Rifle Range Boy

An apology too late?

2026-11-08T00:00:00.000+08:00

Guru Nanak Jahaz (Canada, Punjabi, 2025)

Director: Sharan Art

They say our life is finite. At the same time, they mention that life on Earth is cyclical. What goes around comes around. A pauper may one day be King. We live in changing times. The Indians and the Chinese, who once ruled much of the world before imperial powers came knocking at their shores, were brought down to their knees and reduced to the level of serfdom. Now the colonial subjects have arisen. The former colonial powers realise their awakening and scramble desperately to protect their interests and ensure their citizens continue enjoying the same privileges they once enjoyed and the same level of affluence they once had.

The story of Komagata Maru reminds us how imperial powers loved the wealth they could usurp and the exotic mysteries associated with the colonies, but could not stand the sight of their natives. It revealed their blatant discriminatory policies against non-whites.

At the turn of the 20th century, as living conditions in India grew increasingly difficult, with frequent famines and civil unrest, more and more Indians sought opportunities elsewhere. As North America saw industrialisation, many Indians made a beeline there. Many Sikhs found employment in the growing railway construction, lumberjacking and agricultural work. They aggregated around Vancouver in British Columbia. The local populace, however, were not keen on having brown-skinned foreigners sharing their living space. They made their resentment quite public. The newcomers found solace in the company of their kind in the then newly erected Gurudwara. Soon ridiculous laws were churned out to keep their immigration at bay. They enacted the Continuous Journey Regulation, which required entrants to reach Canada on a single, continuous journey. The trouble was that no ships travelled directly from India to Canada. Indians had to change ships numerous times to reach Vancouver. Another law required each traveller to Canada to have $200 in Canadian currency.

A Sikh entrepreneur from Malaya, Gurdit Singh, had a clever idea to outsmart the law. He chartered a whole steamship to sail from Calcutta to Vancouver via Yokohama. The steamship, Komagata Maru, was baptised 'Guru Nanak Jahaz' (Guru Nanak's Ship), symbolically implying that the Guru's ship would lead them to liberation. The passengers also included Hindus and Muslims.

On May 23, 1914, Komagata Maru arrived at Vancouver to a rather cold welcome. The immigration officers denied them clearance to disembark. The atmosphere on the ground was hostile. The local white population was out, punching their fists in the air, yelling against Indian immigration. The Indians already settled in Canada came in large numbers to offer support in solidarity for their fellow Indians. They formed the Shore Committee to represent the stranded passengers. In that tinderbox environment, they sought a court injunction. The courts ultimately rejected their appeal. Initially, the courts even refused to hear the case because the people on the ship were non-Canadians. About 20 passengers were allowed to disembark as they were returning Canadian residents.

On the ground, widespread unrest also erupted. The Punjabis identified their own kind as informants to the Vancouver police and British officials. Sikhs were killed in the gurdwara, and even a Canadian Immigration Inspector, Hopkinson, was assassinated. Mewa Singh Lopoke, the local leader who helped building the Gurudwara was convicted of the assassination and sentenced to be hanged. The Ghadar Party, established in 1913 to wage an armed struggle to liberate India, also stepped in to help.

After a two-month standoff with Canada refusing to provide food and water, its Navy essentially shooed them away from its shores to enforce the court decision. In conclusion, the court upheld their discriminatory immigration laws.

Another shock awaited the passengers when Guru Nanak Jahaz reached Calcutta after being barred from disembarking at Hong Kong and Singapore. Komagata Maru had to drop anchor at the mouth of the Hooghly River and was stranded for three days for harbouring anti-colonial passengers. The British tried to bundle the passengers on a train and send them to Punjab. The voyagers insisted on carrying their holy book, the Guru Granth Sahib, which had accompanied them throughout the journey, to the local gurudwara in Calcutta. The British relented. During the high octave march, a scuffle broke out. Violence erupted; the Imperial Police opened fire, and massive violence ensued. 20 passengers died, and over 200 were injured. Gurdit Singh, the businessman who chartered the ship, escaped and went underground for 8 years before surrendering on MK Gandhi's appeal. After serving his prison term, he spent the rest of his years in public service.

This movie is a presentation from the Sikh community in Canada on an important event in their heritage. It is the event that highlighted the racist stance of the imperial powers against the colonial subjects at the height of the Empire. Much water has flowed under the bridge, but the incident serves as a constant reminder that history teaches us many things. In 2016, Canada's PM, Justin Trudeau, officially apologised to Canada's Indian descendants for the Komagata Maru incident. May 23, the day the ship landed in Vancouver, is commemorated as a day of remembrance for the Komagata Maru passengers.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Life humbles you!

2026-11-06T00:00:00.000+08:00

Baththa (Tamil; 2026)
Written & Directed by: Balaji Tharaneetharan

https://letterboxd.com/film/baththa/

We are always told that mortality and the fear of dying ground us. We may have very high opinions of ourselves, only to mellow down after a life-changing event.

A few years ago, someone I know had a massive brain haemorrhage while on anticoagulation therapy following a minor cardiac procedure. His condition was critical, needing craniotomy and prolonged intensive care afterwards. He was a changed man afterwards. He had lapses of memory loss, but what shocked everyone around him was that he left his wife of 30 years and his adult kids. He moved in with a new partner and cut off all ties with his former life.

Everybody thought he was enlightened in some way, and living the way he always wanted, in the company of a literati. His temporary hypoxia, and perhaps his encounter with the bright white light at that stage, opened the secret crevices of the unknown.

The truth of the matter is that, during the critical times of his admission when death was a real possibility, his wife decided to peek into the family finances. She noticed that her husband had been leading a double life, with a side chick. Hence, the post-convalescence metamorphosis. It had nothing to do with the Enlightenment; it was more like being caught with one's pants down.

In the spring of youth, death seems like something which happens only to other people. It feels too distant to bother the young. He feels indestructible. A single turn of events, a flicker of the eye, would change everything. He would realise he is as vulnerable as anyone else and would make amends.

In its own way, this movie, set in a Tamil Nadu village in the mid-80s, conveys a similar message. Baththa, a local rowdy, has no time for pleas and excuses. Anyone who crosses his path is sure to be roughened up blue-black. Baththa has built a reputation for himself and is feared by all villages.

Sabari, a young boy, probably aged 10, witnessed one of Bhatta’s blowouts. The event took the living daylights out of him. Sabari's classmates made it worse by describing many of Baththa's ‘larger-than-life’ feats, like breaking through the prison walls.

One day, Sabari’s schoolteacher confiscated his toy and kept it in her cupboard. As it was a long holiday afterwards, Sabari scaled the school gates to get his toy back. After getting it back, he scooted off. He realised that he had left the toilet door ajar. So he returned to bolt it. After doing so, he heard a voice behind the door. Instantly, he recognised the voice as that of the fearsome Baththa. He bolted from the scene, fearing for his life, leaving Baththa trapped.

The rest of the story is a slow narration from the trapped gangster's perspective, who thinks his enemies have trapped him, and from the young boy's perspective, who is scared the ruffian will rough him up if he unlocks the toilet door. To make it worse, the toilet door is new, heavy-duty, and sturdy, and it was just replaced. It proved too tough for Baththa to break.

The movie keeps viewers double-guessing about how things will resolve and why Baththa went to the school in the first place. The film's selling point is when Baththa comes out, thinking Sabari is his saviour. The puny Sabari, on the other hand, is shit-scarred when his bluff will finally be unveiled. In the meantime, the ruffian changes a new leaf and builds a strong bond with Sabari. He also makes amends with his wife, daughter and his enemies.

The lesson I learnt from this story is that even the mighty will fall. Life humbles everyone, eventually.

At the same time, I have seen nanogenarians and centaurians still hell-bent on their old, vindictive ways and refusing to make peace with the people they hurt and their Maker as well..

P.S. This movie reminds me of the movies ‘Cinema Paradiso’ and ‘The Bicycle Thief’, where the movie is narrated from the point of view of a young boy.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

The other side of history!

2026-11-03T00:00:00.000+08:00

The Revolutionaries (Hindi, Miniseries, Season 1; 2026)

Director: Nikkhil Advani

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt31924802/

We were taught that MK Gandhi and his brand of passive resistance eventually earned Indians their independence. The truth of the matter is much different from that. A British pro-India civil servant, Allan Octavian Hume, mooted the idea of a pan-Indian nationalist organisation in 1883. The Indian National Congress held its first session in 1885 in Bombay. Initially, like-minded individuals came together to propose reforms in British India. Over time, two factions began to emerge: the loyalists, who remained subservient to the British and at most wanted to be a Dominion of the British, and the nationalists, who were thinking along the lines of self-rule, Swaraj, and total independence.

A few events led nationalists to pursue a more violent path to achieve their ambitions. Initially, everyone agreed that non-cooperation against British legislation was acceptable. Pretty soon after, Indians were being harmed and instead were blamed for fighting back, as in the Moplah Rebellion; their paths diverged. Gandhi and his loyalists opted for satyagraha, while the nationalists became revolutionaries and turned to armed struggle.

