RIFLE RANGE BOY

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...

A Malaysian documentary on the issue of statelessness among Filipino migrants in Sabah. Living Stateless (Di Ambang) (2014) Created by Matthew Fillmore Like stray animals, they are shooed. They bring the value of their property down. There are poor. There are stateless. Nobody wants them. They are the stateless people of Sabah. While the rest of the country would like to think they are heading to be a developed country by 2020, this fringe part of the state has been battling to get rid of this group of people originally from the Philippines who are neither Filipinos nor are they Malaysians. Without proper documentations, the elders cannot secure jobs, the children cannot get a decent education, no one gets immunisation and medical attention. They show the resilience of the human spirit and are the emblem of the never-say-die attitude of the human race. They live scrapping on discards, monetise trash and perform clandestine menial tasks. Some build up enough courage to ...

After the demise of Singapore's founding father, LKY, the question of personal liberty and freedom versus the need for Big Bro to oversee things for the nation's greater good made its rounds.  Proponents of human rights and individual freedom would argue that the Government has no business barging into personal lives and tapping into our telephone calls. After gruelling all the wrong decisions in the past and paying dearly, the West could no longer trust their governments. Instead, they would let their elected leaders mess up all people's (Third World) future than their own. The leaders are elected servants, and they are there to serve. On the other end, paternalistic leaders feel that human beings are just brainless blind invertebrates with a herd mentality. They just follow their peers without much thinking or analysing! This was proposed by Sayyid Kutb, the Egyptian school inspector who earned a scholarship to the USA. In his daily dealings, he discovered that people ar...

Now that the dust has finally settled on the vilification of Kiki over her outburst and overreaction over the fender bender that is hardly worth discussing, sometimes I wonder how I would have reacted in such a situation - on either side of snafu. I would not be surprised if I had flipped if I were Kiki with the brand new spanking French beau after years of being contented with the only automobile affordable that is forced down my throat with my meagre pay. After paying all the unnecessary additional payments to secure my lucky number and with the smell of new car still lingering on my tunic and skin, it is pure heartache to see it being defaced, albeit its triviality. Putting all that aside, I would have acted inappropriately if a stressful event had occurred prior to that fateful encounter - a unfair statement from someone close, an abusive client, committed a big mistake at work, getting up on the wrong side of the bed, a bad hair day or whatever that would anyone flip. I do not...

Scenes like this was common around Block G. The blended spice makers would be balancing their merchandise (masala) on their head, not potatoes as shown here. There was a time in RRF, when G Block was vacant for a long time. Later as the Kedah Road underwent some development programme, the bulk of its dweller were mass evacuated and placed in the lower couple of floors there. These people were initially were quite reluctant to vacate their Kedah Road ancestral homes but relented after much prodding. They were quite contended with their lifestyle and livelihood of selling grounded spices in the market nearby. Their ancestors, Mussalman from Thenkasi area of Southern India introduced the trade of aromatic freshly grounded blended spice for instant stomach tickling South Indian cooking. Their main reluctance of relocating being inability to continue using the mammoth wooden grinder with massive hand held wooden poles! They did not want the whole flat t...