Wake up call*

The greatness of man is in how he treats the little man. That is how one of my friends signs off her emails. Over the weekend, while at a relative's birthday family dinner, KB was telling of his misadventures with the stars of the celluloid kind. It was a real eye-opener to my children, who like all teenagers at their age, were mesmerised by the glitz and razzmatazz of the movie stars and the red carpet. No thanks to MTV and E!TV.
A few Kollywood actors were in town to launch the audio of the soundtrack of the movie, 'Enthiran' (Robot), starring Rajnikanth (the superstar) and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan.  The entourage also included A.R. Rahman, Shreya, Vadivello and others, were in Putrajaya and Astro was their official local sponsor. KB, being the logistics manager in Astro was given the unenviable task of ferrying and babysitting the stars.
Aishwarya Rai, the dream girl for many was a real pain for the carers for they had to put up with all her tantrums! First, she was irritated upon arrival when her favourite make-up bag went missing. It was later located and given to her 2 hours later. She was also annoyed when people were snapping pictures of her and was forever shunning from people (i.e. fans) who appear barging and closing down on her to catch a better glimpse of her. She strictly gave orders to the many helpers assigned to her that she would only deal and communicate to the selected one of them and no one else.
At the actual event, she refused to walk on the red carpet (which was the pinnacle of any media event) as it was not in her contract. She arrived fashionably half an hour late for the function. Because of her antics, other up and coming actors missed their golden opportunity to glide on the red carpet.By the way, when Shahrukh Khan was here in KL some time ago, he was 4 hours late!
Once Rai was on stage, she metamorphosed into such a jovial, loveable, bubbly, cordial, charming personality with so much praise for Malaysians for being such fantastic hosts whilst expressing her happiness being here. Now, we know why she is such a well-liked actress with many blind followers and why many actors go into politics. Politicking? Acting? What's the difference?

Rameshwaram Sea Bridge

In the course of the conversation, KB praised A.R. Rahman who was with a so down-to-earth attitude, easily mingling with the 'low lives' and posing with the mere mortals. This...coming from an Oscar winner is truly amazing. That reminds me of another man from Rameshwaram - son of a fisherman who later became a rocket scientist albeit the early poverty, launched the first Indian rocket, became the President of India and left the President's House with the same suitcase that he came with. He is a Muslim who is a vegetarian, a poet, a bachelor and a true icon of modern India.- A. P.J. Kalam. Recently he was randomly chosen to undergo a full customs check at an airport in the US. He willingly subjected himself to be examined without raising any melee. Of course, there was a lot of international uproar after this event with India demanding an apology. In reply, he just said that the workers were just doing their job. And who can forget Mr Shahrukh Khan's tantrum on being chosen to do the same?

APJ Kalam

Indeed, the greatness of a man is in how he treats the little man!

This conversation was a real wake up call for my kids who were not convinced by our (wifey and I) 'preaching' all this while...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkQ0OJ5Byls&feature=related

from Indus to Baghdad...

History as I see it - from a layman's viewpoint

Modern history of man as dated by historians pre-dates circa 2100 BC in Yellow River and 3300 BC in the Indus Valley. These civilizations were peaceful ones which had to ward off barbaric tribes from the West. both of the cultures crumbled to pressures from without. The Dravidians had to abscond down south and the Mongols started the Qin Dynasty. Whilst Nebuchadnezzar was busy building the Hanging Garden of Babylon and lived in organized societies, the Caucasians were nomadic tribes wandering aimlessly. Over time, the tide has turned the other way around... Knowing man's history is knowing man's future!

How Man chose a monster to lead?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7JM_NQEeIc

Situational comedy (Sitcom): Not funny no more!

Just the other day, I was watching two sitcoms back to back in the morning - episodes of '2 and a half men' and 'How I met your mother'. For the inhabitants of the Stone Age who are not familiar with these shows - '2 and a half men' is acted by the dysfunctional Charlie Sheen as a drunkard womaniser who shares his house with his 'forever broke' and dysfunctional and gullible divorced brother with a pre-teen son who sometimes stays with him. They have a sarcastic housekeeper with attitude and a nymphomaniac daughter who is a single mother. On the episode that I watched, the subject revolved around what the son overheard from his mother's bedroom when she was with her current live-in partner!

