With a stroke of pen!

Credit: parkablogs.com

With the utterance of the long awaited sentence that the roaring spectators were waiting with bated breaths, he made it official. An ad hoc declaration of a public holiday was announced. He thought that the crowd loved him. This is one the reasons, despite all his daily wranglings with back-biters and double crossers, it all seems worthwhile. He thought he did a favour to the nation with his declaration. Little does he realise that he is actually doing a major disservice to the nation and many of its citizens in the country.

This 30-day month already has nine non-working days over the weekend and four preset national holidays. Hence, we are left with only seventeen working days; minus another day, there are sixteen. Working only almost half a month does not augur well for national productivity, especially in these trying times.

Imagine a patient waiting in much anticipation of his imminent scheduled surgery for his life threatening condition. All because of the unexpected holiday, his surgery had to be rescheduled, and his new prayer is to stay alive until the new date. His condition is not so 'life-threatening' to warrant emergency surgery. But by the time his condition turns grave (pardon the pun) to demand emergency intervention, it may prove too risky. What a catch 22 situation? As elective surgeries are only done on working days, cancellations create havoc to the list. Already patients are waiting for so long for treatment.

Then another scenario. Dates for court hearings are notoriously hard to come by. Even when the case gets court time, there would be thousands of reasons for a postponement. Due to this, disputes remain unresolved for a mighty long time. So, would the defendants pacify by telling themselves to wait a little bit longer? After all, they have waited so long.

Schools would have their examination schedules in disarray. The continuity of the complex timing to accommodate various students taking different tests would turn chaotic. Other quarters that would turn turbulent when they resume work are the banking sector and international trades.

Do the people in power bother, anyway? It is just populist sentiment and to keep the euphoria going until the next elections.

Standing in the eyes of world

Once We Were There 
Bernice Chauly (2017)

Yes, we were there. A time of hope and desire to tell the world that we have arrived. We wanted the world to know where Malaysia was located on a map. For the first time, they realised that there was not a void between the land of the pagodas, Thailand and the little chewing gum free city of Singapore. They have heard of the loud mouth premier who walked the talk. We had the Twin Towers and the Commonwealth Games to showcase. It was 1998. Then this happened.

A country which advertised itself as a moderate Islamic country with conservative views had people talking openly about nocturnal activities that happened behind closed doors. Unexpectedly, its Deputy PM was arrested like a common criminal and dragged to its kangaroo courts racoon-eyed. Suddenly it was alright for the leaders to discuss sex openly and for its dailies to describe in graphic details about homosexuality and sodomy.

Against the familiar landmarks around KL and a dark cloud that seem to shroud the nation, the author dissects deep into the psyche of two main characters. The first is a confused young lady who just drags herself along the tide as the wind brings her. The central premise of the narration is her handling of grief of losing her unborn child and later her toddler. Another important person in the narrative is a cross-dressing transvestite from Sabah who tries to survive in a seeming irreligious, chaotic, hostile and corrupt KL.

The book comes with an 'Only for Mature Readers' label for sale in Malaysia. Perhaps, the publishers thought that the story was too graphic for Malaysians. Or maybe, the portrayal of vice, drugs, corruption and crime was not in keeping with the squeaky clean image that the country seems to put up. Or maybe the image of Muslims living in apparently 'decadent' lives, indulging in alcohol and other intoxicants prove too much for religious authorities to stomach.

(P.S. Funny how time changes everything. If in 1998, the then PM and his deputy were arch enemies, now twenty years on, there are standing on the same platform screaming foul against the current system. Politics make strange bedfellows.)

The last bastion - race and religion!

Perception of Iran
Ch 8. Iran and Aryan Myth
David Motadel

Enemies of my enemies are friends!
Credit: historyisfascinating.com

Just before the world went to war for the second time, there was a concerted effort by the ruling power to unite people along the lines of race and history. Hitler and his henchmen were going all out to describe a pure superior Aryan race. They were quick to vilify Jews as the vermin of society with the help of propaganda films. Pretty soon, the nation was hoodwinked to pursue what became a national agenda, anti-Semitism and eventually Holocaust.

I was a little annoyed at the sight of a down-and-out politician who, without batting an eyelid ferociously claimed to the world that he is an unapologetic racist and is proud of it, to the thunderous applause of his supporters. What are they thinking or are they thinking at all? Do they not know history?

It is intriguing how the Aryan race and its origin had been manipulated by leaders to carry out their personal agendas.

The first known mention of the Aryan race is from the stone inscription by King Darius of Persia (522-486 BCE). He proclaimed to the great king of kings of Persia and of the Aryan race. In the Zoroastrian and Vedic context, an Aryan is a noble person. It is generally believed that the Aryans are the forefathers of modern Europeans, based on the Indo-European linguistic connections. There were similarities in grammatical constructions between Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Gothic, Celtic and old Persian languages.

Around the 1830s, at a time when people became interested in race studies and nationalism was a new construct, historians start talking about a perfect race of Nordic origin (the true Aryans) who started their conquest and brought ancient civilisation to the East.

