Diwali 2.0

So, today is like a Boxing Day of sorts. The morning after, with the head feeling heavy and body feeling just as lethargic. The day after Diwali or Deepavali. For the follower who wished to be enlightened on how we Malaysians celebrate this religious occasion, here it is... Anyway, this what happened yesterday...

It was an important day for two generations - the current teenagers who reinforced the bondage of friendship with their school friends and the older generation who met with their long lost school friends. This is, of course, a day of prayers and mending broken fences in the intra-family relationship. And a day of eating, eating and more eating (Malaysians' favourite pastime and passion)!

After the mandatory morning prayers and siyakai powder and oil bath (just a drop for formality), it was breakfast time at sister-in-law's house. The spread was thosai, roti canai (local oily paratha - legend says that it got its name from Indian restauranteurs from Chennai who used to sell it, hence called roti chanai @Chennai). As you know Tamils were still referring Madras as Chennai when the rest of India and the world were calling it Madras. I heard somewhere that Madras itself was an abbreviation of what the invaders (Britishers) used to refer to the city with those hot-blooded noisy ruffians from the south - Mad Rascals! I wonder if there is any truth in the story? 

Angpow packets

Right, back to the celebrations. All family members were gathered for the feast, including a sister-in-law and family from Saskatchewan, Canada. All the kids were grinning from ear to ear with 'angpow' packets. Now, the concept of giving 'angpow' is a Chinese concept which has infiltrated into all Malaysian celebrations, be it Eidfitri, Chinese New Year or Christmas. Days before the festivities, commercial banks and supermarkets would be distributing free empty 'angpow' packets to their loyal customers for them to give these packets away (filled, of course) to children to heighten the spirit of celebration. These packets usually contain new crispy virgin notes of RM 1, RM5 or RM10. Some may include a coin with it as was good luck to give away things in pairs! And one more thing, angpow packets were colour coded for different occasions - Red for Chinese New Year, Green for Eidfitri, flexible yellow or purple for Diwali etcetera.

Secondary school buds - 28yrs later.

Back...

Then came time for preparation for lunch. Caterers rolled in their typical Indian cuisine, and so did the guests. All in all, about 100 over people were there in the house. Of course, these people did not just walk into our home for meals. Anyway nobody would be turned away if they did. The people who came were my children's schoolmates and teachers of different ethnicity as well as my long lost school friends who I have not met in 28 years since leaving secondary school. Boy, it was always enjoyable talking about the good all times and catching up on old stories... And it went on till about 4.30pm till the last guest left. You see, Malaysians are very hospitable, we do not chase away our guests. Not on Diwali, anyway. Then, a few phone calls to wish relatives far away. After a little cleaning up and freshening up, it was celebrations again - this time in my brother-in-law's house in Kajang. Before leaving the house, our house lights were brightly lit to mark the event.

It has been a tradition in my wife's family to gather as a family on Diwali evening at the eldest brother for a short prayer.

The next generation - after Y?

This short solemn occasion was followed by long merrymaking and partying with friends. Here the crowd was a real international crowd with friends from my niece's international and my sister-in-law, who is a Belgian and her liaison with the Belgian community. There was rich Moghulian food, booze, loud music and fireworks....and we left by 1.30am... People were still there. Hey, we live in an Islamic country, but we always keep our faith and continue our celebrations with no restrictions. 

pretty maids all in a row

One for the album

Oops!

What's Diwali without sparklers?

Music to the Malaysian ears!

Every now and then the local government controlled newspapers would faithfully bombard us with descriptions of worthless and meaningless feats considered achievements of sorts by the powers that be. We are going to be building the tallest building of world, the longest ketupat, the longest yee-sang serving, the largest kolam, etcetera, etcetera.