'How I met your mother' is a story of 5 late 20s friends - 3 guys and 2 girls; 1 couple is a pair who are living together, another couple used to date but have separated, and the remaining fornicates with anyone who carries the XX chromosome! This group will forever be discussing facts of lives in a pub sipping alcoholic beverages. On that episode that I saw, the dilemma was that the promiscuous friend had bedded the other friend's ex-girlfriend, hence had broken the brotherhood code ('bro code').

The glaring similarity between the two episodes was in their themes of adult nature. First of all, sitcoms are hardly suitable for daytime viewing. The script (conversation) was not sexual innuendos but, in fact, point-blank (in your face). This is coming from a country that boasts of being a Christian nation in God they trust and would go into crusades to live their way of living. And a country that has a large so-called 'Bible belt' states. Is it not ironic?

Whatever happened to sitcoms of yesteryears, albeit churned from Hollywood with canned laughter but carves a smile or two on its audience without stooping so low (sic) as to talk about sex, sex and sex all the time. The sitcoms mentioned above make the old sitcoms look like episodes of 'Sesame Street' and 'The Electric Company'. In fact, the teenage Disney sitcoms today are like sitcoms of the 70s and 80s. Am I missing something here? I feel like I have been through a time warp or cocoon and the world just slipped by. I miss real situational comedies like 'Gilligan's Island', 'Beverly Hillibillies', 'I love Lucy', 'I dream of Jeannie', 'Bewitched', 'MASH', 'Gomer Pyle', 'Happy Days', 'Laverne and Shirley', 'One day at a time', 'Different Strokes', 'Facts of life' and 'Brady Bunch'. Does it mean that as the lady's swimming suit gets smaller over the years, we have fewer things to hide and nothing is taboo anymore, and anything can be out in the open? Is taboo a taboo word now?

 
It does not take a rocket scientist to pen jokes of sexual nature, but it takes a lot of wit and brain matter to come up with witty, real funny situational comedies as it used to be in most British comedies. In that sense, their trans-Atlantic counterparts fared much better with their evergreen efforts like 'Yes, Minister', 'Black Adder', 'Mr Bean' and more.

True, we should move with the times like Bob Dylan said, 'Times are a changing'. However, certain things are better left mysterious and the search for it more gratifying!

To the lower secondary school teachers with love...

PFS was a new experience for me when I stepped into its compound in the early days of the year 1976. Besides the super-smart students that I had mentioned in the previous posts, there were equally memorable and dedicated teachers to match that. The most striking teacher that awed me was the late Mr Koh Sin Ghee. In Form 1A, he taught us the English Language. But in reality, he opened my eyes to many other things in life, like divergent thinking and letting the mind wander as well as being verbose. He would come in dressed in his 'uniform' of a long-sleeved white shirt, black pants and crimson coloured tie, carry his briefcase bearing his initials KSG. He would try to humour our young impressionable minds by saying that it stood for 'Kiss Some Girls', contributing much to the class's commotion. We called him DOM (Dirty Old Man) instead. 

He was a self-proclaimed walking dictionary as he tried to open our eyes to the plethora of words in the English Language that (at least to me) appeared gibberish. He would impress us with bombastic words like rendezvous, gargantuan, melancholy, debris (with silent 's') and on and on... so much so that I started a scrapbook religiously enlisting all the 'new' (at least to me) words introduced by Mr Koh, which on average is about 5 words a day. Generally, his class is filled with laughter. Some of us will forward to his dirty jokes and newly coined words like sexperiments, mostly self-discovery of one's own adolescent body! And his dirty humoured laced quotations like, "Hope like eternally in the human in the human breasts!" (emphasis on breasts) and "Time flies, man's hopes go!" The second quotation was more like a sign off when he leaves the class, much like in the 'Mickey Mouse Club' where their parting song goes, "...and now it is time to say goodbye to all our company, MIC....see you real soon, KEY...why? Because we love you, MOUSE...and the waving of the cute children, which included Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, who later become not such good role models!


