RIFLE RANGE BOY

Two things that happened recently made my mind go a-wandering, yet again. Credit: SCMP #1. A friend, whom I have not met for some time now, appeared in my life during the course of my career. About twelve years previously, he became a widower after his thirty-something wife succumbed to the menace of the crab. Left to care for three young girls, ranging from ages of eight to twelve, he took it upon himself to be the sole provider of maternal and paternal love, all lumped to one. With his meagre income and a lot of helping hand from his extended family members, he forewent female intimacy and sacrificed simple pleasures of life to make parenting his sole purpose of existence. Fast forward twelve years later, the girls have managed to attain academic excellence. Each of them is pursuing careers by their own merit in local institutions respectively in medicine. Law and accountancy. It seems like poverty and melancholy never dragged them ...

See what I picked up off WhatsApp... *Parent Induced Wastefulness* (PIW) When parents strive to give their children the best of everything at an early age, they are sowing seeds for materially insatiable monsters that are prone to sloth, apathy, avarice and fear. Don’t stand in self-defence as yet. I have proof. As I sit in my counsellor’s chair day after day I encounter an altogether a new disorder that I have come to label as- *Parent Induced Wastefulness* (PIW). Here are a few examples: * 26-year-old Manas does not want to finish his Engineering degree because he does not ‘feel like’ studying. But he harasses his parents every day for money. He tells me that whenever he did not feel like doing any particular activity, his parents told him he could quit. They always said they did not want him to get ‘stressed’ like they were when growing up. * 34-year-old Raghav is a qualified Engineer and is married for two years but his wife is not ready to live with him hence th...

George Bilainkin, the multi-lingual Polish-Jewish editor the Strait Echo of Penang in the early 1930s made some astute observations on board his ship from England to the port of Penang. He noted the peculiar the way people behave at the first class six course dinner. The very people who had never been served a sumptuous meal back home are the very people who had so much complains about the service and the food! Very much around us! Now how often we have seen this... Just the other day, whilst deeply engaged in my meal with family at a cosy upmarket eatery, I had the pleasure of a family joining an adjacent table. Apparently they had arrived later than the pre-arranged time. No, there were not happy with the sitting arrangements. After much bargaining, they settled in amidst much pomp and pandemonium. No, they brought their own cake and they could not be paying extra charges for serving as the primary aim of their visit was to celebrate a family member's special day. ...

http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/459087/A-case-of-affluenza-The-drink-drive-killer-16-who-is-too-rich-and-spoiled-for-jail A case of 'affluenza': The drink-drive killer, 16, who is too rich and spoiled for jail IT'S the case that’s outraged America: a drunken teenager responsible for four deaths walks free because he’s a ‘victim’ too – of his parents’ wealth By:  Simon Edge Published: Tue, February 11, 2014 Ethan Couch from Texas, USA, killed four people in a crash while drink-driving [AP] It was shortly after 10pm on a hot June evening last summer when a bunch of teenagers from an affluent suburb of Fort Worth, Texas, stole two cases of beer from a Walmart supermarket. They had been drinking already and when an hour later 16-year-old Ethan Couch volunteered to run an errand to a late-night chemist some of them told him he was in no fit state. But when he insisted on it they all piled into his father’s red Ford truck, six in the cab and two in t...