Lennard Lee

A few years ago (2003) when record accomplishing mode was on overdrive, we saw Abdul Malik Mydin lobbying for donations in his bid to be the first Malaysian to swim across the English channel. Donations, he got aplenty!Trivial happenings days leading to the event were published shamelessly in every Malaysian daily. He had a personal physician (Dr Farouk Musa). He completed the feat in 17hrs 42mins. And he was conferred a 'Datukship' for his effort. Less than a year after this swim, in a small column at the bottom of the newspaper page was a small description of a 20 year old Malaysian medical student in Cambridge (Lennard Lee) who, without much fanfare, swam the distance in 9hrs 45min! And his family and friends financed the whole swim! That was that much of it, nobody talked about swimming the English channel till of recent when a young Malaysian girl expressed her desire of the same!

Shilpa Lee a.k.a. Sufiah Yusof

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_Malik_Mydin
Then there was a child prodigy, Sufiah Yusof, in 1997, hit the headlines wiyh admission to read Mathematics in Oxford at a tender age of 13! Even though born and bred in UK to a Pakistani father and a Malaysian mother (i.e. the link to Malaysia), Petronas, the national oil company decided to sponsor her studies for community service, only for her to go astray and go 'around'. Also another local child prodigy, Adiputra, who hogged the headlines for being a maths whiz. And he left school at 12 and ran a direct sales company for memory booster!
Just the other day, I heard on my favourite radio station (BFM, again) about a musical prodigy from Sabah, Bobby Chen who was accepted into the prestigious Yehudi Menuhin School of music. He in turn trained fellow Malaysian children and managed to get 23 of them admitted to this world sort after intake of 60 over students annually. Below is the transcript of wikipedia on Bobby Chen followed by a podcast from BFM of an interview with 2 of the Malaysian students accepted this year. How come we do not read about these on our regular mainstream media? I wonder

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Chen_(pianist)

Bobby Chen (pianist)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Acclaimed by the Independent and Guardian in London, Irish Examiner in Ireland, the Straits Times in Singapore, and described by International Piano Magazine as: “...an armour-clad player of complete technique, a thinking musician, a natural Romantic. Young bloods come no better”, Bobby Chen has performed as soloist under conductors Mathias Bamert, Maximiliano Valdes, Lan Shui, Sir Neville Marriner, Lord Menuhin, Pierre-Andre Valade and concerti with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, London Sinfonietta, Warsaw Sinfonia,Singapore Symphony Orchestra and Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra.

Education

A graduate of the Yehudi Menuhin School and the Royal Academy of Music with Ruth Nye and Hamish Milne, Chen appeared three times as soloist at London’s Wigmore Hall, and performed at Italy’s Fazioli Hall, Beijing’s Forbidden City Concert Hall, Dublin’s National Concert Hall, London’s Cadogan Hall and Purcell Room, Singapore’s Victoria Concert Hall and Kuala Lumpur’s Dewan Petronas at the Twin Towers. Festival appearances include UK’s South Bank Prokofiev Festival and Worcester Three Choirs Festival, Sao Paulo’s Musica Nova Contemporary Music Festival and Sweden’s Lidköping Music Festival.

Recordings

Yehudi Menuhin founded famous school in 1963,
 created the ideal conditions in which musically
 gifted children might develop their potential to the
 full on stringed instruments and piano.

Chen has made live broadcasts for Radio Television Hong Kong and Pianoforte Chicago (USA), and his six commercial recordings include two solo CDs for Jaques Samuel Recordings, a recording for the ‘Cello Classics’ label with cellist Leonid Gorokhov, a solo piano disc for SOMM Recordings and piano trio recordings for Illuminate Records and Toccata Classics.

Since 1963 the School has expanded and now educates more than sixty 

talented boys and girls between 8 and 18. The range of instruments 

is limited to violin, viola, cello, double bass, guitar and piano. 

All pupils sing in one of two choirs and all string players also 

play the piano. In 1973 the School was accorded special status as a 

Centre of Excellence for the Performing Arts. Since 1975 pupils at 

the school have been funded by the Department for Children, Schools

and Families and only pay a contribution to the cost of their child's

education according to their means. It is intended that children 

should be able to attend the school, once selected for their 

exceptional musical ability, whatever their parents' 

financial background.

We only want your money, nothing else!

