused and unsure about almost everything. The more knowledge we seem to acquire, the more we seem to be wanting. The influence of visual media and the persuasive power of raw human emotions make us buy any story and rethink that perhaps conventional wisdom perhaps needs reassessment. For aeons, people succumbed to communicable diseases. Entire civilisations have disappeared in our not so distant past. The advanced Aztec and Mayan cultures were probably wiped out by the smallpox viruses brought in by looting Spanish sailors. Barring some viruses kept in laboratories for bio-weapons, we have managed to eradicate smallpox from our list of the leading causes of mortality. Vaccination used to be hailed as one of the fifty of mankin...

Swans in Venetian Canal  Credit @filterjm Probably for the first time since Man started giving salutations to the feared forces around him, he has been asked to stop all kinds of religious congregations in big groups. For aeons, Man believed that maladies take place because the Divine forces have been angered. In their simple understanding, the only avenue left for them to correct the tragedy is to appease the Divinity by glorifying it to high heavens; hoping that He would throw us His Grace. Hence, despite appeals by the authorities, practitioners of various faiths continue to put their trusts in the forces above, not in rational thinking and the sciences. They feel that people have been misled for far too long. The way the human race appears to be heading does not assure them of a happy ending. Too many have placed self-interest above salvation to expect altruism to prevail. There are groups of people who are hellbent in finding scapegoats. In their minds, many if not mos...