Pity Nasi Lemak!

Of late there is a wrangle brewing between the canteen operators and the education officials on limiting the number of days that nasi lemak can be served in the canteen. It all happened one day when the Honorable Education Minister was suddenly enlightened during a visit to a school when he made an astounding discovery that the school children were getting fatter. Then started the musical chair charade to pin-point rather nail down the culprit (synonymous to fall guy or sacrificial lamb to the slaughter). Suddenly, all the relevant government officials in unison were rudely awakened from their blissful post nasi lemak/nasi kandar stuporous beauty sleep (which they will resume after the dust has settled on this one) to show everyone else that they are in control.  The Minister categorically proclaimed that the root of obesity is the amount of nasi lemak that the children eat (which is way too much). He decreed that that all report cards must have the BMI (Body Mass Index:weight in kg/ square of height in metres) written as if the kids would then miraculously shrivel up to Shia LaBeouf's physique with this gesture!Then he suggested nurses must be employed to educate parents on the significance and relevance of increased BMI and educate everyone on good eating habits. Somehow, time and again, the national food (nasi lemak) has been portrayed as the axis of all evils -that the number of days of their servings in canteen be reduced.
My humble opinion is that we are totally tangent from the real issue at hand. Most parents of the school children are in their 30s and 40s and have been generally well educated by our what has been a fairly comprehensive and extensive education system. (Unless you are an octogenarian and the child is of your third or fourth trophy wife, but then you would be way too filthy rich to send them to public schools). Everyone knows what is raised BMI and its cause and effects as most would have spent at least 11 years in school. They are not retards as they are painted that the government has to tell them that their brads are darn fat!
Maybe he (Minister) should one day see how his subjects (citizens) spend a day at the picnic or what the kids eat during a long train journey on KTM - the children eat and eat gluttonously carbohydrate and oil laden, arteries choking fried processed food from port to port with an interval of snooze along the way. This type of routine will fatten even the thinnest of any famine stricken kid.
Anyway, school recess is just maybe half a meal that school kids have in a day. The major meals (3 or 4) are consumed at home and parents are in control of that, I am sure. The minister is barking up the wrong tree.
If my instincts are right, all this brouhaha will  just be a storm in the tea cup. It will be business as usual.come next month when another issue will crop up (like the you tube depiction of bullying in school). The minister will say that the ruling party has the welfare of the ailing canteen operators at heart and would strive for a win win situation. Nasi lemak will on the menu as usual. The canteen operators would be pleased as Punch with the decision. Maybe the minister would pose eating nasi lemak in the papers. What he means by win is win the elections, lah!
Yet another case wrapped like the nasi lemak packet seen here...

A nation of stop-overs?

Looks like our elected leaders are bending over backwards to please the rest of the world. They want to appear cordial to the immigrant and refugee populations, to negate the impression our enforcement official and RELA volunteers harass them to grease their forever dry hands. At last count, the number of illegal Indonesian immigrants in the country reached 2 million, surpassing the Indians as the third largest ethnic group in the country. The leaders seem quite relaxed about it and have rekindled their respective Indonesian origins - like the PM with his Sulawesian heritage and the former CM of Selangor with his Javanese origin. The way Indonesians weave in and out of the country is like walking around a revolving door with so many of them holding multiple passports, each with different names and age. They themselves have forgotten their original names and ages. They have mastered the art of masquerade to put Charles Sobhraj (the Bikini Killer) feel like a bumbling novice.

This makes our Immigration enforcement a joke, bringing it back to before the time of Teuku Zakaria Teuku Nyak Puteh (a.k.a. P, Ramlee) when Indonesia and Federation of Malay States were part of the Nusantara archipelago where people move to and fro with no boundaries. That is how you got the likes of Sarong Kebaya Queen of the Malay movie Golden Era, Maria Menado from Menado in Celebes (Sulawesi),, Aziz  Satar from Java and P Ramlee's parents from Sumatra.

