RIFLE RANGE BOY

It has nothing to do with mocking the duly departed. No doubt we do not poke fun at the dead. Jocelyn Chia did not ridicule the victims who perished in MH370. She sneered at the country's citizens whose image bearer in the sky went down without a trace of existence. In the same skeet, she peeled bare the impotence of the government, which had lost in the global fight to stay prominent. Whilst the rest of the world is busy improving the saleability of its country and drawing in foreign funds, besides improving human capital and intelligence, Malaysia's leaders are content in drumming the past century's tune of race and religion. The leaders make their gullible subjects feel special when they are merely donning the Emperor's new clothes. So when Jocelyn haughtily flaunted Singapore's first-world status after being jilted from an intimate relationship, during which the Prime Minister had cried about an uncertain future, she knew her country had done well. Speaking from...

MH 370: The Plane that Disappeared(2023, Netflix) 3-part Documentary "Good night, Malaysia 370!" Those were the last words before Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah disappeared with his Boeing 777, 227 passengers from 14 nations and 12 crew members  into thin air in the early hours of 8th March 2014 en route to Beijing. Nine years later, the world is still clueless about how an aircraft as big as a building could disappear without evidence. In an era when we may be at the cusp of discovery of the Higgs boson (God) particle, and we can convict a politician with denatured DNA from semen deposited three days previously, we are still unable to make head or tail to a Boeing plane's whereabouts. All the satellites and tracking devices that monitor our every move simply failed to comprehend its fate after it went off the radar after 0130hrs. External communications and transponder signals simultaneously disappeared after entering the Vietnamese air space. This documentary series has yet...

You cannot fault me for thinking that when I am air bound, I am just a particle in the sky away the scrutiny of eyes of people who were supposed to be on a lookout for my welfare. From a person whose knowledge of projectile does not go beyond the problems I have solved in Mechanical Mathematics and understanding projectile vomiting, I cannot be faulted to think that if anything were to go wrong in stratosphere, I would be literally on a free fall. Nobody would know where I am and where to look for me. It is not paranoia or some kind of phobia of flying that drove me to think so. 10  months ago, our plane went missing and till date no one has a clue where it went, where to look for it and what came out the billions spent looking for it. And more recently, another one went missing. They had all the communication records and flight path at their disposal and yet 2 weeks into its disappearance, they are unable to put a closure to the mishap. So, when you are up there, you are re...

A dejected Sandhu Sr in Penang. As we straddle along the boat of life as it manoeuvres itself or we manoeuvre it along the river of life, we sometimes wonder why some things happen at all. Are they random occurrences or are they planned move made by the king chess-master?  Are they just chaotic activities which somehow coalesce to give meaning and pattern? Is it all a game by the dice thrower for the fun of it? Does the puppet master enjoy seeing His inventions cringe and wail to their heart's content? In 1983, when tensions were high across the Iron Curtain after USSR downed KAL007, a Korean civilian plane, Stanislav Petrov of the Soviet Union made the unconventional decision of not alerting his superiors when the warning alerts screamed  of a launch of US inter-continental ballistic missiles into Soviet Union. The SOP then was to launch missiles in retaliation. And time was of essence as every ticking second meant annihilation. At that crucial time, Lt. Col. Petrov dec...

http://www.cameronhighlandsinfo.com/jim_thompson/ History Of Jim Thompson "Absolute mysteries only improve with age" writes William Warren, author of Jim Thompson: The Unsolved Mystery, "and there can have been few as absolute as Thompson's has proved to be." His skills as a designer and textile colourist were soon noted by fashion editors and, when the cast of the musical, The King and I, wore Thompson's creations, his silk empire was off and spinning. Most visitors to the Cameron Highlands head off for a walk along one of the many forest trails to enjoy the scenery and the refreshingly cool mountain air. Most return to relax in front of a log fire in one of several resorts located in the former colonial hill station made popular by heat-fatigued colonialists who headed up to the cooler Malaysian highlands for some cool relief from the heat and humidity of the lowlands. Very few walkers don't return. The most celebrated trekker who didn't...

In a silly internet poll recently, it showed that my personality is that of an influential person! Influential? Even with the sinuses clogged with phlegm of influenza and my thinking faculty clouded, I still describe myself of anything but influential. Firstly, I am quite lethargic of influencing anybody of anything which makes me a poor salesman, a visionary dictator or industrialist who would transform the world we live in. I am also not influential enough to move mountains or 'arrange things' with my contacts like a chess master moving his pawns. On the contrary, I visualise myself as one easily influenced (fall prey to/suckered) to others' sob stories. I like to think that I can be such a good role model that I can influence others to path of glory! Maybe that is wishful thinking. And you think you know everything and about anything. Just the local leaders and foreign think tanks who basically hoodwinked the world into thinking they were in grasp to all the informa...