Safety Not Guaranteed (2012): [*** 3 stars out of 5] A sweet movie that aspires to greatness, but fails. It starts with a interesting premise: A magazine writer notices an ad by  someone asking for volunteers to join him on a time travel mission. Perhaps there is a human interest story to be milked, so off he goes with two interns. Or at least that is the official justification, because the writer also wants to track down an old flame who lives in the same location. While he goes about that, one of the intern chases down the time traveler and tries to find out what is going on. The movie keeps you wondering throughout. Is the story for real? Is he really going back in time? In that respect, “Safety Not Guaranteed” ends on a perfect note.

Unfortunately, the movie seems low on discipline. The second intern is an unnecessary appendage simply to make a point that would be better on those silly motivational posters. The secondary plot (with the old love interest) is interesting, but ends abruptly. There is a robbery that should have had more immediate consequences than it actually has. The special appearance of Kristen Bell (when juxtaposed with the other actors) is jarring. The movie becomes a victim of its indie style, favoring quirkiness over realism at times. I think the movie could have been much better by either taking itself much more seriously, or going entirely the opposite route of making itself funnier, but it attempts to blend seriousness and comedy, ultimately resulting in a unsatisfactory mix.

Kahaani (2012 — Hindi): [* 1 star out of 5] A big disappointment. “Kahaani” self-destructs with an absurd ending — yes, the one where the director wants to completely stun you, but only ends up making you feel like a fool. “Kahaani” purports to be about a pregnant woman trying to find her lost husband in Calcutta (now Kolkata). She enlists the help of the local police and realizes that his disappearance seems to be mixed up with the Indian intelligence agencies and recent terror attacks. The investigation is engrossing and the director also gives us a nice look at Kolkata and feeds us some pop culture (people say “b” instead of “v”). Vidya Balan as the pregnant lady and Parambrata Chatterjee as the police officer who helps her make a good combination. The director introduces a bit of chemistry that makes things interesting, but sensibly does not take it much further. Anyway, things come to a head when Balan meets the terrorist who seems to have had something to do with her husband’s disappearance. Lo and behold, we find that she is not actually pregnant, but was faking it to find him to take revenge for her husband’s death. Apparently, she had been trained by an intelligence agent friend and now has the skills to take out the terrorist in hand-to-hand combat.

This is mind-bogglingly dumb. If you actually knew this spoiler before you saw the movie, the entire premise of the movie falls apart. It is quite obvious she knows many things that others don’t. And therefore she does not have to start from scratch, especially not by going to the local police station and asking them to start a search. An important turning point is when a character recognizes someone from a photo and then points Balan to a data archival location to verify this information. But Balan knew this! She already knew his name and his entire history. Also, then there was this plot thread where she throws off the police with information gained from what she observed (kind of like “The Usual Suspects” end scene) Not only is the deception part ridiculous, she was supposed to have been training for several months and then she cooks up a story only after she starts the mission? Gimme a break.

Lakshya (2004 — Hindi): [*** 3 stars out of 5] “Lakshya” is like a clean shirt with a few dirt spots. It is very good for most of the time that the sore spots stick out. The movie is about a drift-less student who finds his purpose in the Indian army fighting the Kargil War. Compared to typical Bollywood movies, “Lakshya” goes out of its way to be sober and avoid melodramatic scenes. It also surprises you at times such as when the student enrolls in the Academy and then runs away. I was pleasantly surprised at the production values, such as the stunning scene when a group of soldiers scale a steep cliff. Very scary, very well done. Finally, a stellar cast. What are the weaknesses? One is the over-acting at times by Hrithik Roshan and Amitabh Bachchan, though they do a good job most of the time. Then there is the tension between nationalism and jingoism, which the director is not quite able to balance, for example in a strange scene where one character talks about peace and another starts questioning the first person about the rights of the soldiers who died in a recent battle. More like one of those arguments on Facebook where people keep talking past each other. (Maybe that was the point.) Then the romantic misunderstandings (the short-lived engagement with a third party) and family dynamics (the “Prodigal Son”). A little moderation instead of masala would have been good.