Hawkers stores all over KL are operated by moon-shining immigrants (?illegal) from Myanmar and Thailand single-handedly. Many thanks to the legitimate Malaysian licence owners who find it more lucrative and less tiring to sublet the business. Anyway, the enforcement is lax, and if you take care of them, they will take good care of you. Isn't that Mafia's tagline?

If having a large pool of Rohingya asylum seekers her for the past 20 years is not enough (under the auspices of UNHCR), now we have volunteered to Australia to hold their asylum seekers from Sri Lanka and Afghanistan while they (the Australians) take their own sweet time to process their applications. Why? That is what baffling everybody, but it seems like a face-saving exercise. We can see that some of the Rohingya refugees have blended so well in the society that they speak better Malay than three-quarters of the certified citizens of Malaysia!

Just like our southern neighbours, we are in the same boat, In Singapore, the educated and qualified found greener pastures in apparently economically healthier and freer societies. In their places happy to replace are super-rich from mainland China and Indonesia who only have with the money. (That is all that everybody wants!) And there are the unskilled workers from Southern India and China to do the lowly menial chores.

In Malaysia, the efflux of talented individuals from all ethnic groups has reached dizzying heights. Before long, the large pool of illegal immigrant population will somehow become citizens through corrupt practices of specific individuals with vested interests to garner votes to stay in power. These new citizens would now fight for their space in the sun in their newfound land amongst the already marginalized group of the society who have to jump-start the economy in the 20th century - children of the plantation workers.

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

Freddie lived his life!

Freddy had a time of his life

This is one of the rare biographies of Freddy Mercury (born Farrukh Bulsara) where people from his childhood are interviewed. Notice how close his sister resembles Freddy (or is it the other way around?) And notice how the infrastructure in Zanzibar and Bombay can still pass off as frolics from Freddy’s past (in the 60s and 70s).

Forget about his sexual orientation, he is a wizard in bringing operatic type of sweet rock music to the world. Thanks to probably his exposure to music from the continents of Africa, Europe as well as the Indian sub-continent. Apperently, he used to enjoy melodious crooning of Asha Bhosle! Being the true musician that he is, like Sudirman Haji Arshad, he continued performing almost till his final stages. This is evidenced by his scarecrow like appearance in the ‘Innuendo’ music videos especially in ‘I am going slightly mad’.

It is interesting to see how well a Farsi boy blended into the British society, hardly giving any inkling to his Indian link, what more about his Farsi origin. One can even say that he is India’s earliest contribution to contemporary music before the works

Do you know that at least 2 of Queen’s songs are banned by RTM (Radio TV Malaysia) – namely ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and ‘Mustafa’. In ‘Mustafa’ the azan is used as part of the song. In ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, Islam is portrayed as a non compassionate religion. In this song, a young poor boy dies after being sentenced to death for murder. At heaven’s gate, he pleads for leniency amongst the angels of different faiths. Most angels feel pity for him. The Moslem angels appear cold and vehemently deny his appeal, “Bismillah, we will never let you go!” Ironically, they play this song over the Malaysian airwaves now but conveniently blanking off the part just like they do vulgar rap song with offensive lyrics. Cynics proclaim that Freddy’s aversion to Islam culminated from his Zoro-Astrorian faith. In the 9^th century, Islamic invaders chased them off their motherland in Persia.

In the mean time, enjoy this one and a half hour documentary of the lead singer of the rock group ‘Queen’, Freddy Mercury a.k.a. Farrukh Bulsara… 

Reviving the humane among our Muslims

Azril Mohd Amin
May 12, 11
10:54am

We know that Allah the Most Exalted wants us to return to Him as human beings, not as human in form yet showing many animal qualities. The one letter “e” makes the difference. The first sign of a humane Muslim is that he treats other Muslims as if they were true human beings, not as victims of poverty, war crimes, rich inheritances, elderly or senile, or anything else.

