Evil that men do 2!

Just attended a gala charity dinner organised by a college in town. It was held to honour orphaned children from three orphanages. Sounds like a noble cause, the well endowed high heeled paying back to society, to entertain attention deprived kids and to raise funds for their daily needs!
Yeah right! The nihilistic part of prefer to see it from another angle...
The college run by fat capitalistic businessmen who, realising the raising concern on the decline and apprehension of the standard of public education in Malaysia, built colleges to offer quality education with affiliation to well renowned overseas universities to entice the ever unhappy paranoid Malaysian (who never believe the official version of Malaysian statistics) to send their spoilt bred kids to them for studies at exorbitant fees.
Feeling the guilt and increasing brickbats from the lower strata of society, like the heat felt from the Wall Street demonstrators, these business conglomerates try to wash their 'sins' of charging exorbitantly by having CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) projects. The function I attended above was the product of one of those. The college offered scholarships to students with exemplary academic and extra curricular activities performances with the understanding that these creme ala creme students will end their term with a project like this- to invoke a tear drop to attendees at the dinner and feel the 'empathy' as felt by the rich college. Everybody is happy. The attendees, having contributed to a worthy, tax-deductible cause; the students' for the experience of seeing and feeling how the underprivileged live as most of them were born with silver spoons; the bosses for a feather in their cap which would make them eligible for conferral of honourable award from monarchs which will further elevate their status in the Tatler and lifestyle magazines; not to forget the caterers, the hall owners and the events management manager who made a killing from the function.
The teenagers, which with the wealth of imagination and exposure, did a splendid job of setting the mood with the ambiance (of multiple hues of light, as though we were caged in a submarine) and backdrop. The bourgeois and fine upbringing of the students were apparent from the ushering of the guests, the multi-talented music extravaganza displayed and the smooth seamless handling of the show by the designated masters of ceremonies. Even the glitch of the non functioning microphones was wittily replaced with sign language and the disturbance of the media player was cleverly handled, kudos!
Sad to think that these young talents may one day leave our shores for greener pastures leaving us with non-employable graduates unable to converse in English and need prodding for everything like a snail with the danger of them withdrawing in-toto into their shell if the prodding is too intrusive!
The hosts managed to convince (I always wonder if 'con'ning is part of 'convince'ing?) the many sponsors to part from their moolah which were used to pay for the orphans' dinner ticket. The balance of of total collection (RM35,000) was given as a mock cheque to be shared among the 3 bodies, much to the delight of shutterbugs who were clicking away shots which would be used as CVs and KPIs of college directors and students alike. The students will supplement their long list of certificates with the experience of working with under-privileged kids to keep themselves abreast ahead from their peers in their next scholarship interview, entrance to Ivy League or Oxbridge or future job opportunity in a multinational company.
Coming to the real guests of the honour of the night, they performed to their best ability to entertain their hosts. Unlike their host and the rest of the paying guests who were dressed to kill to nines in their branded cocktail body hugging dresses and stilletos, the children were contented with their regular down to earth street clothes (probably contributions of kind souls) performing to their hearts' content to please their hosts and well wishers to make it worth while the time and money spent!
Call me weird, but in their shoes, I would feel humiliated performing like a dance monkey, performing to please my masters with their corny speeches and material splashing just to fatten their inflated egos.
Evil that men do! Because of some (wo)men who used intimate moments as a recreation rather procreation and society's frowning and denial of promiscuity as a real problem and ostracization of the products thereof, lack of social net for children abandoned by parent(s) who puts more importance in their own worldly satisfaction over their children welfare, orphans exist.

My house, My home, My kingdom

The tallest mansion of squatters!
One eye Jack is king in kingdom of blind

Growing up in RRF, we yearn to have regular addresses, not an address with block number, floor number and unit number. We were quite fed-up explaining to our schoolmates why there were so many dashes, hyphens and digits on our address instead of just the house number and road name. I suppose the stigma of living in a low cost high rise slump-like flats in the 70s was more the reason of the above. Even though living in the 21st century means condominium resort type of living is norm, we from RRF still find contentment living with our feet on the ground in landed properties!
Why am I writing this?
If you have access to people's addresses like I do, then you would have noticed that some addresses leaves no place for imagination on their social economic strata. Home addresses like 'Projek Perumahaan Rakyat', 'Projek Rumah Murah', Taman Bukit Mewah' will tell you how their home would look like.
Someone told me that many years ago, the mental facility in Kuching, Sarawak used to be called 'Rumah Sakit Orang Gila'! And Tampoi Psychiatric Hospital had been known as wad 'Orang Sakit Otak'.  When we grew up in Penang, anyone originating from Tanjong Rambutan was mental unless proven otherwise as the premier northern region Psychiatric Hospital was stationed there.
There is a place in Sabah called 'Menggatal'. Are the people ridiculed to be promiscuous, I wonder?
One cannot help it but over time certain names are acceptable by public may one day become hurtful or politically incorrect. Many years ago, children with Trisomy 21 (Down's Syndrome) used to called Mongols without batting anybody's eyelids. Ever since, Mongolia started being heard on CNN and started producing models, nobody called them Mongols anymore. Down's baby and special child they are!