This miniseries is probably the beginning of one of their stories. I reckon more seasons may follow. The miniseries is based on Sanjeev Sanyal's book 'Revolutionaries: The Other Story Of How India Won Its Freedom'.

We are often told that revolutionaries' attempts are all at the individual level and that the attacks are purely the work of lone wolves. In actual context, these attacks are carefully planned, with a wide network behind them. The network extends into major Indian towns like Benares, Calcutta, and Lahore, and into other countries including Britain, France, Italy, Russia, Persia, Ireland, Germany, Japan, the US, Thailand, and Singapore.

The first generation of Indian freedom fighters must surely be Vinayak Savarkar and Aurobindo Ghosh. Savarkar went on to study law in London and became involved in anti-colonial activities at India House. He was arrested and sent back to India to be charged. His journey back is another adventure altogether, an escape attempt from the ship transporting him, followed by his apprehension. He was jailed in Cellular Jail on Andaman Island, a frequent rendezvous for revolutionaries. Sachindra Sanyal was also sentenced to Cellular Jail twice, a record by itself. Aurobindo gave up armed resistance after a stint in the Andamans, but he contributed to the cause through his newspaper, Bande Mataram, and by trying to unify the masses through a religious path. Rabindranath Tagore did so through social awakening, cultural awakening and educational innovations.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Revolutionaries-Other-
Story-India-Freedom/dp/9356996555

Another subtle way to inculcate nationalist fervour among the people was through the old Indian practice of the gymkhana, for recreation and fitness. Here, youngsters practised bodybuilding, martial arts, and other necessary skills. They went by names like Anushilan Samiti. Secret societies with anti-colonial agendas evolved into groups such as the Jugantar Party, established by Ghosh and others.

The second wave of revolutionaries included Rash Behari Bose, Sachindra Nath Sanyal and Jatindranath Mukherjee. Mukherjee earned the nickname Bagha Jatin (Tiger Jatin) after killing a Bengal tiger with his bare hands. Tilak, Rai, Bal, Bhagat Singh and Netaji must have formed the subsequent wave.

This season mainly revolves around 1915 during World War 1 and follows the lives of Rash Behari Bose (not related to Netaji, but was his later contact in Japan), Sachindra Nath Sanyal (author's great-uncle), Pratibha Lahiri (Sanyal's wife) and Bagha Jatin (whose primary skill was organising revolutionaries under the guise of running recreational centres). Together they organised many underground rebellions against the colonial masters.

In this series, the villain appears to be General Dyer, who seems to be everywhere, foiling their efforts. He becomes infamous later with the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.

It starts with the 1912 foiled assassination attempt on Viceroy Lord Hardinge at Chandni Chowk in Delhi. The British were moving the imperial capital from Calcutta to Delhi, and the Viceroy was to attend the ceremony. Harbinger survived the homemade bomb but sustained many injuries that incapacitated him. Sanyal was the mastermind behind this attempt, but escaped captivity. Sanyal later founded the Hindu Republican Association/Army (HRA). This name shows how close the Indian revolutionaries were to the Irish freedom fighters, as their party was the Irish Republican Army (IRA).

Another point to note in Indian history is the massive migration of Indians, especially to the USA and Canada, in search of a better life through education and employment in the railways, agriculture and lumber industries. There was a media scare in British Columbia that the state would be 'overrun' by Indians. In reality, they were less than 1% of the local population. A key figure who spurred Indian nationalism in Canada and the USA through his writings was Lala Har Dyal Mathur, a polymath who earned a double scholarship to Oxford University but later migrated to North America. Disgruntled expatriates, students, and intellectuals started the Ghadar Party here in 1913. Its main aim was to end British rule in India.

The whites in Canada drafted ridiculous laws to curb the influx of Indians to their country. One of these laws required inbound passengers to travel to Canada on a single, continuous journey. The trouble was that no shipping line offered this service.

So, in May 1914, Gurdit Singh, a contractor from Malaya, chartered the Komagata Maru, an entire ship, from Japan to sail from Calcutta to Vancouver via Yokohama, carrying 340 Indians, mainly Sikhs. The Komagata Maru sparked an international standoff when authorities denied it permission to dock. After the Court of Appeal denied the request, Canadian authorities denied the passengers food and water and intimidated them with the Royal Canadian Navy; the Komagata Maru was sent back to Calcutta.

Indian immigrants on board the Komagata Maru
in English Bay, Vancouver, British Columbia, 1914.
https://parks.canada.ca/culture/designation/evenement-event/komagata-maru

The Miniseries re-enacts the events that eventually took place at Budge Budge Ghat, 17 miles from Calcutta. The passengers were told to board a special train to Punjab. Most, if not all, of the vessel's passengers became sympathetic to the Ghadar Party's cause after the turmoil they had endured off the Canadian shores. The passengers insisted on marching to a gurudwara in Calcutta to deposit their holy book, the Grant Sahib. The book was apparently carried by Gurdit Singh himself, and in the melee that ensued, the barricades were breached, and 20 were killed; Gurdit escaped and went into hiding for almost 8 years. He later surrendered in 1921 after MK Gandhi appealed to him to do so. Baba Gurdit Singh stayed back and was martyred in India.

Another episode featured in this season is the failed attempt to procure arms from Germany. After getting into trouble with the law in the USA, Lala Har Dyal made a dash (jumped bail, actually) to Europe. He used his contacts to form the Berlin Committee, which the German Intelligence Bureau for the East supported and that helped sustain agitations in British colonies.

Bagha Jatin used his contacts to arrange the delivery of German arms to Indian shores. An elaborate plan was devised for SS Maverick to bring the shipment to Balasore in Odisha. Superior British intelligence foiled the plan. The British intercepted it. Jatin and his men were defeated, and he subsequently succumbed to his injuries.

The Ghadar movement was quite convinced that the British soldiers were exhausted by the Great War. The plan was to stage a 1857-like mutiny by Indian soldiers in the British Indian Army and take over the country. February 21, 1915, was set as the date to stage a pan-India takeover of the British Raj. Again, the whole plan was derailed with a little help from British intelligence, double agents and Indian turncoats.

The failure of the mutiny brought about further draconian laws which eventually led to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. The masterminds behind the Ghadar Mutiny and the Budge Budge Massacre were tried in the 1915 Lahore Conspiracy Case Trial. Sanyal, a key figure in the Ghadar Conspiracy, escaped arrest and went underground. Rash Behari Bose escaped to Calcutta, then to Japan, under a pseudonym. In Japan, he married a Japanese woman and later laid the groundwork for the Indian National Army.

An engaging miniseries with high production value. I cannot wait for the next season.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

We deserve the government we have!

2026-10-31T00:00:00.000+08:00

https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/people/article/3265186/
nothing-left-me-thousands-bangladeshi-workers
-lose-everything-failed-bid-work-malaysia

Is it possible that we deserve the leaders we elect? Do we need to be vigilant about the day-to-day occurrences around us? Can we just stay away from politics, saying politics is not for us and one person’s opinion is not going to change the status quo? Are we accountable to the next generation if we mess it up? Is it merely bad luck or inevitable that our country becomes a cesspool of anarchy?

I know a close-knit family who did everything together. The mother was the eye in the sky, guarding everyone, making sure the kids did their schoolwork, did well in school, balanced the family budget, and got warm food every day. She did all these while co-running a tuition centre with her husband. The husband had his own hectic activities with friends and acquaintances, occasionally playing his fatherly role.

Out of the blue, the mother succumbed to a major coronary event. Her children, ranging from late teens to their late twenties, were laying the groundwork for their adult lives. Naturally, they were devastated.

Fast forward five years, the family members only contact each other occasionally. They all went their own way, pursuing their own dreams. The father moved in with a new partner to plunge into a new chapter in his life for himself. The tuition centre is no more. The business had been sold off.

As I see it, it takes one responsible captain at the driver’s seat to ensure things are done appropriately, bigger things are coordinated, and obstacles are cleared for easy passage. Without such an individual at the wheel, everything would derail.

To quote the great APJ Kalam, ‘When there is harmony in the home, there is order in the nation. When there is order in the nation, there is peace in the world’,

Extrapolating this to a world perspective, I looked at Bangladesh's story. Just two years ago, India’s eastern neighbour, Bangladesh, was praised to high heavens by the World Bank for overtaking India in annual per capita GDP. But India's PPP-adjusted per capita GDP had always been higher, meaning Indians' purchasing power is better.

After the major unrest that shook Bangladesh over the last couple of years and drove the sitting PM out of the country, the nation is now out with a begging bowl. Its bold stance against India for harbouring its exiled PM made mutual trade problematic, with Bangladesh bearing the brunt. Economic and agricultural activities took a dive amid the unrest. To add insult to injury, the Russia-Ukraine war further complicated things.

Bangladesh, after cutting its umbilical cord from a fellow Muslim country that treated them as lesser beings for their Bengali roots, saw much misery in its infancy. Slowly, their lives improved, and the 21st century saw them heading in the right direction. Influenced by zealots with their obtuse ideologies and increasing hatred for the hand that gave them existence, India, they now find themselves in this quagmire. A nation, rudderless, with vultures waiting to pounce on their share of the meat.

