Time and place for everything?

Decision to leave (Korean; 2022)
Director: Park Chan-wook

The ageing brain finds it difficult to learn new tricks. Hence, it compensates for its deficiencies by filling them with old remote thoughts. Whilst watching this Korean thriller noir, a conversation with an old friend, 20 years previously, resurfaced.

P was an ambitious young man when he was posted as a secondary school teacher in a remote part of the country. His rumbling young heart knew then that he was made for bigger things in life, but teaching a bunch of uninitiated young kids in the periphery was a start.

Being well versed in the Malay Language, he was quite a hit amongst the locals, particularly his young lady colleagues. These young lassies were all over him, eating out of his hand and at his beck and call. Bending over backwards to be in his company, there were unabashed invitations for intimacy.

Such good chemistry, sensual without being sexual

On further prodding by his nosey on more juicy details, P told them there was nothing more to say. Nothing happened. With a blank face, he said something to the effect of, "one should defecate where he eats!"

P went on to spend his free time preparing for his law degree. Soon enough, he resigned from his teaching stint and is now a flying legal eagle.

In every profession, situations may arise where one can obtain personal favours. He may be lured to use his positions to curry flavours to fulfil self-interests. For that reason, to be professional in a particular job would mean to put the emotional aspect into makings job-related decisions, but to decide with the head and not the heart. But then, when Adolf Eichmann made similar decisions, the world accused him of treating an act of evil as the banalest thing to do.

The protagonist of this Korean thriller noir, Hae-joon, probably did not have a friend like P to advise him on how to act professionally. Married but a weekend husband only as he is stationed as a police detective in another town, he is assigned to investigate a hiker who is found dead. During the course of his investigation, ruling out the hiker's sensual wife, Seo-rae, as a possible suspect, he is drawn closer to her. A Chinese immigrant, a caretaker of the elderly with a clear alibi of innocence, she is off the hook. But there seems more than meets the eye as Seo-rae is seen six months later with another husband who just happens to die soon after their meet!

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

Wrong decisions based on wrong compositions?

A NASA telescope called NuSTAR for short,

which is roaming around approximately 

324 million light-years from Earth, 

happened to be in the perfect position 

to see a black hole's powerful gravity

tugging on X-ray light emitted from a 

nearby Corona.

The discourse started over an article about a poor Hindu man who tried to advise a Muslim man against urinating in the open in a public space. The ego-dented Muslim called his friends to give the Hindu a nice bashing that he would never forget. Well, he never had the chance to remember. He was beaten up in the plain view of the public who, sadly, not one person came to his help or did call the police. The poor man succumbed to his injuries.

The incident escalated to a racial clash when the real issue is public apathy and the curse of being born poor.

From that angle, the debate went on to whether being poor is one's own fault or it is due to a composite of factors. My friend insists that it is self-made. Everybody is given equal opportunities in life. People make wrong decisions again and again, and the end result is being stuck in the lowest rung of society. In this vast world, chances are there for our taking. Nothing happens by chance. We are who we are due to the decisions that we made in life.

That is where I differed, in my opinion. No doubt decisions are ours to make, not everybody is endowed with the wisdom, willpower and intelligence to choose what is indeed best for him in the long run. Some do not have the foresight beyond that of a goldfish. Others are weak to persevere the hardship and throw in the towel easily. The tenacity to withstand a pressure cooker is the sum product of his genetic makeup and environmental factors. Poverty is a rut that traps one in a vicious cycle of malady, hopelessness and melancholia. Lack of parental guidance and supervision, lack of opportunities, lack of role models, lack of push factors and intrinsic desire for instant gratifications just perpetuates one to stay in the status quo. Poverty itself cuts down options. The need to bring the bacon draws both parents on back-breaking money earning spree at the expense of familial bonding and parental supervision. Economic deprivation draws them to less affluent neighbourhoods with less equipped educational facilities. Destitution reduces confidence. A large family demands sacrifices from all its members. In the name of compassion and blood bonding, the skin quivers and siblings have to give up privileges. Then there are social diseases, and the list goes on.

The realisation to break-free usually comes in the form of inner awareness, a kind of Enlightenment from within one's self with a little help from good friends with the same wavelength and family guidance.
Is there a guardian angel who paves the correct path for you or your astronomical coordinates that determine your lifeline?

Playing God?

In times of tranquillity when your life is charted nicely in front you, you can talk. You would say, this is how one should do things, what is right, what is wrong, what is kosher, what is just and what is humane. The real test of humanity comes when civilisation is on the brink of collapse when law and order are in shambles.

