Justice must appear to be done!

Jolly BA, LLB 2 (2017)

Is it not scary or what? Here I am heading to Lucknow for a literary festival, and on the plane, I randomly chose a film to watch. And the movie I decide to view is set in Lucknow, of all the places in India. Is it mere coincidence? Is it synchronicity, the higher powers over me having a quiet chuckle at my expense? Is it trying to show who the boss is? Or am I having a delusion of grandiose that the world revolves around me and for me? Daunting or am I just creating an issue out of nothing? A mountain out of a molehill or cherry-picking what suits me and cry "Boo!"

 This Akshay Kumar movie, which is the second offering after the excellent run of Jolly LLB. Sadly, the sequel does not live up to the standards of the former. It fails to impress in the humour department, and the story is pathetically predictable.

Jolly is a junior lawyer in an established law firm. He has not shown his mettle and is often looked down upon by his boss, partly because of his humble beginnings. To prove his worth, he sets up his own law firm by deceiving a client of her money. The client, a pregnant mother, tries desperately to clear her deceased husband's name who was accused of terrorism. She screams of police brutality, but nobody seems interested. Upon realising that she has been cheated, she commits suicide. The remorseful Jolly promise to continue the widow's work.

The law remains the last bastion upon which the common man can seek justice. Even though the truth is multifaceted and is dependent on perspectives, the ordinary Joe should have an avenue to air his grievances and hope for sympathy, remuneration and dignity. Increasingly the legal system appears not to seek justice but just mete punishment. The judicial system fails to portray independence and merely act as a rubber stamp of the ruling political master. Altruism and morality remain only in rhetorics, as a smokescreen to convince, not in action. It exudes a corrupt image that is easily bought over by power, money and all the ugly primal, animalistic instincts. Paradoxically this was the very reason why our forefathers tried to establish a system where the average person, deficient in own ways, also gets a place in the sun to carry the duties of his existence. The autonomy of the judiciary appears only on paper. 

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Adversities part of life!

Partition Museum, Amritsar.

Every day we hear of people justifying the violence that is accelerating around the world to injustices of those in power against the powerless. The perpetrators rally behind their leaders who hail their people as victims of an unjust system. They are ready with conspiratory theories to justify resistance to the cruel world. 

Unfortunately, life is never easy. Demands snowballs when one party's need is fulfilled. Pretty soon, splinter factions will arise, and the requests never end. Even people who had been uprooted from the hostilities still insists on returning to their past glory days, which by all accounts, may be a figment of their imagination.

Examples of these are aplenty around us.

My recent meetings with close Sindhi friends whose past generation was the victim of such an atrocity showed me how they handled the whole catastrophe. I did not think much of what they were saying then, but my recent visit to the recently opened (August 2017) Partition Museum put everything in perspective.

At the dawn of 15th August 1947, India and Pakistan saw a mass exodus of brothers separated only by religion. The scale of migration was of gargantuan proportions, only seen in war times. 4.7 million Pakistani Hindus migrated to India. Their send-off was anything but courteous, and their welcome was no red carpet. The Hindus were mainly from Sindh district which had been annexed to Pakistan with a single stroke of the pen of a senior lawyer, Cyril Radcliffe, from the UK. The idea of the British was to get the hell out of their colonies as they had become quite a thorn in their flesh. Radcliffe fitted the bill quite neatly as he had never been to India and thus was ignorant of the intricacies, local politics and bondages that the region shared. In record time, seven weeks, he slashed off cultures, bonds and relationships built over centuries. Realising the hardship that he was going to create, Radcliffe left India without even collecting the fees due to him.

Neighbours, who had had cordial brotherly relationships, suddenly transformed into machete-wielding demons who loot and went on killing and raping sprees. Overnight, people lost everything - money, family, homes and dignity. Landowners and merchants became refugees, living on handouts and kindness of others with whatever little commonality and compassion they had. From diwans and zamindars, they became paupers.

The sad tale ended when the community took stock of their situation and started life afresh in other regions. Their diaspora can be seen spread the world over - India, Malaysia, Singapore, UK, US, Europe and the remotest corners of the world.

In every place they lay their hat, they called it home. And every land they sojourned, they had been resourceful and successful. They did not live on the pity of others, brandishing weapons and crying for revenge and justice.

https://www.dawn.com/news/1190552

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I can see you!

