Serumpun lalang!

Before the era of globalization and the seamless, borderless world of the 21st century reared its ugly head, as far as Malaysia and Indonesia were concerned, there were, and there are, no borders between these two countries. In the pre-Independence years, people's movement between nations had no boundaries. Some people had 2 lives and 2 families. This was instrumental in many Malay screen and music legends like Maria Menado, Aziz Sataar, Asiah and even P.Ramlee's father! Fast forward to the future, you still see many Indonesians in Malaysia with 2 lives, 2 families and many passports (just in case one is blacklisted). Even our earlier race-based Malayan politicians (and present ones) had plans up their sleeves to naturalize Indonesians to the Malayan Malay headcount to show dominance!

When the Cobbold Commission went on their mission to carve off a slice of the Malay archipelago to form a new country, General Sukarno and his countrymen went up in arms. They believe that the Malaya-Indonesia entity should be one as Nusantara. It went on for 3 years until Sukarno's ouster.

The Malaysians, on the other hand, have a soft spot for their neighbour. Maybe, because without them, the many mega-buildings around towns would not have materialized, and their children would not be attended to. So many times, amnesty had been given to their illegal intruders. It even paid for their trip, only for them to return with another spanking new passport, courtesy of the Indonesian Government and their inefficiencies. When either team play in either country (Malaysia or Indonesia), they (Indonesia) land in full force to haunt the Malaysians. This is obvious even when Malaysia plays Indonesia in Thomas Cup in KL. The visitors are louder than the host. In Jakarta, recently, during the football finals, our victorious team had not only to survive food poisoning and substandard accommodation, but they also had to survive a hostile barrage of heckling and intimidation.

Now, are we still serumpun (of the same stock), engaging in sibling rivalry, are different because of changing times, or do we choose to sway like a clump of weeds (serumpun lalang) to the direction of the wind when it suits us?

Curse of family royale!

November 22, 1963 –
U.S. President John F. Kennedy is assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas, Texas.


In the mid 70s MGR in his endeavour to win mileage in his political career, unashamedly used a line from John F Kennedy's inauguration speech (Ask what your country has done for you but what you have done for your country!) a verse in a song in one of his propaganda movies, "Naan En Piranthen'('நான் ஏன் பிறந்தேன்').

The History Channel recently screened episodes on the ever famous unofficial royal family of America - the Kennedys. Such an honour does not come cheap, as seen in the series. It had a curse associated with it.

The first episode started with a scene on the eve of the 1960 American elections, and the story is told in series of flashback interposed with 'present' (i.e. 1960) unfolding of events. It is an enjoyable 7 part series on the events pre-dating and tribulations following the appointment of JFK's presidential throne till Robert's (his confidante) assassination.
Joseph Kennedy Sr. (Tom Wilkinson), a not so religious Catholic (apparently Catholics were despised by rest of America) immigrant son who made his millions in business through whiskey licencing had sky-high political ambitions. Due to a foot in the mouth moment as an Ambassador in England during the high tension days of the pre-WW2 era, his political came crushing. He pinned his hopes high on his eye of his apple, the flamboyant first son Joseph Jr.who, unfortunately, died in combat in WW2. His father's political ambition to the White House fell squarely on the reluctant shoulders of JFK (Greg Kinnear) who had been overshadowed by his elder brother.
In this series, we are shown the day to day living behind the regalia and princely lives of the Kennedys through the lens of the director and the writer (must be with the approval of the Kennedys, of course). Joe Sr. is portrayed as a hard-driving demanding, domineering patriarchal father who gets his way for anything through emotional blackmail. He is determined to make a Kennedy a President at all cost even it means making empty promises of immunity from prosecution to the Chicago mobs to win votes. This betrayal seems to be implicated as one of the reasons for the assassinations of JFK (1963) and his brother Robert (1968) (Barry Pepper) who was the AG and later Presidential candidate.

In the part of the show, I was confused - too many Jacks! How come John was called Jack and Jackie (Katie Holmes) was JFK's wife? JFK was nicknamed Jack, talk about a match made in heaven! On top of that Robert is Bobby. In the earlier episode, we come to know that JFK's sister, Rosemary, appears to be schizophrenic and undergoes a lobotomy.
The reluctant politician matures after an indecisive swayed by Generals Bay of Pigs fiasco, he soon takes control of the driver's seat accompanied by a confidante, The AG Robert Kennedy to rule America. Putting a stop to his control-freak father's meddling, he takes control, making decisions from the heart to the chagrin of the big shot gung-ho trigger-happy generals around him. Through diplomacy, he averts an almost WW3 and improves race relations in the race-conscious South.

