Our laurels paved with sin?

Credit: orangjohor.com

Lest we forget that the building of civilisation is paved with a bloody trail of heartaches, violence, injustices and loaded with double crossings, mutiny and vices.

No matter how much we try to whitewash and sugarcoat our history, the fact remains. The victors and losers are equally culpable to take the blame for the mayhem that put us all in a quandary in the first place.

No one party can put their fingers to accuse the other of drawing first blood.

Winners always sanitise their ascent to power through mutual consent as though the conquered willingly embraced their intruders with open arms. People do many things to escape torture and fear of death to themselves or loved ones.

Towns did not flourish the God-sanctioned ways. Without fail, thuggery, vices condemned by religions, sex, intoxicants and threats helped. Skyscrapers did not sprout through teachings of the book but via earnings of the unholy kind.

Once conquest is complete, the victors are at liberty to pen their history as and how they want the future descendants to see. They can start mixing the solution for the eyewash.

These, one must remember, whenever one reads the developments of townships of Penang, Ipoh and Kuala Lumpur. Sure, Sutan Puasa must have had the foresight to see the confluence of Sg Klang and Sg Gombak as a potential site to prosper his tin mine business. But it was also Yap Ah Loy and his boys, with the money extorted from sojourners who crossed the Gombak river at the vicinity of Masjid Jamek, who rolled in cash to spur various businesses to take KL to its current metropolitan status.

Ipoh became the capital of the silver state with its tin business through the blessings of the secret societies, Ghee Hin and Hai San. The royalty did not oversee Ipoh's scaling greater heights from the sidelines but by taking sides cunningly. The British did not genuinely act as the peacemaker with the purest of intention but with a carrot, a stick and lots of backhand manoeuvres.

Thus are the cases too how religious influences must have spread. Rare are instances when the masses suddenly saw the wisdom of a particular religion and converted en masse. There must have surely been lots of goodies passed around, if not fear of the unknown.

Freedom and liberation?

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Everybody yearns to be free. They want to be liberated. They dream of eudaimonia. Sadly, their search for bliss is anything but fulfilling.

When we are young, we long for the time when we are adults and do not have to play to the whims and fancies of our parents or to bow to societal pressures. We thought we had to conform, as a payback measure to our parents to all the food, accommodation and care rendered in our teething years.

Then we get our keys at 21, and we thought that is it - our path to unleashing the caged animal within us. With education came conformity and decorum. With a life partner came mutual respect, reciprocity, tolerance, empathy till death do us apart. With the expansion of the family tree, came commitments, responsibility and leadership by example.

The elusive freedom and liberation just slither us by. We tell us that is just the circle of life. We still bear hope of release from the shackles in the horizon, and we straddle along.

Cornered at a wall, we ask questions, when will rescue come? At senescence, perhaps? We seek solace with people who possess wisdom, supposedly. They raise more queries with their elusive double-tongued talk. Maybe, they themselves are equally in the dark. They escape embarrassment via their non-committal double-headed didelphian speech.

We tell ourselves to suck it up, for the uncertainties were sins of past doing and that we still had time to rectify the next birth. We labour through. More trials and tribulation are hurled at us. We accept graciously. It is an appraisal to probe our conviction and faith. We falter, and our partner does. We take it in our stride. Oh freedom, oh liberty, where art thou?

Will they come when we are free from our worldly duties? Or is it when we separate from our earthly bodies? Perhaps only when we are free from the cruel cycle of rebirth?

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The entity called God!

Pujiyathithukkule Oru (Film: Valar Pirai, New Moon; 1962)

Singer: T.M. Soundarajan

The wisdom of Nature (Fibonacci numbering!)
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Tamil movies and songs have been a constant companion to the Tamil diaspora the world over to spread the age-old Vedantic and Puranic teachings about life, living and the divine forces that control our day to day activities. Their lyrics transcend religion but is secular in outlook and applies to all, irrespective of one's theological conviction. 

It can boldly be said that in no other songs written in any other languages anywhere in the world can anyone see so much of philosophy and wisdom extruding from its lyrics. 

This song, sung by the undisputable leading Tamil cinema playback singer, TMS, is a gem with pearls of wisdom sounding like angels' lullaby to one conversant in refined Tamil language. It explains, in simple terms, the concept of divinity to our nimble minds. Kudos to the premier lyricist and poet of the bygone era Kannadasan whose imagination has no boundaries. So far no other poet has come close to his ability in expressing multiplex concepts in simple words referring to examples in our daily lives.