We treat them as human beings precisely equal to ourselves. How many social workers can treat his or her clients in such a fashion? How many teachers can treat their students in such a fashion? How many parents can treat their children in such a fashion? Or their grandparents?
We can think of compassion, compassion for all beings. If we attend Hajj rites and fail to accept all those millions of illiterate as well as professional Muslims as our equals before Allah swt, we have missed the point. We might as well not go.
We are looking for what the Quran calls “small kindnesses”. They can mean so much. When someone wants to trample us to get to the Black Stone, make way. Do not resist. When someone wants to get ahead of us in the queue at the airport, make way. Do not resist. Our hearts must be big enough and wide enough to accept all Muslim brothers and sisters into itself, into its loving-kindness, no matter what.
This quality of “humane” Muslims is one of the possible bases for a civil society which we Muslims have lost. The medieval community highlighted the virtue of conviviality.
After all, a saying of the Prophet Muhammad (Allah's blessings and peace be upon him) (the authenticity of which is said to be beyond dispute) goes: “Wisdom is the lost property of the believer. Take it wherever you happen to find it”.
Conviviality takes precedence over all things, especially financial greed. Conviviality requires that human interaction, civil interaction, be pleasant before anything else. If it can't be pleasant, it isn't worth doing. Herein lies the overwhelming importance of politeness, in which the various human passions are held in check for the pleasantness of some interaction or other.

Sunnah of cyberspace
Muslims take note. There is a Sunnah of cyberspace that is largely ignored these days, in which not one single communication is personally sent your way without your response.
I remember a dear friend who never wrote a letter without carefully covering each and every point raised by me in my previous letter. And this thoroughness of inter-communication was contagious; it was always reciprocated on my part. Thus she taught me the conviviality of correspondence. My emails would be so much happier were she still alive today.
Perhaps it takes a certain minimum wealth to act out one's convivial feelings on the human stage. Malays have done more for Palestinians than any other Muslim group, and have received very little appreciation for it. Perhaps the Saudis and others have been shamed that they have not done as much, other than talk and fight over petty issues.
Well, the Saudis and other Arabs have certainly had the wealth. What they have not had was any genuine conviviality with the Palestinians to really help out in a substantial way.
The Indonesians are in a similar plight. There is no zakat dollar that goes further than in Indonesia, and yet very little organisation has been done in helping our quarter-of-a-million Muslim brothers and sisters down there, And those efforts that have borne fruit (such as YJIMS foundation in building madrasah in Banten Province) have met with a resounding silence when approaching various of the richer Muslims among us.
The Malaysians had a yayasan which promptly sent all their money to recipients of zakat funds to a certain rich country, who had expressed no interest in Islam or any intention to become Muslim. Most, in fact, were atheist. There are limits to our conviviality, and atheism (or “free thinking”) is surely one of them.
Everybody knows the camarederie of a “mamak” food stall. If “1Malaysia” has any meaning at all it must lie in sitting down to a cup of tea and having some discussion over the issues of the day with our Indian and Chinese neighbours in the hundreds of food stalls lying peacefully all over Kuala Lumpur.
We will not disrupt the weddings of such people, nor will we remain deaf to their occasional needs for funding. Nor will we hesitate to ask for a little credit when we are short of funds ourselves!
“Humane” is an attitude that starts with us individually, our families and neighbourhoods, and then spreads quietly throughout the society. Such is a civil society. Such we have here in Malaysia, and such our Arab brothers and sisters long for in the Middle East.
Let us pray for their attainment of such a civil society, while praising Allah the Most Exalted for such potential civility that we have right here in Malaysia, and especially during these trying times.
Why have we been surviving for more than fifty years? Because, in the end, the civility wins out. And that is as it should be among Muslims and non-Muslims in the modern world. Without guns. Insha Allah.
AZRIL MOHD AMIN is a Kuala Lumpur-based lawyer, and has his writings archived at www.azrilmohdamin.com.