Things we may have to unlearn!

Malu apa bossku? Apparently, all the things I may have learnt from childhood may be wrong after all. Sometimes, I wonder whether I thought the wrong thing or may have been hoodwinked to believe obviously wrong things. Perhaps values changed while we were napping. I always assumed that when one loses any of his properties via public auction, he is said to have lost not only his wealth but also his dignity. The mark of a true man is his ability to acquire wealth and provide for his dependents; his inability to retain his finances is a colossal failure. At a time when pride was everything, abscondment and suicide were standard outlets. My legal eagle friends remain nonchalant about their clients or opponents declaring themselves bankrupt or their properties auctioned off. To them, that is a cost of doing business. Overlooking the inconveniences of bankruptcy, it remains a legitimate 'get out of jail' sort of card. Nothing Earth-shattering, they say, and definitely no shame. I remember a time in my childhood when two policemen came knocking at one of my neighbours' doors. The next thing I saw was my neighbour being escorted out with his hands at the back, handcuffed. My neighbour's mother was wailing, and the other neighbours on the flat floor were busy concocting their own theories of what had transpired before the arrest. Forget that they all had not an iota of clue of what the accused was in for. That left an indelible impression on the young me of how a clash with authorities would affect the people around me. Then came an epiphany. Great world leaders immortalised in our history books spent a big chunk of their lives behind bars. Gandhi was practically behind bars all through the Second World War. Mandela spent 27 years in solitary confinement on Robben Island and other prisons.

In my mind, that is how I thought ex-PM Najib's supporters looked at him when all the legal minds of the country decided that he was guilty of hoodwinking the people's money for whatever reasons. His supporters viewed him as a saviour wronged in a hostile environment when he claimed what was rightfully his. It did not matter that the leader took full responsibility for the duties shouldered upon him in the line of national duty or, like the ship's captain, was the last person to leave a sinking ship. In their eyes, he is a sacrificial lamb of a system supposed to protect him. Whichever way one sees it, their statement just becomes more and more pervasive.

"No, no," reassured the ex-PM's supporters. They insist he was just a pawn in an intricate political ploy to discredit him. "There is no reason to be ashamed, my boss!" (Malu apa Boss ku?) 

I was nurtured to believe that education is a sure way to succeed. Hence, as children, we were told that nothing was more important in life than sitting down and absorbing everything in the books to regurgitate at the appropriate times. Then, it dawned upon me. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Every bit of exposure maketh a boy a complete being. As I learnt from Steve Jobs's autobiography, everything one learns is useful somewhere in one's life. There were many roads to Rome. What is the truth?

Shakuni's temple in Kerala. Homage to his

determination to seek revenge against the

greatest empire of the land. Allegedly attained

moksha here.

Now, the world tells us that we were taken for a ride. All the so-called history taught to us was fraud by the voice of the victors who wanted to paint a favourable view of themselves. The truth was multifaceted. Only until the lion tells his side of the story will every tale glorify the hunter.

To put the cherry on the icing on my cake of confusion, lately, a scholar completely shattered the image of Shakuni, a character in Mahabharata. My understanding is that Shakuni was the villain of the whole tale. He allegedly had a special dice that helped him to cheat the Pandavas of their kingdom and humiliate their wife, Kunti. He walked with a limp that inspired a distasteful proverb in Tamil, which suggested that all handicapped people have evil in their hearts.

Now, they say that it is the Pandavas who instigated the situation. By nature, Shakuni was a skilled gamer. He had an abnormal gait but an able body with no handicap of any kind. Shakuni did not have a limp or had no trouble walking, running or even scaling high mountains. What he had was unbridled loyalty to his sister, Gandhari, and far-sightedness. Gandhari's father, with his kingdom in Afghanistan, had learned from his soothsayers that his daughter had a curse. Her astrological chart suggested her husband would die soon after marriage. So, the family got her married to a goat, which was quickly slaughtered to break the curse. Gandhari was then married off to the blind king of Hastinapura, Dhritrashtra. After discovering that Gandhari was technically a widow, Dhriashtra's father and brother sieged Gandhari's father's kingdom. They imprisoned the male members, who subsequently succumbed to their torture. The family was parsimonious with their food supply to ensure the youngest, Shakuni, thrived through the ordeal to avenge the Pandavas on a later date.

Shakuni later comes to live with his sister to protect her. The rest of what happened afterwards is left to our interpretation.

P.S. The aunties I was exposed to in my childhood did not filter much of what they thought of others. My mother was no different. They called a spade a spade and had no qualms about speaking their mind. Being politically correct was an alien concept. I have often heard my mother cursing people behind their backs for wronging her. She even cursed a handicapped lady who congenitally had an underdeveloped right leg as being as evil as Shakuni. That is when I heard her often mentioned in Tamil, implying that a limping person has a dirty heart!