The Grey (2012): [**** 4 stars out of 5] “The Grey” is a masterpiece of disaster in the wilderness. How would you survive if your plane crash lands in the Alaskan snow? How about those chances if there is a pack of wolves after you trying to make you their next meal? “The Grey” is uncompromising, showing death and catastrophe up close. It works as a thriller. It also works well as a philosophical work, asking hard questions about death, God and the afterlife, such as a strong scene where a character shouts towards the heavens. I didn’t expect the ending it had, though that seemed the most logical of all possible ones. (A note: Make sure to watch past the credits because there are a couple of seconds of the movie after the last credit.)

A few missteps, though. First is the uneven pacing. The movie starts extremely slow and veers towards the mystical, taking unnecessary time to provide plot details and introduce the characters. In some movies, this tactic might make sense. Here, it is irritating. Second, we have the obnoxious character who tries to second-guess the leader of the survivors. It is too much of a cliche and again very annoying. Finally, yes, we do expect characters to die off one by one leaving behind the key players, but how about not making it so obvious, like killing exactly one person in every new scene. Overall though, a great watch.

James Surowiecki’s “The Wisdom of Crowds” is about a simple concept: The collective judgment of many people in the right circumstances can be consistently better than even the experts in the crowd. This is a surprising insight because we think of crowds as “mobs”, unthinking, unruly and prone to emotions. But mob behavior is only one instance of many people interacting together. There are many other environments and examples all around us where individuals acting at the same time make good and accurate decisions.

One example is betting markets which have usually performed very well against highly paid experts. This has been true of elections such as the 2012 Presidential elections where the political pundits kept talking of a close election when the final outcome was a massive victory for one side. Of course, supposedly neutral journalists and pundits have an incentive not to offend one side too much, but the vast divergence between their predictions and the actual result shows that skewing was not as much of a problem as insufficient knowledge or lack of understanding of existing data. Now, in betting markets, this same issue could be true of each participant, but each person’s weakness is cancelled by someone else’s in the opposite direction. The more people involved, the better the predictions.

Surowiecki formalizes this. He suggests that for crowds to be wise, they need to be diverse, independent and decentralized. This is, obviously, the opposite of a mob which tends to be composed of people who are similar (in thought, if not in physical characteristics) and are usually influenced by one or more leaders playing on their emotions. It is also the opposite of what happens in many corporations and government bodies. Surowiecki uses the example of the Columbia disaster to show where incorrect group coordination can result in tragedy. Surowiecki goes into more detail and examples of situations where crowds can be useful and where other factors influence the crowd to render collective judgment problematic.

A good book, though a little cluttered: It could have been better if the author had stayed more above the examples and focused on the main theme.

I have changed many beliefs over the years. Among them, one of the important ones has been my attitude towards cities. I always thought of village life and places far from cities as peaceful and green. I still prefer the quiet of the country, but in societal terms, city dwellers are doing the rest of society a favor. Edward Glaeser’s book “Triumph of the City” explains why.

Glaeser explains how cities can be the fountain of innovation simply because there are so many people interacting with each other and ideas have a greater chance of spreading. Cities makes us happier because they have facilities that are very difficult to sustain in smaller communities. For example, cities have many restaurants with ethnic cuisine from different parts of the globe because their larger population allows restaurant entrepreneurs to stay in business and also offer inexpensive fare. The same is the case with luxury goods, museums, theaters and so on. People earn higher wages by moving to cities because their work is much more productive. Different successful cities have had different paths to success, some through heavy investment in higher education, others through business-friendly policies and yet others through efficient management. Cities are greener because of their lower energy use due to pedestrian travel, public transportation, and efficient use of land.

