The Green Party?

“For a vegetarian, you seem to have a lot of demands,” I told myself. 

I am obviously out of sync with what being vegetarian means these days. At an age when everyone demands rights, I guess it is the same for vegetarians (and vegans, too). Rightly so too. Everyone deserves their place in the sun or rather on Earth, the rich, the economically challenged, the disabled bodies and pretty much everyone else. 

From the things that I understood in my impressionable age, by sticking around erudite adults, I assumed that one needs to control his primal desires to be a better soul. By suppressing innate desires to attack, devour and consume fellow members of the animal kingdom, it is believed people would pick up more brownie karmic points in the repeating cycles of rebirth. Hurting the sentiments of their own kind with their uppity attitude does not count. 

Of course, some have turned green for health reasons. Perhaps they had a pressing need to care for the environment or just ethical judgment of killing a fellow being with no religious undertones. 

My impression of how a vegetarian conducts himself is perhaps moulded by looking at a vegetarian friend, GR, a Brahmin and a vegetarian from birth. Whilst caught in the annual floods in Kelantan on our tour duty, we were left with just rice to eat. There were no vegetables to harvest, no dry land for hens to lay eggs and, of course, no fishing due to the monsoon. Chickens were off the menu. They had probably drowned or could not be transported from the barns. 

So my Brahmin friend ended up sustaining life with just rice and soya sauce. It went on for one week till normalcy prevailed. The rest of us had sardines, anchovies or fermented shrimp paste (belacan).

After laying down the ground rules of who can consume what and the differentiation between vegans, ovo-vegans and lacto-vegetarians, the fight is not quite over. You forgot Jains, who avoid tubers and roots. Then you have the nuevo-riche with gluten-free, lactose-free, sugar-free necessity. Eggs of free-ranging chicken are a no-no for some ovo-vegetarians, as their eggs could have been fertilized; hence, they are technically live animals. 

Vegans have claimed that a plant-only diet offers a multitude of health benefits, is better for the environment, and is the only ethical choice. While some of them respect the dietary choices of others, some of them proselytize with religious-like fervor and are working to get their diet adopted by all of humanity.

What started as a personal wish to control animalistic behaviours in us as we are what we eat and a wish to protect the environment has morphed into something laughable sometimes. It has become a fashion statement, an elitist snobbish gesture. Bending backwards to be nice to animals, they have no qualms about abusing fellow human to meet their dietary need. They also selectively choose to close an eye upon the cruelty done to dairy cows and the indiscriminate culling of male calves. 

At the end of the day, it is economics, stupid!

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The tale behind the old wound...

HUSM, Kubang Kerian, 1986

Ask any medical student in HUSM Kubang Krian around 1986-88. Invariably, everyone would have learned everything there is to know about fistula-in-ano from one particular patient. He was a chronic long-staying in-patient with an intractable condition used in many surgical medical student final examinations. The chap was so knowledgeable about his condition that he would coach medical students on the correct questions to ask.

This patient had quite an engaging story about how he acquired his debilitating condition. He was a peasant in the interiors of Cambodia during the civil war. He was apprehended by the soldiers and underwent unspeakable tortures. Traumatic insertion of blunt objects into his posterior end eventually led to his situation.  

A patient is not just a person with a medical condition but the sum of the ups and downs of his existence. Hence, a medical student should never fail to paint a composite picture of his whole being. We knew he was not a Malaysian but a Cambodian, but he carried a Malaysian 'blue' identity card (ID) with him. Naturally, we probed as proud inquisitive Malaysians who do not like others to have access to anything.

What we found is illustrated precisely in this old Filem Negara propaganda footage. PERKIM, the Malaysian Islamic Welfare Board, as part of their dakwah, a mission to help out fellow members of the Ummah who were in trouble, oppressed by non-believer rulers. It did not matter that their own backyards were in tatters or that their own kind in the Muslim kingdom was suffering. They took it upon themselves to meddle in other people's affairs, unsolicited, to reinforce the state pity-seeking victimhood of its members. These Cambodian refugees were rescued at sea, given a new lease of life, a new name, a new religion, maybe, and a new identity as citizens of a generous charitable Muslim government. 

All of these were done with the active participation of the leaders going through the usual due process. Everything was hush-hush and fast-tracked under the cloak of secrecy.

RETROSPEKTIF : BERLINDUNG DI MALAYSIA (PERKIM) (1976)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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