Of introverts, intellect and talking...

The Quiet Girl (An Cailín Ciúin, Irish: 2022)
Written and Directed: Colm Bairéad

My sisters and I were brought up to believe that only empty vessels make a lot of noise. Through Aesop's fables, we were told to keep our mouths shut. The story of three good friends, a tortoise and two wild geese, comes to mind. In the tale, the three friends planned a guided flight away from their habitat, a drying-up pond. The problem was that the tortoise could not fly. So the geese held either end of a long stick, and the tortoise bit the middle portion with its mouth with strict instructions never to open its mouth when they were cruising at a high altitude. And that is precisely what the tortoise did, opening its gap to praise the beauty of a 'bird's eyes view' of Earth. The end could have been more pleasant.

Children were expected to be seen and admired afar but not heard. But no says techniques of modern parenting. Children are encouraged to express their feelings. They advocate a Socratic type of learning, not to be fed with knowledge but to seek them instead. They participate in familial decision-making, perhaps visiting a gynaecologist's practice too. 

Now I also have learned that more intelligent people are less talkative. Since their basal arousal to know is high, they are said to constantly learn from the stimuli around them. Further stimulation in the form of incessant banter, overwhelming extrovert interactions and music may be offputting. Hence, many recoil into their introvert's cocoon. Arthur Schopenhauer posited that a high intellect tends to make a man unsocial'. That says little about lawyers, businessmen and politicians who source their potential clients mainly through social interactions and social functions. Persuasion via vocalisation forms a crucial crux of their reason for existence.

This Irish nomination to the Oscars is a poignant coming-of-age drama of a 9-year-old girl, Cáit, who grows up in an impoverished family. Day-to-day living is hard with a lazy unemployed father with hardly any money to go around to feed too many mouths. To top it up, her mother is pregnant with her fifth pregnancy. Obviously, there is hardly any love to go around. Cáit is sent off to spend her summer with a distant middle-aged relative to ease the burden of caring for another child. 

Cáit, the quiet girl, is received well by the middle-aged couple who themselves had lost their young child earlier. After a frosty start, Cáit becomes close to them. For the first time, she finds the love of a family and the comfort and security of a home. Then it is time to return...

An engaging movie with superb acting and retro cinematography, sending viewers back in time to 1981 Ireland. Recommended, 4.5/5.

(PS. Somebody once told me that every word we utter reverberates in the Universe forever. Like the flutter of a butterfly and the start of a typhoon, the sound waves emitted from our vocal cords definitely affect the course of Earth and the things around us. Just because we all have a mouth each, it is no excuse to yak and yak for no reason. Talk only when needed. No more and no less.)

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Yada yada, blah blah!

 Joker (ஜோகார், Tamil; 2016)

Before Joaquin Phoenix came out in the 2019 DC comic film as the legendary Joker, there was already an award-winning Tamil movie with the same name. Unlike the DC version, this one is a low-budget production. And like the former, both are political and social satires of the system that we are living. More often than not, in our societies, we give people the liberty to speak a little bit too much. Some talk just because they want to be heard. Others vocalise just because God gave them a mouth. We tolerate many because we pity them; we know it is unkind to be cruel against the mentally challenged. We let them just blabber, but the problem is that mental illness can be contagious sometimes. 

With the advent of social media, there is no limit to how much stupidity can spread like wildfire and profound wisdom.

Unfortunately, life is not so straight forward. Muddled somewhere inside the pile of insanity is what is supposed to be the truth. Because of all the murmur of uncertainty and the noise of distortion, real facts remain buried in the rubble.

There was a time when only the learned would be allowed to speak, and the rest would listen. One needed a certain amount of intelligence to put forward their opinion. With the democratisation of speech and empowerment to express thoughts, everyone gets the opportunity to get their 2-cents worth of view across. Do we call this giving the oppressed a voice to speak? Is the converse the rule of elitist? Is the former pushing for chaos and the latter a precursor to leftist's wet dream of creating unthinking automatons?

