RIFLE RANGE BOY

It was a necessary trip, not a pleasure cruise. It needed to be done.  Just as the restrictions that kept us within our borders were eased, I made a dash for it. I thought everyone would be excited to fly free as a bird all over again - the passengers would be thrilled to meet with their loved ones overseas, and the flight crew with the licence to serve in the airspace, ecstatic to scale the skies. How wrong I was!  The powers that be probably decided to take an excellent last squeeze on travellers one more time, one for the road, before the scare of Covid dwindled away. Out of the blue (not mentioned in any pre-travel requisites), recipients of Sinovac vaccines needed to provide a negative report of their nasal swab for virus detection (PCR-Ag). New directives, it seems. When travellers expressed their dissatisfaction, the staff reassured them that they just happened to have a state-of-the-art laboratory at the airport, by the way, and results could be obtained within two hou...

A thought flew past me as I was sitting through a lavish wedding dinner in a posh establishment recently. A doctor in the infant years of his career was proudly showcasing his catch to the world to ogle. Set with the high-brow society setting and the ambience to match, we, the mortals were given a sneak peek into the lives and times of the groom and bride through a montage of a roll of photos that was rolling during the function. We gathered that the respective families went through thick and thin, scaling the waves of obstacles to attain the comfort that they had acquired in life.  Well and dandy, all these... But how is a measly paid medical officer in the notoriously underpaid system of Malaysian civil service going to sustain the same type of lifestyle? Is he still going to be that dedicated doctor who will weather all kinds of resistance to put wellbeing above everything else as he chose the profession, not for the glamour but the calling? Is he going through grind t...

Tun M tried it once, and now in his second lease of life, he is at it again - wanting to change our mindset to be tuned to the frequency of the Japanese. Their zest for improvement and perfection cannonballed them up from a nation devastated by the pulverising effects of a mushroom cloud to morph into the second biggest economy in thirty short years. Somehow, we are deeply immersed and soaked in our mediocrity and lulled with self-glorification that even if we look at the Land of Rising Sun with awe, we remain faithfully as the Land of Twilight. For it is at the twilight of times, do we all become lethargic. Gandhi, among the many things that he admired about the Europeans, includes cleanliness and punctuality. He went as far as to say that stickling to time made them able to rules countries timezones away (paraphrasing). One of the virtues that skyrocketed the Japanese to great heights in discipline and keeping time. Go to any railway station and one can understand. A minute in the...