1978, the year of the Gibbs

Bee Gees with brother Andy
Credit: Pinterest

Each one of us, when we look back at our lives, whether we have had lived our lives to its fullest, still waiting for that magic something to happen or that the particular moment had just whisked us by, we can still reflect back at our moment back in our life where we were Kings.

1978 must have been an outstanding year indeed for the Brothers Gibb. They practically had a hand in most of the songs that made it to the US Top 100 charts that year. Their Saturday Night Fever soundtrack smashed through the ceiling. Many songs from the track found fame, fortune and accolades. Their song compositions for other singers (Yvonne Ellman, Samantha Sang, Frankie Valli, Andy Gibb) also made it well.

For me, 1981 must surely be the turning point of my life. It was the time that I try to develop my physical part of my life to indulge in sports. The sole purpose of my endeavour was to make my school leaving testimonial more illustrious to include sports participation. To my surprise, the aggressive training for the cross-country run apparently paid handsomely. Not only the course which appeared unscalable when I attempted five years previously was won over, but I also managed to overtake the house athletic captain for the sixth place in what may seem as a photo-finish if it were a sprint! I assured myself that there is nothing more I have to live for.

The lone surviving member of Bee Gees, Barry 2017.

Credit: smoothradio.com

Rifle Range – Penang's colourful time capsule

http://www.thestar.com.my/metro/views/2017/04/25/highrise-heartland-of-local-chinese-a-visit-to-rifle-range-flats-is-an-eyeopening-and-humbling-exper/

Tuesday, 25 April 2017

BY ARNOLD LOH – PINANG POINTS

I WAS filled with anticipation when work took me to see some people in Rifle Range Flats, Penang, last week.

After the appointment, I wandered about and had the pleasure of chatting with a hawker about her grilled chicken backsides. That's bishop's nose, for you.

But not all pressmen relish visiting this place. And you can't blame them because during the 2013 General Election campaign someone in one of the flats filled a plastic bag with urine and threw it down at journalists and politicians walking below.

Thank goodness it did not land on anyone.

Two weeks ago, water rained down on journalists while they were photographing 14 motorcycles parked beside Block B that had been burned by arsonists. They saw soapy water gushing down from a washing machine outlet hose that jutted out of the rear balcony of a fifth-floor unit.

When these press corp shouted in revulsion, an elderly woman from that unit barked back in Hokkien.

“Ha mik? Mien sey, ah?” (What? No need to wash clothes, ah?)

Despite all this, I enjoy going to Rifle Range Flats when there’s a reason to do so.

The 3,699 flat units in nine blocks have 99-year leasehold titles. All are one-room affairs, except for four corner units per floor. The corner units have two rooms each.

Six blocks have 17 floors, while three blocks have 18. These nine blocks take up just 4ha, based on Google Earth Pro’s land measuring tool.

Between 8,000 and 10,000 people are estimated to live here, so the biological load is heavy and the place feels claustrophobic.

Boundary Road — the main traffic artery through here — is only 8m wide. The gap from one block to another is just 15m to 20m.

Yet going there feels like a socio-cultural exploration — an adventure — for me.

Rifle Range Flats is a living, functioning monument of humanity when it was not yet addicted to fossil fuel. It was built in 1969, the same year construction on the first Boon Siew Honda assembly plant started.

At the time, he kapcai (underbone) motorcycles were not yet the vogue, and cars were trophies of the rich.

Rifle Range Flats’ pioneers were cyclists. If you plan on exploring Rifle Range Flats, then carpool, or ride a bicycle or motorcycle. 

I froze wide-eyed upon seeing a tray of 24 skewers of richly marinated chicken backsides inside a glass display along the congested, haphazardly-placed hawker stalls below Blocks H and G.

The elderly lady sells it at RM1.30 a stick, grilled on the spot. Each skewer had five to six chicken backsides, depending on their sizes.

I tried to find out who loved to eat them, how many they might eat in one go, how she acquired so many chicken butts to sell, what the marinade was, how she cleaned them and so on. Journalists are hopeless busybodies.

