Charge God for negligence?

Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)
Directed by Taika Waititi

Soon after the March 8, 2014, disappearance of MH370, the world went into a prayer frenzy. People from various denominations were in unison in wanting to invoke their respective Gods to give a favourable outcome to the fracas. Despite all the fear of possible eternal surveillance by the powers that be, people soon realised that they could let a magnanimous Boeing plane go missing right under their noses with no recourse to recover it.  

All the penance and the prayers proved futile as we have been made to believe that the vessel just disappeared into thin air. What is the response of the believers? Are you going to move on in life believing that the Divine Forces, in all their wisdom, work in mysterious ways and do what is best for mankind? Are they going to think that they had not prayed hard enough, or would they turn livid, believing that the Gods had let them down?

These thoughts went through my mind as I viewed MCU's latest offering. Not being an avid consumer of comics (I was made to believe in my childhood that comics are a waste of time), the characters introduced in this outing are Greek to me. 

As a devoted theist, Gorr soon discovered that the gods he held in high esteem were haughty, self-indulgent figures who never really cared for their loyal followers. At the height of emotional turmoil, Gorr unearthed a god-killing sword, Necrosword, to become Gorr the God Butcher. Gorr becomes a menace, threatening the existence of God. Thor has to save the day with the help of his ex-girlfriend Dr Jane Foster @ now Mighty Thor, as she can handle the hammer Mjolnir now; Valkyrie, the leader of New Asgard and Korg, an alien warrior.

The film earned temporary notoriety after being banned from being screened in Malaysian cinema halls because of its 'gay elements'. As the story in the movie goes, they is a suggestion that Korg was conceived when two male partners 'held hands over a fire'. And Valkyrie expressed love interest in somebody of the same gender in one of the scenes.

The ban is just viewed as a minor storm in the teacup. Nobody is bothered anymore as those who want to watch it do not have to depend on theatrical screenings. They have creative ideas for accessing it digitally, bypassing local authorities' restrictions. And the rest of the world is actually fed-up that LGBTQI elements are deliberatively inserted everywhere in the name of inclusivity, even though in real life, LGBTQI may only involve 1% of society.

The real issue highlighted here is about expecting 'God' to bail us out from all our follies. Should we accept whatever results come out of our endeavours as the will of God? Should we just pacify ourselves that whatever negative outcome manifest in our actions, we will be judged justly at the end of days? Then, why bother about anything, the discoveries, the legal system, the order and the whole shebang of living if living is for the afterlife? A case in point is the recent sentencing of Najib Razak. Despite all the glaring evidence, he and his lawyers insist they never got justice. His lead counsel even has the cheek to philosophise that only God can dispense true justice. It shows how much he believes in his profession; so much confidence he exudes in Lady Justice! 

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As long as law is respected...

Escape from Mogadishu (Korean; 2021)
Director: Ryoo Seung-wan

We go to bed at night knowing jolly well that we will get a good night's sleep. We can get up the next day to go to work, self-assured that our workplace will still be standing. We queue at the checkout counter to pay for our goods because it is the civil thing to do. We do not go around breaking into premises because we know that the long arms of the law will finally catch up with us.

This peace of mind is what we, as a society, gave up for law and order. The powers-that-be promised to care for us, and we, in return, would sacrifice some of our liberty to suppress our inner desires to do what we wanted. When the government loses its grip on power, all hell breaks loose. The evil side of mankind surfaces. The respect for law takes a backseat, decorum disappears, and mayhem will ensue. All special privileges vanish into thin air. The law of the jungle takes over where the rule of law fails.

The diplomats of two warring nations of the Korean peninsula, North and South Korea, found this out the hard way. Somalia in 1991 was in turmoil as President Barre's government was overthrown by General Aidid's rebels. It was a time when the Koreas were still trying to gain entry into the U.N. (This is news to me! Even though Malaysia was already in U.N. since 1957, the Koreas had been struggling to get in since 1949. Then the Korean War came, and the Soviet Union opposed South Korea's entry. Since 1973, North Korea has become a U.N. observer.)