Coming to KSG, he looked a bit like Costello (of Abbot and Costello), short and plump. His temperament was sometimes unpredictable. He would be jovial at one instance, and suddenly he would explode in anger when someone in the class misbehaves (usually chit-chatting or napping). His usual weapon is the soft blackboard duster he would use as a missile to throw at the offender, occasionally missing its intended target.
Rumour had that KSG was a compulsive gambler and declared bankrupt. Many angry old ladies were occasionally seen harassing him, and he sheepishly quietening them. KSG used to sell his personal collections of stamp collection and related paraphernalia to the class students. All the stress must have taken its toll on his health as he succumbed to a coronary event a few years before his retirement when we were in Form 4 or 5!

My form teacher in F1A was Encik Azman Aziz, the fair pot-bellied Randhir Kapoor look-alike sloppy appearing Bahasa Malaysia teacher who was actually trained to teach English. He was called in once to fill up for a dearth of Bahasa Malaysia teacher, and he never taught English after that! Despite his lethargic outlook, he was quite a good Bahasa teacher. I can categorically say that I obtained a distinction in Bahasa Malaysia in SPM through his early input.

AA usually speaks English in the Malay Language class. There was once a circular from the education office requiring everyone to converse in the Malay language in the language class. One fateful day Cikgu Azman attended the class. We had just finished a strenuous (as usual) physical education under Mr Wilson Doss, and we were cooling down under the fan. AA told us to cool down first before we started the class. One smart alec (PV) immediately told not to speak in English in BM class, and the correct word should be 'sejuk bawah', much to the amusement of the whole class! And off PV was sent off to stand at the corner of the course. It was quite distracting with a 6ft 2in figure is standing facing the wall for the entire period whilst lessons went on as usual afterwards!

Lat's caricature

The History syllabus in Form 1 started with the beginning of human civilisation itself -the Indus valley civilisation of Mohenjo Daro and Harappa. This was covered by a fierce-looking over-sized over-endowed tight cheongsam clad tiger-eye bespectacled teacher named Mrs Lai. She was the exact replica of fierce teachers depicted in Lat's cartoon strip! She was later replaced by a highly viviparous but not so vivacious, Cilla Black hair-styled (of 'A Lover's Concerto' and 'Blind date' fame) Puan Majidah, who had just returned from maternity leave. As far as I can remember, she was perpetually pregnant (twice between 1976 and 1978). 

She managed to be pregnant more successfully than she cared to teach us history! Her teaching strategy was simple - a student reads a page aloud, she re-read the page aloud and asks students to underline the relevant parts of a page. Students receiving textbooks for a loan were told to erase the underling before returning them! The stars answered our prayers in the form of Mr Lee Kok Keng, who gave new meaning to learning and relevance to History in Form 3 via his critical dramatisation and story-telling mode of teaching. It was as if he was there at the turning point of history! We missed the lessons that he had to miss as he had to handle the textbook loan scheme at the beginning and end of the year.

Art and craft had never been our cup of tea. Mr Kam Eng Chye just managed to kill the passion and the hidden talent (if there ever was) altogether. I do not remember a single thing that he taught as an Art teacher. He would just come in and ask to draw this and that, without teaching about colours, shades etc. Unlike now, there were no textbooks for Art and Craft either. Only Ho King Hee managed to produce masterpieces after masterpieces, especially for the examinations, with his mother's help or someone who was an art teacher! This changed when Mr Tan Teong Kooi came to the picture in Form 3. The bearded teacher with dark glasses was the patron of the Photographic Society of the school. He at least taught us something which at least helped to get a 'C' in Art! He actually was impressed with a painting of mine which depicted an old lady who was choosing durians from a roadside stall, and he pasted it in the Art and Craft room! And helped in crafting a comical puppet head (Puss in Boots type) for SRP. His wife, Mrs Tan Teong Kooi, was a no-nonsense Maths teacher and my form teacher in Form2A. Mr KSG once made a sexist joke in front of her, only to be told off in a very nice way outside the classroom! Their son, Rene, a year younger than us, was an all-rounder. He excelled in sports and studies and was the head boy of his batch.