She did not understand Cantonese or Mandarin, so I resorted to my broken Penang Hokkien – I am Cantonese Malaccan.

It dawned on me that Rifle Range Flats is the heartland of Penang’s Chinese folk, set back one generation. Their way of life has been preserved.

They are suffering.

Many of the lifts have broken down. The water pressure is horrendous because the pipes are clogged with rust. They do not have a multi-storey car park.

All these will cost tens of millions of ringgit to upgrade, so the state government has yet to get around to doing it.

But it is said that what cannot be changed must be endured, and if you can stop and observe, you will see patience on the faces of these Rifle Range folk.

I resolve to go back there later when I am not being chased by deadlines.

Go to their market and buy groceries. Order a coffee, sit among the aged population and hopefully gain some small talk.

I also need to steel my nerves and try those grilled chicken backsides.

I did not dare that day and have been kicking my rear end for being a gastronomic coward.

Memory, Conscience and Consciousness, bad for psyche?

Lion (2016)

In the process of evolutionary neural development, lifeforms initially developed a primitive neural structure. As the transmission of neural impulses increased by leaps and bounds, the nervous system slowly evolved to develop a brain, protecting information collecting interfaces from the central processing unit. When the impulses were overwhelming in terms of quantity, some of them were suppressed. This highly complicated mechanism eventually developed 'attention schema' and eventually consciousness. Memory, which is an important component of our brain function also helps to build consciousness and conscience!

This interplay has helped mankind to survive the many calamities of Nature, outlive many of their contemporaries and rule over many of the deathly beasts that roam the Earth. Unfortunately, it also acts as a double-edged sword. Memory which helps to avert danger, to repeat the same mistakes twice and to progress as a race, also gives traits like guilt, nostalgia (if it indeed a bad thing) and morbid longing for something which is not there! Memory can be a curse sometimes.

This is an emotionally charged Oscar nominee film is based on a true story of a 5-year-old 'dirt poor' (sic) Indian boy from the economically deprived part of interior India who, whilst scavenging for food and coin on trains, get separated from his brother. The 5-year-old, Saroo, lands in Calcutta confused, unable to converse in Bengali, not knowing his place of origin, keeping himself busy escaping clutches of hoodlums and even the arms of the law, at least initially. He eventually lands in an orphanage to be picked up for adoption by an Australian couple in Tasmania.
Everything was dandy till the time he was 25. His adoptive parents adopted another Indian boy and life went on. His adopted brother, however, had behavioural issues which plagued the whole family throughout.

At university, Saroo developed a sort of Indian consciousness after mixing with other students from the Indian sub-continent. His old thoughts, all so nicely tugged hidden in his subconscious mind slowly resurfaced. His obsession to reconnect with his Indian biological mother and brother reached fever pitch. He spent three good years with the aid of the then new kit of the block, Google Earth, to try to trace back his journey to Calcutta. This madness of his affected his relationships with his family and girlfriend. It finally led to an heart-wrenching meeting of a son with his mother after years of absence and the subsequent meetings of the real mothers, Australian and Indian and Saroo Brierly. After so many years, only then did Saroo knew that his given name is Sheru, affectionate for Sher, which meant 'Lion'!

Allz well

We can see that it is not a question of whether having a memory and a consciousness is good or bad. Having unerasable memory helped Saroo link up with his biological mother to give a closure to his unanswered queries and to the people in India too. Conscience, compassion and love allowed Saroo's Australian mother to adopt foreign children and even support Saroo's desire to reconnect with his roots. All these masalas of the thinking mind not able to forget as well as to fail to remember creates all the drama, mayhem and happy endings in this life of ours.

N.B. Interesting to note that the theme of family separating because of unavoidable circumstances, natural catastrophe or amnesia has been a regular feature of a well-tried formula in Indian movies. The happen endings usually come via a special family song recognised only by the family members (e.g. Yaadon Ki Baaraat, Naalai Namathe). Here, in keeping the times, it is Google Earth and the reemergence of repressed childhood memories!.