However, cities have their own challenges. Until recently, providing a healthy environment or even clean drinking water was difficult, let alone curbing corruption and incompetence among city officials. But cities which have been successful have overcome many of these problems, even if some had to resort to less-than-democratic means. In the United States, the allure of the suburbs, highway networks, the mortgage interest deduction, short-sighted efforts by environmentalists and preservationists and good-old NIMBYism has contributed to higher housing costs inside many cities, especially in the coastal regions. The rise of the Sun Belt has partly been because of migration away from crowded cities in the North-East and South-West that refuse to allow growth-friendly building policies.

“Triumph of the City” does an excellent job of examining these and other aspects of cities. Glaeser does not imagine cities to be the solution to every problem. Indeed, he talks about failed cities as well as now-successful cities who had failed in the past. He discusses the issues that are holding back cities, even successful cities who have managed despite poor policies. He goes in length about the mentality that drives some environmentalists to opposition to taller buildings and higher density, but which turn out to be spectacularly bad for the environment and harm the poor and middle class. Matthew Yglesias’s book “The Rent is Too Damn High” covers some of the same ground.

One weakness of the book is that at places (especially at the beginning), the author seems to obscure what he thinks of a particular situation. Even though he discusses at length about how cities are green, at one point, he suggests that he is not sure about climate change, even though he is for restricting carbon emissions. He is also vague about his thoughts on the racial problems in the 1970s and 1980s that affected cities in the United States and that still influence politics and policies. Lastly, the title “Triumph of the City” would have been a nice one, if it weren’t for the Hitler propaganda movie “Triumph of the Will”. And it is a strange name for a book by an author whose father emigrated from West Germany in the 1960s.

Nate Silver acquired a lot of prominence in recent times as a result of conservative commentators questioning his predictions (in his New York Times blog) of the 2012 Presidential Elections. Those predictions were in odds with the conventional wisdom of political pundits and journalists (who are careful not to offend both sides of the political divide or try to offend both equally). They were also contradictory to the noises coming out of both political campaigns: The Obama campaign, who did not want an optimistic prediction to damp turnout in key precincts and the Romney campaign who did not want a bandwagon effect for the Obama team and, as it turns out, was also deluded about their actual political strength. In the end, the runaway Obama victory in the electoral college (and a larger-than-expected popular vote margin) was a big win for the quantitative analyst who had got it right. Of course, Nate was not alone. There were other analysts and betting markets who had predicted similar results all along. But Nate with his prominent position in NYT became the public face of the quants verus pundit debate.

Those, like me, who have been following politics more closely, know Nate Silver from much earlier. He was famous in political circles during the 2008 elections where he got almost all of his electoral college predictions right. At that time, his FiveThirtyEight blog (named after the number of electoral votes) was an independent entity which had grown out of his anonymous postings as “Poblano” on the left Daily Kos website. There have always been quantitative analysts, notably, Andrew Tanenbaum (of computer networks fame) who created electoral-vote.com for the 2004 elections. But Nate Silver brought a refreshing new style to political analysis, combining statistical analysis with historical trends, and writing amazingly well.

This book follows in that tradition. To my surprise, it was mostly about topics not directly related to politics, though it does have a lot about sports and games, another of Silver’s interests. Nate Silver looks at the financial crisis of 2008, predictions of political pundits on TV, the debate over sports quants, sports betting, chess machines, the poker craze, weather reports, climate change, earthquake warnings, economic analysis, efficient markets, flu outbreaks, and terror attacks. He looks at who is getting it right, how better they are getting at it and how difficult it is to get right. For example, we are much better at predicting weather than we are at predicting earthquakes. But we were more worse at predicting weather a few decades ago. And we still have a long way to completely predicting weather correctly. And sometimes, weather forecasters do not provide accurate reports because they have other incentives (such as the audience who sees their reports) to change forecast probabilities.

