Nostalgia....

Old Penang: Photos and postcards of the past

Help, I am married to the mob!

There goes my Newton New Year 25 km bash over the hills of Puchong and Bukit Jalil. As part of my extended family is dismantling from the country (lock, stock and barrel) early next year, I was literally arm-twisted to join in a family excursion up north with convoy of 20 in 4 cars. I would like to call it 'Jalan-Jalan Cari Makan'. We would be stopping at big towns for meals to continue the journey and finally eat and sleep in the hotel for a real unwinding before marching in to the challenges of the new year -2012. The year which is the last year in the Mayan calender and the year where rumour mongers, naysayers and people who are good at creating a mountain out of a molehill predict to be the end of civilization as we know it! Yeah! I have heard that many times before. Like the end of 1999 as in the TV show 'Space 1999' where the Moon loses its gravitational pull from the Earth which goes into mayhem and the news of San Francisco and Venice being underwater like Atlantis due to melting of polar caps and .....
Like Elton John says, "I am still standing!"...however!
On top of the uprooting story, there is another reason to party as in previous years. 2 family members celebrate their birhday on 1st of January - My mother-in-law by default both husband and wife were given 1st January as their birth dates. The last thing on their minds of her parents in the difficult hunger and misery filled times endured in the trying times of colonial India was to remember their child birthday, what more to celebrate it! Surviving to a another new day was a indeed a birth day. My brother-in-law genuinely born on the first day of the first month as a first born child. And just like in any traditional Sicilian family, we would all gather on new year eve to mark attendance, pay respect and usher the new year in unison! So this year was no exception. The following quote from Mafia move make more sense than to anybody else!

"A man who doesn't spend time with his family can never be a real man." (Don Corleone - The Godfather)

What the heck, another run will come another day. Times spent with family and memories acquired from small seemingly meaningless encounters will last a lifetime, maybe more generations if is imprinted eternally in a digital form! Happy New Year!

In the mean time, Newton 25km race - DNS (Did Not Start)


Relevant quotes to ponder....
Welcome to our big old happy dysfunctional family. You are now in, and whether you like it or not, you can never get out. Hayley Williams (of Paramore, Cyndi Lauper wannabe)


The most important thing in life is your family. There are days you love them, and others you don't. But, in the end, they're the people you always come home to. Sometimes it's the family you're born into and sometimes it's the one you make for yourself. (Sex And The City quotes)


"Fredo, you're my older brother, and I love you. But don't ever take sides with anyone against the Family again. Ever." (Michael Corleone - The Godfather Part II)

Compliments of National Geographic #3

Efficient buses - a shattered elusive dream

Electric tram on Weld Quay, circa 1910

Growing up in RRF, buses were the most important, of not the only form of transportation. In fact, for the middle class and the downtrodden part of the society, public transport play a crucial if not romanticized part of their everyday lives as evident from the numerous movies based on journeys! In our minds (the RRF dwellers), getting away from the clutches on the curse of dependence on buses as the sole form of movement is a way of escaping poverty. That would explain why we (my siblings and I) have not traveled in bus for years!

Buses in Malaysia (especially Penang) carry a very long history predating Independence in tandem with the advancement in railroads. Despite the accusations hurled at the colonial master for squandering wealth from the land of its conquests, they did establish a sound transportation system. In Penang, they experimented with many state of the art (then) gadgets like the tram service and funicular train service as part of community service responsibility.

Mana mau pigi?

I remember a time in our nation's history when many private bus venture companies were operating in major towns on the west coast of Malaysia. There was even a Punjabi family running a town bus service in Seremban. Workers from Selangor Omnibus company even created history when they erected a workers strike in their HQ with Communist Party of Malaysia having a hand in it sparking barbed wired barricades and showdown with FRU around Bukit Tunku area bringing the capital city to a standstill.

Lim Seng Seng Bus

Despite their imperfections, we still romanticize the moments of shoving through the crowd and running after a bus which stopped way off the designated bus-stop to drop passengers in the hope of squeezing through the sardine packed bus door!

Bus No 24-Ayer Itam route

All that has come to naught now! Buses in many states have stalled and brakes have been put on some of its so-called unprofitable routes.Why?
It all started in the gung ho days of the Mahathir era when the powers that be decided that we must have a unified establishment to oversee the running of buses (no-brainer to guess who the beneficiaries were). This was decided after short study-cum-holiday trips by officials to countries with enviable public transport system (whilst making a short stop with family and maid who incidentally flew 1st class). People  who were least interested in business or were hard working enough were assigned to run the show with unnecessary interventions by politicians who were more interested in populists' view. And it has come to this. This essential service has come to a halt. Public is held at ransom and sympathy is gained by sob story so that public funds can be channeled to them to satisfy their bottomless pit desire.

2 ways of dying?

Over the weekend, I met up with a friend who had moved into a spanking new house in the up-market part of town. After the usual cursory formalities and niceties, I had a chat with her father who had been diagnosed to have a serious heart ailment.

