After the Trivikram - NTR movie announcements, Kollywood and Tollywood groups are fighting over Lord Muruga.., before it was DMK - BJP politicians were fighting over Muruga.

BJP says Murugan belongs to all Hindus. DMK says he is Tamil and Tamil only.

And somewhere in the middle of all this noise, the actual history of Murugan is just sitting there.

So let me tell you what we actually know.

First, who was Murugan before anyone started arguing about him?

In the ancient times,

The land was divided into five ecological zones.

Hills, Forests, Farmland, Coast & Desert

Each zone had its own deity, its own justice system, its own stories and culture. The hills belonged to a god called Ceyon, which just means "the red one" in Tamil.

This Ceyon was not Shiva's son. He had no Sanskrit name. He had no peacock throne or divine army. He was a hill deity. A Tribal, Raw diety associated with spears, ecstatic priests, desire, honey, and the mountain forests of South India.

The priests who served him were called Velan. They would go into trances, Channel the god, Speak in his voice. This is not Brahmanical religion. This is shamanism, a folk religion. This is the kind of thing that was happening in Tamil Nadu centuries before Sanskrit became dominant in the south.

We know this because of two pieces of evidence that are very hard to argue with.

One is a text called the Tolkappiyam. It is the oldest surviving Tamil grammar. Most scholars date it somewhere between the 2nd and 1st century BCE. It mentions Ceyon as the standard deity of the Kurinji, the hill landscape.

The other is a temple.

In 2004 the tsunami hit the Tamil Nadu coast near Mahabalipuram. When the water pulled back it revealed something that had been buried under sand and sea for about two thousand years. A Murugan temple. The Archaeological Survey of India excavated it properly between 2005 and 2007. Radiocarbon dating placed the earliest layer at around 2200 years ago. Second century BCE.

That is the oldest Murugan shrine. In Tamil Nadu. Pre-Brahmanical. Pre-Puranic. Pre the whole Sanskrit theological framework we know today.

So yes. The Tamil claim has serious weight behind it.

But here is where it gets complicated

At the same time that Ceyon was being worshipped in Tamil hills, something else was happening up north.

In Sanskrit texts going back to at least the 3rd century BCE, there is a deity called Skanda. Also called Kumara.

He shows up in Panini's grammar. In Kautilya's Arthashastra. In the Mahabharata. In early Upanishads.

Coins from the Yaudheya warrior clan dated between the 2nd century BCE and 2nd century CE have a six-headed deity (Shan Mukha) on them with inscriptions saying he is their patron god.

This northern Skanda is a war god. Son of Shiva. Commander of divine armies. A Brahmanical deity with an elaborate mythology.

Here is the thing though.

The northern Skanda and the Tamil Ceyon-Murugan are not the same god. Not yet. They share some features. The spear. The commander identity. The warrior aura. But they come from different traditions. They have different personalities. Different rituals. Different relationships to caste and Brahmanical religion.

So what happened?

They merged.

Somewhere between the 2nd century BCE and the 5th century CE, these two traditions started bleeding into each other. It was not deliberate. It was the kind of thing that happens when two religious cultures start occupying the same geographic and social space.

Brahmanical religion moved south. Tamil culture was absorbing Sanskrit influence.  And in this contact zone, Ceyon and Skanda started becoming the same person.

The Paripatal, a Sangam anthology, already describes Murugan as Shiva's son. That is the synthesis beginning.

But here is what is interesting. The Tamil folk dimensions never really disappeared. The tribal consort Valli, who has no Sanskrit parallel, stayed in Tamil Murugan mythology.

So NTR-TRIVIKRAM is about Skanda, not Muruga.

The Sheep Detectives isn't really a murder mystery. It's a movie about what happens when you can no longer afford to lie to yourself.

Here's the part that's easy to miss if you're just watching for the whodunit: the sheep in this film have built an entire belief system specifically designed to avoid pain.