Memory play!

Trance (2013)

It is said that memory is a good thing. The memory of having the fingers' burnt, either by fire or the stock market, may act as a deterrent for one to repeatedly parboil his body parts. But then, the body also prunes its memories, to erase off some apparently too painful memories. Nature also becomes selfish by erasing the painful thoughts of childbearing just to continue progeny. If not for lactation and contraceptive measures, the business of baby making will never cease anytime soon.

Are painful thoughts really detrimental to the development of a person? Franz Kafka would certainly say so. Almost throughout his short life, he could not come to terms with his father's abusive alpha male type of behaviour and helpless unhelpful mother. His unfulfilled career and failed marriages were attributed by him to the unresolved issues with his upbringing. Perhaps this chronically depressed state of mind must have made him susceptible to laryngeal tuberculosis.

By then, he tried to ventilate his feelings through his writings, which he requested to be burned after his death but luckily nobody listened. His three Kafkaesque books (Metamorphosis, Trial, Castle) have become the poster children for people living under oppressive regimes. I suppose his clear memories of his bitter past unquestionably became an experience some of the victims could relate to and be a bedrock of hope to sail the choppy seas.

Well, memory is the theme in this 2013 British movie starring James McAvoy and Rosario Dawson. It is a tale of an assistant art auctioneer with an intractable gambling habit, a hypnotherapist whom he seems to treat his addiction and a band of art thieves who plan a heist during an auction.

The auctioneer predictably is drawn as an accomplice but unfortunately forgets where he hid the loot after sustaining an intracranial haemorrhage. The impatient crooks waste no time to try to get our hero to remember, through might, persuasion or even hypnosis!

The plot gets twisted as the hypnotherapist tries to explore the crevices of his brain to give us a dizzying journey between timelines akin to scenes in 'Interception'. It will fall into place with a few coincidences and logic-defying chain of events.

Memory, a curse?

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

Unlike his usual self, Jim Carrey appears as a sober introvert character in this nonlinear narrative of the intricacies of the enigma called mind!

It tells the escapade of a couple who fell out of love and cannot stand each other who decided to try out a new technique which helps to erase certain unpleasant memories from the brain. A shy Joel (Jim Carrey) cannot stand the antics of his free-spirited girlfriend, Clementine (Kate Winslet). While undergoing treatment, they change their mind and decide to opt out. While all this is going on, there is another scandal involving staff of the company that provides the service, among themselves and with Clementine.

Of course, in the end, love prevails but the fun is knowing how the brain works. Life, goes on, looking forward to life, by erasing or, at least, suppressing unpleasant thoughts. The trauma of hurtful or embarrassing thoughts has to be forgotten for the man to move on in life. Repeated reminders of old events are self-defeating.

There is also a question if everything that happens actually happens at our own free will or is it predestined. Even after sorting of erasing the mind of one mine, one of the staff (Kristen Dunst) still falls head-over-hells over her boss.

The film title is based on the writing of Alexander Pope, on the famous but scandalous members of the Medieval monastery, Peter Abelard and  Heloïse d’Argenteuil. Abelard, a theologian from Paris had an illicit affair and a love child with Heloïse. He was castrated by angry relatives but the duo continued their relationship via correspondence.

“How happy is the blameless vestal's lot! The world forgetting, by the world, forgot. Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! Each prayer accepted, and each wish resigned.” Alexander Pope

“Blessed are the forgetful: for they get the better even of their blunders.” Friedrich Nietzsche

In War, all loses!