The parasitic pirate life

Surin Gnanalingam
Director and Story teller

It is ironic to find a DVD named 'The DVD - pirate copy' from the friendly neighbourhood DVD peddler. This movie is a low key 2008 Malaysian (bilingual Cantonese and Manglish) movie which hadreceived 2 international indie movie awards (California Indie fest Excellence Award 2009 and entrance to South African International Movie festival). It is a story of a college boy, his widowed mum and his involvement with the big bad dudes of the illegal DVD business which is closely related to the city gangsters.
At one look, on screen, it looks like everybody in Kuala Lumpur seem to be donning T-shirts bearing logos of English Premier league clubs like that seem to be the national costume of Malaysian teenagers, which actually is quite true. Teenagers and even adults alike, have no love attached to our local national football teams as they are all in doldrums run by pompous feudalistic monarchs and their cronies just to laze off their free time !
A good 85 minute movie but does not really stand out. It feels like a made for TV Disney movie with PG13 rating! Actually there are only a few scenes with knives being brandished but hardly any flesh being exposed unless young ladies gyrating in the usual spaghetti dress or tubes as tasteless!

Angered by Angry Birds

It looks like in a cycle of every 10 years, someone from some corner of the world will come up with some droll characters which will be personified with human characters and cute aesthetically pleasing features and the world by storm. At the end of the day, it would be aimed at reaping financial benefits out of it. That is always the bottom- line, is it not - $, £, ¥ and €?
In the 1980s, it was the irritating pink female feline kitten which ruled the world. Suddenly, it was Hello Kitty everywhere! There were even shops selling only Hello Kitty merchandise - dresses, slippers, make-up, night gowns, accessories, you name it. I suppose even before that people used to have to fetish for domesticated hairy bears fondly named Teddy after Theodore Roosevelt! And the China Dolls, of course now it means something else...or Japanese porcelain dolls ala Chucky!
Just for information, as of 2003, Sanrio, the Japanese company who designed this Kitty, was earning USD 1billion annually.
Then in the 1990s, it was the reign of the violent Pikachu characters of the digital Pocket Monsters (Pokemon). Maybe, because they were Eastern in origin and came out at the correct time when computer games was at an embryonic state and had the world by storm, many sore loser hurled many brickbats against them. The Christians, Jews and Moslems discouraged people of faith to embrace into its cult-like practices of violence, albeit being just a mirage! If that is not enough to add to their list of problems, some children started having seizures after watching one of their stroboscopic red and blue lighted episodes on TV and it had to be discontinued. 2 kids in Japan filed a legal suit blaming Pokemon for making compulsive gamblers.
Not to be left out in the race for cute animal craze of the world which had been dominated by the Japanese all this while, a Finnish company managed to capture the hearts of the pet-figure deprived population of the world with their computer game called Angry Birds. Suddenly you see people wearing T-shirts bearing the grouchy irritated faces of these avian species and carrying balloons with their caricature! The whole aim of the Angry Birds' game is for the birds to destroy the hiding place of the pigs to retrieve their eggs which were stolen from them, hence their anger!
So, download the application on your i-phones (intelligent phones) and degenerate your brain cells in the process and kill your precious time  in this time deprived fast world as if you have so much of them. Hurt your joints, dim your vision, have a headache, be a recluse, be addicted and basically use your skills to hurl things at pigs like a bird brained loonie! Enjoy...

When the good dies, goodness lives on!