Save for Robert (who appears faithful to his wife with his 11 children), the Ks seem to have a weakness for the weaker sex from Sr down to JFK. The appetite just becomes more ferocious for JFK that FBI boss Hoover (the sore loser to the post of AG) had many files and footages on his clandestine activities. One of the not so gracefully out of love victim is Marilyn Monroe. It is even suggested here that his rejection drove her to gulp potent fatal concoction of mega-doses of barbiturates and alcohol.

America's darling -MM

In the bedroom front, JFK's infidelity sets a strain on his family life. JFK also has to battle with Addison's Disease, hypothyroidism, war-induced chronic nagging back pain and both husband and wife's dependency on alternative pain relief treatment from an unorthodox AMA-unapproved Eastern European doctor.

In my opinion, Barry Pepper stole the show with his stellar performance of depiction of the straight-shooting Robert K. Katie Holmes is looking pretty as the photo-friendly oft-copied (dressing and hairstyle) Jacqueline Kennedy.

Scrolling through the cyberspace, there are campaigns against the miniseries' incorrect depiction of the revered American family, citing historical inaccuracies and depiction of the world leader, a national treasure, in a very negative light. They did not want people remembering JFK as depicted in the initial script where there was a lot of sex and romping. Obviously, the final release must have been rewritten to satisfy many quarters as it looks well sanitised. I think that was the same fate when our national icon, P.Ramlee's life was attempted to be immortalised on celluloid. The last time I heard, the feat had many oppositions as the truth of his life was not so pleasant nor pleasing to the religious folks. Hence, it did not conform to the strict guidelines set by FINAS and therefore dead end!

P.S. The Kennedy curse continued on 16th July 1999 with the death of JFK's son who was born 16 days into his Presidential appointment in a plane crash due to spatial disorientation. 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_d5bAbO0fM

Running is like childbirth!

So it is that time of the year again! It is time for me to exhibit my filial piety by visiting my old folks in Penang. Hey, wait a minute! There is a run there too. Yeah, my as well run the run while I do the do - 2 birds; one stone for the killing.
Getting a good night's rest was already a challenge before the real challenge started. We had all passed the stage of going to bed at 9pm but had to, as the race started from 2am. One guy actually suggested doing a MJ-Murray Conrad combo cocktail of propofol! Luckily, common sense prevailed - as if propofol was lying around at our disposal. So, the next best thing to do was counting sheep. Unfortunately being the meticulous shepherd that I am, I just could not complete stabling the sheep as they were just too many. Before I knew it, it was time to get up and I did not even need the alarm. No thanks to the location of the hotel. Despite being housed on the 11th floor, I could still hear crystal clear announcements on the PA system from Ground Zero, downstairs from stroke of midnight.. That is the drawback of getting a venue so near to the starting point. Well, we all get wiser with experience.
Talking about sanity and sense, there was nothing sane about showering at 2am and gearing up for a near midnight run but I should have thought of it before registering. The only people I know who indulge in midnight showers (or rather scented baths- mandi bunga) were people with devilish intent or liaison with pontianak!
Starting promptly at 3am, this time around it is no more the cool ambience and the drizzle that accompanied the run last year. The humongous crowd was a damper at the starting point as the runners kept running into each other's shoes.
Somebody once asked me what goes through my mind when I was running. Besides having morbid thoughts of wondering when my knee would buckle to give up on me and people-antics' watching, there is always time to think what to write in the next blog. During one of these runs, I got a revelation. Running is like childbirth - when you are in it, you curse yourself for getting into the mess you are in but once you see the end product, you soon forget about the torturous unrelenting agony of labour pains and pretty soon you are in the labour room all again in no time. In the case of running it must be the post-run endorphin induced highs and awe received from well wishers! (some call it narcissism)
The 'boom boom pak' beat accompanying Queen's 'We will rock you' set the tempo (on my I-phone) as I ascended the midspam of the Penang Bridge. I guess I was more caught up with the music rather than running as this time around as I completed the run at 2hours 19mins, a good 9 minutes slower than last year. But hey, as a non competitive loser would say, "it was an enjoyable run". To complement the fruit cake, was Amma's excellent preparation of fish curry, chicken peratal, crab sambal with coconut gratings and thosai. My younger son and I flew back home happy, smiling ear to ear.

