Showing posts with label moral. Show all posts
Showing posts with label moral. Show all posts

Saturday, 29 April 2023

Everything has a price!


Joseph (Malayalam, 2018)
Director: M Padmakumar


This movie gives another twist to how man's greed hijacks a noble intention like organ donation. Good virtue has been held in high esteem and is said to be the raison d'être of man’s existence. The sound of one man’s death knell signalling another's beginning of life sounds cruel, but that is how life is. Death and tragedy in the goat family are signs of survival and satiety in the tiger family.

As creative as a man can be, he knows about demand and supply, market forces and the electrifying power of the currency. Money, a lubricant in most transactions, eases this. The desperate seeker calls these middlemen God-sent. The mourners find solace in knowing they had done one good deed before the last call. The observers call it unscrupulous when they see the donors donating before their time is up and the deserving recipients are bypassed for the highest bidder. 

Man has converted everything into businesses, invented creative schemes to monetise even cadaveric organs, and, if needed, expedited death when the situation demands. They become the ‘invisible hands’ that guide the economy. 

Socrates may have convinced Greeks and generations after him to promote good virtue and philosophy as the basis of human living. Plato preached that a wise person uses his mind to understand moral reality to apply it to daily life. No more; this train of thought is so passé. It is not applicable in kali yuga. We all bow to the Money God. Virtue is so Satya and Treta yuga. 

They say our data is protected, and our personal pledges are classified. Any firewall is only as good till the next version hits the market. These systems' inventors will leave a loophole for them to market their next upgrade. 

Hence, our private data, including medical information, are all out for scrutiny. Hackers, in collaboration with sneaky businessmen who regularly taint noble professions, will stop at nothing to scheme out plans after plans to profit themselves. 

In this movie (spoiler alert), pledged donors are screened during their routine medical examination and matched to potential foreign recipients. A fake accident is arranged by thugs in a remote locale. A Good Samaritan, also part of the gang, would bring the accident victim to a predestined hospital. The victim would invariably perish without regaining consciousness. Organs will be harvested. Local recipients planning to receive these transplants would undergo dummy operations, but the organs would be shipped far away. 

A retired police officer had to lose two family members, his late teen daughter and his wife, to these fraudsters before smelling a rat. He devised an elaborate to uncover the whole network. 

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Monday, 26 July 2021

The future is bleak!

Love, Death & Robot ❤️☠️🤖  (Adult Scifi Animation; 2019)
Season 1-2 (2019-2021)

It used to be that animation (called cartoons back in the days) were for children. It was an outlet for mindless personification of cute animals doing impossible stunts in gravity-defying postures. It was quite acceptable if a bomb explodes right in front of the character's face. It would just get off with a bandaid on its forehead. Or it could be thrown off into a mile-long deep ravine just to would crawl back up to fight in another snippet. That was entertainment back then.

Those days are over. Now animation productions are of big budgets and delve into difficult life questions. No, adult content is left to manga series for the Japanese to deal with their men's fixations in wanting their sexual partners or dolls to have round big blue eyes like their favourite manga heroines. We are talking philosophy, the future of mankind and armageddon. Since much of the presentation is animated, the storyteller and digital artists took the liberty to expose more skin than being allowed when real actors acted. Herein lies the confusion. The animation styles are varied; some are simple 2D drawings with disproportionate body parts, some use fantastic graphic designs that viewers are confused about. We are left to wonder whether the characters are played by real actors whose appearance is pixelated to appear sci-fi.

On average, the 26 short episodes, on average lasting 20 minutes, narrate a plethora of topics that carry multiple veiled messages. 

Some of the teachings that seem apparent to me, I have tried to enlist.

If consciousness and memory can be decoded and digitalised, they can theoretically be transferred. Hence, personal desires and ambitions can continue indefinitely just by changing body parts. We do not have to leave behind a legacy or need our offspring to continue our struggle. We can become bio-engineered gladiator beasts with infinite power for infinity. 

We can see that humans show more compassion to their pets than the neighbour next door. They buy the best for their pet animals and care for them as they would their child. So, it is not outlandish if they would genetically modify their cats. In one episode, the human penchant for nuking each other left a desolate world populated with cats with opposing thumbs (genetically modified so that they could sit at dinner with my masters, I suppose), menacing three robot visitors.