We are constantly reminded of a quote often associated with Thomas Jefferson, one of America's founding fathers: “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” It is no use casting votes only once every four or five years. Voters have a duty to gauge their leaders’ performance and nip the thorn in the bud before it starts overrunning the fields.

It is nobody’s fault when the fire has raged, but when the very person meant to protect us is seen ambivalent, playing his fiddle or worse, fanning the embers, then it is our fault. We cannot play the victim and blame everyone else for the predicament. When we join the convoy, the beeline to greener pastures, we know we messed it up.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

...of successful Malaysian Indians.

2026-10-29T05:35:45.585+08:00

Malaysian Indian Heroes

A legacy that inspires generations

Author: Jayaraman Munusamy

If Janakey Raman launched his latest book on a melancholic note describing the plights of the displaced and the neglected, Jayaraman Munusamy's book starts with a jubilant roll call. It collects the achievements of many Malaysian Indians who have left an indelible mark on Malaysian history. They are the sons and daughters of Indian sojourners who left their homelands for economic security and chose to call Malaya home.

The list goes on to tell the life stories of 108 figures who made their mark in various fields, including education, entrepreneurship, industry, public service, and more. What started as a pastime, sending messages on social media, snowballed into something big. The author then had an epiphany. He took it upon himself to document these figures for the next generation of Malaysian Indians. He did not want Indians to be seen only as occupants of the lower strata of the economic hierarchy, but to know we had a role in elevating this backwater country into a modern one seen on the international stage as a shining economy.

Amid the euphoria of honouring icons aged in their nineties mentioned in the work, the organisers decided to hold a forum to discuss the direction Malaysian Indians were heading. Aptly, they summoned three figures well-versed in different aspects of human development. A renowned academician led the panel.

The take-home message from the discussion is that the path ahead is lined with many potentially society-altering plans, waiting only for the news to spread and for society to take them up. We need to shed our past baggage and move forward. We cannot undo the wrongs and failures of past leaders, but they serve as a cautionary tale for the next generation to heed. The ugly truth is that the country's crime index falls unfavourably on the community. Escaping the cycle of crime is not easy; nevertheless, many avenues remain. Vocational and technical learning programmes began long before the current government's push for them.

At this time and age in the country, when race politics is rearing its ugly head more than ever before, there is a risk that the contributions of other ethnic groups may be wiped out from the country's consciousness. Future descendants will hear of it in oral traditions as if these were all mere Grimm's fairy tales.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Judge on trial?

2026-10-26T00:00:00.000+08:00

The Invisible Guest (Contratiempo, Setback; Spanish, 2016)
Co-written & Directed: Oriol Paulo

https://thedullwoodexperiment.com/2017/09/07/contratiempo-2016/

If you are bored of the same murder mysteries Hollywood and Bollywood keep churning out, which try to lure viewers not through creative storytelling but with visual candy like mattress polo and scintillating pyrotechnics, this one is for you.

This whodunnit keeps viewers guessing until the end.

One of my many indulgences includes putting people in hypothetical tight spots and hearing their response. At a gathering of old classmates, I brought up this situation to a senior lawyer. If the client he was defending, at the outset or in the due course of the trial, admits to carrying out a serious crime, say, murder, would he still be defending him? After much circumventing and circumlocution, my friends and I managed to pin him down. For old times' sake, he volunteered an answer. Every man deserves adequate and fair representation. He would defend.

Another lawyer friend, who is in his twilight years and had found spirituality (not the liquid kind) lately, point-blankly said that he would recluse himself. He did not want anything to do with getting a guilty person off scot-free. The third and final subject, an octogenarian, was quite clear in his mind. He would check the client's bank balance first.

Hence, if a criminal gets the right representation who can spin such a yarn, he can literally get away with murder. This movie is about how one spins a story, and the other shoots it down, pokes holes in it, or patches the holes they find. As a friend mentioned recently, 'In a Court of Justice, both parties know the truth; it is the Judge who is on trial'. It is not an exercise in revealing the truth, but a dice game that takes the judge or jury for a spin.

A businessman is out on bail after being accused of killing his mistress. They had been found in a hotel room; he was holding the murder weapon, a vase with blood stains, and she was cold dead with a head injury. The room is locked from inside.

The businessman's high-flying lawyer, who had helped him avoid legal wrangles and destroy evidence to keep his reputation squeaky clean, asks him to give an honest interview to a lawyer he would be sending. She is a fixer and could find a way to squash the evidence a new witness the police picked up might provide. The businessman obliged. They met in a hotel room.

After initially giving the runaround, the accused realised that the fixer was good. She knew much more intimate information that only he and his mistress knew. He opened up.

The story goes back to when this married, two-timing businessman escaped to a remote rendezvous with his mistress. On their return, he crashes into an oncoming car. The driver succumbed to the crash.

To avoid the police and keep his secret, the businessman disposes of the car and its driver in a lake. However, his own car stalled on the road. The mistress stayed in the car to be rescued by a Good Samaritan. Lo and behold, the deceased turned out to be the Good Samaritan's son. Somehow, the businessman's lawyer made some evidence disappear, and finally the businessman was not implicated in the case. The body and the car were never found. Only the businessman knew where the car was.

With no one knowing who the new witness was or what new information he would bring to the table, the fixer and client had to prepare a solid alibi to keep the case airtight. So, the story yo-yos, as both try to concoct a credible tale. Murder mystery fans are up for a satisfying twist at the end.

This movie must be compulsory viewing for lawyers keen to practise criminal law or budding sleuths who want to know how criminals think. For the average Joe, he may find ways to bend the truth. Anyway, a lie is not a lie until it is exposed.

A good one. 8.5/10.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Kollywood's Brokeback Mountain?

2026-10-23T00:00:00.000+08:00

Dorothy (2026)
Director: Karthik Subbaraj

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt38915678/

This movie recently kicked up a storm in Tamil Nadu. Reviews are mixed, but both sides are strongly opinionated. One camp is adamant that such movies should be banned, calling them decadent and arguing that the moviemakers aim to normalise a deviant way of life. Another argues that free speech should have no limits and that all movies can be produced. Malaysia has decided to ban it outright as it involves LGBT issues.

The truth, after watching the movie, is far from that. The film is high quality, capturing the realism of a typical 80s Tamil village drama, minus the silver-screen razzmatazz. In this rough, tough, brash environment, two young boys find friendship at school. Kartik, the newcomer to the village school, is bullied, and Subbu, a pint-sized boy who thinks he is Bruce Lee reincarnate, comes to his rescue. They become close buddies. They spend a lot of time in each other's households. Subbu's father is a casteist but eventually allows Kartik to eat and hang around their home.

Subbu and Kartik grow up to be best friends and become Subbu's father's henchmen. They are feared by villagers. Everything goes well until Subbu's elder brother marries Dorothy, a girl from Kerala. The two grow close to Dorothy. Subbu is often seen in the kitchen near Dorothy, doing chores.

One day, they find Dorothy hanging in the centre of the house. It is obvious there is foul play, probably staged by Subbu's father and Dorothy's husband, but the police deemed it a clear-cut suicide. Subbu gets very depressed. Out of the blue, Subbu shaves clean and walks out of his house, dressed as a woman. His father, a true-blooded macho character immersed in a muscularly toxic environment, would not going to take this lying down. Earlier, Kartik, who absconded from the village after killing another villager, is summoned by Subbu's father to kill his best friend, Subbu.

The rest of the story follows Kartik, now a cross-border lorry driver, as he hunts down Subbu and gathers the courage to pull the trigger on his friend. Kartik is slowly schooled in Subbu's hardship as he tries to conform to societal pressures and starts empathising with his difficulties. He arranges for a dead orphan's body to double as Subbu's alleged dead body to convince his father that Kartik had completed his mission. Subbu is allowed to do whatever it takes to live among transgender people and pursue whatever she wants.

Most viewers could stomach it up to that point. What happens next is what most viewers could not stomach. Kartik has a 'When Harry Met Sally' moment when he confides in a fellow henchman and confidante, Vadivu, about the turn of events with Subbu. Vadivu convinces Kartik that what he feels for Subbu is not friendship, but romantic love. Kartik agrees and makes a dash to meet his beau at the climax in another town, rushing through the crowd and, caught in an embrace, kissing another man for the first time in Indian cinema. End.

The director asserts that it is not his intention to normalise deviant sexual practices but rather to highlight the difficulties transgender people face. He also wanted to highlight the toxic environment the marginalised live in.

I suppose the filmmaker added the last scene as an afterthought to stir the hornet's nest among conservative parts of society. Anyway, controversies turn heads. It attracts curious minds, people talk, and that generates publicity, which translates into box office returns.

By the way, I was impressed by the film's superior quality. Besides the excellent recreation of a 1990s Tamil Nadu village, the acting of every other actor and the supporting cast is beyond comparison. Sassanth, who plays Subbu, did a fantastic job transitioning into a female role. It was indistinguishable from a cis-woman. His gestures and mannerisms are impeccable. The fighting scenes are quite realistic, minus the gore, which seems to be the trend these days. Good movie, 8/10.