Nana Mouskouri

Geography was taught by Ms Teh, a dedicated mild-mannered teacher with Nana Mouskouri hairstyle and spectacles.
Ms Tai was a fierce spinster with a bulldog face who taught us Commerce. She looked like a potato with toothpicks at four sides, further accentuated by her tight body-hugging cheongsam. Another fierce lady taught us English Literature. All I remember of her name is that we use to call her 'Gagool' - the same character (an evil witch doctor) that she was trying to teach from the book King Solomon's mines.

Talking about slave drivers, Mr Wilson Doss fitted the bill absolutely. He was supposed to teach us PE, but he would ask us to do manoeuvers that were humanly impossible, like Duck Walk and Crouch Bounce. The aches from the exercises would last a whole week until it was time for another session. His famous words were, "Do as I say but don't do as I do!" as he had a drinking problem and subsequently succumbed to it. Despite his strict disposition, he was liked by many, especially the cricketers, as he moulded the school team to victory.
In Form 1, we got the most uninspiring teacher of Science in Mr Chew Kee. He was a plain Joe with forever the same set of attire and brown plastic bag tucked under his armpit and cycled to school daily on his grandfather bicycle.

Ray Milland

Another funny character with a twisted sense of humour taught us Science in the form of Mr Teoh Chin Kooi. He had the uncanny resemblance to Ray Milland of Alfred Hitchcock's 'Dial M for Murder' with the same broad forehead, receding hairline and back-combed hair. One day his lesson to teach prisms had to be cancelled as it was raining. He then told us, "We will do the experiment tomorrow but ask your God not to pass urine tomorrow!"

Before Paul the Octopus came into existence, we had our own soccer soothsayer through Mr Chang, our Mathematics teacher. 1978, when we were in Form 3, was a FIFA World Cup year. Mr Chang was the first to discover that the cup always stays in the host continent, except for Brazil, in 1958. His exception seems to have recurred in 2002 (Brazil won In Asia), and this year - Spain won on the African continent!

Cikgu Ibrahim:2010

En Ibrahim recently appeared on the 50th anniversary of the 7th Georgetown South Scout movement in Penang (see pic). He was the Afternoon Session supervisor and a strict discipline master. He had taken a few relief classes and tried teaching a thing or two. What I remember from his classes is the joke that he had repeated a bit too often. A young boy went to a shop to buy pencils. He picked up a pencil and its cost. The shopkeeper said, "10 sen". He picked a second and asked him again. This time, the shopkeeper said, "15 sen!"  So our hero put back the first pencil and pays the shopkeeper only 5 sen!

He and so many other teachers like him who found great pride and pleasure in their profession are true icons of 1-Malaysia. Their sweat nurtured the young ugly ducklings into majestic swans that we are today. To all my teachers, a big 'Thank You' from the bottom of my heart!

Next attraction: Upper secondary teachers...

Matha Pitha Guru Theivam

 மாதா பிதா குரு தெய்வம்

The Tamil language is famous for its many saying and quotations. The critics will also complain that its literary circle is only full of talk with no action! Not only they just talk, but there is also so much emotion and gestures to complement this. Just like the joke that has been circulating in the Klang Valley...

The Police once arrested an Indian man for helping them in their investigation. This handcuffed suspect was brought in to the interrogation room for questioning. Despite repeated attempts by the junior policemen at exploration, the suspect just would not speak! In frustration, they called in their superior for help. Their seasoned superior just walked in, removed the handcuffs from the suspect and off went the suspect, rattling away, complete with hand gestures and facial expressions until the cops told him to shut up.

Another proof of this statement is evidenced in the 'Arratai Arangam' (அரட்டை அரங்கம்) - a Tamil talk show (from Tamil Nadu) on Malaysian cable TV. Speakers on this show, who would typically be discussing social issues relevant to Tamil Nadu, would sometimes be so emotional and loud that the moderator has to step in to put the house in order. The outbursts, however, are puny by Jerry Springer Show's standards! Another favourite topic of their discussion is the glory of old Tamil movies, which just goes on to show how vital the celluloid make-believe world is in the Indian culture.