This bizarre movie starts with a man who is living in a debilitated hut. Starting his day answering calls on his cheap mobile phone answering to the name of President of India, rubber-stamping his letter with the Republic's emblem and pushing his weight around his neighbourhood. Slowly we realise that he is delusional. He has a comatose wife at home who became so after a freak accident caused by the government machinery's corruption. He tries to obtain a court order to allow euthanasia on his wife but repeatedly fails. The whole film just shows the vulture of politicians and his sycophant businessmen and hyena henchmen who hawk on Government projects to maximise profit and pay back the minimum to the gullible public.

Without a cerebral matter, imagine even ants can organise such complicated colonies, complete with armed forces, reserves for a rainy day, and even sick bays to care for the infirm. Why do we need politicians to guide us through? Seriously, mankind should have stopped at the oldest profession of all time, not start the second oldest, which is close to the first! 

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Wisdom from the Upanishads

Ten Powerful Ideas from Ancient India - Wisdom from the Upanishads.
Roopa Pai

Secular in their content and universal in their appeal, these compositions have life-affirming secrets that contain ideas about life, the universe and everything relevant from the 700BCE to the 21st century. Computer engineer, journalist and children's author, Roopa Pai is the co-founder of Bangalore Walks and the winner of the Crossword Award for "The Gita for Children". She has published over 20 books, including the fantasy-adventure Taranauts. 

Easily the best TedTalk in a long time.

Speak for the sake of it?

We say a lot of things that we do not mean and do many things that we do not say. What we say may not be relevant in just two years, what more a lifetime. It is ironic that since most of the human interaction is based on verbal communications, we still cannot trust what we say. Are they just smokescreens for us to achieve our desires at all cost? Do we promise the moon and the stars, without mentioning the fine prints, just to get things our way?

The direction of society and our lives is guided by our art of persuasion in debates and speech, but yet verbal communications are just fillers to decorate our lives; an exercise in creative writing to trigger the limbic system to immerse the brain in euphoria. One wonders if speech is relevant anymore.

Maybe it is time for us to periodically reassess our promises. Like at the end of a rotation duty of a security officer who plays back the closed-circuit recordings of the night before, perhaps we should be doing the same. We should put an interval upon which we should assess and re-assess what we had set out to do in our lives. Sometimes, we would look back at the promises of the past, laugh it off as a jest of the spring of youth which mellowed down with the lessons of the School of Hard Knocks. Unfortunately, sometimes the whole spectre of our existence may have stemmed from our earlier rhetoric. Could we be punished for our blabber during our innocence?

Like an episode in Black Mirror where computer chips are implanted at the back of the neck for people to rewind and reanalyse all their memories, do we need retrieval facilities to make culpable to whatever we say? 

The best thing to do is strap our belts, avoid those potholes, keep our eyes on the road whilst at the same time enjoy the landscape, keep the hands tight on the steering wheel, follow the rules, enjoy the journey and re-live the trip every now and then even if we do not reach the intended destination.

So, speak for the sake of it. You would probably do not mean any of it, anyway!

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Not all that glitters...

Who has the last laugh?

Everyone is responsible for himself. The world outside there is just out to make mincemeat out of you. They would entice you to tread on the wild side just to get you off balance. They would appear casual just to let you lower your shields. They would encourage you to indulge in social lubricators just so that you downgrade your security level. They would talk dirty just to get you all excited. Then you let your hair down. That would be the hay that breaks the camel’s back. And the world will have a field day. And you would dig, your grave to bury all the good things that you took a lifetime to perfect. The dream that kept you awake comes crumbling like sandcastles that get washed away just like that. People would pry with judgemental eyes. Who cares if they would not be qualified to cast the first stone.

Why do they bother? They were not put a pedestal to be praised to high heaven. You were. Nobody told you, but you were the icon that many schoolboys envy. Yours was a success story to emulate.