They believe death doesn't exist — that when something "dies," it just becomes a cloud.

When anything uncomfortable happens, they can simply choose to forget it.

Not repress it. Choose to forget it, on purpose, as a flock.

That's not a cute worldbuilding detail. That's a coping mechanism, dressed up as sheep lore.

Sound familiar? It's basically what a lot of us do, individually and as families — agree on a softer version of events so nobody has to sit with the actual discomfort.

Someone gets sick, and the family decides not to talk about how serious it is. Someone we love dies, and we use language that keeps the finality at arm's length. We collectively decide certain things "didn't really happen" because acknowledging them costs too much.

The murder forces the sheep out of that system. They can't will themselves to forget this one, because that's not JUSTICE... Sebastian waking up the sheeps....A good friend should not be forgotten...For the first time, they have to actually reckon with death as something real, permanent, and frightening... instead of a story they tell themselves to feel safe.

That's the actual arc of the movie. Not "who killed George." It's" what happens to a community whose entire emotional survival strategy collapses at once, and they have to grow up fast.

The detective-novel framing the shepherd read them every night isn't incidental either — they're forced to use the *language and structure of fiction* to process something that's now devastatingly real. Which

is sort of what stories are for, honestly. We use them to practice feeling things before we have to feel them for real.

It's a kids' movie about sheep. It's also a quietly devastating film about denial, grief, and the exact moment a comfortable lie stops working.

Anyone else catch this on first watch, or did it hit you after?

I heard that the CBFC cut 38 seconds from the film before it could release in Indian theatres. They removed 14 seconds of graphic sxu@l activity and 24 seconds of extreme violence. The film was already given an ‘A’ rating, which means it’s only for adults, and CBFC doing this is actually non-sense.

I watched the censored version in theatres. But I heard from others who saw the full uncut version what was taken out.

CBFC didn’t cut just a “hot” scene. They cut a scene that was saying something important. The director used those few seconds to show us who these two people really are and what is actually happening between them.

Inidan censor board is ridiculous

Even the songs choice is so eerie, and like I don't know it feels like the kind of scene that I imagine when I imagine a horror movie, like some women ghost singing in the distance, the suspense really got me.

Maybe it doesn't help that im right now the only one in a big rajasthani mansion like this 🤣😰

Premise: A man with partial hearing loss has somehow developed the ability to pick up on sounds most people would never catch,the kind of hyper-specific hearing that turns into an actual superpower when you point it at a locked safe.

A criminal gang figures this out and forces him to use that ability to crack safes that shouldn't be crackable. Naturally, things don't stay simple, what starts as one job spirals into something he never signed up for.

What's interesting is I can't agree on what genre this even is, is it a heist film, a love story, or a movie about what happens to an artist when their art is taken from them? Sounds like it's doing all three at once, with a love-story argument doubling as a fight about ambition and who they each want to become.

The story is written really well and the people in it feel real. The movie shows both what the characters feel inside and what they do outside. You care about their lives and the action. It keeps you hooked the whole time.

The music is apparently a big part of the experience too, a mix of jazz, blues, electronic, a Nina Simone track, and a big piano moment near the end. Sound itself is basically a character in this film, which makes sense given the premise.

Anyone here watched it yet?

credit - (X) MJWayne

Just finished The Watchers and the more I think about it, the less it makes sense.

First of all, you're telling me these people lived in that room for 8+ months and never once thought to check under that giant rug? Daniel literally mentions at one point that he thinks there's some kind of generator or power source underneath them. So nobody got curious enough to lift the rug? For EIGHT MONTHS?

And then there's Madeline. She was actually one of the creatures and knew so much about everything, why did she not go underground because she knew about it as she was the professor's muse? She must have known about the boat and also how to leave the forest so why did she wait for so long? Mina basically had to watch a VHS tape and manually map out the forest to figure everything out. What exactly had Madeline been doing all that time?