I digress...

The saying 'Matha Pitha Guru Theivam' is taught to most elementary students in Tamil school, Tamil language classes and Hindu devotional classes. The words translate to 'Mother, Father, Teacher and God' - that is the easy part.

There are many interpretations of this elementary saying. At a glimpse, the phrase seems to denote the hierarchy of importance in a person's life: Matha (Mother) is at the pinnacle of prestige, source of unconditional and unassuming love; followed by Pitha (Father) - the provider; then comes the Guru (teacher) - who would open our eyes and mind to the world outside; and finally Theivam (God) for divine guidance.

Another interpretation would be that this is the order in which an individual goes through from cradle to adulthood. And another is that God is the final destination, and all the others are our vehicle to reach our destiny. Some say that our mother, father and teachers are the God that we can see. The bottom line is that all the people mentioned above deserve our undying respect and support. That would bring us to another topic - filial piety.


*The photographs above are of two famous Tamil talk shows - Leoni and Visu. Give them a topic, and they will talk and talk till the cows come home and go grazing again! And they would be still talking!

What are you running for?

What are you running for? That was the tag-line for this year's Siemen's 10km run held on 18th July 2010. Participants in the fun run category were supposed to fill up the reasons on their vest bib. Some wrote the usual - for fun, for health reasons etc. One man wrote 'in memory of M Kahelan (again!)' I wonder who this Kahelan chap is. That is why he has to write again as nobody gave it two hoots the first time he wrote!

Coming back to the run per se

...
This time around, Suresh and I car-pooled for the run together - of course, we ran at our own comfortable pace. Even though it was organised by a German multinational company with a fixation with discipline, the run decided to follow Malaysian timing. They started half an hour later than their scheduled time of 7am! From the starting point at Dataran Merdeka, we galloped along to the Bank Negara area, up a few wavy path and terrain along Bukit Tunku hills till we reached Lebuhraya Mahameru. Running along the highway, we entered Jalan Parlimen, pass Padang Merbuk into Jalan Raja Laut and finally into Jalan Tunku Abdul Rahman. Here we were greeted by thumping beats of drums from various ethnic groups, setting the pace as we approached the finishing line, back at Dataran Merdeka again.

Suresh and I completed our runs at 58"  and 1'01", respectively. The run itself was just a run-of-the-mill type of affair without much razzmatazz. 

What fascinated us happened as we were walking back to the car. We met a gentleman whom we gathered from our conversation that he completed his 10km run in 58" and had just completed the recently concluded (5th July 2010) Gold Coast Marathon (42.195km) in 5'15"! And he was 65 years of age, but he did not look a year older than 50!

So, what are we running for? 

Is it for its health benefits? It will help us to maintain our weights. Is our blood vessels in our body like a drain? If the flow of leachate is sluggish, eddy current forms causing debris to accumulate the gutter walls. Running probably increases the flow rate making it less likely for atheromatous plaques to form. Is it also to ward of lifestyle diseases like diabetes, hypertension and hypercholesterolemia? Of course, you may get hit by a car, looking at the way some maniacs handle their 'F1' machines! 

Is running the elusive elixir of youth that everyone is dying for? Running supples the joints, making it possible to be more ambulant and independent for many more years in the twilight years, delaying the need for walking sticks! It also probably reduces the deposition of adipose tissue in the middle part of the body. Is it is a coincidence that it occurs in 'middle age'?

Is it because of the euphoria that you get afterwards when you complete the race and the sudden plethoric gush of endorphins occurs, giving an all-time intoxicating feeling with no hangover, headaches or guilt!

Is it a state of denial as the years roll by when the first digit of your double-digit age increases? Mind you, we are not in a midlife crisis but rather at the peak of our prime!

Whatever we are running for, we will still be running till we can. Next stop - Newton Run, 26th September 2010...

Silent movies 'say' so much!

Bored of the usual reading and feeling depressed? Why not sit back, relax and a enjoy a short snippet of Charlie Chaplin in a black and white (duh) silent movie?