Water Diviner (2014)
I remember that the Gallipoli campaign was one which carried a high mortality but somehow almost all involved in it came out heroes, or at least they were made to think. The Australians and New Zealanders began their nationalistic pride here as a nation and still commemorate their landing through ANZAC day and glorify their dead in their monuments. The Sikhs are proud to have died valiantly defending the Queen and their colonial masters. The Turks held their heads high to have successfully kept the Allied Forces at bay. It was also the ground in which a certain soldier who later modernised Turkey - Kamal Ataturk. As Sun Tze said many years earlier, "In war, they are no winners, only losers."
Even Winston Churchill whose strategy fell flat here, leading to meaningless deaths here, blossomed to lead the nation to fight another world war to come out smelling of roses and be immortalised as a true statesman.

Recently, the star of this movie, Russell Crowe gave an incisive interview to an Australian TV. He reiterated that Gallipoli is not an event to be proud of but a graveyard to many Turks and Australians who had no quarrel between each other. After all, the Empire attacked a sovereign nation. Of course, the veterans are not going to take that lying down.

The film is 2014 directorial debut for Russell Crowe who also assumes the role of a farmer father who goes in search of his 3 soldier sons who went missing in action in Gallipoli in 1915. The farmer soon discovers that his loss is not unique and they are others in his same predicament, on the enemy side. He soon discover another culture and friends along the way. War does no good to anybody.

21st Indian Battery Guard. Photograph taken in 1915 

by Sergeant Charles Alexander Masters while on active

service with the Australian Imperial Force in Gallipoli.

The treasured asset - memory!

Still Alice (2014)
This intense drama depicts the trials and tribulations of a Columbia University linguistic professor who is stricken with a rare form of early onset Alzheimers' disease.
It portrays the heartaches that she and her family go through as they sail through the journey of progression of the disease. It is disheartening to see an articulate and expressive person slowly slide down the slippery slope of hopelessness.
Julianne Moore gave a sterling performance as mother of 3 who inherits a rare form of hereditary early onset of the dreaded disease.
Our life basically goes on uninterrupted based on the things that we learn through memory. Even our bond with our family is strengthened with memories of things we did together. Remembering the moments of seeing our offspring growing up and achieving baby steps towards their steps is all part of harmonious life. When that faculty fails, it can be frustrating. Furthermore, how long your loved ones be tolerant enough to bear your deficiencies as they too have certain targets in life.
Even if, when you lucid, you decide that you should end your life once you are burden or a joke to others, your mental faculty would not be in the right frame of mind to help you in your endeavour!

Every piece with its magic!

Just like Sting's song which goes as 'Every little thing she does is magic', every piece of decorative piece that my parents had arranged and safeguarded in the living room cabinet all these years carry with them a figment of history of my childhood. It looks like each piece had imbibed upon it a piece of my life.
Perusing them during my last visit to my parents' home opened the floodgate to the avalanche of nostalgic memories.....

Riddled with scars of the test of time, this chick in spite of its cracking battle wounds of the ticking clock, it is still standing strong apathetic to its surroundings. In its lifetime, it had witnessed many a chance. The 70s, 80s, Y2K, the digital era and so on. Got this piece of pencil sharpener as a token after getting many 'brownie points' for good attendance at Sunday School. Yes, I went to Sunday School. I made me neither a believer nor a non but only enriched to appreciate the fact we are still  groping in the dark about the Truth. We go on making our rules as we go on or justify our actions by interpreting the old scripture as how we deem fit and suitable to our needs.

The sharpener contraption have long fallen off. I had another chick in my list of property. It was supposed to be my piggy bank. Only thing was that it was not a pig and it was made of cheap plastic (not much of a bank). My sisters thrive on my thrifty savings by cannulating out small changes out of the flimsy self made aperture at regular intervals without my knowledge until one squealed on the other when their comradeship hit a sour note once. Then I changed my hiding place to a compartment under a plastic mold of Lord Muruga. Unfortunately, 'Lord Muruga' was not much of a protector as my dough kept disappearing!

This herd of elephants may just a few years younger than me. The herd used to be bigger though. The golden elephants lost another adult member due to breakage. The grey-pink herd lost their mother and two other siblings.

Over the years, the coral had shrunk in size. After all, it had graced our household for almost half an century through thick and thin. Time, however, had not altered its bleached white hue.