History has the nasty habit of trying to repeat itself. If a particular event is twisted, the sequence of events may vary, but the endpoint will be the same, albeit within a different timeframe. One episode asks, "What if Hitler was killed not in 1945, but in 1908 when his application to Vienna Academy of Art was rejected. The Hindu concept of time moving in a cyclical manner, rather than a linear fashion, is evident in the History of Man. Man becomes an aggressor at one time, and the same person becomes the victim. The aggressor becomes the aggressed and vice versa, indefinitely, in an episode titled 'Witness'.

We like to think that we are the legitimate inhabitants of Earth by default. The planet was made for us. Well, I got news for us. We just may be the invaders upsetting the equilibrium set by others who prevailed long before us.

Ever wondered why the mammoth structures that occupy this planet exist. We are awed how the Pyramids, Easter Island statues and Stonehenge came to be. And we still do not understand their functions. Well, the episode 'When yoghurt took over' may have explained all these. A mutated yoghurt solves all of the world's problems and leaves Earthlings with all their great inventions. This must ring a bell with fans of 'Ancient Alien', which posits that we were visited by aliens who try to impart wisdom, gave up on us and went off.

A subtle message goes out to sympathisers of immigrants in the episode 'The Dump'. Local council officers after officers who go to the illegal dumpster to repossess it for development goes missing. Apparently, all the long-standing rubbish has developed a brain of their own to claim their place. Settlers who had entered our country illegally will soon have their whole life earnings and memories invested here. Their base would grow roots so deep that uprooting will be a Herculean task. 

We talk about preserving nature but not giving two hoots to people living in constant fear of wildlife. We glamourise a time when animals roamed free. Yes, in a flick of a moment, we can be snacks to predators. The wild is not kind. (Episode: Fish Night) 

Like the message from 'Citizen Kane', the character in 'Zima Blue' realises the hard way, after working all his life to unattainable heights, that the things that really matter at the end of the day are the simple things in life.

We are all so dependent on our digital devices and sometimes feel paralysed without them. Every so often, we have been locked out of possessions. With so many safety protective features added to our machines, it is not unthinkable that there will come a day that the AI inserted in them that will treat us as the perpetrator. We may be hunted down like dogs.

With the advancement in our medical treatment modalities and fixation with healthy living, immortality is theoretically possible. If no one dies anymore, overpopulation would be a problem. In one episode, having children is illegal, and there is a special police squad to hunt and shoot down children.

In one of the last episodes, like a scene from 'Gulliver travels', a giant has swept ashore. People get all excited about this new find. As expected, the curious probe, prod, pose and want a piece of momento of the beached body. Their interest wane with time as nature takes its course. The body decomposes and slowly is swept away. The only thing that is left is memory.

Saturday, 7 October 2017

Life is not so simple, or is it?

© Asleep at the Wheel, New Yorker cover by Frank Viva
We think that we do not have self-driving cars because the technology is not perfect. Furthermore, we heard of Uber experimental driver-less car crashing. Hence, the whole exercise had been put into cold storage.

Jack Ma, in one of his interviews, was quoted as saying that we should wait for a perfect system before introducing it for human consumption. He suggests that we should present it anyway and make changes as we go on, as we encounter obstacles and bumps. I think that is a businessman talking. Capital ventures usually sell an idea, get everybody excited, convince them that it is the best thing since Adam, create an illusion of demand, make loads of money starting the venture, selling the business, going for a kill and split the scene to begin another venture somewhere else.

The idealist would, however, ponder and yonder till the cows come home. Nothing new would see living daylight. Every endeavour would fizzle out as unremarkable as it started.

Another discussion that I heard recently on the use of a driverless car is the moral dilemma. It is dandy that the vehicle can be navigated from point A to point B. Now, along with the way, there can be many unforeseen circumstances. It could be one that had not been programmed with the machine's algorithm. A split second decision may need to be made. The car may need to decide between crashing into a crowd or hitting the pavement. But wait! Hitting the sidewalk or the tree may endanger the passenger. The question arises whether the maker of the car should give importance to its client or to the vagabond slouched by the roadside. How is the software going to know the identity of the potential accident victim if not for facial recognition and access to his bank account and social background? Oh no, does that mean some lives are more worth saving than others? Does owning a self-driving car make you more valuable than the man on the street? And all this in a fraction of a second!

