Four years after it almost got nominated for an Oscar and won its British equivalent, Asif Kapadia's "The Warrior" opened here to a flattering critical notice in The New York Times.

Played by Irfan Khan with menacing disquiet, Lafcadia is the protagonist of Kapadia's film that is being finally brought out for a staggered release in New York and Los Angeles first and then in other US cities.

Times critic Laura Kern described the film as "a minimalist but strikingly beautiful tale of renounced violence told with uncommon precision and depth".

Lafcadia may not have ruled a kingdom even one billionth of what Emperor Ashoka did, but his remorse is comparable in its magnitude.

After a life of murder and mayhem, Lafcadia inevitably runs up against the wall of his conscience. He can either raze the wall and continue with his bloody ways, or pause, reflect and decide to change.

He chooses the latter much like Ashoka, the only difference being that the scale of his destructiveness is far, far smaller. What is comparable is his sense of anguish.

Kapadia was struck by the comparison with Ashoka during a conversation but said he did have the great king in mind while making the film. His film is a cross between the samurai and Wild West genres.

There is nothing deliberate about the timing of the film's release, coinciding as it does with America's nerve-wracking and mismanaged military engagement in Iraq.

Remorse is nowhere to be found in the Washington lexicon. In fact, if any anything, the heat from the July 7 London bombings have dried up any prospects of remorse even as many Iraqis die daily in suicide bombings.

Speaking of the London bombings, brown men with backpacks, a fairly common sight on New York's streets, subway and buses, do cause Americans to look anxiously, albeit ever so subtly.

Purely at an intellectual level, who can blame them when one considers the strikingly middle class profiles of the London bombers. One was a teacher of all things!

A particularly aggressive policeman was quoted by a New Yorker as saying that any man wearing unusually thick clothes or someone who seemed suspiciously obese around the waist area ought to be watched out for.

It is a different matter that if gargantuan girth alone was the measure of a potential suicide bomber, half the American men would qualify.

One can say with reasonable certainty that the remorse felt by Lafcadia would remain a barely pursued virtue in a world where young men strap themselves up with explosives and let off the charge in the middle of a crowded square or aboard a train.

Equally, it is a world where the most advanced nation on the planet would invent causes to invade another nation, and in the process feed precisely the kind of frenzied and utterly misguided religiosity as is manifest among a section of the Islamic population.

There is a scene in "The Warrior" where Lafcadia is passing through a village that he helped pillage and ransack.

Images of those whom he had so ruthlessly slaughtered keep coming back to him. It is a powerful scene that is loaded with unintended lessons for a world where bloodletting is such an easy pastime.