Fastfood, Amritsar style ©JMatthew

There I was clinging on to the side-rail and my dear life as the auto-rickshaw needled its way through the tiny alleys squeezing through the passage with surgical precision that only a neurosurgeon can outdo. Stunts that these fellows can do, even Evel Knievel would fail. They knew their vehicles like the back of their hands as if their machines were extra appendages of their bodies. They do not need a reverse camera to judge the distance to the car behind them. Neither required is the irritating tones of sensors for their work. They just need their car horns. Have honk will travel! They swerve past pedestrians leaving a trail of dust and smoke without a care in the world. The blaring horns seem not a last-minute desperate measure to alert but instead gave rhythm to the rickety vehicle and noisy engines like Illayaraja's percussions accompanying his masterpiece. The automan's joy and pride, his horn, gave warnings of different tones, from a light whisper to a yell to an almost angina-inducing 'foul-languaged' curse that 
would chase animals and even people into hiding. Welcome to India. 

This was an entirely new experience for me. Guarded against the vultures from the land of the survival of the fittest, I had it cushy. I had been taught and was expected by the fellow users of the road, to uphold certain decorum. I come from a land where rules were made to be followed, not flaunted.

Here, red on the traffic lights are mere ornaments like the ones that dorn the Christmas trees. Traffic signs are just accessories. Traffic rules are Aesop's fables, only for children. Seat belts, safety helmets, overloading... what are they?

Despite all the chaos, the continuous trail of movement of people with the heated brake pads, nobody seems incensed. Nobody shows any emotion. Like an emotionless poker player, motorists just overcome their obstacles with monastery students' patience. Nobody has time to show their displeasure, either with their middle finger or steering locks. Perhaps, they realise that the mascot-idol on their dashboard is watching their every move.

There is no bottleneck, just a slight hiccup in the system. There is always a little space for an oversized vehicle to squeeze through in these narrow lanes. The pavements are still there for the autos to do a side wheelie!

I see you!

"I was here first!' screamed the tree echoed by other tree
huggers! ©FG

             There is place for everyone on God's Earth ©FG

No fake news!

Credit: pbs.org

We were told in our history lessons that the American Civil War stemmed from the noble intentions of the Union States to end slavery in North America whilst the Southern States opposed as they were of an agrarian society of which cotton and sugar plantations were labour intensive. Well, that is just part of the story. As in any back story to an event in history, there is always money involved.

The Southern States traded cotton to Europe and the rest of the world. They got their other supplies from Europe and the Northern States. The South found imports from Europe to be cheaper than from their counterparts in the North. To protect the local industries, the Union, mostly comprising the Northern states, started imposing a levy on the European imports.

This incurred the wrath of Europe who stopped purchasing American cotton. The South felt bullied. Resentment was brewing.

Meanwhile, in the European continent, the French, the British and the Germans were apprehensive of a stable booming economy in the other side of the Atlantic. After defeating the Spanish and sending their armada packing from the Caribbean, the Americans decreed the Monroe doctrine which dictated that any attack on Northern or Southern American continent by a foreign force would be considered as an invasion on American soil and the Americans would retaliate. This kept their enemies at bay. The enemies thought a divided America would make their task easier. Hence, the wounded foreign powers had all the reasons to instigate hatred between brothers.

In fact, during the Civil War, the French conquered Mexico to put up a puppet leader in Maximilian, who had a cordial relationship with the Confederate States. At that time too, the British tried to checkmate the Americans by placing troops in Canada. Russia, who had a bone to pick with the French-German-British alliance for attempting to break some Balkan and Scandinavian states away from the Tsar kingdom, placed their battleships in America to threaten the potential invaders.

Lincoln, who was no sympathiser of the African slaves' course and had superiority feeling of the white race over the coloured, just wanted to stop slavery and send them all back to Africa. The problem is that the Southerners had invested a lot of money into acquiring slaves. Losing them immediately would be disastrous. The slave owners actually planned to make slaves freemen over time. Making them free would mean that they were paid for their work. Slaves were getting lazy already.

Credit: mycivilwar.com

The threat of the Southern states to leave the Union was the reason the Americans went to war.

War was good for business, especially for the bankers. Financiers from the European continent moved in to support both sides of the Marcus-Dixon line. From then, money dictated the progression of the course of the war. Many new monetary policies were devised to finance the war. Fiat money was printed and legitimised by legislation. National banking system and war bonds were sold to fund the war. The losing party is the general public. They lost their life earnings. Northerners who demonstrated and opposed the war were shot and killed by the Union soldiers. Imagine, shooting your own people to save slaves!

Lincoln made enemies on both sides of the divide; the Southerners for losing, the Northerner businessmen who wanted to make a more significant killing from the South. It seems that John Wilkes Booth was a member of an organisation that wanted to take over America to establish a military government!

The Elixir of Life?

The Shape of Water (2017)

Okay, this movie is a sci-fi romance flick which won an Oscar. It is modelled after 'The Beauty and The Beast', about a young cleaner-lady falling in love with mysterious scaly water-creature in captivity, initially captured in South America. There seems to exist more mystery behind the story of this mute orphan who lost her vocal powers probably after a neck injury. She spends a long time in her bath and gets an attraction to this creature. She spots the reptilian being in the laboratory, as he is being tortured.