The media is brutal. Like vultures, they scavenge for victims, slowly see them die, wait patiently, peck how much they want and fly away to find other easy kills.

Beware of the smooth talkers. Not all those who make the most noise are empty vessels. Some may be slithering serpents luring you to take a bite at the forbidden fruit and condemn you to eternal damnation.

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

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https://www.facebook.com/groups/riflerangeboy/

Sorry is the hardest word?

Really?

People always say that sorry seems to be the hardest word. We are all so encrusted that in our hard-shelled egos that by admitting our mistakes, we value ourselves much less. And our psyche takes a dent so hard that we want to shrivel up and disappear! Hence, when a person comes down his high and mighty horse to eat humble pie, he is admired for his virtuous act.

It sounds all dandy but it is really not so simple.

Of late, however, what we see insincere utterance of apologies just for the sake of it. How many times have we seen drivers driving under the intoxicants causing major catastrophes and all they can say is, "I am sorry!" Some lackadaisical teenage would have elbowed an antique, just to apologise, as if by doing so, the broken menagerie would somehow miraculously glue together as if like magic!

Yes, people say sorry without really meaning it. They know that the tragedy is no skin off their back and all the hardship is for others to endure. They know that apology is the easiest escape clause to avoid punishment. Whether they actually meant it or were genuine, it is immaterial. At least they said sorry, the least they could do. They know rhetorics and melodramatic tear-invoking histrionics works wonders all the time. Even the scriptures profess that God forgives those who repent (or at least appear that they do to qualify!)

What do you do to people who repeatedly do the same mistake and go on to say sorry and move on? Some even want you to say that it is alright when it is not! We work in a team and one's action or inaction would affect the other and put a serious dent in the whole social structure. To err is human, they say but to forgive is divine. Since we are mere mortals, forgiving wrongdoers does not fall into our domain. We just do what we think is right. Let God deal with Mercy!

Hair on end talk!

We were meeting after 30 years and what do we talk about? Hair. Understandably, many had lost their crowning glory or their beauty mane. In the place of David Starsky's luscious fluffy hair and John Denver's mop hair is Kojak's shining scalp. Comparing each other's tonsorial assets was the order of the day.

In the land of baldies and the receding hairlines, emerged a man with assets of Samson proportions. Standing steadfastly defiant against his wife's tirade and Delilah-like threats of trimming his lock, Samson stays adamant not to part with new found interest in trichology. Amongst the crowd also stood a gentleman with a scalp thick of Sultan Azlan-type of majestic thick silvery hair and another with a heavy white beard to compensate a somewhat bald head.

Samson justified his penchant for keeping long hair to the same reason why sages and philosophers stay unshaven. It is same justification for psychiatric ward policy of shaving patients with serious mental illnesses including schizophrenia. Besides posing a health risk if these patients decide to indulge in hair bezoar, shaving the head serves as an electromagnetic 'jumpstart' to offset their unusual brain activities, so it seems! We are all aware of the gravitational effect of the moon on events on the tide, mood and lunatics. By keeping their hairs untrimmed, brain activities stay unperturbed, they say.

That would explain why barbers think that they are one step ahead of an average man. Since hair is so important in man's thinking, being constantly immersed in the sea of hair may rub some of the clients' intelligence on them! My barber's philosophy, a topic for another day.

Talk not mere words

There are three levels of verbalisation.

One which is vocalised for all to hear. This would be the one that gives an impression of ourselves to the world. It is often used as a yardstick to gauge our levels of education, our politics, our upbringing, class and creed. The spoken words in this category are guarded and carefully worded so as not to jeopardise one's own image. It is our way to engage with the world which would compartmentalise us into our pigeon holes.