Adolf Hitler talking to Grand Mufti of Jerusalem,
Haj Amin el Husseini Keystone / Getty Images

To build a national spirit of an ailing economy in post-WW1 German, Hitler brought people together with the concept of a Germanic master race. He toyed the idea of Aryan versus Non-Aryan, Aryan vs Semitic and Jewish vs No Jewish demarcation of society. The Nuremberg Law of 1935 outlawed marriage and extra-marital unions between Germans and Jews.

The Qajar Dynasty which ruled Persia also joined the bandwagon to promote the Aryan agenda. It changed the country's name to Iran which meant 'Land of Aryans'. They and the Ottoman Empire were not classified as Semitic but Aryans as they were to be the allies to the Axis.

Amongst the German circles, the Iranians, the Egyptians and the Turks were never considered to be equal to them. This Aryan discourse died a natural death after the fall of the Third Reich and remains a myth.

http://www.davidmotadel.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/MotadelAryans.pdf

Motadel, David (2014) Iran and the Aryan myth. In: Ansari, Ali, (ed.) Perceptions of Iran: history, myths and nationalism from medieval Persia to the Islamic Republic. International Library of Iranian studies (37). I.B.Tauris, London, UK, pp. 119-145. ISBN 9781848858305

Of Moral Courage and Ijtihad...

Allah, Liberty and Love (2011)
Author: Irshad Manji


Thanks to the religious authorities of Malaysia, this book received free publicity after the seizure of its Malay translation. This author was almost unknown when the English version was out in the Malaysian bookstores. The moment the Malay version hit the shelf, all hell broke loose. That, in turn, drew many a curious mind to delve into her work.

Manji is an unabashed Muslim lesbian who drew many a flak from professors of the religion. She is quite comfortable with her sexual orientation and has no qualms in practising her belief as she sees fit. The purists, however, are up in arms, literally with her as they believe that unconventional sexual practices are condemned to the highest order in the scriptures. As the sole purpose of conjugal relations is procreation, to them, same sex relationships are a no-no. Period. Based on this point alone, all her intelligent arguments are rejected wholesale.

Manji is one the preachers along the line of Mu'tazilas who teach people to use their thinking faculty, ijtihad, before accepting anything into their belief systems. She encourages people to build the moral courage to voice out what they believe in and not to be cowed into submission without an intellectual discourse. Most religions in the world are happy to have its congregations to be uniform in their thinking, practice and acceptance of a standard set of rules of what is right and what is not. They look at uniformity as unity, engaging in debates as divisive and that division is heresy. The need to conform had numbed the moral courage to stand for oneself.

She argues that freedom of religion is not a Western construct as King Cyrus of Persia is said to be the first monarch to allow religious freedom. None of the modern values that are hailed by the younger generations is Western in origin. All good values are interrelated just like how Gandhi got his idea of passive resistance from Henry Thoreau (an American poet philosopher who authored 'On the Duty of Civil Disobedience'), as for how Emerson was inspired by the Eastern wisdom and Martin Luther King Jr planned his fight against racial segregation from Gandhian ideology.

From her writings, I find her to very smart and knowledgeable of many areas of interests. Unfortunately, some of my Muslim friends utterly reject her rhetorics, saying that she is ignorant of her facts. Sadly, they accuse her of tarnishing the good name of the religion and copping out to its enemies.

She makes a distinction between culture and faith, a trait blurred in today's practice of the faith. A person does not have to follow a particular culture to profess a religion. Culture is human-made, not God-given but religion is a divine relationship between human and his Maker. We should also accept that no one is perfect. We all err in our day to day practice. Just as we are offended by others in our daily duties, we must take care not to hurt others. We are quick to blame others for our misfortunes without, for once, reflecting upon our shortcomings and faults.

As uniformity is an important aspect of the religion, just like the five pillars of the faith, I can understand why some of my friends are upset with her views. She is quite happy with her unorthodox method of praying and frequency of prayers in a day. She also highlights particular cherry picking of verses from the Holy Book without highlighting other contradictory ones. Then there are the 'Satanic Verses'!

An interesting verse I picked up from the book is by Martin Luther King Jr, "If a man had nothing to die for, then he is not fit to live." Funny how this verse can be picked by the morally and ethically vacuous jihadist to meet his course just as much as Manji uses it to stir moral courage to voice out their convictions! Everything is just perspective.

Poverty, a qualification for success?

Two things that happened recently made my mind go a-wandering, yet again.

Credit: SCMP

#1. A friend, whom I have not met for some time now, appeared in my life during the course of my career. About twelve years previously, he became a widower after his thirty-something wife succumbed to the menace of the crab. Left to care for three young girls, ranging from ages of eight to twelve, he took it upon himself to be the sole provider of maternal and paternal love, all lumped to one. With his meagre income and a lot of helping hand from his extended family members, he forewent female intimacy and sacrificed simple pleasures of life to make parenting his sole purpose of existence. Fast forward twelve years later, the girls have managed to attain academic excellence. Each of them is pursuing careers by their own merit in local institutions respectively in medicine. Law and accountancy. It seems like poverty and melancholy never dragged them but instead propelled them forwards. They whipped fate to change their future.