The Koreas were frantic trying to gain votes from African countries for U.N. entries. They were sabotaging each other for this purpose. The level of animosity reached a feverish pitch until Somalia fell into anarchy and the rebels destroyed the North Korean embassy staff scurrying for refuge. Against much hesitation, the South Koreans gave humanitarian support and together, they tried to escape from Mogadishu as the hostile rebel troop terrorised the country. After all the fight for survival, they go separate ways acting as mortal enemies. At the height of desperation to stay alive in Mogadishu, they covered each other's backs and grew to like each other.

'Escape from Mogadishu' is a gripping action movie with high suspense and edge-of-the-seat value. It is based on actual events but with a liberal sprinkle of artistic liberty. If 'Black Hawk Down' was America's viewpoint of the Somalia situation, this film's South Korea's version. Maybe one day, we will get a Somalian version of the debacle.

(N.B. Perhaps Malaysians should give a pat on themselves. Being a young democracy that came into existence as an independent third-world nation 65 years ago, it did specific earth-shattering things to its government without much turmoil. It booted out a corrupt government through a peaceful election. It further sent its ex-Prime Minister to jail for corruption and may send more for the same.)

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The Queen is dead, long live the King!

©Elanour Tomlinson

We are often advised to say only the nice things about the recently departed. Somehow, all the ill feelings and the wrong paths crossed are temporarily swept under the proverbial carpet. Everyone, including the ones who tend to benefit from the deceased's passing, is expected to carry a sombre outward appearance - wear a sad face, dress down and avoid merriment. 

After the so-called mourning period, it will be pretty much no-holds-barred, I guess. 

But now, even before the dead are laid to rest, the wokies are already at it. I am referring to the recent demise of one of the longest reigning monarchs of the once most enormous Empire of the world, where the sun never set. True, she inherited a bounty of loot from the world over. At one time, pirates scaling the Atlantic high seas were free to pilfer gold from Spanish vessels legitimately under the auspices of the British Crown as long as they paid their dues to the monarch.

True, they went out with their imperial stance with a chip on their shoulders and a stiff upper lip to match. And plunder wealth from civilisations that had found peace with their place in the sun, create mayhem to liberate the oppressed and destroy other cultures with their new economic model.

This turn of events is inevitable. Every nation wants to improve life for itself. The designated / king does that for his subject at the expense of a gamut of benefits for himself and those under his umbrage who held his torch. This way of conquest was thought to trickle down the food chain and continues to date.

There were plundering imperialists, and there were cruel plundering imperialists. Some maimed their subjects without caring about their future. In a way, the British made some humane decisions to ease their administration but ended up causing their Empire's own destruction along with other compelling factors. They laid down plans for proper administrative machinery, invested in education for natives to help (and look down on their own cultures) and created an extensive web of transportation networks. 

If not for the English, this blog would not be in English or an incomprehensible language that could hardly pass for English. We were lucky that English became the lingua franca of the world, the modern language of communication. Left to our politicians to steer us to the future, we would still be a fumbling fishing village ruled by despots, not that they are not preventing this from happening. An unthinking obedient herd of the population led by their leash to the slaughter is their idea of utopia. If we had been savaged by colonists, we would have been brutalised by our own kind. As the Tamil saying goes, "Whether Rama or Raavan rule, it doesn't matter to me, I don't give a damn!"

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All the justice money can buy.

Chief Justices Tengku Maimun Tuan Mat, Chief Judge of Sabah and 

Sarawak Abang Iskandar Abang Hashim, and apex court judges 

Nallini Pathmanathan, Mary Lim and Mohamad Zabidin Diah.