The talking points here are twofold. Firstly, is there no place for platonic love? Can't two people of different genders be friendly without romantic love getting intertwined? Must physical love be inserted? Secondly, all future brotherly relationships, the ones we call 'brothers of different mothers', may risk being labelled gay relationships!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Hukum, Tiger ka Hukum!

2026-10-21T00:00:00.000+08:00

Jailer 2 (Tamil, 2026)

Director: Nelson Dilipkumar

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt33318732/

This is strictly for all Rajini fans. That 75-year-old surely deserves a standing ovation for single-handedly putting this film together. Despite all the big names in this movie, Ramya Krishnan, for one, single-handedly holds the film up as the Rock of Gibraltar. Rajnikanth's star presence is so strong that he overshadows everyone else. The unnecessary cameos by Bollywood actors who have seen better times, like Jackie Shroff and Hrithik Roshan, simply legitimise his reign as a superstar for 50 years. The film conveys this veiled message through one of its many punch dialogues.

Mithun Chakravathy, who has appeared in a few South Indian movies, is a baddie among the many baddies who get pulverised when Rajini assumes his Narasimha form and goes on a killing spree through his unseen proxies. Vidya Balan, in a rare Tamil film appearance, is a badass Neelambari on steroids. The only thing is, the original actor who played the original Neelambari is a pale shadow of her former self, now playing a docile grandmother and wife. SJ Suryah, in his usual self, completes the kuhana trio with his quirky dialogues and sadistic acts. Mahesh Babu is the usual unlucky baddie, uttering self-deprecating yet philosophical one-line soliloquies.

Rajnikanth no longer does gravity-defying stunts. All he needs to do is get his invisible henchmen to carry out his destruction, with a little help from his spectacles, which may be sending mini guided missiles directly to the intended villains. He gets away with doing majestic walks shot with long-lens cameras, delivering one-liner punch dialogues, and lines that remind viewers of scenes from his yesteryear movies. Realistically, he does not gyrate with beauties, but the sugar-candy department is confined to the Mafia's celebratory parties.

In Jailer 2, Rajinikanth assumes the role of a doting grandpa and a retired jailer, minding his own business as a supervisor at a minimart. A minor tiff with a corrupt water department snowballed into a massive clash with a Hindu idol-stealing syndicate and a mafia network.

The first half of the story is easygoing and engaging. From Jailer 1, viewers know Rajinikanth's son was a turncoat. Rajinikanth punished him for his betrayal. This becomes part of the climax. Meanwhile, non-Rajinikanth fans have to endure long fight scenes, senseless explosions, and unnecessary cameo appearances by stars from Mollywood, Tollywood, and Sandalwood, who are not relevant to the storyline but are meant to draw ticket collections on a pan-Indian scale. Vijay Sethupathi shows up for five seconds in an irrelevant scene at the end.

The producers clearly have Jailer 3 in the pipeline, as the surviving villains look into the horizon, licking their wounds and thinking.

A feel-good that whets the appetites of moviegoers, old and new, each telling themselves the hero in them never dies. The hero just has to rebrand himself. Hukum, Tiger ka Hukum!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Nature, Human Nature!

2026-10-19T07:04:55.953+08:00

Digger (2026)

Director: Alejandro G. Iñárritu

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt31450459/

This is one of those movies where you either love it or hate it. It is dialogue-heavy, and the actors seem to be just shouting for no reason. This goes on for a good hour, and one starts wondering what Tom Cruise is doing here. Where are the gravity-defying stunts, you wonder?

Then, the camera goes back, and we see it all. It is all a stage setting, and the cast is acting out the 25th edition of a play depicting an eccentric American oil explorer, Digger Rockwell, whose megalomaniac ideas essentially brought massive catastrophe to the environment and ruined the world as they live in.

Surprise, surprise. The play 'Fossil Fuel' is produced by Digger's nephew, Kenny Rockwell. Herein begins the series of contradictions. Is Kenny ridiculing his uncle to absolve himself of his uncle's sins? Even though he inherited his uncle's empire, it seems he is creating a caricature of his uncle to legitimise his inheritance.

Within the play, too, we see subtle shifts among different layers of society. The ultra-rich are fixated on what they want to do, and they want it yesterday. They whine and scream at their subordinates even though they know their requests are ridiculous. Their subordinates try to sugarcoat bad news so that their bosses will hear what they want to hear. Morality and religion are just to coddle and pacify the poor. The rich are beyond morality. Social mores do not apply to them.

They treat people like dirt, yet put their pet animals upon a pedestal, offering demigod status, while they run over their workers like trash. You hate it when the powerful talk all philosophical about the impermanence of life, yet act as if they are infallible and immortal. People celebrate the dead, as long as it is not their own.

The haughty Americans are gungho with their might, able to crush everything with firepower and greenbacks. Europe is broken, as depicted by the leaky auditorium where the symposium is held. Despite all the talk about green technology and wanting to preserve the environment, people still cannot live without their power-hungry devices.

At the end of the day, the world is destroyed. People still go on with their lives, finding new ways to overcome the obstacle at hand and accepting destruction as the cost of making money. Again, the poor will bear the brunt of ecological damage.

Digger is a highly intellectual satire. It can be viewed from many angles: the Americans steamrolling their might, the boomer pushing their ideology without a care for the world, or Gen Z trying to do damage control, or the future generation laughing at the generation before them. It may not be for the masses.

P.S. One day you are a cat, then this! (showing an urn)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

A Cyclist’s Diary: Ride through Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan

2026-10-17T00:00:00.000+08:00

“It could be our only chance to do it”, we thought. After all, the master organiser extraordinaire, JS, staying true to the grit of his profession, had planned an elaborate itinerary, complete with plans A through C and beyond in case of obstacles. And I did not want to let him down, so there we were, just JS and I to do the course as a duo, cycling through the wild countries that could only be tamed by the Khans themselves, the Mongols, not the Bollywood Khans.
...

Call it bias, but because of their leaders’ association with Malaysia’s disgraced PM, Najib, my initial impression of Kazakhstan, even before going there, was dismal. To prove me right, my first contact with a Kazakh was unpleasant. The airport taxi driver tried to fleece us by concocting a story to charge six times the usual fare. We managed to talk ourselves out of it, but this kind of trickery seems to be a common pastime in Kazakhstan. On the last leg back to Almaty, another cab driver tried the same trick.

https://borderlessjournal.com/2026/10/16/a-cyclists-diary-ride-through-kazakhstan-and-kyrgyzstan/

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Investigative journalism going overboard?

2026-10-16T06:10:27.330+08:00

Primetime (2026)

Direction: Lance Oppenheim

https://a24films.com/films/primetime

This film appeared on the radar only when the media announced that the film would not be allowed to be screened in Malaysian cinemas. No reasons were given for the ban. Everyone just assumed that it was because it deals with a controversial subject matter: paedophilia. In the recent past, leaders tried to hush the subject with ridiculous statements like 'it was consensual', 'matters have been resolved, for they have married', and so on.

This film is based on an NBC programme named 'To Catch a Predator', where the host, Chris Hansen, worked with a vigilante group, 'Perverted Justice', to catch child predators in sting operations. They used decoys to lure and trap potential child predators into a house fitted with CCTVs, a camera crew and police. The perpetrator would be apprehended, much to the applause of the general public. Even the US Congress praised this programme for its exposé.

The show became controversial in 2007 when the team lured a district attorney to one of these dens. The police and the camera crew were waiting to trap the DA. Unfortunately, the DA, realising he was trapped, pulled the trigger on himself just before the shenanigans were about to be exposed. The DA's sister sued NBC for wrongful death. The matter was settled out of court. It was said that NBC, 'Perverted Justice' and the police were working too closely to create anxiety among the public. The police, it seemed, were at the beck and call of the media and the vigilante group. It was a case of investigative journalism going overboard.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

At book launch...

2026-10-14T00:00:00.000+08:00

Malaysian Indians: Impact And Pain
Narration of an Unending Saga of a Marginalised Community
"The State's Systemic Discrimination on a Vulnerable Segment of Society"
Author: Janakey Raman Manickam

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for letting me speak at this important event. Why do I say this event is important? As we realise, as the days go on, the country's history is slowly being rewritten, and the roles of certain groups of people are omitted and deemphasised. The book being launched today forms the backbone and a constant reminder to all Malaysians of who we are, who we were and how we came here. As the proverb goes, “one who does not know where he came from will not reach where he is going to!”

I have to congratulate Mr Janakey Raman on yet another fruit of his labour. I first came to know Mr Janakey Raman after reading his book, ‘Malaysian Indian Dilemma’, in 2011. I wrote a review of this extensively researched history of Malaysian Indians and their economic plights. The book received a roaring response and was also translated into Tamil.

Mr Janakey has dedicated his life to social research and activism, and he has an arsenal of statistics that could unlock the country's secrets and potentially rewrite the history that we've been told.