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What's in a name?

Maverick School, Malaysia.

I am amused by how some establishments have probably wrong choices of names. In my mind, their names have negative connotations. Or it was intended to be so. As they say in business, any publicity is good publicity. Anything that would stir the readers' curiosity or turns any head is good for business.

Recently I came across two such instances.

A private school called' Maverick' was set up in the Klang Valley. I always thought a maverick always has something up his sleeves. He has a scheme, a sleight of hand, that would benefit him. I perceive a maverick as someone like Artemus Gordon of 'The Wild Wild West' (1965), a secret service spy with tricks up his sleeves to protect the US President.

Apparently, over the years, the term maverick had evolved from giving a negative connotation to something positive. People are no longer expected to be conforming and obedient but to think outside the box to be innovative. Correspondingly, students should not be rote learners but creative instead. Hence, to be a maverick is legitimately legal.

Traditional wisdom dictates that we are strong by numbers. We are familiar with Aesop's fable about the feuding brothers and their ailing father's attempt at unifying them through the analogy of breaking twigs singly versus a tied bunch.

Nexus, Bangsar South, Malaysia.

However, big institutions and conglomerates have earned themselves a bad reputation in modern times. With the ever-widening income gap between the top 1% and the rest of society, they are the favourite subjects of leftists and conspiracy theorists.

A new term often thrown in daily conversations nowadays is the word 'nexus'. That word was intended to denote one's central position in the thick of things, like centrioles in the process of nuclear divisions. Or in the centre of the railway line connections. Also, a nexus of evil is out to destroy civilisation as we know it, etc. Examples of the nexus often mentioned in civil or not-so-civil conversations include The Rothchild Foundation, the Illuminati, the Masons, China, the World Economic Forum and George Soros' Open Society.

Pran

To name a multi-million mammoth construction 'Nexus' to hold business dealings and functions and to promote it as the next best thing since sliced bread may appear shady at best. Does it not sound like a big establishment with nefarious intents? Again, any news is good news.

It cannot all be doom and gloom. If not, my father would not have named me after a Tamil movie star synonymous with villainy. If Charles Sobhraj were notorious, would he have called me Sobhraj? But then, there was a time around the world when no child was named Pran, as the name Pran was the epitome of evil as far as the Hindi film world was concerned. He personified what evil meant. His big piercing eyes, grinding teeth and a cloud of cigarette smoke around his silhouette were enough to send shivers down viewers' spines.

Forget the fact the name 'Pran' refers to the Pranava Mantra, which signifies the cosmic sound Om or Aum, the most powerful mantra in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism.

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Nothing is sacrosanct!

Gehraiyaan (Depths, Hindi; 2022)

Director: Shakun Batra

The democratisation of movie-making has led to this - an Indian fairy tale movie made in the vein of a soft porn Western movie just to lure in India's Anglophile liberal English movie-going viewers. The only thing remotely linked to Indianness is the spoken language; otherwise, it is just like any garbage churned out of the factories in Hollywood, sex, lies, murder, and obnoxious flaunting of wealth. 

The following are the few lessons I leant from this movie:

• It is perfectly alright to have sex with your best friend's boyfriend without having a second thought or an iota of guilt;
• It appears to me that wealth is the justification for everything. After all, living life is for the experience. Doing the morally right thing does not fall anywhere near the equation;
• Two-timing is perfectly within your rights;
• Consuming alcohol is your birthright; indulge even when you are pregnant;
• DIY abortion is a no brainer; perform it in your bathroom; 
• Murder your lover and keep mum about it; you can get away from it!
• Be opinionated about everything and do not forget to blame all your follies on your parents. After all, they know nothing;
• Scold your live-in boyfriend for everything. He is your punching bag. You can scold, abuse or even an occasional whack; he would not retaliate because it is not cool for a dude to lay his finger on his beau. His toxicity just would not be justifiable.
• A live-in relationship is a perfectly acceptable living arrangement for an Indian couple, approved by their old folks.
• Treat your family like trash but do not forget your civil duties. Taking out the garbage is the most socially conscious duty one needs to perform.

Soon spaghetti tops and hot pants would be the national
 costume of the Indian diaspora, much like is what is
viewed as progressive in most metropolitan cities.

A struggling yoga instructor, Alisha, has just had it with life. Her procrastinating boyfriend, Karan, is dragging with his book venture, and the app that she is developing has not found investors. At that juncture, he hooks up with her childhood friend, Tia, and her obscenely wealthy fiance, Zain. Alisha has a dark cloud hanging over her. Her mother had hung herself, and Alisha blames her father for it. Alisha finds Zain a convenient catch who would help her find happiness. Things take a turn when a glitch with money happens.