The naive, straight-thinking, law-abiding me with no background in the legal field used to think that the buck stopped at the Court Of Appeal. If one fails at the Appellate Court, it was pretty much that. One goes to jail to complete a sentence or meets his maker as he hits the gallows. 

Now we know there is life after the appeal. One can seek justice by pleading at the Federal Court. If the results there are not to his liking, he further argues to have a judicial review of the panel of judges that meted his sentence. Even the Federal Court can be held at ransom. This is called justice in the world of the high-heeled. Everyone deserves adequate legal representation, and it is his human right. Of course, it becomes mandatory if the client can afford the obscene amount of retainer fees involved as the case goes higher in the hierarchy of the legal accolade. Nobody has the guts to inquire about these people's seemingly bottomless coffers and the disproportional amount they save from their structured civil servant pay.

Not to forget the special treatment these VIP client is entitled to. In the eyes of the law, unlike what everybody else says, he is not a criminal until he has exhausted all his legal avenues. Till then, he will be roaming freely, still flashing his designer outfits and not repeating wearing the same tunic more than once. He can perhaps add a tinge of tangerine in his tie to mock naysayers who miss the joy of seeing him in an orange prison suit. The shiny steel cuff links can remind them of the handcuffs that he does not have to wear. 

We, the mere mortal we are, are also told that everyone deserves a second chance. Like a true religious confession, with a single stroke of the royal quill, one can get a clean slate, free to do what he seems fit, sniggering at the whole parody of it all. 

In the true mantra of cash is king, money can buy friends, love, liaisons with the rich and famous and definitely justice and freedom. Laws are made to make the powerless remain so and squirm at the sight of the stick. For the privileged 1%, it is just an inconvenience. Laws are meant to be broken. The rich can challenge it. The poor just have to oblige. 

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The thrills and spills of being hip...

Pam & Tommy (2022)
Disney + (8-episode miniseries)

The joyfulness of youth does not last forever. Its spills and its thrills fade with time. All the hormonally charged freshness of young adulthood eventually loses its mojo. They say we want to immortalise all these as you only live one (YOLO). Time and tide wait for no one too. Hence, there is a pressing need to freeze everything you have to last a lifetime. Time is man's greatest foe; the race between man and time always sided time. 

This country, this world is no place for older men or women. It is all about youth, vibrancy and freedom. Even Nature sides the young. With wear and tear, the facial musculature of the old naturally sags, giving its wearer a perpetual frowning facies. In the words of Schaupenneur, the world is a miserable place, and Nature knows it. Senescence is grim. Hence, the lips curve downwards with age, opposite to how a smiling face of innocence appears.

Pamela Anderson, in her iconic role

Photography and later video were God-sent. These can permanently capture the joy and visualisation of assets long after the battle scars of Hard Knocks of Life knock them down. With the advent of recording devices at everyone's disposal, immortalising that notable, intimate, non-event or pornographic material has never been easier.

It is a trend for newlyweds to digitally commemorate the image of their supple young bodies. As part of their wedding photography shootout, they even include a pose in their most sexually enticing pose in their birthday suits. This, they would like to admire way after the scars of life take over their mortal bodies. 

Since everybody is doing it, the peer pressure to get a full monty representation of the shames of the Garden of Eden is ever compelling. So every average Jane does it, and nobody gives a second look. Not when the player is every young man's dream girl - the buxom Pamela Anderson who gained stardom appearing semi-naked every week on Baywatch and had appeared without a thread as Hugh Heffner's bunnies.

Pamela and her then-husband, the wild cocaine-snorting Motley Crew's drummer, Tommy Lee, found out the hard way when their intimate honeymoon sex tapes were stolen that the world is not kind. 

Even though they laugh with you and encourage you to do whacky things, when you get on the wrong side of the law, you are actually alone. The world judges you through their conservative lens even though you think the world has changed. No siree. The media is there to yank you out of any shred of dignity still left you. Everybody just takes you to the cleaners. You are left shivering in the cold while everyone prospers on your account while you salvage whatever self-respect that is. Court injunctions and proceedings are just farce. It does not lead to anything meaningful.