In the 1990s, while I was working at Hospital Tengku Ampuan Rahimah in Klang, I was waiting at a traffic light to enter the hospital compound when I saw an incident that made me think. An Indian female ward attendant was waiting for her bus at the bus stop. She looked anxious. She was probably late for something. Just then, another lady, also a female ward attendant, a Malay woman, pulled up to the bus stop in her Perodua Kancil to offer the Indian lady a lift. That got me thinking, “Why is it that even though both ladies do the same job, one can afford a car and the other cannot? Is it that one has excellent economic planning and the other does not? Why is there disparity? Is there a systemic ploy behind this?

Mr Janakey Raman is trying to answer some of the questions in the latest fruit of his labour, “Malaysian Indians: Impact and Pain. What you will read in this book is not pretty and may hurt our leaders, of the past and present, in areas that would hurt them most.

In the 1990s, if you wandered around Wilayah Complex in Kuala Lumpur on Friday nights, you would see scores of luxury or vintage cars parked there. Their owners were, of course, attending their regular watering hole, Chakravarthy. That is the place to be, to convince ourselves that all Malaysian Indians are doing very well. The reality is that our achievements are far from equal. On one end, we have high-achieving, internationally recognised Malaysian Indians. On the other hand, there are the oppressed Indian poor who are stuck in the same poverty trap for generations.

All is not lost. These days, more and more Malaysian Indians are telling their stories so that everyone knows about them. People are talking in podcasts. They are producing books and sending WhatsApp messages about the achievements of past and current Malaysian Indians. This is more urgent now than ever. Every day, the country's history is rewritten, and the role of Malaysian Indians is slowly being erased. Hence, Mr Janakey Raman's book is essential reading as a reminder.

The last thought that I want to leave you with, which has been plaguing me for so long, is this. If you look at the Indian diaspora brought to the world over, be it to South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, Suriname, Guyana, or Fiji, they have all done well. In many countries, they have prospered so much that other ethnicities envy their achievements. Well, Fiji even had a prime minister of Indian descent in 1999. In Malaysia, however, despite the country's international achievements, 40% of the B40 population remains Indian. Why? We have to find out!

Malaysian Indians: Impact and Pain tells the story of an unending saga of a marginalised community. The author theorises that this is the result of systemic discrimination, first by the colonial masters, who were mainly interested in milking wealth from the colonies to enrich themselves and their motherland. They were least interested in the welfare of their workers. When they left, Malaysian estate owners emulated the same business model, putting profit over social responsibility. When the 1969 race riots happened, the emphasis was on improving the living conditions of the Bumiputras. Again, the marginalised community was pushed aside. In the 1980s, as industrialisation was in high gear and estates were cleared, workers were left high and dry, with no living skills or housing. They also had to compete with foreign labour for work. They were just expected to find their own space in society.

Decades of failed investments and failed promises filled our history. Even our contributions and existence are slowly being erased as our heritage also disappears. Their temples, which had been around for more than a century, have, in a bizarre, twisted turn of events, become illegal or effectively nonexistent.

You can learn more about these and many more in Mr Janakey Raman’s book. Thank you.

For orders, contact the author at 6013 3927727.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

The affairs of the heart are complicated...

2026-10-11T10:38:37.115+08:00

Rental Family (English/Japanese; 2025)

Written and Directed by: Hikari

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14142060/

The genetic bonds that unite people are quite different from other connections that bind people together. We may confidently assert that we may be connected to the hip with someone based on likes and dislikes, social background, religious beliefs, or even Alma mater or place of origin; when the push comes to shove, the binding bonds of DNA sequence invariably prevail.

Increasingly, these bonds are being monetised. Mates, boyfriends, girlfriends, mock spouses and playmates can be found at a reasonable price. These are purely transactional and do not stand the test of time, or do they really? With the string of relationships and the vow of marriage becoming as impermanent as scribblings on a sandy beach. We merchandise relationships, put a price on intimacy, offering more on OnlyFans and scoot off from a broken union with a fat lump sum.

These days, not only are relationships mirages, but even everyday people are only a fragment of who they claim to be. Against this background, Phillip starts looking for a job in Japan. He is a small-time actor who is now struggling to find his next gig. A company named 'Rental Family' offers him a peculiar job. He is to act as a child's estranged American father to a Japanese girl so she can gain entry into a private school. Phillip agrees.

He has to show up as a soon-to-be husband to a Japanese lady's parents. This lady is actually a closeted lesbian who is secretly married to her wife and plans to migrate to Canada. The arrangement worked well. Everyone is happy.

Another assignment is to masquerade as a journalist to interview a demented man. His caregiver, his daughter, is hoping that it will jog his memory of his past.

Phillip soon realises that these transactions are not mere transactions but carry heavy baggage. The affairs of the heart are not so cut-and-dried.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Man of God beyond reproach?

2026-10-08T00:00:00.000+08:00

Death of a Pastor's Wife (2026)
Documentary, 3 episodes (Season 1)

https://letterboxd.com/film/death-of-the-pastors-wife-2026/

This is a documentary presentation of an ongoing case. A young wife of a pastor was found dead in her car, in a national park, far from where she was residing. The police deemed the death a suicide, but there is an increasing cry from the general public that the death was anything but self-induced and that her husband, the pastor, is as guilty as sin.

The documentary makers try to lay down the facts, perhaps with a lot of input from the victim's siblings, friends and former attendees of the Church the Pastor and his wife, the victim, used to preside over.

The Solid Rock Church in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. It was established by a charismatic preacher named John-Paul Miller. The Church had a huge following and was quite active with its singing sessions, preaching and motivational speeches by JP. Mica's mother and her many siblings moved to Myrtle Beach after their parents separated. Going through a tough time at 15, Mica found solace in the Church and its activities. JP was probably a father figure whom she lost. JP was already married at that time. Mica married a fellow congregant by the time she was 18. By 20, she and JP were caught by JP's wife red-handed in an extramarital affair. JP was 35. There is talk of some kind of grooming going on there. Mica was 13 when she joined the Church was already the pastor.

Mica and JP were married for about 9 years in what could be described as a toxic marriage. JP was the one who called the shots, using Biblical verses to cow Mica into submission. There was plenty of gaslighting and probably sexual abuse. Mica at one time was institutionalised for a psychotic episode, said to be due to an adverse anaesthetic reaction following a breast augmentation surgery. There were many hospitalisations subsequently and a hint of infidelity on the part of the pastor.

Things became worse with domestic violence, restraining orders, desperate 911 calls, medications and so on. She served divorce papers to her husband. Two days following that, Mica was reported missing and was found dead in a State Park far from her residence after apparently shooting herself with a gun she had bought earlier.

JP has not been charged with Mica's death but is awaiting trial for charges of cyberstalking and giving false evidence to the federal investigators. That would probably be a second season of Mica's death. At the end of the season, the story is left hanging. We only hear what appears to be the victim's family's POV of the whole situation. The police records paint the pastor in a very bad light, almost as a psychopath, with all the gaslighting, psychological manipulation, religious indoctrination and cyberstalking. Despite all this, her death is still classified as a suicide. Unfortunately, we do not hear the pastor's side of the story. JP was never charged with murder even though, from what this show seems to insinuate, all the evidence seems to lead to this.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Citizen Vigilantism, ok?

2026-10-04T12:54:44.265+08:00

https://www.facebook.com/kinitv/posts/a-petition-calling-for-
rohingyas-to-be-removed-from-malaysia
-has-been-taken-down/1455906693246600/

Of late, day in and day out, social media platforms in Malaysia are inundated with reels of citizen-vigilante action groups against so-called illegal stalls set up by the immigrant population, specifically the Rohingya, all over the city, especially around Selayang.

It looks like citizens have made it their birthright to walk into stalls and shops to demand their licences and work permits, accompanied by roving mobile phone cameras.

The commentator would then hurl insults at the immigrants who do not have a business permit in the first place. In Malaysia, certain goods deemed essential for daily consumption are protected by law. To sell cooking oil, cooking gas, and rice, one needs special business permits. There are certain bylaws regarding the sale of fresh produce and meat. These businesses default on all of these.

The vigilante group would verbally abuse the immigrants for overstepping the welcome given by the Malaysians to them. They were granted asylum as fellow brothers of the same faith, but the vigilantes assert they had overstayed their welcome. They accuse the Rohingyas of siphoning off the country's wealth, stealing locals' businesses, and even spending lavishly at their private functions and, unbelievably, talking back to the locals!

That is how things have become, with the locals taking the law into their own hands while the rightfully employed officers slumber on the job. This influx of Rohingyas started about 10 years ago after the political leaders gave a blanket rule to magnanimously allow Rohingya refugees to land on our shores when they were denied entry to Indonesia. As the general election was imminent, the leaders wanted to earn some brownie points among the majority population, who are Muslims as well. Malaysia did not need to do that, as it is not a signatory to the 1951 UNHCR Refugee Convention, but it did so anyway.

