RIFLE RANGE BOY

PFS was a new experience for me when I stepped into its compound in the early days of the year 1976. Besides the super-smart students that I had mentioned in the previous posts, there were equally memorable and dedicated teachers to match that. The most striking teacher that awed me was the late Mr Koh Sin Ghee. In Form 1A, he taught us the English Language. But in reality, he opened my eyes to many other things in life, like divergent thinking and letting the mind wander as well as being verbose. He would come in dressed in his 'uniform' of a long-sleeved white shirt, black pants and crimson coloured tie, carry his briefcase bearing his initials KSG. He would try to humour our young impressionable minds by saying that it stood for 'Kiss Some Girls', contributing much to the class's commotion. We called him DOM (Dirty Old Man) instead.  He was a self-proclaimed walking dictionary as he tried to open our eyes to the plethora of words in the English Language that...

  மாதா பிதா குரு தெய்வம் The Tamil language is famous for its many saying and quotations. The critics will also complain that its literary circle is only full of talk with no action! Not only they just talk, but there is also so much emotion and gestures to complement this. Just like the joke that has been circulating in the Klang Valley... The Police once arrested an Indian man for helping them in their investigation. This handcuffed suspect was brought in to the interrogation room for questioning. Despite repeated attempts by the junior policemen at exploration, the suspect just would not speak! In frustration, they called in their superior for help. Their seasoned superior just walked in, removed the handcuffs from the suspect and off went the suspect, rattling away, complete with hand gestures and facial expressions until the cops told him to shut up. Another proof of this statement is evidenced in the 'Arratai Arangam' (அரட்டை அரங்கம்) - a Tamil talk show (fro...

What are you running for? That was the tag-line for this year's Siemen's 10km run held on 18th July 2010. Participants in the fun run category were supposed to fill up the reasons on their vest bib. Some wrote the usual - for fun, for health reasons etc. One man wrote 'in memory of M Kahelan (again!)' I wonder who this Kahelan chap is. That is why he has to write again as nobody gave it two hoots the first time he wrote! Coming back to the run per se ... This time around, Suresh and I car-pooled for the run together - of course, we ran at our own comfortable pace. Even though it was organised by a German multinational company with a fixation with discipline, the run decided to follow Malaysian timing. They started half an hour later than their scheduled time of 7am! From the starting point at Dataran Merdeka, we galloped along to the Bank Negara area, up a few wavy path and terrain along Bukit Tunku hills till we reached Lebuhraya Mahameru. Running along the highw...

Bored of the usual reading and feeling depressed? Why not sit back, relax and a enjoy a short snippet of Charlie Chaplin in a black and white (duh) silent movie?

21.7.2010 Today there was an uninvited guest to the house this morning. Out of nowhere, I sighted a little mouse scooting across the room. I followed it and it appeared again! As a reflex, I stepped hard on it! And hold behold, I killed it instantaneously. Karni Mata Temple in Rajathan Then it fell on me. The Hindu sages say that a visit by a mouse is a visit by Lord Ganesha himself! And a bad host I have been, That would explain why they have a Rat Temple in Rajasthan which shelters thousands of rats. They would say the same thing if a snake should enter your house. One should not harm the reptile as its partner would come back with sweet revenge. And legend has it that cobras are supposed to have a real elephantine memory! If fact, 10 years ago when there were plenty of constructions around the housing estate, I found a baby cobra in one of my jogging shoe! This, I found it the hard way when I slipped in my foot into the shoe just to kick it out thinking that there was a co...

1976 PFS Form 1A class photograph The talk about stopping the leak from brain drain is all hogwash. Nobody (the powers that be) is serious about this, as we slide further and further as a nation with intellectuals just to be replaced with flight-by-night entrepreneurs and their immigrant workers to do their dirty job as the entrepreneurs laugh all the way to the bank! And intelligent people have kept on moving since the 70s in droves. With the widespread use of internet social networks like Facebook and Google, we are now able to trace some of these long lost people. In my my case, I managed to track down some of these child prodigies that Malaysia lost to the rest of the world, predominantly Singapore. Ho King Hee was an all rounder in PFS. Besides being first in the whole form, he was a school prefect, played tennis and chess for the school, sang in the school choir and obtained A in Art and the Science subjects. Thanks to the ASEAN scholarship, ...

Just like a parturitent mother who feels drained out  after completing the zenith of her expression of her womanhood (i.e childbirth), a football maniac will be all cried out. A post partum mother, who in the antenatal period was flushed with loads of endogenous natural steroidal hormones and in the adrenaline rush days before the event of labour, will feel down after the sudden drastic drop in these hormones! For the past couple of days, a football die hard fan feels just like that. After one month of top world class football action, now suddenly life has no meaning anymore! All the adrenaline rush, nail biting moment, vocal cord damaging incomprehensible shrieks extending into the wee hours of the morning has now come to naught. Life is now moving at a snail's pace with nothing to look forward to. Even F1 has lost its lacklustre. And the illegal DVD peddlers are to business as usual after more than a month of business diversification as footballl bookies! Come August 1...

14th July 2010 Bastille Day – the day the French peasants ambushed the Versailles prison after tolerating years of tyranny under the Louis XIV and his predecessors.  While the peasants’ kids were wailing in hunger, the French aristocrats were basking in wine and caviar in their summer garden party! Enough is enough, they said. And the rest they say is history which changed Governments forever. Legend has it that King Louis the XIV’s consort, Marie Antoinette, was captured at the Austrian border whilst escaping from the mob. When she was hurled back to Paris , all her hair turned white overnight! That was the act teaching that Mr Lee Kok Keng taught back in the History class of Form 3B in 1978 and I still remember it like it was yesterday. And his visionary statements about Onn Bin Jaafar being a forward thinking leader who quit from UMNO when his idea to open the party to all Malayans was shot down. That was the type of teacher we had back in our schooldays. We respected them an...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3qBG0wSmJg  (Madu Tiga) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4IYZ4psuSM&feature=related  (Madu Tiga -song) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M38ZytgjzFc&feature=related  (Dendang Pontianak) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4iQ1WsRW-I&feature=related  (Anak Bapak -Chetty) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z84aQPIgwqc&feature=related  (Nasib DoReMi) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyLbm79Y0oo  (Gerimis) My son Danny enjoys watching Malay dramas and movies on Astro Citra, a passion his other siblings cannot understand. It is probably due to his predominantly Malay male and female classmates. I believe that over time, he will realise that his comrades will get different treatment than himself, and he will start shunning his passion and go on with his different things in life. In another instance, my other kids could not understand why we (my wife and I) chose to sing Malay songs by Alleycats during a karaoke se...

வானொலி நாடகம் - மர்ம மே டை   (Vanoli Nadagam - Marma Medai) Yesterday, as I returned from the supermarket after getting the weekly grocery, we listened to the Tamil drama on the radio. The children could not understand why I liked listening to these melodramatic dramas. I told how my whole family grew up staying glued and listening to these radio dramas on Sunday evenings on Red Network of RTM at 6.30pm in RRF. Like that, I recalled an episode that I heard decades ago and related it to them. It was a story on the mystery series Marma Medhai (Stage of Suspense). I think it was written by a master radio writer of yesteryears, S. Vairakanoo. The story starts with an insomniac man who has the habit of fiddling with his short-wave radio in the morning to tap into transmissions from a remote part of the planet. One day he stumbled upon a channel which only came on the air for a few minutes to predict his horoscope for the following day. He became interested as the days went on, as...