RIFLE RANGE BOY: progress

Saturday, 20 November 2021

Unplugged!

1950s P Ramlee

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.

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

Tuesday, 28 February 2017

Go with the flow?

So it all takes is for someone to snoop around to look for another destination. A place where people lead an idyllic life living in symbiosis with the elements of Nature with the divine forces as their guiding light.

Venture capitalists move in. They show them the carrot and the lure of what money can do to enrich their 'impoverished' lives. They influence the elders who steamroll all oppositions who want to maintain the status quo. The general public thinks the opposers are just spoiled sports, reminiscing the old times, living in the past and naysayers who do not move with the times. The time to live is now, and they do not want to be left behind. So builds a frenzy to join the bandwagon to draw sightseers to see what they had to offer. They were willing to play dance monkey to the tune of the first world revellers.

Slowly, the native's lives change. Their age-old tradition of caring for humanity rather than worldly materialistic things is but a thing of the past. Rituals and prayers are only for display which they do like zoo-caged animals or museum artefacts. Hey, it draws the crowd, and it pays for 'modernity' and 'development'. They all want to move forward in life, want to go one step ahead of what their forefathers left them. The world is changing, and they must catch up, they thought! They want modern education, modern amenities, industrialisation, and avert their fathers' brutally unproductive ways. They want to do catching up with the rest of the world. For how long are they going to be cocooned on their so-called glorious past?

Like that modernity embraced them.

Fast forward. What they see is their people in the same helplessness. The only difference is that it had become worse with the introduction of greed as the primary armamentarium to prosper. The leaders have cherished this introduction of modernity. Gone are the community spirits and the need to live for the continuity of the clan. They, instead, have become chess pieces in the game of the rich. Their way of life has become a hedonistic indulgence of affluence to spread the foreigners' beliefs as if the natives are too stupid to understand Nature and live to respect it. They give the jungle dwellers things under the pretext of bringing them out of the yoke of ignorance, but time has only shown the invaders' cluelessness. See how many of theirs are disillusioned with their 'progress' and joined the simple way of living that the natives have been practising for aeons?

There must be some wisdom in the words of the forefathers!