Spartans! Ready your breakfast and eat hearty... For tonight, we dine in hell!


Battle of Thermopylae, King Leonidas, Spartans and Xerxes are the flavor of the season. Yours truly went last week to catch the movie on theatres and after less than 2 hours does have a few things about the movie and hence the banter. No, no this ain't the countless reviews you have come across of the movie but of different variety. the movie though was full of cosmetic visual imagery, it was nothing short of a mammoth epic of the scale of Gladiator. Still the Gerald Butler starer has its share of positives. What stuck me apart from eloquent dialogues and stunning visual imagery was the scale of imagination of the team involved and the guts to base a movie on the exploits of 300 Spartan soldiers at the battle of Thermopylae. Well a novel attempt all the way round.
Few days later I came upon a cartoon in Gulf News and it showed Tony Blair as Leonidas and Ahamedinajad as Xerxes and it was so designed to echo the sailor crisis of Britain with Iran. It was thought provoking nevertheless to say except the roles had to be reversed!
The courage and valor of Spartans against Persians was so beautifully depicted. It reminded me of an earlier Hollywood attempt with regards to portray Alexander and the battle sequence with the Persians. There I think the person was Darius III. It also showed the ruthlessness of the Persian army. It made me wondering. so numbers don't win battles after all!!! Possible.. strategies do!! possible. But why doesn't the land that make these movies understand this. America has a sizable percentage of its forces spread all over Asia and still cant get the equation right in Iraq and Afghanistan. No, no not another rounding in America analysis but to cut a long story short, the movie 300 showed us how the insurgents work in Iraq and Afghanistan. What do you have is armed groups with catch phrase as in the top out to defeat the armies of the Xerxes's of the world. Can anything stop it? It dint stop the Spartas and Leonidas at the battle of Thermopylae against the Persians....will it so for the insurgents?