For the uninitiated to statistics, this is a nice book to understand how probabilities work, especially in cases where they seem to defy common sense, such as in applications of Bayes Theorem. For advanced readers, there are great examples, especially the amazing one about the computer bug in Deep Blue which was interpreted by Garry Kasparov as a sign of highly superior thinking and which troubled him enough to lose his confidence and the chess match series, handing the first victory of machine over man in chess. There is a lot to digest in this book including both theory and examples. But for all its technical material, it really is a fantastic and easy read.

A suspense thriller works if it fulfills two conditions. One is that it keeps you at the edge of your seat, wondering what happens next and perhaps wondering why what just happened. Second is that it  comes to a satisfactory conclusion at the end. Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl” does great on the first, but fails miserably on the second. This failure is enough to ruin what started out as a novel that promised more beyond the usual whodunit book. But to explain that, the rest of this review promises you spoilers!

The first part of the book starts with a very interesting form. Alternate chapters have a narration in the present by Nick Dunne and pages from a diary by his now-missing wife, Amy Dunne. It is a cool twist on the flashback device, even if the entries in the diary seem to have been written in real-time rather than, say, at the end of the day when the writer is aware of everything that happened for that diary entry (though perhaps we should excuse this because of the twist in the tale explained below). In the present, Nick slowly comes under suspicion. The narration and the diary slowly reveal their past life: how the couple found each other in New York City, how they lost their jobs and finally end up in Missouri. Their relationship is increasingly troubled and we wonder how much Nick is responsible.

Well, it turns out that the unreliable narrator is Amy, who wants to get Nick arrested (and perhaps executed) for murder. So she writes a false diary, fakes her disappearance and plants enough evidence to make it seem that she was murdered and dumped to dispose of her body. We don’t have to wait till the end of the book as this is revealed midway through the book. And so we get to see her story after the faked disappearance and Nick’s increasingly desperate attempts to prove his innocence. However, Amy, who apparently had been well-planned in her vendetta against Nick, is a fish out of water while hiding out and after a couple of skirmishes with criminal lowlife and a friend who takes advantage of her situation, she returns home and somehow manages to convince the police that she was abducted. Nick is kept in line with threats and there the book peters out.

There are several problems with the twist in the middle. One is that the Amy of the fake diary was a sympathetic character and the real Amy turns out to be a psychopath. The twist invalidates much of the first part of the book where we see two young people facing problems in their relationship and trying to work them out. The loss of both their jobs and their move to flyover country would even have made for a separate book itself. But because the whole diary is a lie and because even Nick seems to have been concealing things, that part is entirely washed out. But then we get the real Amy who the book reveals to be a mentally disturbed individual right from childhood and is just doing to Nick what she has always done to other people who have pissed her off.

In this context, the ending seems way off. Amy never gets her desserts. We see Nick trapped without any peaceful resolution at least in the short-term. Also there is very little change in the status quo including the move to Missouri which triggered many problems in the first place. Also problematic is the behavior of the police. During Amy’s disappearance, when there is not even a body, we see the cops being very suspecting, showing initiative and resolve. But at the end, they seem to just throw their hands up in the air even though an actual murder (with a body) is involved. You would think they would try harder to break through some of the lies.

I read through to the end of the book, hoping for a more meaningful conclusion. Unfortunately, I was disappointed.

Looper (2012): [**** 4 stars out of 5] “Looper” is a superlative time-travel tale with an intriguing premise: Criminal gangs send people to be murdered back in time and to erase traces of their crimes, they finally send the older version of the murderers back to be murdered by their younger selves. For most of the duration of the movie, the time travel mechanism seems to run without flaws resulting in a mesmerizing and thought-provoking action movie with great work by Bruce Willis, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and the 7-year child actor Pierce Gagnon. One issue, which you realize after the movie ends, is that the central loop associated with the Rainmaker seems to be a chicken-and-egg problem that is never resolved by the plot. But we see the same problem with movies like the Terminator, so that is not such a big deal. Our sympathies get shifted around because of how the plot evolves. Unfortunately the key role of the young Rainmaker goes just over the creepiness boundary, so the end feels more cynical and brutal than it probably should have been. One thing that the movie makers did well was to change the physical appearance of Gordon-Levitt. Though this was done to match Bruce Willis’s face, it worked out to make his character more serious than otherwise.

