My dignified rants - Vijay Ramalingam

Black Mass – Movie review An aptly titled film that gives a hint early on about the nature of the main plot and the protagonist, Black Mass is a sober and gripping crime drama based on real life Irish-American mobster James ‘Whitey’ Bulger and his ’unholy alliance’– as called by the makers themselves, between Bulger and FBI. The film is directed by Scott Cooper and is based on the 2001 book ‘ Black Mass: The True Story of an Unholy Alliance between the FBI and the Irish Mob’ by Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill. The film starts with the close-up of a tape recorder, recording the confessions of Kevin weeks, a former associate of Bulger to an FBI agent, thus taking us straight to the plot with no frills or dramatic opening scenes whatsoever. We hear the story of Bulger from a series of confessions from most of his erstwhile close associates, beginning with Weeks telling his first encounter with the mobster and his inclusion in to Bulger’s Winter Hill gang. The early acco

Chennai remembers SMS Emden, the dreadful First World War German battleship     Not many know about some of the different, interesting facets of the Great War, more commonly known as the First World War, in the Asian front. The German navy during the war, tried to flex its muscle as far as the Indian Ocean and Chennai (then called as Madras) a southern port city in British India then, became the unfortunate ‘beneficiary’ of its wrath. On the late hours of September 22, 1914, a peaceful and unsuspecting Chennai retiring in to the night was stealthily approached by SMS Emden, a Dresden class light cruiser of the German navy and commanded by Captain Karl von Müller, with the singular objective of ‘enlightening’ the unperturbed and leisurely Indians of the horror and destruction of the Great War. On reaching the Madras harbor, the captain after surveying the scene around for a while, gave the order to fire at the numerous large oil tanks of the Burmah Oil company at