Since it is not a signatory to the convention, Malaysia is not required to provide them with accommodation, schooling, or healthcare. This duty is handled by the numerous NGOs and charitable organisations around the country. The refugees, after going through hell to reach where they were, still had the fire to work hard and achieve things in their lives. They were young; hormones ran high, so they married. That union produced offspring. Children needed to receive a sound education, since their final destination was expatriation to another host country. If Malaysia did not provide education for refugees, they made makeshift schools. That, apparently, was against the local law. To support their families, they needed to be creative in making money. Again, all their endeavours ran afoul of local laws.

Everyone has ambitions and wants to be a step better than the generation that preceded them. Youth is finite. They cannot be living as beggars or on handouts forever. Anyway, the refugees are willing to do the work that is shunned by locals for being dirty, dangerous and degrading.

The citizens are barking up the wrong tree. They should instead channel their anger towards the politicians who systematically allowed foreigners to flood the country, as well as the enforcement officers and civil servants who are on the take or work with one or two eyes shut! Humans, Rohingya, migrants or not, are just fulfilling their biological and social needs. They are simply completing their raison d'être.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

The burden of a grieving father…

2026-10-02T00:00:00.000+08:00

My Boy Jack (2007)
Director: Brian Kirk

https://www.primevideo.com/detail/
0SCANTPFXJ2P5YXSOFULRVJ3LV

We all know of Rudyard Kipling. We literally grew up listening to stories about Mowgli, Sher Khan and Baboo in the 'Jungle Book'. As we grew older (and wiser), we began to see another side to his writings. The poem 'The White Man's Burden' revealed his rather dark thoughts. He opined that the white race had a moral duty to civilise the natives. He pinned this legitimacy seal to imperial powers to advance their colonising ambitions.

As World War I drew closer, Kipling was busy pushing for Britain to mobilise its forces to fight the Germans for their invasion of Belgium. He was vehemently loud in the speeches that he prepared for Britain's propaganda messages to its citizens.

Naturally, his only son, his 17-year-old John, took up the idea of enrolling in the Navy. Rudyard had two daughters before John; the elder of them died young with pneumonia.

Now, the problem is that John keeps failing his medical entry examinations into the Navy and Army because of his shortsightedness. Wearing glasses is considered a liability and is automatically rejected.

Rudyard uses his influence to secure a place for John, not in the Navy, but in the Army. John starts his training with great difficulty but is eventually commissioned as a Second Lieutenant and later as a Lieutenant. He is much liked by his contemporaries. Unfortunately, in a gruelling trench war, just a few days after his 18th birthday, John is reported as missing in action at the Battle of Loos in France.

That uncertainty started the avalanche of emotions in the Kipling household. Months of enquiries and pestering the Army brought no closure. That led Rudyard to become active in the Imperial War Graves Commission (later renamed the Commonwealth War Graves Commission) to ensure that fallen British Empire heroes are given due recognition and are named, and that their graves are marked correctly. Only after three years, it became clear that John Kipling was shot by German gunfire after losing his glasses in the mud during an assault.

Rudyard Kipling, his wife and his remaining daughter spent the next years heartbroken. The Kipling heritage ended with him, as his daughter never had a child.

At the turn of the century, objections were raised as the Commission failed to honour the thousands of non-British soldiers, especially Indian warriors who took the bullet for their faux pas in Gallipoli. In 2026, it was announced that close to 10,000 names of fallen Indian soldiers under the banner of the British Empire were to be mentioned too.

A quite stirring story complemented by a sterling performance by Daniel Radcliffe of Harry Potter fame. Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem titled 'My Boy Jack' in 1916. Even though the poem mirrors his personal grief over the loss of a son, it was written as a prelude to his story 'Sea Warfare' about the Battle of Jutland. It was based on a celebrated fallen young naval hero, Jack Cornwell. John Kipling was never referred to as Jack in official documents, but was sometimes called Jack in the family.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

"Mathematics can change lives"

2026-09-29T05:58:51.657+08:00

I had written about Anand Kumar back in 2014, when his efforts to change the landscape of rural Bihar were in their infancy. He came to my attention when I watched a documentary about his ambition to coach his handpicked students from lower strata of society to achieve 100% admission to IIT. He had started the Super 30 programme in 2002. Anand was a Mathematical whiz who qualified to read Mathematics at Cambridge University but had to opt out due to financial constraints. He decided to start an institute instead.

Much time had passed since then.

Now, in 2026, in the company of some friends from Bihar who happened to be Ananji Kumarji’s students, I learned that he was in town. While attending a conference in Kuala Lumpur, he managed to set aside some time to meet up with his former students who had done well. I joined in as an independent observer.

It was an evening filled with an overflow of emotions, but not of the melodramatic kind. It was a meeting of grateful students who could not find a better way to express their gratitude to their teacher, who had lifted them out of the yoke of poverty and carried them to the international arena. Many of the students had cracked their IIT examinations, gone on to join MNCs, and completed postgraduate studies at overseas institutes of repute. Within a single generation, through education, they had leapfrogged themselves and their families up the food chain.

The Government of India also recognised Anandji's selfless efforts by honouring him with one of its highest civilian awards, the Padma Shri. Despite all the accolades behind his name, he continues his philanthropic work. Anand Kumar had a one-to-one informal session with his gleaming students and their young families, who had nothing but admiration for him. They feel that he played a part in the recent resurgence of the State of Bihar towards prosperity, after so long being cast out as the land of gundas, poverty, and chaos. Maybe one day, it will reach the glory days when Nalanda University and the Magadha Empire defined Bharat, which is also India.

https://www.riflerangeboy.com/2014/06/then-what.html

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Our endless appetite for news!

2026-09-26T00:00:00.000+08:00

Nightcrawler(2014)

Written & Directed by Don Gilroy

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Nightcrawler-DVD-
Jake-Gyllenhaal/dp/B00OZJ2WVW

The people's rapacious appetite for news as events unfolded probably began at the outset of the Gulf War, when the USA believed it had to overrun Kuwait. What was initially thought to be a short surgical strike that would last only a week, we know never stopped. During Operation Desert Storm, we were given the impression that cameras were actually following the tanks into war zones and bringing us live coverage from ground zero, just as Sanjaya narrated the events of the Kurukshetra War to King Dhritarashtra.

The cravings for news never abated after that. People kept wanting more. One after another, everything became groundbreaking news—the 2001 Twin Towers 9/11 tragedy, the 2004 Tsunami, the 2014 missing flight MH370 and the list just kept on going.

Soon after that, with the advent of mobile devices and the ease of recording outdoors, citizen journalism became a thing. News channels liberally paid contributors, even for the faintest and scrawniest raw footage, as long as it depicted live coverage of an event dear to the public.

This movie just shows the extent to which photojournalism and citizen reporting can go to capture the most sensational angle of the news. Sometimes crime scenes were altered, bodies were moved to get better lighting, and crime scenes were contaminated; in the rapacious pursuit of having events recorded on film, human decency, like helping the wounded, takes a back seat. Money and the lure of being in the limelight supersede everything else.

Nightcrawler is a neo-noir film that tells the tale of a petty thief who scavenges public property for a few bucks and suddenly discovers the lucrative business of photojournalism on the violence-filled streets of Los Angeles. While most of the city slept, there was a wealth of money in selling exclusive footage of violent and morbid events to a local news station.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

A sad end to an era.

2026-09-23T00:00:00.000+08:00

The Last Moghul (The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857)

Author: William Dalrymple (2006)

In our secondary-school history lessons, we were taught that the 1857 rebellion by sepoys serving in the East India Company’s army was caused by their unease about handling Enfield rifles and cartridges greased with beef and pork fat. The sepoys needed to bite open the cartridges before loading their rifles. This was unacceptable to Hindu and Muslim soldiers alike. They revolted, but the British managed to suppress the resistance and continued to rule India for another 90 years. Unfortunately, that may be only part of the truth about what actually happened.

This book suggests that there was more to the rebellion than meets the eye. It gives a minute-by-minute account of what transpired before and during the months following the outbreak of the 1857 uprising. Some disgruntled Indian soldiers in the East India Company’s army—Hindus and Muslims alike—refused the high command’s order to use the newly commissioned Enfield rifles. Mangal Pandey was court-martialled and hanged soon afterwards. Before long, some of his contemporaries also refused orders and were imprisoned.

Resentment towards the British had begun well before the introduction of the Enfield rifle. Its roots went much further back.

India was already in a different league before Western imperial forces entered the country. The British were awed by the Mughals, who ruled India and displayed extraordinary wealth. Sir Thomas Roe, the first official ambassador sent by the British Crown under King James I, was mocked for his choice of gifts for the Mughal court. The gifts, which included paintings, a carriage, maps, and a cloak, were regarded by the Mughals as cheap and worthless. The Mughals reciprocated with superior maps, priceless linen and other treasures. It proved to be a diplomatic nightmare for the British East India Company (BEIC).

Early BEIC arrivals were respectful of local people and integrated well into the community. Some married Indians and embraced the Indian way of life. The Anglo-Indian community thrived.