The second level of spoken words is the one uttered amongst immediate relatives and close ones. Here, the words are less guarded, but still, a certain amount of restraining is always exercised so as not hurt the sentiments of the people around us. We also take into consideration that the younger ones are watching (and listening). We have to be careful with his choice of words to a certain extent. Sometimes emotion takes charge to prove a point. The threshold to lose our composure is lower as we are in the comfort of familiar surroundings and we can exert our authority.

The final level of communication is the unabated one when one engages in a soliloquy with no-holds-barred. All the deep-seated personal disappointments and frustrations may be outpoured with no one to judge. It is an opportune time to re-evaluate, re-strategise and re-brand. This form of introspection can be cathartic.  This must be the significance of the signage at the entrance to the Temple of Apollo in Greece - Know Thyself.

This similar level of sensory input can be appreciated in other senses as well. We look, see and perceive. We hear, listen and understand. We feel, empathise and quiver. We touch, feel and cringe. We taste, wink and puke.

N.B. Living in a society is an art of dodging and hypocrisy. People who say the right thing but mean the wrong thing is elevated but the individuals who say the wrong things but mean well get the boot. Everyone has to be politically correct all the time to protect the voiceless minority. We cannot call a spade a spade all the time. Sometimes we have to call it a shovel and on other occasions a scoop!

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

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Direct line above?

The First Phone Call from Heaven
Mitch Albom (2013)

I picked up this book during a long wait at the airport. You fly low-cost, your time is also low-cost (cheap), and they expect you to come early and wait. After reading all his books thus far, it is only natural for me to lay my hand at once. His books deal mainly with important things in life like death, heaven and Godly matters.

This time around, too, he dwells on 'life' after death and incorporates Alexander Graham Bell's invention, the telephone, as the means to receive a call from the heavenly world!

Interestingly, we learn a few snippets here and there about Bell's journey to his invention, which is still being contested by the original discoverer. His invention almost did not make it to the forefront, thanks to the Brazilian King who worked with Bell and the hearing impaired, who insisted that his device be seen.

Despite all the hurdles, it has stood the test of time. In fact, in its infancy, there were suggestions that it could be used to communicate with the departed on the other side of the world.

Bell must have never dreamt, even in his wildest dreams, of the hassles that modern man would face with his invention. For one thing, his wife was hearing impaired, and his device was not mobile.

8 occupants of a small town, Coldwater, Michigan, started receiving calls from the dearly departed ones from heaven, sending the whole town into a tailspin. A usually quiet town becomes abuzz with activities. Out-of-towners started moving in to witness this phenomenon. TV crew move in to capture this news as if they are genuinely interested in helping. Only deep inside, there are there for personal glory and to stir a hornet's nest when there is no trouble. Real estate prices go north. Sales of the particular brand of Samsung model of phone soar. Revenue to the local council boom, business at the local deli skyrockets! Even the congregation at the local church overflows, and the church helpers are stretched thin.

Of course, the naysayers were out in droves to prove the hoax. The excitement proved too much to handle. In short, with the heavenly calls, all hell breaks loose in this usually quiet town.

Not all recipients of the calls are happy. One contractor receives a call from a disgruntled employee who blames his death to his uncaring employer.

In the midst of this, Sullivan Harding, a former Air Force pilot, walks out of prison after serving time for crashing his plane allegedly for misguided orders from communication towers. The recordings, however, went missing, and his toxicology showed impermissible alcohol levels. His wife and the said technician who gave orders were involved in a tragic accident, sending Sullivan and his son's life into a mess.

As the kerfuffle reaches its zenith and Sullivan's young son starts carrying a mobile phone to receive a call from his dead mother, Sulivan decides to put a lid on giving false hope. He uses his connections working in the town newspaper company to get to the bottom of the problem.

With modern technologies, talk is cheap, and we tend to take it for granted. It is only when communication becomes impossible that we really appreciate and long for the little times we indulge in that tete-a-tete or that sweet nothing.

At the end of the day, in the story, there was a plausible explanation for all the calls (almost)- I do not want to be the party pooper!