Premium Rush (2012): [*** 3 stars out of 5] Another Joseph Gordon-Levitt movie, this time with his regular face! The plot is nothing much to write about (a MacGuffin) and simply acts to put together some of the most spellbinding chase sequences in Manhattan I have seen. All the chases include at least one bicycle going at around 50 miles an hour in rush hour traffic. Add some good villainous acting by Michael Shannon, it is a good thriller.

Don (2006 — Hindi): [*** 3 stars out of 5] This is the Shah Rukh Khan remake of the classic Amitabh Bachchan thriller with some twists along the way. When you watch a remake, the important thing is, does it improve upon the original? When it comes to production values, there is no question that the new Don leaves the old one in the dust. The budget has been wisely spent on shooting at good locations and creating realistic action sequences, including ones that would rival Hollywood movies. The acting is also excellent with restrained under-acting and little melodrama. The problems with the movie have to do with the deviations from the original movie. We learn at the end that the real Don had actually survived and was the one in all the scenes. This literally makes no sense. The real Don was escaping from the police when he was injured and captured. Why would he fake memory loss when he is able to return to his gang members? Why would he not kill Vardhaan when he gets a chance? Why does he create a chance for Vardhaan (or D’Silva) to kill Singhania? None of this is meaningful unless it was not the real Don. The other problem is the character of Roma. Don had killed her brother and his fiance, but in Don 2, we see a weird scene where Roma has the chance to kill Don, but does not. I actually liked “Don 2″, but the whole background in Don makes it seem worse than it is. Also, in both movies, the fact that Don, despite being the head of the underground, acts as a delivery man for drugs is ludicrous.

Let the Wind Blow (2004 — Hindi): [* 1 star out of 5] This is a reasonably good Hindi movie that is completely destroyed by the ending. The main plot revolves around a college student who is trying to make sense of his lower middle class existence. He is friends with a bunch of older youth, one of whom finally ends up trying to get him to come work with him in Dubai. Unfortunately, while they are all celebrating his future success, India and Pakistan launch nuclear missiles at each other and so their lives are snuffed out. Seriously, what the hell. If someone wants to make a movie about Indo-Pak relationships and nuclear Armageddon, do that. But if you are creating a movie about teenage angst, corruption, middle-class existence, income inequality, etc. then do that. Don’t mix the two.

The Proposition (1998): [** 2 stars out of 5] “The Proposition” is a rather boring movie that somehow manages to keep you switching it off with A-list actors such as William Hurt, Kenneth Branagh, and Madeleine Stowe. It is about a rich Boston Brahmin who, being sterile, uses a surrogate father to create a heir. Unfortunately, the latter is a little too emotional resulting in his violent death, and critical misunderstandings that result in further intrigue and death. One incredibly distracting aspect of the movie was the use of flashback where one character narrates the story to another character, who was actually part of the events being narrated. The romantic entanglement of a clergy member was, I felt, too silly. Finally the acting by Blythe Danner was miserable — a total miscast.