So now Diwali is officially over, now that we as a family has watched a movie together. This time around it was another Bollywood sci-fi action thriller 'Ra One'. Oh no, another robot movie after the last Chitty's manifestation in Rajnikanth's 'Enthiran'?
Well, this time around I did not doze off and action sequences were acceptable as they were all computer generated, hence people take at face value knowing the fights were supposed to occur in cyberspace. Whatever it was, the VW car chase scenes were literally out of this world as far as Bollywood is concerned and were comparable to 'The Italian Job' and 'French Connection' except that all these happened in London with The Thames and London Bridge in the background.
All these were too much for some of the patrons who were expecting tear-jerking melodrama and emotional blackmail and they decided to walk out on the show half-way. Guess some were not ready for this transformation in Indian cinema.
Somewhere in the middle of the movie, I thought I had been transported to a cinema hall in India when Rajnikanth made a guest appearance as Chitty and the whole hall went into a cheering and clapping frenzy!
The movie can boasts of a star studded cast from SRK, Kareena Kapoor, Arjun Rampal, Sanjay Dutt, Priyanka Chopra and Rajnikanth.
Gone are the days when special effects in Indian movies were far from being special. Here, the runaway train scene is comparable to Spiderman, Matrix and Superman put together. And the collapse of Mumbai Central Railway Station was incredible. Even singer Akon sings in Hindi here. As SRK is depicted as a clumsy nerdy Tamil computer programmer, he had to speak in Tamil in many instances. One of the songs also has Tamil lyrics in it. The scenes were done tactfully not as to hurt the Tamil community as they were once were when 'Padosan' was released in the 60s.
In summary a good movie to say 'Bye' to Diwali and carry on with life. Soi.

Anywhere Anytime

Engeyum Eppodhum (எங்கேயும் எப்போதும்) 2011

So you think you have seen them all - Tamil movies with the usual masala, boy meets girl, girl plays hard to get, then succumbs to undying love which  plucked the right chords and strings of the heart, then comes the villain or unrelenting parents and resistance, then climax with a little bit of humour thrown in for your money's worth! Think again!

In 1979, just before the heights of the reign of Kamal Haasan and Rajnikanth as the undisputed heavyweights of the Tamil silver screen, there was a musical movie (all Tamil movies are, anyway) Nineithale Innikum (Sweet Memories) with both of them being band mates with Rajnikanth doing a bit of overacting playing the electric guitar the way only Rajnikanth and maybe Sivaji can play! In that movie there was a song titled 'Engeyum Eppothum', hence the title of this movie 32 years later but Rajnikanth and Kamal Haasan are still very much in the limelight still! Seriously, I cannot fathom the correlation!

The beginning of the movie was a surprise when the familiar loud orchestral symphony music which usually accompanies 20th Century Fox movies flashed. You see, it is the first venture of Fox into Indian cinema. Is it a good thing or is it like a scene from 'Lion King' when Uncle Scar stands before his clan to announce that a new dawn has come where lions and hyenas were friends!

The movie starts with a head-on collision between two buses. The story then unfolds in flashbacks of two lovebirds and the evolution of their love stories. One green village girl who lands in Chennai and takes fancy to a town boy. The other is about a domineering girlfriend and forever obliging partner. The story weaves on to put these people these two buses. Along the way are some small but significant characters to spice up matters, like a father who is returning to meet her daughter whom he had not met since her 5 years previously as he got a job offer in Dubai just before she was born. There was also a pair young college students falling in love on the bus.
It was an eye opener to see posh and clean buildings in Chennai. They must have been either airbrushed and edited aggressively for the movie or India has indeed prospered tremendously! Even the highways looked like highways (Thanks to Samy Vello for introducing tolled highways there)! The long haul express buses looked robust and fit for the road for once.

After the accident, however, all the typical behaviours of people of Southern India came to fore. All the loud, demonstrative wailing were seen just as seen in any Tamil movie. I would not say that this is an earth-shattering new revolutionary moviemaking that need to be seen or anything like that. It is just that it showcases old story from a new angle and it is refreshing. Happy Deepavali....

Enjoy it while the aroma of mutton curry and sweet scent ghee balls (நெய் உரண்டை) still lingers on...

Jung Punks - Psychoanalyzing psychotic deviant teenagers

I have come across many teenagers who rationalise their inertia in life and their inability to attain the full potential of their ability which they may conceal within themselves by going under covers of psychological rationalisations. They suddenly have become junior Jungs and Freuds to pass the blame to (thank you very much) their parents who did what they thought was best they could do in their best of ability, knowledge and resources.

These young loafers have no qualms in blaming the absence of paternal love, dearth of fatherly bonding, peer pressure of their dog eat dog world, regimental upbringing, systemic humiliation by parents, yearning for brotherly or maternal touch, sibling rivalry or everything else under the sun except themselves for a reason for their ill-fated situation - everyone and everything else except themselves.
 They call it the stress of modern living and their role models are none other than the Kardashians - yeah, the dysfunctional family with a quirky and warped sense of values but the teenagers all over the world use them as a yardstick of how life should be lived!