YeaH iTs MY liFe..!!!!!!!!! (Bon Jovi)

He is a 77-year-old man who, after the recent passing of his wife of almost 50 years, is living between her three daughters' houses at his own leisure. After striving hard to bring the bacon as a police officer through the hard times of the nation fighting bandits' intelligentsia throughout the country, he is glad that his three children are self-sufficient and independent. He feels that his life and duties on earth are done, and he is living on borrowed time! (Especially after being a chronic smoker of 50 sticks a day for 50 years until one fine day when he developed distaste to cigarettes upon completing pilgrimage to Holy Land). Perhaps, he should have made the trip much earlier in life.
So, when his doctors investigated him for neck pain and found that, through a morbidly terrorising angiogram experience (for him, at least) there were five blocks in his coronary vessels, his decision was pretty easy to make. "No, sire! No intervention for me", he said despite all the well-meaning persuasions from doctors and nurses. "For all you know I may have had these blocks for years before. Thank you very much!"

Well, they are no right or wrong decision in these situations. After all, it is his life. We may have heard of complications during and after surgery.

I was just reading the other day of a doctor who had devised ingenious surgical procedures to treat a particular type of pancreatic cancer which itself had a poor prognosis, by prolonging life by 3 to 5 years, albeit with its poor quality. But sadly when he was afflicted with the very same disease that he had been treating patients for years, what he did was mind boggling to his peers. He called it quits. He closed his practice and decided to spend his remaining days with his family. Sure, he did spend a lot of quality time for the next two years before leaving the company of his family.
That brings us to the two ways of how people deal with sickness - one quietly without pomp and splendour whilst the other in an almost fiesta-like atmosphere. In the former, he would decide to deal with his trying time alone or with immediate family in secrecy. The latter would enjoy the attention, gifts, sympathy and self-pity conveyed by equally extroverted family members and friends from near and far who would have no bearing on the outcome of the disease! The only thing missing would be confetti!

Perpetrators of the latter would vouch that kind support, gentle touch and sympathetic attention goes a long way in the organisation of fibrous tissue and resolution. Call me weird but how is answering the same question on the discovery or detection of the disease, mode of treatment and the constant reminder that everything is going to be okay make you feel rejuvenated, get up, acquire Kryptonic supernatural  powers and run?

Joy to the World

The spirit of Christmas is already in the air. It started when I was ushered it to join my dear friend's church's musical presentation called 'This Little Child - The King of Kings' - a musical extravaganza showcasing the true meaning of Yuletide minus the commercial tags associated with it.  His church members decided to put up a choir plus narration presentation.
I only managed to sit through two third of the show as I had to entertain some foreign guests. What was sorely missing in most other religious organizations in Malaysia was nicely cultivated here in this hall. Youths (young and slightly older ones) were literally undergoing training to survive in the real world by improving their event management and many other skills - human interaction, stage decoration, music recital, band performance, sound system engineering skills, allaying stage fright, developing public speaking skills and many many more.
It may be a little preachy but, hey, good deeds and good values are universal to the betterment of mankind in general. In my opinion, the highlight of the show was the short film presentation symbolically depicting the gripping tale of a father who sacrified his son for the safety of 400 over passengers aboard a speeding train. It was supposed to be a true story of a John Griffin in 1937 who became a rail bridge operator after losing all his money in the 1930 stock market - symbolically depicting the sacrifice of God in giving his only Son to die on the cross to wash the sins of mankind!
That my friend, is the true meaning of Christmas - the celebration of the birth of a Son of God to the world to save Man, not the clinging of wine glasses, countdown to stroke of midnight on Christmas eve, the Santarinas and Santa and his elves!... Watch and learn....

Based on a true story:
The father's name was John Griffith. He had lost all he had in the stock market crash. He moved to Mississippi where he took a job as bridge operator for a railroad trestle. In 1937 he was involved in a horrible accident. One day his 8 year-old son, Greg, spent the day with his Dad at work. The boy poked around the office and asked dozens of questions - just like little boys do. The bridge was over a river and whenever a ship came John had to open the bridge to allow the ships to pass. The day the boy was there with his father a ship was coming so John opened up the drawbridge. After a moment or two he realized his son wasn't in the office and as he looked around, to his horror, John saw his son climbing around on the gears of the draw bridge. He hurried outside to rescue his son but just then he heard a fast approaching passenger train, the Memphis Express, filled with 400 people. He yelled to his son, but the noise of the now clearing ship and the oncoming train made it impossible for the boy to hear him. All of a sudden John Griffith realized his horrible dilemma. If he took the time to rescue his son the train would crash killing all aboard, but if he closed the bridge, the boy would be crushed in the gears. John would sacrifice his son. He made the horrible decision, pulled the lever and closed the bridge. It is said, as the train went by John could see the faces of the passengers, some reading, some even waving, all of them oblivious to the sacrifice that had just been made for them.

You better watch out,
You better not cry,
You better not pout,
I'm telling you why,
Jesus Christ is coming to town!!!!                                                                           

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year and Happy Holidays!

Tamil language echoing in Canadian Parliament...

This is an edited version of a maiden speech of the first elected Indian-Canadian into the the Canadian Parliament. She spoke fluently in English, French and Tamil in this speech. Outside Tamil Nadu, this was the first time Tamil was heard in a Parliament sitting anywhere in the world!