RIFLE RANGE BOY

https://mybukz.tumblr.com/post/175292906152/poem-the-roost-by-farouk-gulsara Credit: FB group: Rawthers Penang circa mid-1960  There was once a time, a few years ago, there was a spate when many of my relatives had given up on their motherland, turned their back on Malaysia and started looking around for greener pastures. I wondered how Mother Malaysia would feel to see one by one, her children, after years of nurturing them, after growing so big and strong, feel compelled to fly away from their roost. Like a proud mother seeing her kids having a mind of their own, she must be immersed in a kind of bitter-sweet feeling. Like a flight of swallows, you came all stocks and barrels, from Swatow, from Coimbatore, Looking for a peace of mind, you scaled the high seas and brine. You were hungry, I fed your soul, you had shivers, I showed you warmth. you were homeless, I gave you home. you were stateless, I was your hope. Under the yellow umbrella, and a piece...

Tun M tried it once, and now in his second lease of life, he is at it again - wanting to change our mindset to be tuned to the frequency of the Japanese. Their zest for improvement and perfection cannonballed them up from a nation devastated by the pulverising effects of a mushroom cloud to morph into the second biggest economy in thirty short years. Somehow, we are deeply immersed and soaked in our mediocrity and lulled with self-glorification that even if we look at the Land of Rising Sun with awe, we remain faithfully as the Land of Twilight. For it is at the twilight of times, do we all become lethargic. Gandhi, among the many things that he admired about the Europeans, includes cleanliness and punctuality. He went as far as to say that stickling to time made them able to rules countries timezones away (paraphrasing). One of the virtues that skyrocketed the Japanese to great heights in discipline and keeping time. Go to any railway station and one can understand. A minute in the...

A unique painting: Krishna points out the Eid moon. 17th century, possibly by Hamid Ruknuddin from Bikaner, Rajasthan. "Krishna Sights the Eid Moon," artist unknown, probably late 16th or 17th century. Did you know that Muslim artists in Mughal India produced many exquisite paintings of Krishna? Of course, the scene here is a historical impossibility, since Krishna, if he existed, predated Islam. But in this painting, and in the many other paintings that depict Vedic devotional themes using Persian/Mughal techniques, we see evidence of a time when religion was not the rigid, codified thing it is now. This India existed, in fact, until recently. And this syncretic approach to faith was the norm across Southeast Asia too, in what is now Indonesia and Malaysia. Something to think about this Hari Raya/Eid.

Stalking Crimes (2018) Author: V.G. Kumar Das The author was trepidatious with publishing such a book. It seems that there is an unwritten rule in the country that writings, even fictions, can only put the country in a favourable light. She cannot be portrayed to be a nation filled with crime, corrupt officials or religious xenophobes. That is why he took the liberty to publish an e-book rather than a physical book as that would be fraught with frivolous bureaucratic obstacles and unnecessary stresses. That is what the new set of leaders are promising - an open society which dares to confront the uncomfortable questions that we, as a nation, are facing. That is not going to be an overnight transformation. The community, ever so immersed in a feudalistic mindset and the culture of not wanting to be controversial, needs time to adjust to the new milieu. People say that the idea of the nation-state is foreign to people on this side of the world. Before immigration policies were me...

Thank you EsKaySK for sharing this. The building of cars has come a long ways from the early days of Ford Motor Co. This shows how large Ford really was. Unfortunately, everything in this world has a shelf life. Massive empires which never thought the sun would ever set on them actually saw twilight. Kings who claimed to have to have found the elixir of mortality only fell folly to their own foolhardy. Like Flint Town in Michigan which was looking into prosperous times when General Motors decided to build its plant here. It used to be the postcode that everyone wanted their lovely home to be. Look at it now. With the relocation of automobile plants and the slump in the American car industry, melancholy seems to be the order of the day. It has become a ghost town with no economic activity and lawlessness prevail in the greater part of the town. These pictures are of Detroit, another of the numerous American cities in the same boat. What would you if you are an inmate of such...

