Surin Island Underwater Paradise

It takes a ten-hour bus ride to get to the Muslim-dominated province of Pha-nga. From here a large ferry takes one on a two-hour trip towards the island. Passengers are then transferred to smaller boats to reach the island itself, as big boats are not allowed near it lest they damage the corals. Koh Surin, a national park and sanctuary, sits south of the marine border of Thailand and Burma. Being on the Andaman sea it was one of the sites of the tragic tsunami that hit the country a few years back.

Additional trips to the Mogen sea gypsies community for selected toursists provide an opportunity to witness how the Thais have integrated them into society by giving them family names, a school, and some small business interaction with tourists. Several Mogen houses lined the beach if only to illustrate their way of life at sea. We were told the majority have moved inland since the tsunami.

The tour and dive guides are apparently all volunteers who were provided free food and transportation but without pay. I saw them picking up trash on the beach before everyone else awakes in the morning. They served food to the tourists. Many of them wore"Save Koh Surin" shirts that were not available in the souvenir shop. It makes perfect sense to have this kind of programme with travel agents, where young volunteers get to go along with tourists and educate them about the environment and life on the island while enjoying the trip at the same time. It's one of the more successful ecological tours I've known (the other one being the whaleshark diving trip in Donsol, Philippines) and I felt quite proud to take in more than the beautiful sights. I felt equally responsible for saving Koh Surin.

IF-- Cannes Palme D'Or 1969

IF Midnight Cowboy won the Best Picture of the Oscars in my birth year, IF, by Director Lindsay Anderson is celebrated as the winner of the Cannes’ Palme D’Or of that same year. The film stars Malcolm McDowell before his Clockwork Orange fame. BBC Scotland’s feature of the film quoted British officialdom’s disdain of the film as “vulgar”. Actually if we show this to teenagers of today I’m sure many would find the narrative slow, the acting stiff and the dialogues dry, owing to a generation of films that followed, about teenage decadence that made the theme passe. To imagine how it scandalized British society of that era, I just recall my days at an exclusive girls Catholic College run by nuns. It really does create rebels.

Reel.com reviewed it thus:
Shot both in color and black and white, If …. is naturalistic and fantastical, as well as horrifying and comic, as it expresses the trio's experience of this arbitrary world. While a strong thread of homoeroticism runs through the film as the whips obsess over pretty Bobby (Rupert Webster) (though it is Wallace who captures the boy's attention with a slyly seductive gymnastics routine), But the strongest thread is violence, the soul-crushing routine violence, the hazings, bullying, and punishments (Mick and his friends are whipped, not for anything they do, but for their attitude) that make up campus life and the surreal war games the cadet corps play. Under these conditions, it should come as no surprise when Mick begins behaving in the manner that he looks when the movie begins, as a fellow student puts it, like "Guy Fawkes back from the dead."

A parallel was made of this film and the riots of May 1968 in Paris while another recalled a more recent Columbine College shooting similarity in the United States.

For my own shallow observation, having learned only through American school standards and thus utterly ignorant of the British boarding school system, the film blasted me to only one familiar setting: Hogwarts! There was the so-called Headmaster; there was the Head of House; professors in long black gowns, and even the gothic school architecture. Then there were the three misfits with their nemesis teacher and schoolmates. I won't be surprised if J.K. Rowling said IF was one of the inspirations for her famous series.

Photo by http://www.reel.com/