Every generation feels that the generation after them is not doing it right and moral decay is setting into its youngsters. And the world is one step nearer to annihilation or Armageddon, they say! And it started when Elvis the Pelvis began gyrating his pelvis in his blue suede shoes, and when Jerry Lee Lewis married his 13-year-old first cousin!

That was more than half a century ago, but we are still standing!

I guess, we, need time to accept the inevitable change which will happen with or without our approval. When more and more agrees with this practice, then it is no more a taboo but an accepted norm and socially acceptable and expected code of conduct.

The vicinity where I worked, has, over the years, blossomed from a predominantly housing estate to as an oasis of a congregation of a multitude of cultures of the world over with dual carriage highway cutting through, a hypermarket  and a giant m (McDonald's!) logo right smack in the hype of activities. All this happened when a university college was established here some three to four years previously. It is a common sight to overhear students in various hue and stature loitering, walking chatting amongst themselves or on their mobile phones in different foreign tongues (African, Arabic, Persian and Chinese sounding). One can easily differentiate the difference between Mandarin spoken by a mainland Chinese and a Malaysian - way too many words with 'sh' in their sentences!
Together with this free flow of money into the country and the appreciation of property value around here, trickled in some alien and disturbing cultures... Or am I plain old fussy old despot forever whining and romanticising about the good old times again and again?
Ever since the leaders of the country saw that there was money to be made, in terms of foreign exchange, in promoting Malaysia as an educational hub, every Tom, Dick and Harry of an entrepreneur remotely or at all linked to the education sector decided to join the bandwagon in building colleges and university colleges. That saw mushrooming of many 'fly-by-night' colleges which were built with the sole purpose of generating 'moolah' for their business masters. Period. Making Malaysia in the same map as Harvard, Oxbridge and Singapore are least or at all on their agenda.

We can see that the influx of people to this part of the town has changed its landscape altogether. Seeing strewn empty or broken beer bottles seem to have been accepted as part of the fauna and flora of the district. We used to have an outdoor badminton court with adjacent garden and benches where residents used to spend the evenings. It was primarily for daytime use only. Now, due to rampant nocturnal clandestine activities alien to our cultures, by many foreign students, this place is now brightly lit all through the night with fluorescent lights, making it as least romantic as possible for lovebirds to actively pursue their nocturnal bedroom antics out in the open but instead study, for a change!

Living up to Beverly Hill students seen in the TV hit series '90210', we can see many students jaywalking to their lecture halls casually dressed like they were beach-combers on vacation in Bali's Kuta Beach; complete with loose spaghetti strap blouses, hot pants and beach slippers with little left to imagination of the simple-minded. I do not think we are talking about MIT and Stanford stuff here!
And almost every day, one can notice broken beer bottles lacing the roads around the college. Is studying so stressful that the student have to vent their frustrations by squashing bottles? Back in my varsity, it was illegal to bring in alcoholic beverages. Times are a-changing!
You better shape up or be shipped out! Accept it! The end is near...21st December 2012 ain't far away, you know...

I came across a student from China who was a 2nd-year student in one of these colleges who went to a clinic for an ailment but could not relate her symptoms to the attending doctor as she was not well versed in English and had to get the nursing aid to be her translator. Her justification for not knowing English even though she was an international student was that she was only learning diploma in Music! So, that is the type of student we seem to be attracting; not the earth-shattering revolutionary thinkers of the future like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates who will one day change the world we live in.

Everyone has a tale to tell!