Coitus Interupptus and Other Stories (2017) Author: Malachi Edwin Vethamani We all have seen these characters in our lives. Many of them lived amongst us or with us. Some of their actions may seem quirky, but we accept them anyway. We know that variety is the spice of life. Just because their point of view is different from ours and they unusually perceive specific values, it does not mean that they are evil. Who are we to judge, anyway? Born an Indian in Malaysia and living through the time when some of the short stories were set, I can so relate to some of the characters found in this book.  Going against the grain of what is expected of a marriageable girl in a conservative society of us, there are those who want to have the cake and eat it. They do not want to play second fiddle to some man but want to lead instead. The fear of losing one's religion is ingrained in the psyche of every Indian boy in their childhood. Oh, how many times have we seen ladies c...

 Kardashians - fiz-x.com This post was spurred with someone mentioning how the whole Government machinery has suddenly found new vigour to streamline all its dealings. At a wink of an eye, civil servants who all this while had not been civil enough to show the gratitude to the salary that the taxpayers paid them, have found rejuvenated zest to right their wrong of so many decades. Have they really turned over a new leaf? Have they had their wings clipped or hand tied that prevented them from doing what they were yearning to do all these while - to serve? Are these moves just reactionary to the change in the tide of the time? My thoughts were cradled back to a time in our recent past. The mantra of the day then was that we were to become an industrialised and advanced country by 2020. Wealth and money were then the new God. The yardstick to gauge the advancement of a society was the material things, not civic-mindedness, positive human values or culture. Megalomania was an acce...

https://mybukz.tumblr.com/post/174902329732/poem-aging-with-grace-by-farouk-gulsa JUNE 15TH, 2018 WINGSWORLDWEB  Poem: Aging With Grace by Farouk Gulsara Photo by Pranav Jain on  Unsplash Ageing with Grace My mane, my crowning glory, Once my pride, my joy, Is now but just a silvery tuft. My dimples, my charm, Have lost their twinkle, now just wrinkles. My charming Bella Donna eyes, Cataractic, xanthomatous, have lost their glaze. My neck, so nimble, so supple once, Now only arthritic, sprouts crackles. My breasts sprout proud once, Parturient, now sag, atrophy. The curtain bows. My female chest so majestic once, Now left kyphotic and osteoporotic. My midriff navel tease, sari for cover, Left now with striae, protuberant and scarred over. My posterior, an asset, my pride, Adipose now deposited on both sides. The thigh, the thunder, Is flabby without tone, none to wonder. The feet used to...

Dear White People (2014) Living in the post-modern world has proven to be quite challenging. If keeping up with fleeting of information and the changing of fashions is hard enough, try being politically correct. It would drain out the last ounce of strength in you. It seems that people these days are all so fragile and can easily cringe like mimosa pudica  the moment we hear something remotely unsavoury.  If you use a word that feels benign enough not to offend anyone, the same people would turn around and tell you that by skirting around the issue, you are actually promoting discrimination. For example by using a sex-neutral pronoun, one may allege that we are accentuating the divide! This film is a satire on the above subject. It is a bold attempt to put in the open, the dilemmas that the Ameican blacks that go through in their day to day interactions with the other. It portrays identity issues surrounding black students amongst themselves, with white students...

© FIFA Almost like a ritual, it turns up regularly every four years in the Northern summer. Nobody bothers about the Southern hemisphere anyway. One says that games are on this summer, it refers to summer in the Northern hemisphere, not South. Many a couch potato who had seen better times at running after a ball, all turn out to be expert football pundits and fantastic football strategist; many times over than the world's highest paid football managers. These podgy characters start their day in the afternoon with puffy red eyes and husky voices after staying up the whole night to the wee hours of the morning at nightspots cheering for teams whose players would not even be able to place our country on the globe. My exposure to this most loved started way back in 1978 when Argentina hosted this quadrennial fiesta. My mathematics teacher, Mr Chang, besides teaching us probabilities and possibilities, he also exposed us to some of the FIFA world cup related trivia. Brazil, at th...