When you laugh, everyone laughs with you. When you cry, you not only cry alone, the whole world laughsat you. You also know that winning a lottery only solves a few of your problems. On the contrary, it creates more issues and shows who your real friends are. No one becomes rich after winning a lottery.
Another thing. The whole architecture of modern society is set up to make your life a decadent one. It makes partying enjoyable. Extragavance is revered. Alcohol is hailed as an indispensable social lubricant. The media promotes, and society encourages its usage. Nobody talks neither about its addictive nature nor of its destructive potential. But still, when a country is red and needs money, booze and cigarettes are the first things to be taxed under the heading of sin tax.
Society glamourises smoking as if it spurs the creative juices but fails to mention the respiratory ailments, the dependence and the expense that ensues. To top it up, many creative musical compositions were apparently composed under the influence of mind-altering substances. The media also advertises high-flying lifestyles and horse racing like a sine-quo-non of life. They conveniently omit the fine print of the danger of living in credit and bankruptcy.
Just how much can an average being can control his urges. One needs to have enormous willpower to remain sane in modern life.
'To Leslie' brilliantly tells us what happens after the money earned from a lottery goes dry. Reality hits the winner when the party lights dim and the money for drugs and booze fizzles out. Lack of prudence makes Leslie live door-to-door in a suitcase, and she loses the only love of her life, her now adult son. The film narrates how Leslie struggles to get her act together, stay sober and get in the good books of her beloved son. In the meantime, she finds love from a soul who truly understands her predicament.
Good acting and a good message, but we have all seen too many similar real-life instances to predict how everything will unfold.
The teachers thought he was mental. Living in his own world, humming to the tunes that emanate from his mind, they were sure he would end up as a nobody. Some even toyed with the idea of sending him off for a psychological assessment, and perhaps to a lesser taxing environment, unlike the grammar school that he is placed in. Collectively they thought he belonged to the loony bin. Surprise, surprise, 20 years on, he was composing music, making movies and winning international awards for his acting skills. The boy grew up to be the one and only, the legendary P Ramlee, a national treasure.
An elderly auntie once told me that she and her husband had decided to leave their first home in Lorong Seratus Tahun in Penang. They were particularly disturbed by the loitering of boys along the roadside, strumming away their guitars and crooning into the deep of the night, crooning in their high pitched squeaky voices. They were not thrilled by their unkempt beehive hair, beatings of drums, either. They thought that the neighbourhood was not conducive to bringing up their children.
Little did they know that their kids were listening to the same guys who their parents wrote off ten years down the road. By then, three of those roadside boys had become the Alleycats. Their beehive hairdo was then fashionably called ‘Afros’!
Of course, the Alleycats are the most successful of Malaysian bands with international recognition.
The world is a cruel place. People forever want to exert their dominance over the other as much as and whenever they can. They will not rest until and unless their position on top of the perch is secure. They would be wary of any behaviours by the other that is not mainstream. What if the others’ actions put them in the limelight, and their puissance is bowled out?
Alleycats
Every time I held my guitar, people would exit the room. They would say I should not act weird and stick to my daytime job. They assert that wearing too many hats would make me a Jack of all trades but master of None. They asked me what I was trying to achieve and was it my narcissistic tendencies that pushed me to venture into new frontiers considered self-indulgence?
Covid was God-sent. They left the room, citing my contact with the public that puts me a potential transmission source. That arrangement was just dandy. Nobody was there to be bothered by my disjointed and out-of-tune strumming. They did not disturb me, and my practising did not annoy them.
Fast forward. I could say I did not do too badly with my self tutoring. As is seen in the short snippet below, everyone is having a good time.
I was fascinated with the concept of having a drawing room commonly seen in Victorian homes. All the while I thought it was a place where architects drew their plan or generals drew their strategies to cannonball another helpless native country.
Only of late, I came to know that the drawing room is nothing as romantic as that. It is simply a room where the men simply withdraw after finishing their dinners while the ladies engage in tete-a tete or organise the maids to clean up. The men would withdraw, smoking their expensive cigars, sipping down their port wines and stir up the prospect of creating business opportunities.
The same concept seems to work at pubs and smokers' room in country clubs. A place where same minded people would congregate and talk about small things that could one day eventually change the world. Many world decisions, engineering feats and history had been created in these spaces — a little indulgence in sin to build the camaraderie that would survive the harsh trying challenges of life.
In the present age and time, it is not politically correct to be seen to allow or seem to indulge in these type of health-damaging recreational activities. Furthermore, as its impact, the secondary smoke and all, affects others, steps are made to demonise these rooms. Many of these rooms are being closed as many of their aged occupants had passed on, and the younger generation seem content building their network the cyber way!