#2. Another friend whom I had not met for 30-over years manifested himself out of the blues. Starting life in the humblest of circumstances, he had beat destiny to be a globe-trotting consultant of sorts. After realising that there is no place like home, he returned home to Malaysia. 

After a guided tour of the house, he told my son that the study room was as big as his whole house, area wise, the home, he grew up as a child. He reiterated that the young generation does not have worry about the nitty gritty about surviving but instead can channel their energies towards reaching greater heights that were never dreamt by their elders. In their own ways, they had a head start in life.

"Litre of Light" - a simple initiative in the 

Philippines to bring brightness to the poor with

just a plastic bottle filled with water.

More than half a century ago, as one of my uncles was trying to unshackle himself from the clutches of poverty through education, he had to appeal to a school headmaster for his kind office for a placement in his school. Being born to a rolling stone father who rolled from town to town without collecting any moss, he had no certificates of proof of his educational achievements. My uncle tried to plead his case by invoking his debilitated state of his economic affairs. The learned man told him, "Boy, poverty is no qualification but, in you I see the drive to succeed. That, no piece of paper can be a substitute!"

Necessity is the mother of all inventions, they say. True to that adage, the simplest of inventions usually from the most deprived of the society. Look at the ingenious ways things are used beyond their intended inventions by people in economically deprived areas of the world. (See picture).

Conversely, when there is abundance in a society, instead of reaching for greater heights, the denizens are lulled into boredom, lack of innovations and paradoxically melancholia of intangible things that seem ludicrous to their deprived counterparts in the land of barren!

P.S. Then there is another lady friend who grew up so poor that her family bonding time would include copying textbooks. They could not afford to buy textbooks so they would borrow the books from their affluent friends and the whole family would burn the midnight to copy the book in verbatim. Now she looks at those times and appreciates her family better.

Welcome to the New World!

The Founder (2017)


Everyone has his passion for something. He has obvious ideas on how he wants to develop his baby to showcase to the world with so much pride and joy. He may be committed to his course and would sacrifice time, effort, sweat and sleep over it. But sadly passion alone is insufficient to take his brain-child to a higher level. Others may not share his madness and may fail to see all the excitement, and the endeavour would just fizzle out as swiftly as the revelation materialised.

It takes a kind of something to bring the idea to town. That is where the role of a ruthless loud mouth jack-of-all-trades makes an impact. The type who could promise the moon and the stars and could sell ice to the Inuits. Even though on the surface this kind of practice may be frowned upon, at the end of the day, these kind of ruthless people are the ones who rock the world. They make things happen. They move the world, not the Mr Nice Guys who worry about hurting another and living right to his words; keeping true to a gentleman's handshake and not bending the truth.

These mammoth movers, at the end of the day, after their giant feats for humanity are not only forgiven but are put on a pedestal and feted for the innovativeness and boldness for their unconventional wisdom.

This is the story of how the biggest franchise in the world came to be. Initially started by an unknown duo, the McDonald brothers, they were fighting an unwinnable battle to make patrons like their brand of fast food. Dogmatic on how they wanted their products to be sold, they fared poorly in repeated attempts at expanding their business.

In comes Ray Kroc, a down-and-out travelling salesman. He sees the potential in their business and single-handedly 'hoodwinks' them to include him as their partner. We see the seemingly ugly uncompassionate side of American capitalism which emphasises more on profit, appearances, statistics and megalomania rather than human values. This is the new world. Money is the new God. Compassion and being nice is so yesterday.

For the pleasure of your rods and cones!

Sometimes, you see a photograph which summons a whole storm of emotions inside. Often this is down to a perfectly chosen angle or a shot taken at just the right moment. Sometimes, it’s a shot of a stunning landscape or an awe-inspiring natural phenomenon. But in other cases, it can be something as simple as the chronicling of our everyday lives from all around the world.

Some very 'attentive' judges at the European Games in Baku, Azerbaijan

A woman quietly observes Johnny Depp’s arrival at a movie premiere

A herd of sheep pass through a gate

The heavens open. Copenhagen, Denmark

My neighbour Totoro

This guy dreamed of having two sons. His dreams came true — eventually!

Feeding the ’birds’ in Ecuador

A tornado in Genoa, Italy

So much emotion in just one photo!

Life is good

A cycling team from Rwanda sees snow for the first time

With mom

The photographer fell over when he was taking the shot and ended up with this masterpiece of a wedding photo

A cat: The view from below

Swans swim through the street after floods, UK

A walrus becomes embarrassed when it’s given a cake made of fish for its birthday, Norway

I really want to know what they’re looking at...

A typical rainy day in Chicago, USA

Police dogs in China queue for lunch

In the African wilderness

Marilyn hasn’t aged well...