Watch it just for the hoopla surrounding it. If you are pressed for time, watch something else. Precious time is better spent elsewhere. 

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We shouldn't be here

It was a dark, humid night, and as I was traversing a back alley making it to my car, I stumbled upon a meowing or rather a weak yowling. It turned out to be that a tiny kitten, all drench in muck, was straddling to wherever it was heading to.

My heart felt for that tiny creature. No, I did not take the pitiful animal home to nurse it back to health and send it out to the wilderness with a glint in my eye. It is too much responsibility.

What went through my mind was what someone told me (or maybe overheard) long ago; that our existence is just a freak accident of Nature. We, the products, have to fight it out to survive to preserve the entity called Consciousness. The consciousness that probably also happened via the accident of Nature. Life as we knew it was just going on without care as simple organisms with hermaphroditical abilities. We dragged on our existence with self-propagation without care. As life became more complexed, there was a need for variation. Nature dictated that heterosexual reproduction was essential for variety. Together with that came oestrus, lust, copulation and orgasmic bliss.

Not all the outcome of these unions were received with open arms. Some are left to fend themselves against the forces of Nature. As the maturity of offspring became complicated, protracted care became necessary. Somewhere along trickled in Consciousness.

In fact, Consciousness has made Man evolve to such a level that they have become a threat to Mother Nature herself. They squander, slaughter, rape, destroy the environment and bite the hand that fed them in the first place.

Our birth, in that way, is a curse. We should not be here at all. Nature was here long before Man came to existence, and it will still be here without us. The trouble is that the way the world seems to be changing, there might not be a planet at all when this civilisation annihilates itself.

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The road to success is fraught with misconceptions?

Outliers, The Story of Success
Author: Malcolm Gladwell (2008)

Life had never been easy. Now it has been made more complicated. Kids all around the world had been fed with the idea that if you put in the hours and do as you are told, your future would be bliss. Nah, don’t buy that!

The secret to success still remains an enigma. Many factors affect the success of an individual. The author goes through the lives of a few successful people and a few who had the potential but did not quite make it.

One has to be born at the correct time. Sometimes the window of opportunity only comes once. One has to be of the proper state of mind and of the right age to grasp it. At the spur of the time when it happens, he must be willing to put in the long hours. That indulgence itself, an awful lot of hours, would determine your future success. The examples of Beatles and Bill Gates are mentioned here. Beatles' acid test was in Hamburg in 1962 when they took the challenge of playing long hours despite the difficulty. Computer maestros were obsessed with the new gadget to know it inside out. 

Of course, social strata of the individual’s family makes an impact. A rich kid has all the exposure, a parent who is willing enough to ferry him around, who would identify his aptitude, give him the coaching to be confident and assertive and to create an environment suitable for his goal.

However, the poor, if given the push in the right direction, would prosper. There, however, must be a concerted effort on the part of the individual, his family and perhaps the administrators and the governing bodies to organise appropriate platforms. The zest to succeed must also come from the individual.

The author goes on to analyse a few air crashes and to suggest that possibly cultural aspects played a minor but relevant role in them. He proffered the idea of Power Distance Index (PDI) - the measure of existence of hierarchy in a society, how it is accepted by a particular community and how it affects day to day conversation, particularly in life-threatening situations like a plane crash. A child nurtured in affluence would probably be more self-confident and assertive in getting his way around. One in a family taught to conform to authority or growing up in a dysfunctional environment may end up not trusting people in power and hence losing out many chances laid in front of him.

A lengthy discussion on PDI resulting from a cultural background as a contributing factor to plane crashes is put forward. Cultures which tend to hold people in high esteem (i.e. high PDI index) tend not to tell off their bosses when they are wrong and fail to exert their authority when needed. This had led to disastrous outcomes in many cases.

Unfortunately, I think the one on which he tries to explain the superiority of Chinese students in Mathematics as being too simplistic. He asserts that the labour intensive, highly skilled, lengthy duration of rice duration as well as the simplicity in the pronunciation of numbers as the reason for their excellence. He compares this to short planting days in the West and the shorter days there. Maybe he is saying that this may have engrained in the genetic level as many of these students are no longer planters' kids. And Singapore is hardly a farming society.

This dilemma is nothing new. Scholars from the Indian subcontinent, for aeons, have been trying to understand this conundrum - why two people develop and perform differently from each other. They try to invoke the time of birth, to place planetary positions as well as the constellation to predict the personality and aptitude of an individual towards a particular field. Unfortunately, it is not specific. Hence, its sensitivity is questionable.

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

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