This streak of tigers were presented to us by Auntie (Indra Shan) back in the 70s to satisfy Appa's taste for glass menagerie. I was particularly fascinated with the cub whose stripes inscribed an 'A' on its body!

Only memories... The gentleman in the centre, David, was born on the same date and year some 10,000km apart. David, born in England, decided to stay in Malaysia after completing his tour of duty here. They developed a bond which lasted until his demise last year.

Of foie gras, food and fond memories...

foie gras

I grew up amongst elders who always complained about the lack of taste in the food prepared by the then younger generation. The usual banter that they indulged whenever the elders meet is the reminiscence of the mouth-watering palatal stimulating dishes that their elders used to prepare back in the days. Sometimes I used to think that these people were indeed gluttons and lived to eat. One of them includes my father and my maternal grandfather. The latter literally sold off his ancestral property just to satisfy his taste buds and hypothalamic satiety centre. They used to recollect the times when the aroma of chicken curry cooked in one person's kitchen used to fill the whole neighbourhood and how simply-out-of-this food generally tasted.

I used to think that taste never changed. I thought their remote memory of input of olfactory nerve to the limbic system just reignited their nostalgic childhood memories. Until I heard the story of a man in Spain who reared geese to prepare them for foie gras, the natural way without the notorious force feeding which is often spoken about.

A journalist well versed with fine dining decided to trace this eccentric man, Eduardo, to his farm to interview and see for himself the truth of his claim. Eduardo has his own beliefs on ensuring succulent, juicy fat geese liver. The goslings are left to roam wild in an unfenced field exposed to variously selected grasses. Of course, security is a concern as he lost 20 to 30% of his flock to predators and wanderers. He does not touch the geese as it may lose its protective sebum. The herd is left to roam freely and happily.

Geese have an inborn ability to gorge themselves in preparation of winter. They eat and eat if they are happy.

At the end of the interview, the journalist had the chance to taste his product. To his astonishment, the dish did not need artificial flavouring. The foie gras did not require additional seasoning as all the various flavours were allegedly provided by the food that the geese fed on. According to Eduardo, modern farming had destroyed natural tastes in food.

I suppose there must be some truth in what the old folks were saying when we were growing up. To feed the ever-increasing population of the world, we managed to increase the production of food at the expense of taste.

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

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

30 Most Powerful Images Ever!

http://www.boredpanda.com/must-see-powerful-photos/

Thanks KR for contribution.

1. Starving boy and missionary

2. Inside an Auschwitz gas chamber

Image credits: kligon5

3. Heart surgeon after 23-hour-long (successful) heart transplant. His assistant is sleeping in the corner.

Image credits: James Stanfield

4. Father and son (1949 vs 2009)

Image credits: Vojage-Vojage

5. Diego Frazão Torquato, 12 year old Brazilian playing the violin at his teacher’s funeral. The teacher had helped him escape poverty and violence through music

Image credits: salvemasnossascriancas.blogspot.com

6. A Russian soldier playing an abandoned piano in Chechnya in 1994

Image credits: drugoi.livejournal.com

7. Young man just found out his brother was killed

Image credits: Nhat V. Meyer

8. Christians protect Muslims during prayer in the midst of the 2011 uprisings in Cairo, Egypt

Image credits: Nevine Zaki

9. A firefighter gives water to a koala during the devastating Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria, Australia, in 2009

Image credits: abc.net.au

10. Terri Gurrola is reunited with her daughter after serving in Iraq for 7 months

Image credits: Louie Favorite

11. Indian homeless men wait to receive free food distributed outside a mosque ahead of Eid al-Fitr in New Delhi, India

Image credits: Tsering Topgyal / AP

12. Zanjeer the dog saved thousands of lives during Mumbai serial blasts in March 1993 by detecting more than 3,329 kgs of the explosive RDX, 600 detonators, 249 hand grenades and 6406 rounds of live ammunition. He was buried with full honors in 2000