At times of emergency when the social order collapses and everyone is hanging on to their dear lives on a thread, decency, common courtesy and even humanity is a misfit. Does it really? Or is it the place where humanity is put to the acid test?

Heard over a podcast about an incidence at a hospital during the time Hurrican Katrina hit New Orleans. The medical staff thought they were well prepared to handle the crisis, but they soon realised that panic button was hit when the levee broke on the second day. The hospital was flooded and by the third day, power supply was disconnected after the water reached the crucial areas. Mishandling of rescue services saw patients and medical providers stuck with very sick patients and depletion of backup power supply to sustain life. The worse hit were the chronically ill and the ones needing life support. Oxygen supply came to a halt, and the staff had the unenviable task of triaging who deserved the much-needed elixir of life- oxygen. They also had to decide who deserved to be saved first when helicopters eventually arrived. As transporting patients to the helipad on the top floor without elevators was a challenge, morbidly obese patients had to be left behind. Sanitation was a problem; toilets were non-functional.

Many of the patients on life support were literally breathless and dying. Very ill patients were in misery, knowing that they would be left behind due to space constraint in the rescue vessels. Some terminally ill patients were quite miserable. It was in this instance that someone thought of and perhaps administered drugs to the effect of relieving them of their miseries. In other words, maybe higher than usual doses of analgesic in the form opioids were given which proved fatal.

When the dust finally settled on the aftermath of the Katrina brouhaha, an investigation was initiated to determine any mala fide. Even though nobody was convicted, it did, however, spur discussions on the difficult decisions that the health personnel have to endure in their daily workplace and emergency situations, what more in a war zone.

 http://www.radiolab.org/story/playing-god/

Decision, decisions

When I was young, either by ignorance or defiance, I tended to look down at the wisdom laid down by the Eastern sages but looked up at what, at that time appeared avant-garde, pop culture. With age, hopefully, wiser, I am exposed to the much wisdom that the Eastern philosophers had to offer. And I was just thinking of something I heard the other day.

Amongst the numerous moral dilemmas highlighted in the Mahabaratha, there is one which involved a priest. He was just sitting minding his business doing his priestly work. Along came a group of desperate men apparently running from something or someone. The desperate people were running from a band of thieves who were out to rob and probably kill them. They did not want the priest to tell them the direction of their route.

Sure enough, moments later, a group of menacing looking robbers appear.  The priest was put in a spot when asked about the whereabouts of the earlier men. His understanding of life is that one should be telling the truth, and nothing else would do. If he were to show them the right direction, which is the right thing to do, the innocents would be killed and robbed. If he were to deny any knowledge, the dacoits would surely beat the truth out of him. To lie and show them the opposite direction would be deceit, which was a no-no! Hence, the dilemma! He did what he thought was the best thing to do, to tell the truth. Apparently, the Gods were not happy when he died. He was sent to Hell.

Another moral conundrum evidenced in the Mahabaratha, as from many, is the process of assailing of Drona. The teacher who changed allegiance, after being humiliated by the Pandavas, had the knowledge of a secret weapon. The only way to defeat him was to catch him off-guard. Krishna, sometimes referred to as the inner conscious, suggested that the Pandavas tell a white lie. He was to be told that Ashwatthama, his son, was dead.

The truth of the matter is that Ashwatthama was not dead, it was all a facade. The question was that whether it was alright to lie. Krishna asserted that winning for an honourable reason was noble. When an enemy could not be defeated in the usual the straight-forward manner, victory by deceit is acceptable. For Yudhishtra, the eldest of the Gaurava's sons, who could tell no lie, could not proceed such a line of a devious plan. He was made to be convinced that indeed there was an elephant named Ashwartthama which was killed. Hence, technically he was not lying! For other brothers, Arjuna and Bheema, it did not really matter. They felt that they, of the warrior stock, just wanted to win.

The point here is that it is not easy to make the right decision that would satisfy all quarters. Nobody actually knows whether an act is a noble one at that juncture. Prevailing circumstances and the societal set of moralities determine its appropriateness. The wisdom of a particular action could be a judgement in retrospect. We are mere mortals, how are we to know?

N.B. These are just part of a tale of intertwiningly epic proportions. Every action in Mahabharata is justified in sometimes contradictory fashions. What is good for the Kings may not be appropriate for the peasant. Like Schopenhauer said, we glorify the past and the points that suit our agenda. Not everything in the past is bad, and not everyone in the past was noble.