Over the years, however, attitudes changed. Possibly influenced by the increasing influx of missionaries, the newcomers began to look upon Indians with scorn. They regarded the local population as uncultured heathens, increasingly emphasising religion and promoting the incorporation of Christianity into everyday life. Morning prayers were introduced in government offices and even in the army, offending the local people. Then came the controversy surrounding the Enfield cartridges. It began with a group of sepoys refusing to obey British orders. They were court-martialled, humiliated and stripped of their uniforms.

By 1837, Mughal hegemony in India had dwindled to the confines of Delhi. Emperor Bahadur Shah II, also known as Zafar, and his family were largely restricted to the Red Fort, as was their influence. Zafar—a poet, a Sufi and an old man—was quite comfortable with this arrangement. The British paid him a regular pension.

The detailed events surrounding the Sepoy Rebellion—also known as the Sepoy Mutiny, the Indian Rebellion and India’s First War of Independence—were documented in the Mutiny Papers, written in Urdu and Persian. They provide a detailed account of the sequence of events from the perspectives of the British, the royal family and ordinary people caught up in the turmoil.

The rebels—disgruntled Indian soldiers in the BEIC army—freed their imprisoned comrades and rushed to the Red Fort, where they strong-armed Zafar into becoming their nominal leader. Meanwhile, another group of devout religious leaders and volunteers joined the fray. Over the years, they had witnessed the Christianisation of India and had long wanted to change the status quo. Zafar, whose mother was Hindu, was a fair-minded man who managed Hindu–Muslim relations well. The jihadists, however, sometimes created unnecessary tensions between the two communities. One such incident occurred during Eid al-Adha in 1857, when they were determined to slaughter cows for the occasion. To avert unnecessary friction, Zafar decreed a ban on cow slaughter.

The uprising is sometimes described as the ‘Raj’s Stalingrad’. It witnessed considerable brutality and cultural destruction. The British tried to inflame ethnic tensions by pitting one group against another. Both sides—the rebels and the British—worsened the situation through widespread looting and robbery. The Hindu community, which included many merchants and business owners, bore the brunt of these losses. The unrest soon spread from Meerut to Delhi to Kanpur to Lucknow and, by June 1858, was said to have been quenched in Gwalior.

There was also considerable betrayal within the warring factions. Zafar’s younger wife, keen to install her son as heir to the 82-year-old emperor, sought British assistance to achieve this end. The rebels’ lack of cooperation and communication proved a blessing for the British, who mobilised resources from Bengal, Punjab, and the North-Western Provinces to retake Delhi. They also employed psychological warfare, bribery and covert operations to provoke communal divisions in the city.

Moreover, a solar eclipse that occurred amid the turmoil sent many rebels scurrying home, as they interpreted it as a bad omen from the universe. The mutiny, however, also spurred many local leaders—including Nana Sahib of Kanpur, Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi, Tatya Tope, Babu Veer Kunwar Singh of Bihar and Rao Tula Ram of Haryana—to rise to the occasion.

After Delhi fell, Zafar took refuge at Humayun’s Tomb. He and his family were subjected to a sham trial. His princes were executed, and Zafar and his wives were exiled to Rangoon for treason, formally bringing the rule of the last Mughal emperor to an end. The British East India Company later transferred governance of India to the Crown.

Zafar spent his remaining years in melancholy. He wrote poems lamenting the grief and heartbreak of exile from his homeland, sometimes using burnt sticks to write moving Urdu poems on walls. He died a broken man in 1862, aged 87. The British buried him in an unmarked grave to prevent the site from becoming a focus for future anti-British uprisings. In 1991, workers discovered the grave during excavation, and later erected a shrine over it.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

How the RBI Governor saved India?

2026-09-20T12:26:57.161+08:00

Governor: The Silent Saviour (2026)
Director: Chinmay D. Mandlekar

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/entertainment/hindi/movie-details/
governor-the-silent-saviour/movieshow/130622351.cms

In the 21st century, India seems to be on a roll. With a young, qualified, internet-savvy population proficient in the world’s lingua franca, the world is its oyster. Its economy, by GDP, ranks sixth after the US, China, Germany, Japan, and the UK.

Its position in 1991, however, was quite dismal: India ranked between 15th and 17th place and accounted for less than 1% of global GDP.

Independent India started life as one of the poorest countries in the world, a far cry from its pre-imperial era, when India and China accounted for two-thirds of the world’s GDP. Nehruvian Fabian economic policies were socialist in nature, and the government of the day had tight control over how money was spent.

In the 1980s, however, under the leadership of Rajiv Gandhi, India increased government spending. External borrowing also became significantly heavy. A growing debt burden and rising inflation were noticed. Tax revenue collection was also dismal. By 1990–91, following the US invasion of Kuwait, oil prices had risen. The import bill increased, and foreign confidence declined. India had very low reserves. By June 1991, it had sufficient reserves to pay for only three weeks of imports. Political instability following the fall of Rajiv Gandhi’s government and the subsequent short-lived rules of V. P. Singh (1989–90) and Chandra Shekhar (1990–91) did not help the situation. Leaders had to focus on their own survival rather than lay out concrete steps to strengthen the economy.

S. Venkitaramanan was appointed Governor of the Reserve Bank of India by the Chandra Shekhar government. Under the Narasimha Rao government, with policies introduced by Finance Minister Manmohan Singh and the RBI Governor, an emergency contingency plan was implemented to address India’s balance-of-payments crisis.

Manmohan Singh oversaw broader fiscal and structural reforms, while the Governor handled monetary, foreign-exchange, and banking matters. It is said that Venkitaramanan, while serving as Finance Secretary (1985–89) under the Rajiv Gandhi government, had alerted the government to the impending danger.

The IMF forwarded a loan while India strategised on measures to improve its finances. The IMF also helped to improve international credibility. The RBI mobilised gold from the country, including 20 tonnes confiscated from smugglers, as collateral to secure loans from the banks of Japan, England, and Switzerland. The gold was India’s last resort to secure the loan and had to be transferred physically and discreetly to convince creditors that India had the reserves. It worked. By November 1991, the RBI had repaid the loan.

P.S. A memorable quote from the movie: “Beyond truth and lies lies responsibility.”

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

The churning of the primordial soup!

2026-09-17T00:00:00.000+08:00

Newton's Third Law (Telugu; 2016)

Written and Directed by Rajesh Karna

Newton's Third Law of Motion is fundamentally different from that of Karma. According to Newton's laws, equal and opposite forces act in tandem to make an object move. They work in opposite directions and do not cancel each other out.

In Karma, however, the focus is more on the philosophical or moral consequences of one's actions. There are no two opposing forces; rather, one action affects another, as in the butterfly effect, where the flutter of a butterfly's wing can cascade into a tornado, as suggested by Edward Norton Lorenz.

In the Karmic sense, actions are actions. They are neither good nor bad actions. Whatever action one takes, it can set off. Nor is promiscuity triggering climate change. Good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people. It is all an interplay of players in the primordial soup, which can be swayed by a single flicker of action.

This story is an interesting one that happens to involve two deaths. A young man in his 20s falls from his balcony. A young mother dies in an apparent hit-and-run, leaving her young child staring blankly into space. The police investigate. That was only the prologue. The current storyline shifts to the present, when someone receives a book in the mail about the incident above. The receiver gets hot under the collar and summons the writer to his mansion.

The story then unfolds. The young man, his buddy, his staff nurse mother, his alcoholic, hot-tempered father and his shortcut to wealth, involving a dangerous gangster. On the other side, the young mother receives news that her husband is killed in a fire. The only connection between these two families is that the young man's mother and the young mother are both nurses and working colleagues.

The joy of the storytelling is that it goes from twist to twist without appearing too outlandish for Indian movie standards. 4.5/5

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

We Come with Nothing…

2026-09-16T00:00:00.000+08:00

It was just another meeting to catch up. The topic that cropped up was about downsizing. One of my friends, now in her sixties, realised that her house was filled with too many things. I do not know whether she had just heard about Marie Kondo, but that was what she had been talking about all night.

It all started when she was growing up among the members of the lower heap of the food chain. Her elders told her to value everything in life. She was taught that even a small twig has its use: to pick the teeth. The compulsion to keep and not waste began

https://borderlessjournal.com/2026/09/15/we-come-with-nothing/

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Use God-given assets to succeed?

2026-09-13T15:47:00.000+08:00

Baby Face (1933)
Directed by Alfred E. Green

I remember someone who was quite a player in his heyday. He left a trail of broken hearts, just moving on after getting bored with his latest flavour of the month or when the girlfriend becomes too clingy. The next thing I heard, after a few years, was of him being hospitalised after a suicide attempt. Apparently, one of the girlfriends he fell head over heels for rejected his advances. The affairs of the heart are sometimes difficult to predict.

Trainees, in those days, were expected to manage all patients in the ward and to rattle off their treatment regimens and latest investigation results at the drop of a hat. Failure to do so will invite verbal and personal abuse from the seniors, all in the name of excellent patient care. In every batch, there would be repeat offenders who would not live up to the mark. Somehow, they would get away with murder, using all of their God-endowed assets. Watching this pre-Code movie rekindled those old thoughts.