The cough near the stairs*

So what happens when 4 guys who met at the tender age of raging hormones meet up again 30 years later with declining testosterone and receding hairlines. They talk and talk. Gone are the small talks and gigglish teenage pranks. After embracing life in their own strides amidst its ups and downs, the discussion progressed to something intellectual and profound. Conveniently, all the four followed different paths to righteousness. Just like the saying, 'all roads lead to Rome' and 'if you don't know where you are going, any road takes you there' (courtesy: George Harrison), we had representatives from Bahai, Christian, Hindu faiths as well as an agnostic atheist.

 
Just like how Einstein's futile attempt at answering nature's favourite curiosity - Does God exist?- the quartet and wives of 2 embroiled in a stimulating discussion on God, nature, evolution, The Message, as well as bankers! Why bankers? In the new postmodern world, they rule the world, man and beyond, with their economic might and bite. In essence, they are the new God. How appropriate that one of the chaps is a banker by profession.

 
As all discussions by mortals on subjects on Divinity, the parting words were the same. Just continue with what you are comfortable with, as long as it gives you hope and something to hold on to in times of calamities. With that, we are all left to respective lives doing the same thing we were doing with the trust that we were sent, by whoever, for a reason, and it was our duty to provide for our dependents. Rather than trying to appreciate the unknown, it makes more sense to understand our juice of life - the bearer of our DNA and the contributor of the other half!

* melepaskan batuk di tangga!

Oh, Oprah!

From the time of civilisation, human beings have tried to make Man think in the same manner so that it is easy to control. Anyone thinking outside the box is considered deviant and a troublemaker out to disturb the tranquillity. A uniform way of thinking and values are imbibed to all. It is accepted that red is danger and it means 'look-out!' In the same manner, a certain response is to be invoked to a particular situation and is accepted as the norm. For example, if you find an envelope with an address written with a stamp pasted at its corner, the normal reaction expected of a person is to put the said envelope into the nearest letterbox. This is accepted as how a civilised individual is expected to react.

If I were to tear off the unused stamp to use for myself and just throw the envelope and its content into the nearest bin, though logical and rational, I may be labelled as barbaric uncultured, uneducated or under-developed mentally!

This is how the world subdivides its population. We always feel comfortable around people who act, respond and have the same values as we do.

First, they came out with a uniform scripture for all to follow. To give a divine authority to it, they said that it descended directly from God via hand-picked adversaries. To ensure conformance and uniformity in governance, they gave the fear of God of devastating consequences of after-life if His words were disobeyed. Then came the mass hysteria and mass hype of mass media. Repeated messages by various channels somehow sounded more convincing and people engulfed it as the gospel truth. A lie told repeatedly become the truth!

Fast forward to the time of telecommunication and obsession with daytime TV, reality and talk shows, now we have modern day evangelists who try to solve people's problems through public declaration, confessions and shame. People are all encouraged to think the TV talk show compere's values are the universal values accepted by the modern world. To disagree is to be uncultured or even barbaric. There is no shame in washing dirty linen in public. Bring it on, everybody has things stashed in their closet. Why wait for Boghi?

Cows, BS and mule!

Now that the news of the forthcoming 13th general elections is on every body's mind, it is only appropriate to mention something on Malaysian politics.

Some people talk passionately about politics. Now, with the dissolution of the Parliament, politics is at the tip of every body's tongue. People of all ethnicity and social class, as it appears to me, seem more courteous to each other as though have teamed together to fight for the betterment of the country at large.

One particularly peculiar observation that I realised is that whenever you are embroiled in heated political discussion, say in a social function - birthday, wedding reception, dinner etcetera, the person who leads the conversation with much passion, offering intricate inside information would invariably not be registered as a voter with the Election Council!

Of course, you have to ask him point blank on the face to skewer this information. And you have to indulge in a lot of face reading to authenticate the truth of his statement. Be prepared too for lashing if the storyteller is the easily offended type or is a bona fide voter! 