My simpleton's translation of the song goes like this.

Within an emptiness, he rules a kingdom,
He stays unassuming,
One who understands him is God.
Within the fluid of a young coconut, inside the hard shell,
He stays like a coconut,
One who understands him is God.
When life is bitter, and he has to break his bond,
He stands by your side,
If you seek Him, that is God.
He left an egg within a chicken and a chicken within an egg,
He kept an offspring in a banana tree,
The name of the poor soul on Earth is God.

‘Tamil a beautiful language and I regret I don’t speak it,’ Modi.

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The missing human factor

Sully (2016)
Director: Clint Eastwood

This movie is quite relevant in this time and age. The democratisation of access to information and freedom to verbalise has reached such a height that everyone with half a brain is a warrior, at least in cyberspace. With the luxury of an obscene amount of information that their disposal assisted by the ease of artificial intelligence (which, knowledge-wise, coincidentally is as much as its inventor), turns every armchair critic into a seeker of the Truth and a self-appointed Robin Hood of the oppressed.

Heroes are born every day, but most of them remain unknown to us all. They appear out of thin air at the necessary time, do things beyond their expected capacity and disappear as quickly as the manifest. Sadly, many a time, their genuine intentions are questioned and put under the spotlight for scrutiny. Too much trust is placed on computer simulations. The human factors like empathy and compassion which had brought mankind through so many obstacles throughout their civilisation are swept under the carpet. We tend to think that artificial intelligence (AI) can replace Man. We forget that there is a reason why AI is labelled artificial in the first place.

This film is another of Eastwood's offerings to celebrate the deed of an ordinary man, based on a true story. Captain Sullenberger is an experienced pilot of American Airlines. Soon after lift-off from La Guardia airport of New York, both his aircraft engines failed after an encounter with a skein of geese. Despite orders from the control towers to redirect the plane to other airports, the good Captain made the calculated judgement to land the plane on the Hudson River instead. Even though all his 155 occupants escaped injury, the aircraft was a write-off. At the internal enquiry, he was questioned along the line of pilot error for the 'accident' for landing in the river rather than the airports as directed. Computer simulations concurred that damage to the vessel could have been averted if he had followed orders.

In this modern world where every modality of treatment, technology or device is assessed through comparative experiments and randomised double-blind studies, we forget the human element that is linked to the outcome of any endeavour. Lately, the scientific community has also realised that reproducibility is many findings in what is considered as hallmark studies strangely cannot be replicated! Experience plays a pivotal in decision making. Not all world-changing moments can be decided from cookbooks.

The early silver screen moghuls

Hollywoodism: Jews, Movies and the American Dream (Documentary; 1998)



 The main driving point of this documentary is that the American Dream that Hollywood is trying to propagate is no American invention. It is the message brought in by a few Jewish immigrants who escaped the pogroms in the shtetls (Jewish village) of Eastern Europe. They invented Hollywood and owned the six leading studios in Hollywood in the 1920s. The message that they try to disseminate are their own experiences; Harry Warner and his three brothers who brought sound to the motion pictures; Samuel Goldwyn @ Goldfische, the biggest of the independent producers;  Carl Laemmle, the founder of Universal Studios; Louis B. Mayer, founder of MGM; Adolph Zukor, founder of Paramount; and William Fox of 20th Century Fox. They all came from an area within a 500-mile radius area in Europe, between Poland, Hungary and Russia. They end up living in Los Angeles within a 15-mile vicinity.

After leaving the tyranny of persecution and discrimination against the sin of being born Jew, they left their homeland in the heart of Europe to seek newer pastures in the New World. Here, the ghost of their past re-surfaced. The American public was not welcoming of their Jewish newcomers. They were ostracised and were discriminated against in fields of banking, business and education. Growing up in the ghettos, these enterprising people persevered. They moved to West Coast with their risk-taking attitude to reinvent themselves. Within a generation, as the joke went, they progressed from “from Poland to polo in one generation,”!

Outwardly these re-invented American exude a nationalist persona. They promote allegiance to the American flag and to whatever the founding fathers stand for. Deep within themselves and their household, they stick steadfastly to their religious beliefs. In their movies, they portray images that behind in their villages. The suffering of the little people is seen as the pilgrims hunted by Native American bandits, a robust maternal character out to defend the family, the looting, the burning in the early Westerns are all reminiscence of their past lives. At the same time, the films try to create a new American society which is more democratic, where blacks, Jews and Gentiles are treated as equal. In real life then, that was far from reality.