Pre-Code movies refer to Hollywood's post-sound movies in the 1920s and the period when strict censorship was enforced in 1934. The Hays Code was deemed necessary to curb the portrayal of crime, sex, and sexual manipulation in a positive light and as rewarding. As with this movie, many filmmakers had to change storylines or dialogue to conform to the Code.

Looking through today's lens, the story may be construed as a feminist rebel yell. But then, maybe not, as here we see female empowerment is seen to be abused to fulfil personal agendas. We also see Nietzsche's text manipulated to justify the heroine's shenanigans through his fictitious book titled 'Thoughts For A Reason'. Nietzsche had always said in the book, "face life as you find it - defiantly and unafraid. Waste no time yearning for the moon. Crush out all sentiments".

Barbara Stanwyck, who was praised for her performance here, plays Lily, a hostess and escort at the abusive father's bootleg bar. The characters who end up are mainly uncouth gangsters and lowbrow members of society. The story seems to suggest the father may have abused her and even encouraged her daughter to cosy up with an important client. A fire destroys the joint and kills her father.

Lily and her servant/confidante were at a crossroads. A cobbler, a frequent visitor of the pub, advises her to migrate to New York to build a good life for herself. That is when she starts holding the bull by its horns. Using her physical charm and feminine prowess, she manipulates men to climb the proverbial corporate ladder at a bank, leaving a trail of broken hearts in succession. The series of boyfriends grows more affluent and powerful over time.

The screened version showed Lily as remorseful and content to start over from the bottom. This type of poetic justice is not seen in the original, uncensored cut (restored in 2004) version. It exposes a significantly more uncompromising view of male hypocrisy and female agency.

P.S. Nope, this movie is not about the life and times of America's notorious bank robber, Baby Face Nelson.

P.P.S. Another Nietzschean quote in the movie is 'you must be a master, not a slave. Exploit yourself.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Only some deserve sensitivity?

2026-09-10T07:04:07.811+08:00

Zoolander (2001)

Director: Ben Stiller

https://letterboxd.com/film/zoolander/

It is now water under the bridge. When Trump made a stopover in Kuala Lumpur last year, he was welcomed by a gleaming Malaysian Prime Minister. Trump was so happy with the hospitality that he broke protocol and started strutting his dance moves with a random Malaysian dancer who was part of the welcoming crew.

Nobody remembered the movie Zoolander, which Hollywood made 25 years earlier, and thought that assassinating the Malaysian PM would be a comedic piece. The average Malaysian would not have had the chance to watch it, as our Censorship Board had banned it. The enthusiastic few would have viewed it after a visit to their friendly local DVD seller, whose network would have a pirated version at hand even before the movie had a theatrical screening.

The Government thought, rightly so, that it was offensive to outrightly mention the call to assassinate the leader of a sovereign state. Most films usually create fictitious countries for these types of acts, such as Wakanda in Marvel and Tomania in Charlie Chaplin's 'The Great Dictator'. But no, it is Malaysia, and it is mentioned 27 times.

Another reason the ruling party, then led by Mahathir Mohamed, was up in arms about the movie was its choice of actor to play the Prime Minister of Malaysia. They thought the actor, an American-Japanese named Woodrow W Asai, looked too Chinese for their liking. There is an unwritten law in the country on who could be the leader of the country or the state under Malay supremacy rhetoric (Ketuanan Melayu) professed by UMNO, the most dominant political power in the country. So, a Chinese face did not cut it!

25 years on, nothing has changed in Malaysia. If anything, with the rise of identity politics worldwide, Malaysia's own brand of divisive politics has gained further legitimacy. What Malaysians thought was reform turned out to be the same garbage, packaged in different vessels. The politicians have sold their souls to Satan to control the majority of seats. It looks like UMNO will hail in the next general election as well.

Zoolander is a lowbrow satire that takes a dig at the modern macho image that modelling agencies project onto men. The male fashion models who are supposed to dictate how a real man should appear in public are portrayed as shallow-minded, effeminate, easily manipulated, unthinking beings who crave to be in the limelight. To many, these narcissistic icons are their role models. Are we heading to a dystopian world of immature humans, less of substance but only colourful outer wrappings?

Derek Zoolander, a three-time model of the year, loses his fourth attempt at the award to an up-and-coming younger model, Hansel. The frustrated Derek is lured by his agent and another fashion mogul to assassinate the new Malaysian Prime Minister, who decided to outlaw child labour, upon which the whole fashion industry apparently thrives. What follows is a goofy storyline meant to entertain only Americans.

P.S. It appears that hurting sentiments only applies to Americans, not the rest of the world. Since the film was released only two weeks after the 9/11 attacks, the director took the executive decision to digitally remove the Twin Towers from the New York skyline as a mark of respect.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

There's a difference between them and us!*

2026-09-05T21:20:49.018+08:00

Operation Safed Sagar (Operation White Ocean; 2026)

Miniseries (E1-6)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt36643714/

US Ambassador to India Sergio Gor's first visit to Jammu and Kashmir has triggered a diplomatic uproar in Pakistan because, in his speech, he mentioned that Jammu and Kashmir was an important part of India. Pakistan's stance, since 1947, has been that Maharajah Hari Singh's accession of the princely state to India is illegal. Being a Muslim-majority state, Pakistan asserts that it should be governed by Pakistan. As far as the UN and many countries that support it are concerned, its people are yet to determine, through a plebiscite, where they want to be. That is why, during the Pahalgam attack, the world heard the Prime Minister of Malaysia, Anwar Ibrahim, refer to Kashmir as 'India-occupied Kashmir'. Turkiye and many Islamic nations do not recognise the Line of Control (LoC) as the demarcation that separates the Indian union territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh from Pakistan-administered regions like Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan.

The modus operandi has always been the same. Be it 1947, when Pakistani soldiers masqueraded as Kashmiri tribal shepherds, starting a skirmish or 1999, when their soldiers infiltrated the no-man's-land dressed as Mujahideen, all the Pakistani government did was deny, deny and deny. They asserted that Pakistani intelligence had no activities at the disputed border and that India was weaving a fiction. The irony of it all was that all of this was happening while India and Pakistan were engaged in cross-border diplomacy. Atal Vajpayee, the then PM of India, went on the inaugural New Delhi-Lahore bus service through the Wagah border into Pakistan to sign the Lahore Declaration with Pakistani PM Nawaz Sharif.

As the saying goes, 'all countries have their armies. In Pakistan, the Army has a country'. From 1958, after General Muhammad Ayub Khan became the first military dictator following a coup d'état, the Army has always held the reins over the democratically elected civilian PM. The sudden ouster of Imran Khan after he began criticising the Pakistani Army is a testament to this.

This miniseries is a highly engaging, big-budget TV production that successfully evokes Indian nationalism in its viewers, whilst painting a rather 'lesser than human' kind of persona upon their arch rivals, the Pakistanis.

While Sharif was holding peace talks with Vajpayee, the Army, led by General Parvez Musharraf (who later ousted Sharif as PM), was not having any of those. In their mind, Kashmir is Muslim land, and per the agreement before Partition, it should be given to Pakistan. Period. It did not matter if Kashmiris wanted to remain with India. Cladestinely, Pakistani soldiers crossed over to the LoC, spilt over into Kargil district and occupied strategic checkpoints.

That is where the Indian Air Force Squadron #17 comes in. The story is centred around them. While engaged in one of their aerial reconnaissance drills, one of their fighter jets is hit by a Pakistani missile. To rescue his comrade, another fighter pilot rushed to his rescue. Both jets crashed. The second pilot was, however, apprehended by the Pakistanis, interrogated, tortured and subsequently killed mercilessly. India soon realised that the Pakistanis had infiltrated deep into the LoC.

This started an international scare. Two nuclear nations at loggerheads did augur well for regional stability, the big powers, especially the US, were heard saying. The trouble is that the US were in the precarious position of arming both parties, with preferential treatment to Pakistan, of course.

The Indians were using the Russian-made MiG planes with American-made GPS systems. That is when the Indians realised that the US-made systems were compromised, perhaps intentionally so, to ensure India's failure. Embodying the Indian spirit of jugaad, the Indian Air Force successfully executed critical, unprecedented high-altitude aerial operations to overcome its enemy.

Throughout the whole imbroglio, the Pakistani PM Nawaz Sharif was kept in the dark about his Army's operations. Even its Air Force was not brought in. By the time the Kargil War reached its zenith and the Pakistani side was losing, there were mounting pressures to call for a truce. It was a soul-crushing defeat for the Pakistani forces, yet again. Pakistan faced diplomatic isolation. Soon afterwards, Musharaff executed a military takeover and became the supreme leader of Pakistan. For India, the Kargil War was a wake-up call to develop its own expertise. It became evident that their technological know-how jumped by leaps and bounds. Proof of this was seen later in the subsequent space missions.

P.S. 'There's a difference between them and us!*' is a line from the miniseries. Just because the other side acted barbarically, it does not justify doing the same. That makes the difference!