The lesson here is that youth and love are many splendoured things. The underdevelopment of the neocortex of the frontal lobe makes you do many things. But remember, many of these things have long-term effects and ruin the rest of your remaining life. It is OK to be young and free, but freedom comes with specific responsibilities. You do not want to be stuck, on tenterhooks, for the rest of your remaining life with its aftermath.

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History is kind to Victors!

Churchill's Secret Wars (2010)

(The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during WW2)
Author: Madhusree Mukerjee

In 1952, Nehru appeared on BBC TV in his first ever TV appearance. He was invited to the UK to partake in the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. As the head of a former colony of the Crown, Nehru was there, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Winston Churchill, gracing the event. By that time, Churchill had descended from his intense contempt for all races except whites. Churchill must have been brimming from ear to ear as India and many other former colonies had consented to stay under the umbrage of the Crown under the title of the Commonwealth. If two hundred years of looting of wealth from India was insufficient, now their subjects have agreed to make their wealth common! 

It is ironic that Nehru and the bulk of the Congress leaders spent crouched in jail all through the most pivotal years before Indian independence, during World War 2. It was the time all the wheeling and dealing of talk of carving the country was in progress. In 1953, barely ten years after the ugly Partition, there was its leader chummy with their brutal colonial masters. Nehru says no offence in the interview when asked about the 18 years he spent behind bars fighting for India's independence. What the interviewer did not mention was the systematic philandering of India's wealth over 200 years, which saw India spiral down from a country which allegedly possessed over 20% of the world's GDP in mid 18th century to become the sixth poorest country in the world when the British left India.

No wonder the current generation of Indians want to re-evaluate and re-write their history, not from the viewpoint of the conquerors but the conquered. As the African proverb goes, "Until the lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter."

The events surrounding the systemic state-sponsored persecution and mass murder are constantly reminded to the world. The word 'Holocaust' is almost synonymous with the killing of six million Jews by Nazis during WW2. The world has not been fed about the repeated famine-related deaths that the Jewel in the Crown of the British Raj had to endure to enrich its colonial masters and his countrymen were well fed.

In 1950, Winston Churchill embarked on a journey to write the history of the perilous times of the 20th century. He wanted to ink his legacy of how he defended his tiny island nation and shouldered the burden of her mighty empire. His six-volume just conveniently forgot to mention Bengal's 1943 famine which engulfed nearly 700,000 lives by modest colonial estimates and up to 5 million, according to village scribes and academics.

It was a heartless inhumane strategy to sacrifice the perceived lesser human race to safeguard and feed the Europeans. When Churchill was repeatedly told about Bengal's humanitarian crises, he blamed the malady squarely on the Indians for breeding like rabbits. 

In reality, it was the British's elaborate plan to impoverish and weaken the Indians. It constituted part of its strategy to defeat the enemies of the Allied Forces. Just as there was the threat of the Japanese from India's eastern borders, the British scorched all the rice fields. The produce, however, was shipped off to feed the Allied soldiers. Then there was the subsequent smuggling, hoarding and spiralling of food prices. Farmers who fed the nation instead died of hunger. There was no plan whatsoever on the part of the British to rectify this. In fact, the efforts by the local British representatives were thwarted by Churchill. To Churchill, it was imperative to feed hungry Europeans than some brown people. In Churchill, rationing of food to the British was unthinkable. At no time during WW2 did the UK have any food shortage. Famine was endemic in India all through the British Raj rule. Approximately 15 million died from 1850 to 1899 in 24 major famines.

Mother Nature had not been to the Bengal region. Before this famine, there was a devastating monsoon. Then there was the heavy taxation. And the British scorched the fields to prevent the Japanese from getting their food supply. Shipments of food supply from the US, Canada and Australia scheduled to arrive in India never made it.

