It is all Mimesis
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Electric tram on Weld Quay, circa 1910 Growing up in RRF, buses were the most important, of not the only form of transportation. In fact, for the middle class and the downtrodden part of the society, public transport play a crucial if not romanticized part of their everyday lives as evident from the numerous movies based on journeys! In our minds (the RRF dwellers), getting away from the clutches on the curse of dependence on buses as the sole form of movement is a way of escaping poverty. That would explain why we (my siblings and I) have not traveled in bus for years! Buses in Malaysia (especially Penang) carry a very long history predating Independence in tandem with the advancement in railroads. Despite the accusations hurled at the colonial master for squandering wealth from the land of its conquests, they did establish a sound transportation system. In Penang, they experimented with many state of the art (then) gadgets...
Over the weekend, I met up with a friend who had moved into a spanking new house in the up-market part of town. After the usual cursory formalities and niceties, I had a chat with her father who had been diagnosed to have a serious heart ailment. YeaH iTs MY liFe..!!!!!!!!! (Bon Jovi) He is a 77-year-old man who, after the recent passing of his wife of almost 50 years, is living between her three daughters' houses at his own leisure. After striving hard to bring the bacon as a police officer through the hard times of the nation fighting bandits' intelligentsia throughout the country, he is glad that his three children are self-sufficient and independent. He feels that his life and duties on earth are done, and he is living on borrowed time! (Especially after being a chronic smoker of 50 sticks a day for 50 years until one fine day when he developed distaste to cigarettes upon completing pilgrimage to Holy Land). Perhap...
The spirit of Christmas is already in the air. It started when I was ushered it to join my dear friend's church's musical presentation called 'This Little Child - The King of Kings' - a musical extravaganza showcasing the true meaning of Yuletide minus the commercial tags associated with it. His church members decided to put up a choir plus narration presentation. I only managed to sit through two third of the show as I had to entertain some foreign guests. What was sorely missing in most other religious organizations in Malaysia was nicely cultivated here in this hall. Youths (young and slightly older ones) were literally undergoing training to survive in the real world by improving their event management and many other skills - human interaction, stage decoration, music recital, band performance, sound system engineering skills, allaying stage fright, developing public speaking skills and many many more. It may be a l...
Life is a continuum that Man is trying to make sense of. Ignorance and the zest to acquire the hidden secrets of the universe, which he perceives as 'an awful waste of lots of space', linger on and will linger on till 'Thy kingdom come' (i.e. if you believe so). From time immemorial, Man tried to figure out various mind-boggling natural events like natural calamities, disease and emotions. The eldest amongst the pack, the most powerful, the most domineering, the bravest or the far-travelled will take charge and dictate how 'life' should go on. And life went on with a few hitches here and there. The magnificent forces of nature still could not have answered all their questions. The question of angering the 'forces' above came to mind. The leaders decided that certain manoeuvres be done to appease them. Much to everybody's dismay, the misery just kept on rolling. Variations to ways doing things were introduced by disgruntled individuals. Alternativ...
Born to run! That is the slogan of this year's Malakoff 12km run over the bourgeois hilly neighbourhood of Bukit Damansara. After becoming a running junkie, this is my third year in running this race. This time around Raj was there to keep company. Born to run? People are born everyday for a heap of reasons. Some are born after years of tireless effort, a fruit after cascades of failures and disappointments. Others are born after a short unprepared unplanned unplanned (under the influence of) liaisons of forgotten meetings or partners. Once, about 2008 years ago, there was even one with no other intervention except one immaculate divine one. People were born with various spoons - silver, wooden or plastic- for specific reasons; MK Gandhi to boost the morale of Indians for self-rule, Mother Theresa to embrace the downtrodden, Father Damian for lepers, etc. I would say that I was definitely not born to run. We can leave that phrase to the Kenyans and Fauja Singh. I may f...
