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Film: McFarland USA




Based on a true story in a place called McFarland in California, USA the film deals with the extraordinary lives of a group of ordinary school boys. Track coach Jim White identifies the school boys  can outrun any other boys in their school due to their life and daily hardships they used to face in their everyday life. They used to get up at 4a.m to help their father in fields and run to school and attend classes. Such was their daily routine that unknowingly they were running at 10miles/hour. Their family bonds, incredible team spirit brought them the title of great runners and achievers. Splendid film for all, leaves a sense of inspiration and awe for the indomitable spirit within all human beings.

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Film: Imitation Game:




The enthralling film encompasses how the protagonist (Allen Turing) and his team decodes the Nazi code during Second world war. The code was called Enigma, and each day the code changed, hence decoding such plethora of data was next to impossible for a team of 5 people. Hence Allen started designing the Turing's machine (modern day computer) which will take the input from the message readers and give the output. He named the machine as "Christopher", after his childhood's best friend, whom he lost unexpectedly in tuberculosis. Christopher was his only friend in school, who saved him from many bullying and was the first person who understood his bent towards mathematics and cryptography. The film encompasses human intellect , emotions, woman in men's world of code breaking and mathematics.
Alas, the person who saved thousands of lives and made the victory possible faced the wrath of society and the-then government being a gay.

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Date: Jan 29th, 2015

Book: 'Black Like Me', by John Howard Griffin (1961) [non-fiction]
Film: 'Selma' [historical film, released in Jan, 2015]

Coincidentally  I started reading the book and watched the film during the same time. I grabbed the book from a garage sale few weeks back. The title and the size of the book grabbed my attention. It's a small sized book, around 200 pages. Though I personally doesn't have any personal grudge against novels but I loose track as my thoughts keep on wandering about the myriad thoughts while leafing through the pages.

     Initially I thought the book to be written by a black person who had written his life's chronicle. But it's a journey of a white American who has pigmented his skin colour as black in order to actually live the life of the black people. It's a true story of the amazing journey which the author & the journalist "John Howard Griffin" penned down, in the time when the stark discrimination of the skin colour was vehemently present in USA, especially in the southern part(As stated in the book). Though himself being a white American himself, he wanted to feel the reality which the negro's daily struggle. The book gives a deep insight of the human mind, the deep-rooted thoughts finely ingrained which probably let the apparently pragmatic Whites to unknowingly loose their rationale. The author presents a holistic overview of the societal nuances, how the black preferred to be out in dark in order to avoid the first depressing discrimination for the colour, on which no-one but Almighty had the control. It was an indefinite loop of everyday struggle which was demoralising the black, slow-poisoning their very own existence and confidence from within & the society as a whole.


     During the end of the book, there was the mention of Martin Luther King Jr. and how his movements were gearing up a confident environment among the black people, in Selma (city in the lower west Alabama). The film Selma, has the incredible depiction of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his fellows struggle for the voting rights for the black. Though officially the right has already been given but in reality there were more than hundreds of odd reasons and lame excuses which were incessantly blocking the  people of their basic right as voting. The famous march from Selma to Montgomery for the voting rights was a historical non-violent movement, which was acclaimed from both the strata of the rational society (Whites & Black). It passed the bill whereby black Americans were allowed to vote without been asked about the number of counties in Alabama, naming the counties or some bizarre paragraphs from the constitution (as depicted in the film and written in the book). Truly the historic march had shaken the conscience of the nation[1].

References:
1. March from Selma to Montgomery
2. Selma, FILM

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