"I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits." -Winston Churchill

Churchill always tries to put the narrative that Hindus are an uncouth race. The enlightened followers of the Abrahamic faith stand to be oppressed in an Independent India if India was a free nation. With the increasing debt accumulated because of WW2 and lopsided trade practices that impoverished the Empire, Britain had let go of its colonies. The India that Britain encountered 200 years previously was submissive and easily conquerable. It was like that no more. Initially, Gandhi and his passive resistance to demanding self-rule worked just fine. It was India's death wish, and the British easily thumped their boots on the resisting freedom fighters. The coup de grâce came as a mutiny of the British Indian Navy after the trial of captured Indian National Army prisoners of war in Delhi.

Jinnah and his band of born-again Muslims decided to play their victim card that people of the Muslim-dominated areas in India would be treated as second-class citizens in an independent India. They started demanding a piece of land to be carved out of India to call their own, a new true blue Islamic country named Pakistan. The British thought it was a jolly good idea too. The rest is history.

This book results from years of meticulous research into many de-classified British documents. It concentrates mainly on Churchill's mishandling of the 1943 Bengal famine and eventual Partition. The author's point is that he intensely disliked the non-white race. His actions indicate that he was stuck in his Victorian mindset. He felt that the white race was superior and it was the white man's burden to civilise and govern over the rest. Churchill's handling of the famine can border on negligence or criminal by today's standard. Despite all these, the world puts Churchill on a pedestal, hailing him as a true statesman and a great leader.  

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They think they have everything under control!

Kala Bhairava

The slayer of Time with a dog as his
companion. Hence, dogs are given
due reverence.

Maybe the nihilistic part of me cannot stomach all these. My athymic insides cannot stomach the idea that someone can be so cocksure about everything. I have come to understand that Time and Tide wait for no man and that Time is the greatest killer of Man. Time flies; Man's hopes go! No Man has yet to win over Time; Shiva, a wandering seeker, is the exception and was conferred the title 'Kala Bhairava' - the conquerer of Time. 

I just cannot fathom how a group of people are forever pleased with themselves, knowing very well that they have covered all the potential glitches in life. They act as if they have in their possession a crystal ball through which they have a clear view of what lies in front of them in life's journey of uncertainty.

They have the acquaintance of an experienced seer. Using ancient astrological knowledge, he can precisely point out times they must be careful. He carefully calculates pockets when the planetary positions are not in their favour. Bad events, he asserts, can be averted through rituals that can appease negative energies. 

If that is not enough, they want to know their karmic baggage from their previous births that could potentially derail their blissful time on Earth. Fear not! There is indeed a specially pre-ordained palm leaf in a specific village for every living soul on Earth. It is a genealogical account complete with past karmic brownies and demerit points. Again corrective rituals can be instituted here to keep maladies at bay. 

Maybe one can take a walk in the lonely pathways of holy towns in India. Chances are that he can have a chance encounter with someone who is his long-lost soul from a previous life with a score to settle. A little exchange of wealth in current life should suffice.

Being born in the Hindu diaspora is viewed as a boon as they have avenues for release from the unrelenting life cycle in their armamentarium. In their own way, they feel that they are indeed Universe's chosen ones. Is it not funny that everyone carries the aura of grandiosity and as being the point of reference? Even in their previous lives, they thought they were someone of importance who had changed the world. Statistical odds suggest a nobody, a peasant with a short meaningless life or even a dead neonate!

Come what may, there is nothing lots of money cannot reverse. With a bottomless pit of moolah at one's disposal, unexpected medical emergencies or misadventures are just a medical bill away. There is nothing preventive medicine cannot preclude.

While I tread life with caution, keeping abreast and taking notes of the varying stimuli fed to me, they walk with their noses high like breathing on imported air. The fidgety me took guarded little steps like a prancing jaguar, knowing very well that the lost prey would mean staying hungry and possibly disappearing into oblivion.

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