Image credits: STR News / Reuters

13. Man Falling from the World Trade Center on 9/11. “The Falling Man.”

Image credits:  Richard Drew /AP

14. Alcoholic father with his son

Image credits: imgur.com

15. Embracing couple in the rubble of a collapsed factory

Image credits: Taslima Akhter

16. Sunset on Mars

Image credits: nasa.gov

17. Five-year-old gypsy boy on New Year’s Eve 2006 in the gypsy community of St. Jacques, Perpignan, Southern France. It is quite common in St. Jacques for little boys to smoke

Image credits: Jesco Denzel

18. Hhaing The Yu, 29, holds his face in his hand as rain falls on the decimated remains of his home near Myanmar’s capital of Yangon (Rangoon). In May 2008, cyclone Nargis struck southern Myanmar, leaving millions homeless and claiming more than 100,000 lives

Image credits: Brian Sokol

19. A dog named “Leao” sits for a second consecutive day at the grave of her owner, who died in the disastrous landslides near Rio de Janiero in 2011

Image credits: Vanderlei Almeida / Getty Images

20. “Wait For Me Daddy,” by Claude P. Dettloff in New Westminster, Canada, October 1, 1940

Image credits: Claud Detloff

21. An old WW2 Russian tank veteran finally found the old tank in which he passed through the entire war – standing in a small Russian town as a monument

Image credits: englishrussia.com

22. Flower power

Image credits: Bernie Boston

23. A woman sits amidst the wreckage caused by a massive earthquake and ensuing tsunami, in Natori, northern Japan, in March 2011

Image credits: Asahi Shimbun, Toshiyuki Tsunenari /AP

24. The Graves of a Catholic woman and her Protestant husband, Holland, 1888

Image credits: retronaut.com

25. Greg Cook hugs his dog Coco after finding her inside his destroyed home in Alabama following the Tornado in March, 2012

Image credits: Gary Cosby Jr. / AP

26. Demonstration of condom usage at a public market in Jayapura, capital of Papua, 2009

Image credits: Adri Tambunan

27. Russian soldiers preparing for the Battle of Kursk, July 1943

Image credits: Shirak Karapetyan-Milshtein

Update: Our reader Leif-Erik pointed out that this photograph was actually created in 2006-2007 for a photo competition. It is based on archive photos from the war in Russia in 1941-1945.

28. During massive floods in Cuttack City, India, in 2011, a heroic villager saved numerous stray cats by carrying them with a basket balanced on his head

Image credits: Biswaranjan Rout / AP

29. An Afghan man offers tea to soldiers

Image credits: Rafiq Maqbool / AP

30. Some parents, likely now in their 70′s, still looking for their missing child.

Image credits:

Nostalgia

Recently met a guy whom I last met more than 40 years ago. Yes, 40 years ago! When he was a skinny 20 something year old chap all sprung up to find a place for himself in the big wide world while I was also a skinny lad hardly able to read and write.

We were introduced to each through a common acquaintance and whoosh glazed the avalanche of memories like a flashback scene in  a movie! Of course the memories were patchy and sporadic. The more you tried to think about it, a few more just pops up. That chap was quite amused and sometimes embarrassed with some of the things that I remember about him during his weekend stay in my house.
They say that little things excite little minds, so the little things that he and my uncle did stick permanently on my mind. The sight of with face full of shaving foam was new for me then as my dad never used foam. They used to laugh a lot then while shaving. It was followed by a splash of aromatic liquid from a cute bottle which I came to know later as 'Old Spice' after-shave liquid.
For hair grooming, a little scoop of Tancho with the index finger, rub on the palms almost obsessively, slide over the hair, 10 minutes of grooming and viola you are ready to go. This part was just part of old memories of a bygone era as he had lost his prized crowning glory quite early in life. On the other hand, my uncle is still faithful to his Tancho Pure Vegetable Nourishing Pomade after all these years.
To uncle B, you sculptured the idea in my young mind of how a mach man should be - tall, intelligent, opinionated, articulate and suave!