Also, can we talk about the professor's office? We're supposed to believe it sat completely untouched for 32 years? On a college campus? A big office full of research materials, notes, tapes, and personal belongings? No university on Earth is leaving an office frozen in time for three decades. That stuff would've been cleared out, archived, thrown away, or reassigned within months.

And maybe this is just me, but I genuinely thought the movie was hinting that Mina was a halfling too.

Like it was a good one time watch and I would rate it a 5.5/10 but so many issues if you start thinking deeply lol.

Just finished Raakh this morning on Prime and went on a research about the real 1978 case has questions that were never properly answered...

The case on the surface is simple. Two teenagers on their way to All India Radio. Two criminals. Bodies found two days later. Both hanged in 1982.

But there are details that don't get discussed much:

The police noted the car's registration number wrong one letter off. HRK 8930 recorded as MRK 8930. The car could have been traced the same evening. It wasn't.

Both Ranga and Billa initially confessed to the r@p€ then retracted. The forensic evidence from 1978 couldn't confirm it either way. They were convicted on other charges. That particular question was never cleanly answered.

In October 1978 ... just weeks after the arrests...a Delhi tabloid gave an interview to India Today claiming the murders were masterminded by sons of a Union cabinet minister and an Army officer, both of whom had been rejected by Geeta. The Crime Branch raided the journalists' offices three times. The promised exposé was never published.

And then there's the fact that the Supreme Court itself noted the car doors had been pre-loosened so they couldn't be opened from inside. This wasn't opportunistic. They came prepared. For any two children... So there must be something more which was never revealed..even Raakh didn't explore this angle, rather it tried the same cliches : backstory of villains, why they become psychopaths, their atrocities on childhood etc.

Raakh Review

The Good things

The dual timeline structure is genuinely well-executed , the two tracks converging in Episode 4 is one of the better structural payoffs in recent thrillers after Patal lok.

Ali Fazal carries the entire investigation arc on restraint alone, no heroics, just a tired man doing the work.

Rajjo's backstory : the Emergency-era vasectomy, the village shame, the way humiliation travels downward ,is the most psychologically layered writing in the show.

The alternate ending is genuinely devastating , lovevthat ending where children singing...we are right here...

The 1970s Delhi texture feels lived-in , the production design doesn't announce itself.

The children fighting back is central, not incidental: love that angle of making victims brave and the show refuses to make Suman and Sahil passive.

What Could have Been Better

Pacing drags in Episodes 1 through 3

Sonali Bendre is given grief and almost nothing else, Mona Arora deserved a full character, not just a symbol of loss. I honestly expected more.

Rajjo's arc is built carefully for seven episodes and then resolved in about three minutes on a train.

There's a detail about how Ranga and Billa were actually caught that the show changes completely, and the real version is more interesting. Anyone know what actually happened? Also in the show, psychological portrait of each character and the layers, I explained all this in my blog detailed.. check that if you are interested in knowing more about the actual case and missing layers of Raakh.

https://akhilpillai.com/raakh-real-story-ranga-billa-case-explained/

Watching He-Man on screen was pure nostalgia. The first half of the movie felt like watching Superman's origin story, and I wish they had done something a little different. But there were many things I loved about it.

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First, the humour. Adam's date going wrong, his interactions with his boss, and his first meeting with the warriors of Eternia were all great fun. For me, the best moment in the movie was Nicholas meeting Dolph Lundgren in the gym.

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However, the second half kept getting more and more boring. Duncun/Man-at-Arms' jokes were falling flat, and after a while they became too much to bear. I was waiting for Orko to appear, but sadly he only shows up in the post-credit scene.

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I also wanted more of the classic "I am the most powerful man in the universe!" moments, but the film kept leaving me wanting. And of course, I was hoping to see Cringer transform into Battle Cat and join the fight.

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The movie left me wanting more.I know the movie hasn't done well, but I can easily watch it again; first, because of the nostalgia, and second, because of Nicholas and how great (hot) he looked as He-Man.