Yeah, everyone has their own tale to tell about how they sailed the rough seas, scaled the high walls and swam through the shark infested choppy waters and came out unscathed smelling of roses.Previously, we have read about the true life saga of Lincoln Murthi, Kal Raman and T. Muthuswamy Iyer.
Just the other day, I met up with a friend who is now drilling hole into people's bones and spine as an Orthopaedic surgeon, just like how his late father was drilling (and digging) into people's lawn and public roads to sort out their plumbing woes as a plumber in the Water Work Department! Going through various trials and tribulations, my friend managed to be where is through his and his parents hard work.
Just like a radio DJ was telling his experience in Vietnam where the tailors literally worked around the clock to sew his suit. The suit was measured at 8pm, the client was called for fitting the next morning and the merchandise was ready to be collected by that afternoon. All this for a fragment of the cost in the tourists' respective countries. And mind you, the cutting is of latest Parisian style! (And they have 24-hour dentists in Vietnam too, drilling into people's teeth at 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning!) These hardworking people's sweat will one day pay off and the sweet produce of their endeavours will be savoured effortlessly by the next generation. Whether this wealth will prosper into the following generation is anybody's million dollar question as the Chinese have a saying, 'Wealth in a family only lasts for 3 generations'.
Here, for your perusal and approval....Malaysian Dream and  前进吧！马来西亚(Dynamic Malaysia)...

Pair made in heaven?

I particularly fancy this Hollywood couple due to the scaring similarities between their birth dates and mine as well as my other half's! - 16th July (Ginger Roberts & yours' truly); 10th May (Fred Astaire & my other)!

Who cares? So what?

Mountains out of mole-hills?

If you remember the article from the local daily a couple of weeks ago, Amber Chia's baby is finally out to pose in the press. Too bad there were no paparazzis snooping around ala-Brangelina type of scenario around Ashton's way! Anyway everybody is just making a mountain out of a mole hill. So Amber has a kid, so what? Just doing what biology has taught us and nature will take its course in due time, big deal. No new ground-breaking record breaking discovery here!
But I guess that is the job of the people in the press and the media (including advertisement moguls) - to create an apparent need or dying desire to know everything out of and apparently an insignificant and trivial event and sell it like hot cakes whilst smoking their Cuban cigar and laughing all the way to the bank!
Who cares what the leaders or sportsmen do outside their normal working hours? Just because you are a star, it does not mean that what you do (like dangling your baby off the window or driving with your infant at the steering wheel) fascinates and boggles most simpleton minds!
Like in the story below, so what if Amber Chia is feeding her baby: And she is not breastfeeding; And she is feeding an empty bottle? And she is holding it at an awkward angle! For all you know the maid (nanny) may the one who is fully attending to the infant 100%! The star may be too posh to mind the baby, the manicure makes it just not practical!
I remember a few years ago, my neighbour in Malacca used to baby-sit a couple's children until the babies were about 2 to 3 years old before the parents took them back to their homes. Soon after the babies were born, the mother would send them to this neighbour's house. The parents would drop by at my neighbour's house after work for about 2 hours. After that they would then say their goodbyes to their kids and carry on with their lives until the next evening when they would drop in again. The reason for this kind of arrangement is the children by then would be toilet trained and easier to handle (among other reasons). Interesting...

Tuesday October 19, 2010
Amber Chia’s baby boy to follow in mum’s footsteps

KUALA LUMPUR: Supermodel Amber Chia’s son Ashton Wong Jian Way is only a mere three weeks old, but the talent scouts have come a-calling. His parents have negotiated a deal for Ashton to be the model in an advertising campaign for a milk bottle company. Ashton will “start work” when he turns three months old for a print ad. The baby, born in a private hospital here on Sept 27, is a natural and loves to pose.

Model family: Chia feeding her baby as
Adrian looks on at their home in
Kuala Lumpur yesterday.

Whenever there are visitors, he will open his eyes widely and smile, said Chia. “It’s so easy to take care of him. He only cries when he’s hungry. “He likes to spend most of his time sleeping or observing the surroundings,” she said at her home off Jalan Klang Lama here. Now, who does Ashton look like? He’s got a good mix of genes from both parents. While his features resemble those of his dad, he’s got a pointy chin, long legs and arms like his model mum.

Hope in humanity

Just when you think, the world around you is on the verge of crumbling down on you, just view these snippets to convince yourself that there is hope. There always is, you just have to find it! Hope lies eternally in the human chest!

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/04/01/cnnheroes.krishnan.hunger/




http://www.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/04/01/cnnheroes.krishnan.hunger/