Thaandavam (2012 — Tamil): [** 2 stars out of 5] An action thriller that seemed to be made by 2 directors — one good and one bad. The scenes shot in India were remarkably good, but the rest of the movie was garbage. Even the good part of the movie had silliness surrounding an arranged marriage that never gets consummated and weird shots of Vikram feeling nice about himself. But that is nothing compared to the British Tamil cop who keeps fiddling with his iPad playing games, a stupid, loud taxi driver and our protagonist who is blind, but fights his enemies by using human echolocation.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012): [** 2 stars out of 5] If you notice the editing, the editing is not good. The last movie in the rebooted Batman trilogy has the necessary ingredients for a great superhero movie. A superb, menacing villain with a chilling voice. An unexpected twist towards the end (though I suspect I should have caught that). Blasts from the past. A cool new bat vehicle. But it suffers from shoddy movie-making. The jump scenes of Bruce Wayne make no sense, and done simply to make a silly philosophical point. The first aircraft scene was also illogical with Bane getting captured needlessly and also an editing problem where we don’t get to see someone thrown out of the plane. The first hour of the movie is confusing and cluttered. It is never made clear why Bruce Wayne spends 8 years in depression. It is not clear why when the intention was to destroy Gotham and the evil guys had the weapon, which they knew was ticking down, and they had an instant detonator, they simply chose to wait until the last minute. The whole anarchic angle is a complete red herring and intellectually dishonest. More from others here and here.

Talaash (2012): [**** 4 stars out of 5] “Talaash” is a brooding movie that seems to be rudderless until it redeems itself at the end. This is a movie that deserves to be watched a second time and, in fact, works better the second time you watch it. A police officer investigates the mysterious death of a popular actor while trying to deal with the tragedy of his son’s death. The portrayal of the struggles in the personal life is done very sensitively by Aamir Khan and Rani Mukherjee and key to making the movie work. I was not initially impressed with Kareena Kapoor’s character, but after a while, she does a good job. One mistake in the movie is the character of Frenny, which should have been written more effectively and been done by a better actor.

The Artist (2011): [***** 5 stars out of 5] Another black-and-white movie and this one silent, though this was set in 2011 and won the Best Film Oscar. It is the story of a silent-movies actor falling on hard times as the “talkies” become popular. The plot is not particularly inventive (you can see much borrowing from other popular movies), but the screenplay is mesmerizing and the acting, particularly by Jean Dujardin, superb. There are splendid scenes, such as the one where the starlet played by Bérénice Bejo hugs a coat, or where a film scene is taken multiple times (and it becomes relevant at a later time in the movie).

The Housemaid (2010 — Korean): [** 2 stars out of 5] “The Housemaid” is a movie that makes promises that it doesn’t keep. Here is a movie with a rather banal plot — the housemaid of a rich household getting pregnant with the master. But the acting, the characters, the dialogue, the slow-paced dramatic development make it a superlative one until the final resolution, which turns out to be spectacularly disappointing. Spoiler: It is kind of silly to make a movie set in 2011 modern South Korea about a topic like this and having its lead character be completely naive. Turning this into a revenge flick may have been more conventional, but at least made some sense.

Mugamoodi (2012 — Tamil): [**** 4 stars out of 5] Pleasantly surprised to see a Tamil movie take a superhero idea and create a serious, watchable thriller filled with action. Amazingly, the movie also gets away with introducing a Kung-Fu master/disciple theme set in Tamil Nadu, something I would have laughed at if described to me, but believe it or not, actually works. The story, within its parameters, is believable. The actors do a decent job, the villain vicious enough to make things more interesting. The plot has a couple of nice twists. Funny at times, but unlike many Tamil movies, never becomes farcical.

Mujhse Dosti Karoge! (2002 — Hindi): [*** 3 stars out of 5] I saw this movie during a period when I was crazy about Hrithik Roshan. It is a watchable movie because of Roshan’s screen presence and with the bubbly Rani Mukherjee the lead actress. Looking back, the plot is a little preposterous (a case of mistaken identity) and Kareena Kapoor and Uday Chopra are pretty miserable for the most part. However, I liked it at the time and the main pair give us something to care about, even if it is a tempest in a teapot kind of thing.