Patriots & Pretenders

The Malayan People's Independence Struggle
by Kua Kia Soong.

Yet another small nonfiction book from this prolific political scientist who did time in Kamunting. This time around an analysis of a possible alternative pathway our history would have taken if not for the governing circumstances and world ideology then.

It is a very factual book with lots of recommendations for the country, which seem to suggest all the things that KKS has been fighting for most of his post DAP life.

The gist that I digested after I read this book can be summarised as follows....
Malayans have already been unified before Merdeka, thanks to their fellow Asiatic aggressors in World War 2. First and second generation immigrants were already fighting for the country either as British stooge via the legalised Communist Party of Malaya or MPAJA. The Chinese in Malaya had a score to settle with the Japanese for the Nanjing massacre. When the Japs finally retreated, the Britishers returned denying Malayans of self-administration. The escalating tension on the world stage did not want to see communism to hold root in South East Asia. Furthermore, the British's agenda of maximising profits from their colonies was frequently hindered by the growing loud demands of the ever increasing louder voices of the various Workers' Unions as evident by a country-wide strike, Hartal on 20.10.1947. So, the idea of eventually handing self-rule to a unified Malayans with dangerous liaison with the devils that they knew did not make sense. On the contrary, to maintain their hegemony on the country's raw material and safe guard their interests, it was imperative that they have to look for alternatives to the multi-ethnic AMCJA-Putera. It came in the form of elitists of the Malay Royal Family (UMNO) whom they had had dealings since the Pangkor Agreement in 1874 and the capitalistic Chinese businessmen. The British, the masters of divide and rule, saw this communal politics ideal at satisfying the royalty, the Malays with their special status and the Chinese with Malayan citizenship. Communism and workers union were mostly squashed to pulp through Emergency plans and banning unions. After that, it is more than half a decade of communal politics in Malaysia with MCA, MIC and others joining the morass.

Onn Jaafar is portrayed here in the IMP and Partai Negara as an ultra racist colonial slave just out to stir racial sentiments to garner political mileage just like what UMNO Youth used to do in the 80s and PERKASA is doing now. I always thought Onn Jaafar was the good far sighted guy in Malayan politics (at least our textbooks said so) who wanted to open UMNO to non-Malays! He allegedly proposed flooding the country with Indonesian immigrants for racial dominance. Hey, see history repeats itself and perpetrators (today) learn devious techniques from history!
The 'Patriots' referred to in this book are the people who fought and fell for the country in WWII and Emergency. The 'Pretenders' are the members of Alliance Party who were groomed by the British and were handed to rule the country on a silver platter to safeguard their own interests.

**Hurdles in life are like a game of Angry Birds. You think you just managed to cross one level by tooth and nail - and there you have an even higher bar to pass. It only gets more challenging! Anon.

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

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

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RRF to PPSP: Ep 4: The syllabli - PBL

McMasters' method of medical education was a deviation from the traditional medical studies norm that we usually hear of (at least in the 80s). In the old way, medical students were taught the pre-clinical subjects in the early years and were expected to integrate what they have learnt earlier in the clinical years at the tail end of their medical school and use them for the rest of their lives. The critics of this method argued that too much knowledge is learnt and wasted, not of clinical significance. In the USM model, this integration is done early via the problem-based approach of learning and their Holy Grail of community-centric teaching in the hope of producing community conscious physicians. It all sounds very novel and noble but in practice...

The powers that be decided that to reach the ambition of the Government determined race-based upliftment of society, they congregated a motley crew of students with variable academic capabilities in the hope of churning out the mush into something useful to society! (To quote Professor Charles Kingsfield of Paper Chase *- a TV law drama series in the 80s).
The enrolment of the class, after initial correction when the Dean gave an ultimatum for the purdah wearers to remove their facial veil and to do some alterations to their dull-hued shapeless drapes, was 96.

One of the pillars upon which PPSP was laid upon by the founding fathers - Prof Ong KH, Prof G Simmons. Prof Saidi, Dr Reddy, Dr Kyaw TS et al. - was PBL (problem-based learning). PBL would have (and shown its capability in many other countries) would have been just fine if students genuinely had the desire to learn through self-motivation minus the 'kiasu' mentality frequently associated with Malaysian students and the playing field of students' intelligence was levelled around an acceptable axis.

