Priority! Priority!

Loan shark ad at the back of cab

The priorities of a society can be determined from the daily activities of its members. Jog through your memory of two telephone booths - one in KL and another in London. The one in KL would have been vandalized, the receiver would be missing or would be detached like a doll without an arm or you could be at the mercy of the machine which would be happy to gobble up all your money for nothing. But that is another story - you would also notice plastered all around the booth are numbers of generous people who are out there to finance your never-ending financial woes that have plaguing you at this while at practically a cost of a phone call.
In contrast, in a similar setting in London, the booth would be decorated with multi-coloured 'stick-em-on' papers advertising a plethora of social services (escort, the companionship of sexual nature, of different ethnicity, age, gender, techniques or anything you fancy!)

A typical scene at a London phone booth

Now you know where each society's emphasis is. Asians, as all of us are aware, give importance to wealth to climb the strata of society. The rich are worshipped as one with lots of money can do no wrong and money can buy you love, health, sleep, friends, relatives and everything in between. As the Tamil proverb goes, 'At the sight of money, even a corpse would open its mouth!' I suppose in London, its citizens have reached a certain level of comfort in their lives that they can now look into finer things to enjoy life rather than be worried about their daily bread and butter issues as it is their Government of the day's job to do that! [I wonder if it (the booth) is the same in Kansas City- where Superman lives - he looks for a phone booth to change and come out in a jiffy with his underwear on the outside! I just wondered.]
Every now and then, our mainstream media is fluff with tear-jerking stories of how families get torn apart and how victims succumb to the shame and the threat of the creditors and decide to take their own lives and spare everybody else of the torment!
Now, since the loan shark issue is a sticky one, what are the authorities doing about it? So far all their endeavours have been in vain. First, they said that all mobile phones (pre-paid and post-paid accounts) need to be registered so that loan sharks who normally display cell phone numbers can be traced. The menace continues, however.

Sharks and (Red) Devil in same boat?

Now, the powers that be are saying that the numbers go unanswered when the enforcement officers called them. I find this difficult to believe - advertisers not answering calls advertised? It is, therefore, the status quo as it is. To add salt to injury, taxpayers now have to fork out money to clean up the mess of garbage contributed by the bills. From January 2011, the City Council of Johore Bahru removed over 31,000 sheets of loan shark advertisement bills there. In Penang, the contractors assigned to perform the same job has stopped doing so as the thousands of ringgit allocated from them is insufficient for the load of rubbish they have to gather!

In the meantime, the sharks are still swimming in a carefree manner in a sea filled with ill-gotten stash of moolah...