Anyway, human beings are not the best of moral agents especially when it is their lives, or their loved ones are involved. Social class, race, religion and self-interest may cloud their judgement. Are machines going to be any better as they would be programmed by us anyway?

Friday, 25 August 2017

Of Moral Courage and Ijtihad...



Allah, Liberty and Love (2011)
Author: Irshad Manji


Thanks to the religious authorities of Malaysia, this book received free publicity after the seizure of its Malay translation. This author was almost unknown when the English version was out in the Malaysian bookstores. The moment the Malay version hit the shelf, all hell broke loose. That, in turn, drew many a curious mind to delve into her work.

Manji is an unabashed Muslim lesbian who drew many a flak from professors of the religion. She is quite comfortable with her sexual orientation and has no qualms in practising her belief as she sees fit. The purists, however, are up in arms, literally with her as they believe that unconventional sexual practices are condemned to the highest order in the scriptures. As the sole purpose of conjugal relations is procreation, to them, same sex relationships are a no-no. Period. Based on this point alone, all her intelligent arguments are rejected wholesale.

Manji is one the preachers along the line of Mu'tazilas who teach people to use their thinking faculty, ijtihad, before accepting anything into their belief systems. She encourages people to build the moral courage to voice out what they believe in and not to be cowed into submission without an intellectual discourse. Most religions in the world are happy to have its congregations to be uniform in their thinking, practice and acceptance of a standard set of rules of what is right and what is not. They look at uniformity as unity, engaging in debates as divisive and that division is heresy. The need to conform had numbed the moral courage to stand for oneself.

She argues that freedom of religion is not a Western construct as King Cyrus of Persia is said to be the first monarch to allow religious freedom. None of the modern values that are hailed by the younger generations is Western in origin. All good values are interrelated just like how Gandhi got his idea of passive resistance from Henry Thoreau (an American poet philosopher who authored 'On the Duty of Civil Disobedience'), as for how Emerson was inspired by the Eastern wisdom and Martin Luther King Jr planned his fight against racial segregation from Gandhian ideology.

From her writings, I find her to very smart and knowledgeable of many areas of interests. Unfortunately, some of my Muslim friends utterly reject her rhetorics, saying that she is ignorant of her facts. Sadly, they accuse her of tarnishing the good name of the religion and copping out to its enemies.

She makes a distinction between culture and faith, a trait blurred in today's practice of the faith. A person does not have to follow a particular culture to profess a religion. Culture is human-made, not God-given but religion is a divine relationship between human and his Maker. We should also accept that no one is perfect. We all err in our day to day practice. Just as we are offended by others in our daily duties, we must take care not to hurt others. We are quick to blame others for our misfortunes without, for once, reflecting upon our shortcomings and faults.

As uniformity is an important aspect of the religion, just like the five pillars of the faith, I can understand why some of my friends are upset with her views. She is quite happy with her unorthodox method of praying and frequency of prayers in a day. She also highlights particular cherry picking of verses from the Holy Book without highlighting other contradictory ones. Then there are the 'Satanic Verses'!

An interesting verse I picked up from the book is by Martin Luther King Jr, "If a man had nothing to die for, then he is not fit to live." Funny how this verse can be picked by the morally and ethically vacuous jihadist to meet his course just as much as Manji uses it to stir moral courage to voice out their convictions! Everything is just perspective.

Saturday, 14 June 2014

Warped morality, you say?

You contract something that smells like a sexually acquired communicable disease. You get it treated by your trustworthy friendly doctor, and you get back into the hype of things. As a responsible modern meterosexual individual, what is expected of you?

Your moral conscious would bug you to rummage through your old faithful little black book to sieve through the contact your ex-es to inform them of your predicament and advise them to sort out the issue. Perhaps they had caught a bug or two during the good old days, they way we were! Sometimes, your duty does not end there, but you may be needed to arrange an appointment with your doctor and even accompany her to such a visit.