Continuing my journey like a sage performing Lord Shiva's prayers at Mount Kailash (oblivious to his surroundings), I have discovered yet another outlet to release the stress of modern living. If cable TV was blamed for all the decadence of society, there can now say bye-bye to Astro, our local cable TV and turn their accusing fingers to its competitor - UniFi. For a TV junkie like me with a daytime job who is hard-pressed for time, Astro, with its frequent reruns, erratic transmissions due to Malaysian's tropical weather, mind belittling unnecessarily loud advertisements and mind boggling schedules was a real turn off. Along came Telekom's next generation high speed broadband Internet connexion. And there is no stopping now... I just downloaded the whole season of Law and Order SVU Season 8 on line with the help of bit torrent and thumb drive. The thumb drive is inserted into my DVD player and viola, there I have, crystal clear screening with home theatre system with re...
Ranking: is it necessary at all? Now the Malaysian universities are spiraling down the rung of ladder of ranking. First they were contended in hovering along the 200th mark whilst our southern neighbours were comfortably at the early double digit level. Over the years, as fewer and fewer students actually bother to secure a place in any of the public universities, the slide has worsened. Naturally, as a defense mechanism, our mortar-board wearing keepers of academic excellence insist that ranking is like a pulling wool over the eye, a whitewash! Yeah, right! Standards are ascertained by what the majority of people expect of a product. In most cases, the best way to gauge of improving effectiveness and quality of something is to compare it to its neighbours or in this case to a list that has already been around for many years. Real McCoy and impostor Alike but not the same! Many years ago, badminton pundits used to wonder the greatness of teams from Indonesia and China. Thos...
1972 13th December 2011: Today, Sultan Abdul Halim Muadzam Shah ascends the throne as the constitutional King of the nation for a second five-year term. His first term was about 41 years ago when Rifle Range Boy was getting used to living in 'high society' - staying 15 storeys above ground and the great stories to blog about quarter a century later. He is the oldest monarch to have been crowned Agong at 84 years and the only one to have sat on throne twice! Many things have changed since his last reign. He has a new consort (after the demise of the previous majestic looking scholarly one) and the feudalistic acceptance of his subjects have declined over the past two decades. Daulat Tuanku!
One of the many books I bought during the 'Big Bad Wolf' warehouse sale includes Jeffrey Archer's Path of Glory. Being the nationalistic British leader he is, he decided to claim his British mark on the alleged achievement his countryman on the the highest peak on planet Earth, Mount Everest. A little bit of background for the uninitiated, Jeffrey Archer is an English politician and author who did time for his wrongful involvement with the law and money issues. Good for him and us that he stuck on his daytime jobs. And writes well he does. I bought this copy off the shelf during the Big Bad Wolf warehouse sales, not because I was dying to read this book but rather because it was going cheap and had heard that he was a prolific writer but never had the chance to read his books. I thought to myself that it must slow paced and draggy as most books on drama-in-real-life are, furthermore it was set at the early of the 20th century. How wrong I was! It turned out to be all th...
Aubrey Collette was born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), as the son of a photographer. He was an art teacher for a while, before his political cartoons started appearing in newspapers The Times of Ceylon and The Ceylon Observer. When the political climate became volatile, he left for Australia in 1961. There his comics and cartoons first appeared in The Bulletin, and later he joined The Australian as an editorial cartoonist. He won the Walkley Award for Best Cartoon in 1970. He moved to Melbourne, where he started working for the Melbourne Herald, but never lost touch with Asia, where his work appeared in magazines such as Asia Magazine, The Straits Times and the Ceylon Observer. A popular newspaper comic strip by Aubrey Collette was 'Sun Tan, the Asian Sensation'.
Can you imagine? Seventy years after its release (1941), Citizen Kane, hailed by the movie industry as the best American movie of all time, is still appealing. Citizen Kane is an epic movie narrating the life and times of a 'fictitious' (some critics say it is not) flamboyant debonair of an individual who was uprooted as a boy from a God-forsaken place to be given the comfort of wealth by a guardian. He grew up to be a playful megalomaniac of a character who jumps from boarding school to boarding school with no university certificate to show! His turning point was when he turned 25, took over a newspaper, and started his legacy. The movie was written, acted, directed, and produced by Orson Welles, one of Hollywood's equally eccentric characters. It won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 1941, though it was nominated for 9 and did not break even at the box office then. The movie starts with the introduction of Charles Foster Kane's death with a s...