The story of the golden era tried very hard to fit Jews in the American society. The process of assimilation had begun. Interracial marriages were depicted as acceptable norms. Came World War 2, these silver screen Moghuls paid their national service. They infused patriotic values in their stories to keep the fighting spirits high.  Washington was working hand-in-glove towards this end. Making movies about Russia, who were their allies, was acceptable. The first generation had become a power to reckon with and could walk shoulder to shoulder with the WASPs (wealthy White Anglo-Saxon Protestants), finally.


The dreams of these moguls fell apart soon after WW2. They were accused of thinly disguising communists values in their presentations. The witchhunt for un-American activities had begun through the House of Un-American Activities (HUAC). Some say that the outsiders (as the WASP always considered them to be) never really recovered from this blow. Actors and directors lost their jobs. Others lost the zest to fight.

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Conspiracy theorists' galore

Social Engineering, Agenda 21 & Transhumanism - The Secret Manipulation of Humanity

(2014, You-tube; David Icke)

Recently, I was introduced (not in person) to this erudite, fast-talking, fearless critic of modern civilisation. He can be said to be one of the doomsday prophets who predicts a very bleak future for mankind. He foresees a future where Man would not be a thinking individual but rather one whose reasoning power is numbed, thanks to the subversive actions of alien lifeforms and their representatives on Earth, the descendant of the Rothschilds and many other leading members of the society including the ones in the Fabian society. 

In this 2 and a half hour presentation, the speaker tirelessly covers many ranges of topics that he has been trying to do a summary of all the things that he has been trying to theorise all these years. First, he suggests that human beings many centuries ago had full use of their brain, living blissfully long lives in harmony. An alien race, the Archons, who landed here changed all that. These visitors infused their 'reptilian' DNA into Man. This breed of hybrids lives amongst us, mainly in positions of power, controlling us. The examples of these are the monarchs and Rothschilds. They rule by proxy; the leaders of the most powerful nations and members of elite groups. The Jews are not pictured as the bad guys.

Interbreeding between the God and human have been mentioned in many ancient and serpent symbolism are surprisingly represented in so many cultures, from Africa, Orient, India, Nordics to the Americas.

The alien race controls the human race via their centre located in the matrix of the Moon. Their mission is to numb our inner eye to dampen the ability to receive wisdom and inner realisation. They plan to depopulate the planet. Their many ways towards this end include the denudation of its forests, inclusion of toxins into our bodies via vaccines, fluorination of water, genetic modification of our foods and creation of unnecessary wars.

They are infiltrating our bodies via microchips, monitoring our every move through surveillance and facial recognition techniques as well making us zombies through our addiction to our handheld digital devices.

These reptilian visitors would not rest until they change our world akin to their anarchic 'Archon world'

There is hope yet for mankind. People have to realise these agendas. An awakening is needed to combat this annihilation. Anyway, cracks are appearing in their work. Many of their nefarious works are slowly being exposed. We need to transform our reality by changing our reality to truth and love, to be who we really are.

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

What is Love?

Echoes of Silence (1994)
Author: Chuah Guat Eng

It is long overdue, but it is never late than never. For many years, Malaysians have been writing novels in the English Language. Sadly, their following is few and far between. Through my association with a group of up and coming writers and with the power of social media, it has come to light on the treasure troves of writings of Malaysian writers in the lingua franca left by our colonial masters. I am not just referring to authors to the likes of Tan Twan Eng, Rani Manicka and K.S. Maniam. Do you know that periodically Malaysians do hit the headlines for the right reasons, literary awards being one?

Guat Eng is hailed in the local literary circle as a 'Godmother' of sorts. She has been an active participant in the writing scene and was in the advertising field. In this story, which is set around the early years of Malaya, though the World War Two, we are ushered into a fictional world of how Malaya used to be and a peculiar case of intergenerational murders!

The author talks about many things in this book; politics, race, nation building, interracial tensions, commercialisation and so forth. What interests me, however, is the part where she asks 'what is love'? Does it have to be expressed by physical contact and overt demonstration of passion? Is public display of affection a mere construct of the modern era or a Western influence? Many choose to show love not through words but by their actions. One can say so much by saying nothing at all whilst others best stay mum as they do more damage when they open their mouths!

http://www.viweb.mysite.com/vilit_guat-eng.htm

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