Inevitable by-product of affluence?

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 the counselling.
He is qualified alright but refuses to stick to any job as it makes him feel stressed!
Every two months he runs back home from work and wants his parents to solve his problem like they did every time he refused to go to school.

* 28 years old Anjali does not want to go back to her one-year-old marriage because it is too much for her to work in the office and then look after the household.
She wants her mother to come and live with her and do the household work.

There are many others...
but all originating in overzealous parents wanting to protect their children from even the smallest discomfort in childhood.
You love them alright, but when you shell them from the adversities of life, what you are doing is bringing them up in a sterile environment.
The result: the moment they are exposed to the world their immunity buckles up and they stand threadbare wanting to run away from everything that is anything but comfortable.

They have to live in this very world and away from you.
Do you really love them?
Or do you love yourself more?
If it is them, then you would ensure to make them future ready- let them face, talk to them, provide support, but let them face housework, studies, bullying and adversities.
Tell them money is limited and let them learn to hear a lot of ‘NO’.
That’s what makes them 'FUTURE READY'.

- *Dr. Sapna Sharma*
Psychotherapist, Spiritual Counselor, Life Reinvention Coach & Motivational speaker.

Living on a prayer!

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 rent a shack to cramp up their families. Children become creative creating games with garbage. A roller of an ergonomic chair is a pushcart; a discarded wheel is play-toy, and somebody's trashed plush toy is their life-long buddy.

Every stateless person has a sob story to tell as they ponder aimlessly into their future in which they do not foresee any ray of hope. The authorities try to expel them now and then. Undocumented immigrants are occasionally repatriated but like mushroom after rain, they keep on coming back. For them, even though they are treated like lepers here, life is still better in Sabah. There is economic activity. They have a chance to feed their family. In the southern islands of Philippines, there is nothing, only Abu Sayyaf and pandemonium.

What is it that you really want?

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 are only obsessed with materialism, violence, and sexual pleasures. They are clueless about what they actually want in their lives, and they need strong leadership to pave and lead the way. His ideology became the spine of many ultra-nationalistic and religious bigots.

LKY has an impressive set of laurels to prove that his formula of regimentalised dictatorship had been pivotal in transforming a backwater village into a first-class metropolitan city. His foes would say that the only difference between Kim Jong Il and LKY is the prosperity of its citizen. But is not that the end of all, being prosperous and affluent? Or is something more than being happy, belly full and money jingling in your pants and knowing your old age is taken care of?

A storm in the teacup?

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, however, condone any of her actions by any means.
Regarding her seemingly racist's rant, come on admit it! We, Malaysians are racist by birth, by default and by force by the powers that be. How many times have we try hard to compartmentalise a new colleague or acquaintance into the common ethnic group in the country? It has become almost second nature to us to instinctively utter a totally inappropriate statement, racial wise, by stereotyping one by race. In the heat of the moment, Kiki did the same.
Perhaps her mistake was that her anger took a mighty long time to subdue. And to be caught on tape. If there were no evidence of the whole event in cyberspace, it would just be another unglamorous event occurring on a daily basis in the streets of Malaysia, another storm in the teacup.
What happened afterwards was even more laughable! The trial by social media, the vilification, exposure of personal details, the show of lack of privacy and how our life can be bear open for others to see, the crucification, the unwelcome stardom and the mania that followed does not augur well for us in our endeavour to portray to the world as a developed and mature society.
The biggest lesson learnt from kerfuffle is that 'Somebody is always watching you'... I am afraid to wash to wash my hair, when I look up, I see somebody standing there, somebody's watching me now! Who? The IRS!!!...

Balancing act

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 to rattle. Seriously, I think they thought the structure of the flat built with German technology and pre-fabricated concrete would not be able to stay the constant pounding. They finally agreed when an area between Blocks G and H was sanctioned for their pounding activities and their merchandise were marketed in the morning market nearby.

Traditional grinder

The trade was left to the female folks whilst the guys usually indulge in jobs which took them away from their homes for months (from my astute observation, if it is indeed accurate). The women folks were usually imported as brides from India and were generally not conversant in the local languages. For convenience and security, they would move in droves with innumerable children in the eye catching multi-coloured attire. To keep tab on their crowd so as not to leave out anyone behind, they would usually make a big ruckus calling out each others' names to ensure attendance! Their antic would be a spectacle and sometimes embarrassing to fellow Indians as they would converse in Tamil, especially on a crowded bus. When I was young, I thought the balancing act of putting things on the head would pass in the future as Malaysia becomes 'advanced' as, to me, this practice was confined to under-developed countries of the Black Continent and some hill kingdom somewhere far away (and perhaps Chinese Acrobats and Circus performers).

Balancing at the fringe of civilization

As I listened over and over of the media propaganda of Malaysia progressing by leaps and bounds over the various 5-year programmes and industrial efforts, my assumption was reinforced.
Hold behold, 40 years later, what do I see? People in the fringes of the capital city still loitering around aimlessly with no documents to show their existence selling Java batik balancing their commodity on their heads and flashing their betel nut stained horrible teeth!