Imagine the awkward scenario where you accompany your ex into the doctor's consultation room, and you feel like a fly on the wall whilst the doctor rattles off enquiring about your ex's recent extra-curricular activities, and he is not talking about her training for next half marathon! Sometimes, you have the urge to immerse yourself into the mirage world of your smartphone but social etiquette intervenes.

Hey, the modern man would say that is how a modern man should behave. He has to take responsibility for his actions and is his moral duty to inform the receiving party of possible exposure to something sinister. Moral duty you say but is it morally right to leave a part of you all over the place akin to a member of the canine species marking his territory? Morality, my foot!

Saturday, 14 September 2013

One man's meat is another's ...

Back in early 90s, whilst I was still a green horned newbie at the art of healing, I was approached by a lady who despite her outwardly ultra conservative appearance of being dressed in a hijab, looked straight in the eye and asked whether there was any way that her 3-month fetus could be screened for Down Syndrome.

From her dressing, it did not require a rocket scientist to guess her views on prenatal screening and termination of pregnancy.

After a protracted discussion, I discovered that her previous child was a Downs and needed multiple surgeries for heart septal defects and Hirschsprung's disease even before he was one. Seeing the puny one cut open and pricked repeatedly was just simply too much for her to stomach. And the monthly follow up the Capital City just drained here physically and financially. Even before she could recover from the trauma of having a special child, in rolls in another pregnancy (through an act of Man and The Divine Powers) in came the ensuing uncertainties. Rather than seeing history repeating itself, she was willing to undergo whatever test even a termination of pregnancy if warranted than to deliver a Down Syndrome baby despite her religious conviction and country laws because she had first-hand experience of a special child.

It is easy to judge others using our life experience as a yardstick of how everybody else should live. When a similar malady strikes us, all the rules and regulations, which in normal times would be fought by tooth and nail to be upheld, just goes out of the window!
This reminded me of a Lat cartoon published in the local dailies at a time when moral policing was the flavour of the month (it still is). It was a caricature of an elderly husband-wife couple in their 70s. The husband was reading aloud about the banning of Muslim girls in beauty pageants. The wife replied that it was improper to expose too much in public. To this, the husband responded, "I wonder who the 1947 Miss Ratu Ronggeng was? And the wife bowed her head in embarrassment!

It goes on to say that we make rules and regulations for others to follow but when we are the affected party, somehow the bar is lowered or the goal post is shifted!

Tuesday, 9 July 2013

A meaningless discourse on love

Le Genou De Claire (Claire's Knee, French; 1970)

Continuing into the journey French culture, I ventured into Éric Rohmer's fifth movie in the series of the Six Moral Tales. I am still wondering how it was voted as the year's best movie for the year. Maybe I am ignorant or overlooked something, pray tell.
It tell of a 30 something old diplomat (Jerome) who is spending time in the beautiful French countryside, trying to sell off his bungalow before he settles down to a fellow diplomat who is away on tour of duty.
By chance he bumps into his old friend, Aurora. Through Aurora, he catches the acquaintances of Madame Walter, a widow and a divorcee who is about to marry for the third time as well as her daughter, Laura and her step daughter, Claire (who appears later).
Even though, Laura is just a teenager, Jerome seems to be unable to resist his attraction for her because of her complex character. Laura just puts a damper on his feelings after initially teasing him.
Then, when the physically attractive Claire appears, Jerome falls for her; not for proportionately endowed physique but he develops a fetish for her knee! -hence the title!
Whilst all these is going on, Aurora and Jerome have an intellectual
discourse on the turn of events.
One day, Jerome catches Claire's boyfriend intimate with another lady. He informs her on a boat trip and he gets his fetishism satisfied when he coaxes an emotional Claire by stroking her knee!
Time comes for everyone to leave - Jerome off to meet his beau for wedding etcetera, Laura to Switzerland boarding school, Claire reconciles with her boyfriend. Aurora revealed she is actually engaged.
The main attraction of the movie, beside the actresses was the picturesque country-side scenery.
I find the characters a bit too talkative for their age. It is not quite usual to have teenagers to be able to analyse and express their inner feelings so succinctly, especially to someone much older than themselves.

“Be afraid. Be very afraid.”*