9/10 you would get a sheepish smile with the reply he had not registered for the flimsiest of reasons and justifications. At the end of the day, he would emphasise that he only feeds on the crumbs of the droppings of the present day leaders, whosoever holds the helm. One devil would not be more righteous than the other. He may add that "Cows may come and cows may go, but this bull here (obviously referring to himself as a muscular alpha male type and not referring to his words that fall from his mouth like droppings, i.e. BS!) stays forever! But lest he forgot that cows are sensitive words in Malaysian politics that can lead him to trouble.

Come 5th of May 2013, these big talkers cannot complain much if the rest of the voting community decides to elect a mule as their leaders! These whiners just have to pick up their crumbs or droppings and move on....bray, bray, bray...

Speak in riddles, Parseltongue!

Lord Yama

It is interesting to see men who had been in the limelight of late for deeds not deemed moralistic by an average simple minded plebeian, a simpleton, is invoking the quiet sleeping giants, i.e. the Gods. One was seen religiously performing religious rights and seen regularly in the temple. Whilst the other, thanked the Divine one and the spirits of the unceremoniously departed for saving him from the clutches of The Reaper and the Man on the Bull recently.
I always thought, which shows how naive I am, that a man should say what he means and mean what he says. I also thought that it is as succinct and precise as that. A mark of a true gentleman is just that. There was a time when man would hold by their word to the grave. But then, that was a time which seem so distant, almost eons away. Now,words are just words, a means to impart orders but not intentions. Only the wrong doers, the conniving mavericks and lawyers are allowed to play with their words and bend the truth by introducing elements of doubt and technicalities.
The Gods must be taking a step backward and smiling to the antics of man invoking His name in all their deeds and misdeeds, oblivious to Master plan that He has planned.....Hee..hee..hee...
When the going was too good, nobody complained and God or The Force was nowhere near the equation. Fast forward when the churning was in disharmony, people dissociate themselves from the union and start blackmailing with piecemeal information to spend most time grabbing the microphone and hoarding the rostrum!
And I always thought, one good deed deserves another.
In Tamil language, they have a saying.... It is no use performing sun worshiping rituals when the floods have risen your neck level. Go figure!

The tongue has no bones!

This is a blatant bastardization of a Malay proverb which goes like this, 'Lidah tidak bertulang'. Essentially it means that talk is easy and words can be malleable to suit a particular scenario. In other words, it shows the insincerity of man who would sway to the tide. Well, this colossal trait of the glossus (tongue) is a particularly useful tool of the trade of some professionals in the upholding the law (whichever side) business as well as politicians who have to make statements and modify them periodically.
Why this talk about tongue, bones and insincerity?

Imposing Bukit Takun, like a sleeping giant,

forms a formidable backdrop at Templer Park. (The Star)

On 9th May, Wednesday, at 6pm, a 51 year old seasoned trekker went into the jungle to trek out a path for his fellow climbing junkies and never came back. By the following day, a search party had been organised by police, family and friends to track him down. Just as soon the newspapers announced the news by Friday, that is when the stories began to roll on...
Everybody started giving their worthless opinion on the possibilities of what could have happened even without their shoes soiled but with the comfort of an ice-chilled beer.
' "He could have had a fall in the stream and could have been swept to the sea with our present unpredictable weather!' ' said one. 
' "You know, there was a similar case a few years ago. Another trekker went missing and was never found. After a span of 10 years, a distant relative found him in America assuming a totally different look and identity. He had to run away from his overwhelming problems. You can never say..." '.
' "Maybe it was robbery and murder, with our appalling crime rate now..." ' 
And the spin doctors kept on yarning their yards of stories whilst the family continued their search and prayers.Came Sunday, the trekker was finally found weak, dehydrated after injuring himself after a fall. Kudos to diligence of the search party. Waheguru!
The grateful wife said, "Every single one of them is a hero and they have made today a happy Mothers Day for me. I thank them all,” .