Now there was a joke among NUS (National University of Singapore) students. Everywhere in the world, the performance graph of students in a class would follow a bell-shaped normal distribution Gaussian graph except in Malaysia - where it would be skewed towards both ends resembling a dumbbell (the pun, the pun).

In PPSP, PBL (which is actually supposed to be a group discussion with all students giving input as a clinical case study is unveiled scenario by scenario and a resource person, usually a lecturer, acting as a facilitator) ends up as a staring contest! One group of students armed with all the knowledge was stingy to share whilst the other group had nothing to share as they were clueless on the topic. Some were just shy! Everyone was just pleased with 'hand-outs' - printed reading material which can be read at their leisure in the comfort of library or dormitory. One of us (TFLG) would say, "We have pride, we don't live on hand-outs!", but he would still take it anyway and studied that to pass the tests!

* ' "The study of law is something new and unfamiliar to most of you, unlike any other schooling you have ever known before. You teach yourselves the law, but I train your minds. You come in here with a skull full of mush and, if you survive, you leave thinking like a lawyer."'
Prof Charles W Kingsfield Jr of Paper Chase. → →

Apollo 18: Was It A Cancelled Mission?

This must be the mother of all conspiracy theories, a hush-hush top secret to the moon organized by the Department of Defense of USA in 1973 during the height of the Cold War! The producers, after laughing all the way to the bank grossing $25 million for a $5million capital, insist on authenticity of the fact citing facts from leaked secrets on the internet via www.lunartruth.com. Repeated attempts to reach this website proved futile, however.
The thrust of this story is there was indeed another unmentioned manned lunar mission which nobody talks about. The story starts like in Apollo 13 where the good news comes in via phone during a family barbeque. Just that this time around it is top secret. So, the family members cannot rejoice!
The movie is made in a semi documentary format like in 'Blair Witch project' with fuzzy, sometimes grainy print creating an authenticity to the 'leaked' project.

Moonwalk!

Midway through the movie, we find that the two US astronauts found a dead Soviet cosmonaut on the moon during their moon walk. Hey, I thought going to the Moon was American's baby; Russian only went around the world with Yuri Gagarin! Then all hell broke loose with moon rocks (they are alive and are the bad guys who propagated under your skin) damaging the space shuttle. They (the 2 astronauts and the one in the mother-ship) are denied information and approval for any of their assistance. In the end, using the Soviet space ship to escape Moon, all 3 men perish in a direct collision. We are left with the impression that the moon rocks were alive and were out for vengeance and the US and Soviet governments were conducting human experiments to learn more about them.It also implies why there were no more lunar missions.
The movie ends with a caption that there were many moon rocks on Earth and that the astronauts' demise was reported as training accidents.

Glory days!

Wow! Malaysia beat Australia 3-2 in extra time after being a goal down twice in the recently ended Sultan of Johor Cup junior hockey tournament. En route to the final clash, Malaysia in the early rounds lost to Australia initially. They went on to beat teams like South Korea, Pakistan and India with convincing margins.
I am sure all the teams sent for the tournament must have been their second, third or fourth stringers. It still feels good though. Just like England's soccer team must be on cloud nine after beating Spain's B-team 1-0 in the friendlies yesterday. They must be thinking that they have won the World Cup especially after also winning the right to wear the poppy flower after the fiasco with FIFA recently.
Back in 1975, when I was Standard 6, the most happening event of the year in Malaysia was our hosting of the Hockey World Cup. Heavyweights of those days, Pakistan, India, West Germany, Netherlands and others were there in this extravaganza. Our class master, Mr Chan Teik Huat, took it upon himself to set up powerful sound system (Toshiba Bomb Beat or something like that) in our classroom for us to listen to the live telecast of Malaysian games on the radio. In spite of being devoid of visual stimulation, we could actually feel every dribble, every pass, every fall, every miss and disappointment felt by the spectators in the field. Our team achieved its highest achievement to date by capturing the fourth spot. 1975 was also the year when the big mouthed 'Fly like a butterfly and sting like a bee' Muhammad Ali came to town. In those days, every heavyweight boxing match was a fiesta. Malaysians of all walks of life watched the match live on Malaysian TV and work generally came to a standstill and the dual lane highway was empty. One acquaintance took 6 hours to drive from KL to Kota Bahru at that time! It used to be like this for all boxing matches until Ali retired. Mr Chan brought in a TV set us to watch Ali encounter with Joe Bugner where Ali won by points.
Then an era ended.......