But this ignores the fact that there are many different religions with completely contrasting and incompatible ideas. Some religions believe in reincarnation. Others believe in Heaven and Hell, with some believing in Purgatory before Heaven. Some religions have a single God, others a few more, but limited and yet others have hundreds. Religious practices and traditions are so diverse that people following the same religion in different countries may have completely different customs. Religious fragmentation is everywhere. Even if most of the major religions have similarities in terms of ethics (treat people well, don’t lie), the differences in beliefs and religious practices are huge. Also, importantly, many religions stress belief and practices as the path to reward. The question of “Will Gandhi/Mother Theresa go to Heaven?” is critical because it shows that at least some religions think that pious acts or ethical living mean little if not accompanied by belief.

Before the advent of modern science, the question was “Religion A versus Religion B versus Religion C, etc.” People have differed over which religion is better and they have fought wars and killed people to resolve such questions. We don’t get so much nowadays, but religious tensions and suspicions are a fact of life across the globe. Most people are not converts and they have simply followed the religion that they were born into. Most people think that their religion is the right one and others are false. Even though people are branded fundamentalists if they openly say so, the reality is that if they thought that some other religion were more correct, they would follow that instead.

Dispassionately looking at different religions, why would one choose one over the other? If you are going to take a buffet approach to religion, picking the beliefs and practices that you think will lead to a better ethical life, that is not choosing a religion among the existing ones. That is simply creating a personal religion (another one!) or if bereft of “religiousness”, simply a personal philosophy. You have to choose the whole package. One could say that religions, as practiced now, have been heavily distorted over the years by practitioners and religious leaders. But most religions do have holy books that record the religious beliefs and practices, and some document the lives or sayings of their main teachers. Of course, the farther we go in time, the more likely the books themselves have evolved. But at least, there is something “fundamental” within the religion to state what essentially that religion is.

If there are multiple religions expounding different beliefs, who can one believe? For most periods in history, people didn’t have a good answer. Partly I think this has to do with the “Sports God Syndrome”. That is, most people use religion and God for material needs. “Give me this” or “Solve that for me” is the common format of prayers. This is taken to the point of silliness when people pray for their team to win a sports match, while others pray to the same God to do the opposite, even though it is more likely that any God has no interest in interfering. More soberly, though, people pray for their real problems. And while many prayers go unanswered, some do and people’s beliefs strengthen. Even unanswered prayers have a comforting effect — they allow a person to share their innermost thoughts, and in the case of terrible disasters (like the death of loved ones) this can be extremely helpful and cathartic.

Before a century or so ago, the life of the average person was much more fraught with calamity: Disease, warfare, destructive weather. And prayer was important here. Religious institutions also played a bigger role in alleviating problems: shelter, food, care, etc. But as modern society advanced, there was a reduced role for religion. Peace, prosperity and the rule of law meant that people had much less to worry on the political and financial front. Advances in medicine left only a few major diseases (cancer, heart attacks, alzheimer’s)  as problematic and almost all of them have to do with aging. Insurance (private and governmental) provided a backstop for catastrophes. Inventions provided better protection against the vagaries of nature and also reduced the ceaseless manual labor that was the bane of past generations.

So in the present day, we go back to fundamentals and beliefs. Again, to repeat, what would decide why we choose one? Isn’t it one religion’s words over the other? Who would you trust more? What would make you? And I think it is here that the scientific method has something to offer. A religion that is not in direct conflict with observed phenomena is more likely to be trustworthy than another which has beliefs that have been found to be contradictory to science. For example, a religion that assumes that planets have a mind of their own as opposed to be simply being subject to gravitational forces cannot be serious.

Now, there is a loophole here, which is that when a religion was founded, it usually was hard work convincing the people around about its beliefs, let alone telling them that the earth moved around the sun, or there were dinosaurs, or there were microbes causing diseases. But then you could have a religion that remained within the “belief system” and actively stayed  away from telling fiction about the real world, which any deity would know would be discovered by people in the second millenium. The “belief system” is essentially the set of things that cannot be proved or disproved by science. For example, the existence of Heaven or Hell or of a soul is, by its nature, beyond scientific experiments.

