A wedding - a celebration of life?

BP was a year junior to me at university. Coming from a similar family background, we clicked. Our paths would occasionally meet in the daily hustle and bustle of our academic lives. Our course required us to spend two of our five academic years away from the main campus, at the university's teaching hospital in the East Coast State of Kelantan.

It was in my last year that BP used to hang out in my room in between his long studying hours. We used to chat about little things, such as quirky occurrences during ward rounds and other similar topics.

Soon, it was 1988, and it was convocation time, marking the beginning of the different paths life would take us. Working in various hospitals, we acquired the necessary skills to progress in our field of expertise.

Periodically, we kept in touch, trying to stay in touch as often as possible. It was the pre-digital era; hence, we had only depended on landlines and physical meetings.

Just last month, I was pleasantly surprised when BP called me on my mobile phone to invite me to his daughter's wedding. It took place in a private hall in a small town.

I used to think weddings were something personal, only to be shared within a close family circle and friends. That a large celebration was opulence and a waste of money that could be put to better use.

After attending the celebration, it dawned upon me that it is more than flaunting one's wealth or one that irks the roving eyes. I began to view wedding celebrations in a different light. It is a celebration of the path that both families traversed. It brings together all the people who were somehow involved in shaping a young couple into what they are today. They must have gone through their ups and downs together. This moment must be the victory lap for their labour of love, not for others to see but for themselves to bask in the glory for a task well done.

As mysterious as life can be, I noticed that many people BP invited for the wedding celebration were also known to me, but not through the standard university connection. The same people who crossed BP's life also crossed mine, albeit at different times during training in various towns. So it was a good catch-up time for me too. Some of them I had lost contact with for over twenty years.

Life springs so many surprises. Just like how I met BP many years after graduating in 1988. It was 1995, and as I was walking along the cobbled streets of Edinburgh one warm November afternoon, who did I bump into? A jubilant BP who had just passed his membership examinations at the Royal College of Medicine! And I was given the honour to share the proud moment of him receiving the scroll from the President of the College.

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It does not matter...

This weekend would see meaningless parties and stupifying merrymaking in the name of a monarch who is synonymous with opulence and redundancy. There cannot be a worse time to glorify a family when the rest of the world looks at entitlement as a bad word. The idea of a person, by his birth, being feted up to high heavens despite all the scandals that have linked with the royal family does not make any sense. It is worse when the ruling monarch takes the helm as the head of the Church of England.

Nothing looks pretty when we talk about their predecessors' curriculum vitae or past glory. Her laurels include legitimisation of robbing non-British merchant ships of their gold and silver, giving a royal seal to pirates to loot the Spanish royal armada of their wealth,  allowing famine deaths in their subjects (just because they are brown) to feed their soldiers and brutally murdering millions in the name of civilising the natives. Yes, the Platinum Jubilee of the longest-reigning British monarch is here. 

  

Completed 1903 to mark Queen Victoria's
Diamond Jubilee (1897). At 60 ft tall, it
commemorates each year of her reign.

When the wokes are up in arms questioning the privileged, the errors and omission of the generation past, as well as the blatant widening of the gap between the haves and have not, this is in bad taste. There is no reason for the royal family to flaunt the wealth that they acquired by birth and force others to revel in jubilance. If anything, it only rekindles old festering wounds and re-emphasises the extent of the limit humans are able to dehumanise each other. 

To the aristocrats and plutocrats, it is an opportune time to reinforce their loyalty. In return, the tongue-hanging loyalist would pounce upon the mittens shrewn to them as picturised in the children's folklore 'This Old Man' - give a dog a bone!

In my school days, I remember walking past a clock tower in Penang, erected in honour of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. Then from pictures in magazines and museum documents, I realised that Penangites were having a whale of a time during Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee and King George V's coronation. The million-dollar question is whether the colonial subjects really share the sentiments of their Masters, or there are they there just for the party?

Like the Tamil proverb that says, ராமே ஆண்டாளும் ராவனே ஆண்டாளும் (Whether Rama rules or Ravanaa rules), it does not matter to the Average Joe. The life of the ordinary man hardly changes for the better. Still, like Sisyphus, Average Joe tries to find contentment via these meaningless celebrations despite his seemingly hopeless life. He can pack his troubles and seek a release from his bottled-up emotions for one evening. But come tomorrow, it is back to the same grind mill.

(N.B. The idea of celebrating a Jubilee goes back to the time of the Old Testament. A Jubilee is celebrated in a kingdom every 50 years. At this time, debts are written off, enslaved people are freed, and people take a full year of a break from work. It is a kind of reboot. The land is not planted, and people were expected to fete in ecstasy for the ruler.)

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Rock on!

Whilst everybody is arguing about the political correctness of spreading the spirit of the festivities and whether Winterval should replace Christmas, and on the other spectrum, whether X’mas is a religious celebration at all, people forget the message behind any celebration. It does not matter if it is a pagan festival. The spirit of any get-together is the fellowship, the fun, the laughter and the strengthening of bonds of camaraderie, of family and the temporary amnesia of the accumulating thoughts of uncertainties of the future. 

As the arms of our family tentacles spread wide to explore greener pastures and in the advancement of careers, the number of remaining members slowly dwindles. If previously, greetings were expressed with bear hugs, exchange of presents and boisterous meetings packed with roars of laughter and trays of food, now we have to content ourselves with digital cards, heart signs and virtual kiss emojis. Messages after messages impressing and outdoing each others’ longing of the other regularly clog the family Whatsapp groups.

These are the gruelling needs of the time and an existential need to propel the family DNA up a notch from where the previous generation left it. If one were too sentimental and fail to be a realist but stay forever romanticising the so-perceived glorious past, he would be stuck in a dream only to awaken to realise that the next revolutionary bus had left us by. 

So forward we shall march with the fond memories of the yesteryears to spur us and the dream of a better future to engine us. The mistakes of yesterday will be the lessons to build a better tomorrow as we sail through the vast Ocean of Life on our minuscule and wayward vessels. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. 

In the spirit of the Yuletide. 2009, Kajang.

https://asok22.wixsite.com/real-lesson 

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A different time?

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.