Not so Random: Hurt Locker vs Green Zone....Conspiracy Theory to Emotional Young Uncle Sam!

There are two very important knowledge ingredients in American blood.... first the Right to Speech, and second How to use it? Browse through the mighty internet and get a long, really long list of Conspiracy theories. For the sake of direct and simple station, Wikipedia has also got a List too. Interestingly, most have their origin in America! Being it the New World Order or the popular Kennedy’s assassination or the much widely known Moon Landing and why not the Death of Michael Johnson!

Well, that was just the preamble. The post is about what I observed watching two Hollywood movies, one of which won the Oscars, the other my favour! One of which was on the work done by United States Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) in Iraq, other depicting the Iraq Conspiracy Theory....One was the Hurt Locker, other the Green Zone.

I liked Hurt Locker. It was a movie about an Army team whose work was to dispose the explosives dropped in Iraq and lying there. It portrayed the humane
side of rough-and-tough war soldiers beautifully! Fabulously! The way James connects to a little Iraqi boy "Beckham" and finds him somewhere in cold desert finding the boy’s body surgically implanted with an unexploded bomb, the way he (apparently, for the first time in movie) feels the death and remembers his family; touched my heart. But, though I felt the gooseflesh, I felt the sentiments, emotions; I’m sorry but, what was there in the movie that won so many Oscars? As I found reading comments and reviews all over the Softnet, the movie was seriously highly overrated! Direction, acting, scripts everything flawless, but what issue it actually raised? Kind hearted US men!? Just that!

Green Zone, whereas, is set in the very same Iraqi background; but decisively it tried hitting the probable rationale behind the US’ attack on Iraq! Certainly, no WMD, just the hydrocarbon resources tapped beneath the Iraqi soil. The way Director Paul Greengrass attempted to dramatize the much-talked Conspiracy Theory behind the Iraq invasion, is, for the time being at least, unparallel. I haven’t gone through the Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City on the life in the Green Zone, Baghdad; but the Green Zone for sure strengthened the understanding I have earned in the due course of time, that there is something fishy certainly cooked on and off the battleground. Whatever, the fact is that some commercial person tried to speak out for the much talked US conspired invasion in to the Iraq. As Greengrass has said that Green Zone reflects a widespread popular mistrust of authority that was engendered by governments that have not told the truth and have let their citizens down over the Iraq war, the movie has a lot to say and yes spoken a lot in a brilliant tone. The plot may have used plenty of fictions, based may be loosely on the unproven facts, but as The New York Times says the movie "seems to epitomize the ability of mainstream commercial cinema to streamline the complexities of the real world without becoming overly simplistic, to fictionalize without falsifying."

Hurt Locker definitely won the Oscars and the Hearts too; but what left an imprint on my mind was the Green Zone, a flop movie depicting a simple saga of the unrevealed truths and lies.

Go watch the movies, if you haven’t; if have already comment and let me know what’s your verdict!

Banned Indian Books

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; Where knowledge is free; Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls; Where words come out from the depth of truth... Few days back when I came to know about a book on an Indian Business Barron on the Banned Indian Books’ List, the first thing that came in my mind were the lines from Tagore . What an irony, we live in a country, whose forefathers have dreamt about a nation without fear, about a nation with right to speech, right to knowledge; and where the Government enjoys the “privilege” to “freely” ban the books, censor what it feels offensive! Wikipedia describes Banned books as the books whose free access is not permitted. Further it says that the practice of banning books is just another form of censorship, and often has political, religious or moral motivations. In our country, banning books have got its history since the British rule days. In fact, few of the Books

...not just Right, it's My time to visit Melbourne NOW!

‘ Sir, wake up, it’s Victoria ’ some sort of voice-management, of course with due courtesy, and it banged on my ears again ‘ Sir? It’s Victoria, didn’t you want to get down here… ’ Fighting the universal conspiracy, I tried opening my eyes and listening to the conductor simultaneously, yeaah multi-tasking ! ‘ Oh, yeah, thank you! Thanks !’ a formal smile, rubbed shoulders (it wasn’t crowded, I was yet sleepy) rubbing my eyes I stepped down of the tram. “ Wooo….Man! Where I am? This is not Kolakata, forget it, this is not even India !” I stepped down apparently from Kolkata Tramway at Maidan near Victoria Memorial, but it wasn’t the same. There was no maidan , no typical Kolkata traffic, no Victoria Memorial and it was something else. Fishy! No it wasn’t fishy. I looked back at Tram, it wasn’t like Tram either. Highway 31 Bikers' Restaurant ‘ Have I had grass? No, neva! So, how did I disembark a metro when I picked up a tram an hour ago? ’ I

Trekking Ghansoli Gawli Dev (Parsik) Hill

It’s been there for geological ages, we have been looking at it for last about 4years and I have been planning to trek it since a long time. Finally, few weeks back, we trekked the Ghansoli Hill. Ghansoli Hill is located at the eastern boundary of Ghansoli town, behind our office complex at RCP. The hill or better hillock is a part of small range that separates Kalyan and Navi Mumbai towns. A search on Google Map returns with a name Parsik Hill for it, though there is one more rather famous Parsik Hill in Navi Mumbai. We also found a NewsArticle , that talks about NMMC plans to develop Nature Awareness Centre at this hills and calls it Gawli Dev Hill. Here, we would be calling it Ghansoli Hill . I asked my colleague about it and he readily agreed. The very next Sunday we did it with another friend. We weren't aware of the route. All we knew is that a Central Road runs along the western edge of the hill and can be reached through the Vashi-Mhape road. We later found that there’

Agnivo4 May 2010 at 08:51
for the record Hurt Locker was a flop movie too...and who knows Green Zone might do wonders at Oscars next year. I have not watched the movie so would not comment on it. As for Hurt Locker i guess the bigger message in the film is about how the American President fooled his countrymen into a war with Iraq, yes, soldiers do have hearts too and that goes for Americans too. The message that u missed in Hurt Locker was that of Humanity :) and i will definitely talk about Green Zone when i watch it after my exams :)
Ghumakkar Punit5 May 2010 at 19:31
Green Zone is exactly about what you said "how the American President fooled his countrymen into a war with Iraq", with a critical angle on the Iraqi Oil resources in background.