People can turn the loophole upside down by asserting that present scientific knowledge is wrong. For example, if a BC-era prophet had stated that the earth was 4.5 billion years old, he would have been right, but impossible to prove right then. However, science has advanced quite a lot in the meantime and if people want to make assertions that don’t match with our present scientific understanding, the burden of proof is on them.

Bottom line is that it is “Religion A versus Religious B versus… Religion N versus Science”. If a religion is in serious conflict with science, then it has to make the case for why people should believe the rest of its story.

The geniuses who edit the Wikipedia page on Border have come to the conclusion that Border is an anti-war movie based on the last montage which shows a few dead soldiers with a song mourning the wages of war. Unfortunately, much of the movie is just a celebration of xenophobia and mindless war sentiment. “Border” was a war movie that was able to capitalize on the rabid nationalist sentiments of the ‘90s India to become a blockbuster hit. But it has nothing to offer the thoughtful viewer.

To start with, the movie is a bastardization of a famous battle of the 1971 India-Pakistan War. The war, over in 13 days, was one of the shortest in history and ended in a complete defeat of Pakistan, with West Pakistan becoming the newly independent state of Bangladesh. The Battle of Longewala, one early engagement, was a disaster for the Pakistani troops who had initiated an attack on a small border post. Although numerically overwhelmed (120 soliders to 2000), the Indian post had a superior defensive position and managed to defend themselves so well until reinforcements arrived that they lost only two (not a typo) soldiers compared to 200. In effect, it was a rout and for the Indian Air Force planes who came to the party, the enemy soldiers were like a “turkey shoot”.

Obviously, such a story would not make well for a patriotic blood, toils, tears and sweat movie. Instead, we get hand-to-hand combat, soldiers who sacrifice themselves to save their fellow men, weeping widows and so on. There are many Indian deaths and, as we would expect, some of the main stars end up dying with dragged-out drama to spice things up. Sunil Shetty’s death is particularly egregious: He walks to a Pakistani tank and throws a mine underneath it after being shot like a zillion times by the infantrymen. The expression on his face while he does this is priceless as an artifact of over-acting.

If you take a war movie like “Saving Private Ryan”, the general theme is that the battle is less important than the characters. We get to learn who they are, a little bit of their civilian life, their aspirations and hopes. Some die heroically, some pathetically or unexpectedly. Our feelings towards the main characters and how we relate to what they are doing drives our outlook towards the movie. The problem with “Border” is that it creates quite a few unlikeable characters in the main roles and the interesting characters are subjugated to values that most viewers would not identify with.

The most unlikable character is the main actor, Sunny Deol. I previously thought that “Darr” was simply a director’s mistake, but Sunny managed to outdo his bully role in that movie. Here, he threatens to divorce his wife because she had the temerity to ask for a safe position for him in the army. Then he kills some enemy spies in what can only called a war crime. He threatens to shoot a soldier who showed some “unnecessary” joy in getting permission to go home to care for his wife dying of cancer. Another weird character is played by Sunil Shetty who fights a fellow solider who complained of the heat in the desert, simply because he should not talk of his “motherland” that way.

Akshay Khanna plays a pacifist who was forced to join the army because of a promise made to his father. His character makes a few astute observations and asks good questions, but in the end, the movie makes him into a maniac ready to die for the country. The key to understanding this movie is that in 1971, the idea of India was quite new (only 24 years after independence), but in 1997, it was honed by the right-wing nationalist parties into a political force. The idea of India as “Maa” (or mother), as opposed to the secular concept of “Watan” (country), was relatively new, a religious overtone driven by the success of the Jana Sangh and BJP during the decline of the Indian National Congress.

There is an interesting passage in the movie where we think the movie might be wanting to revisit the whole concept of crazy jingoism, but it goes nowhere. Stay away from this movie. The songs are good, but you can get them elsewhere.