The story goes predictably as she and her band of misfits try to kidnap him from the science facility. They discover each other and live happily ever after. Of course, it is made more interesting than that. The setting is 1960 Baltimore, in a government lab. It boasts of colourful characters, all with flaws in them. The mute protagonist, her colleague who has been through multiple poor judgements in relationships, a talented but unsuccessful painter as her neighbour and the nasty head of the facility who is a family man, but a dangerous boss, who would stop at nothing to prevent his prized scientific specimen from going missing. Amidst all this, there is a scientist who empathises with the sea creature but is also a Russian agent.

What fascinated me more was the title of the film. The 'Shape of Water' reminded me most of the character of water of having the memory of the things that they have come in contact. Scientists recently discovered that water droplets from different sources show different appearances when they are visualised under dark ground microscopy. When the same water is exposed to other objects, (e.g. a flower) the water clusters of molecules change appearance. Again when another flower is dropped in it, yet another shape takes form. This is labelled as the 'face of water'.

Yogis and religious practitioners over the years have been telling about the unique qualities of water, the elixir of life. It is the only substance in all three states on Earth in its natural - solid, liquid and gaseous forms. It is also the most potent solvent in the world, comprising more than 2/3 of our bodies and the world we live in. Interestingly, it has one of the highest surface tensions that allows creepy crawlies to walk on it and to enable water to be pumped up by capillary action high up xylem of a tree of metres high.

Water which is stagnant gives different vibes as compared to a fast-moving one. This must have been the basis for storage of water in particular earthen or metallic containers before consumption. Water chanted with verses of specific frequencies has medicinal and healing qualities. No wonder water plays such a vital role in cultural and religious rituals.

Water memory is the purported ability of water to retain a memory of substances previously dissolved in it even after an arbitrary number of serial dilutions. ... Water memory defies conventional scientific understanding of physical chemistry knowledge and is not accepted by the scientific community. [Wiki]

https://truththeory.com/2017/01/14/german-scientists-discover-water-memory/ 

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Is this what we want?

The Podcast

Something which must have been thought of as a novel intention has not materialised to such. The idea of steering the genesis of a country from scratch in the mould of the Islamic Constitution must have excited many who were hellbent on enforcing God's laws and justice on Earth.  Sadly, 70 years after its establishment, what we see is chaos, killings, vengeance, violence and lawlessness. The head does not know what the team is doing. The tail is working autonomously at a spinal level, and the puppet of the administration is controlled by invisible but invincible strings of which nobody has any clue.

Recently, BBC World Service completed a 10-part weekly podcast series which was an investigative journalism piece by a senior correspondence, Owen Bennett Jones, on the assassination of Pakistani's 2007 Prime Minister in waiting, Benazir Bhutto. Jones had had many intimate one-on-one interviews with Bhutto and her family before and after the murder.

With a fine tooth comb, he meticulously examined interviews, footages surrounding the assassination and the multiple prior failed attempts, telephone interception recordings and transcripts of dialogues as well as reports from intelligence officers. There was even a United Nations-led investigation surrounding Bhutto's slaying. Despite the thorough scrutiny, the whole probe proved to be an exercise in futility. Conflicting hearsays from ISI team, the ruling junta and the informants just gave a tailspin to the entire imbroglio. Despite clear-cut evidence of the suspected person responsible for the killing, nobody dares to pursue the matter, fearing their own physical or political survival. People who are allegedly dead turn up alive over the border in just a couple of days. And many individuals involved in this high profile case also turned up in body bags. Each arm of the administration seems to be clueless or apathetic about the actions of the other. Perhaps, each of them is suspicious of other. The police give a picture of either incompetence or helplessness.

At the end of the day, the people responsible for her death in an apparent suicide bombing by a fifteen-year-old madrasah student is still at large. The suspects include the former President Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani Army, the ISI (Inter-Service Intelligence), Pakistani Taliban, Al Queda and even Benazir Bhutto's husband, Azil Zardari, for he later became the party leader!

The rule of law in this country is best described as fractured. It is a lesson for countries around the region. We, in Malaysia, should be apprehensive about the movement of many of their citizens seamlessly into and out of our country at will. Furthermore, many of our girls are charmed by their close to Bollywood charm and fall flat at their pheromonic appeal. Our country will be their new base for their nefarious activities and to spread their pervasive ideologies.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-42409374

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No sacrifice?

The partially completed Kek Lok Si
temple in Penang in 1905. It holds
the dark secret of a melancholic
monk with self-inflicted wounds
after his tireless endeavours to
rebuild the temple was sabotaged
and bad-mouthed. In its annals
too, woven are the intriguing
narrations of the selfless services
of a young Dr Wu Lien Teh
who nursed him back to health.

What is a sacrifice? Is it an overused word with its meaning taken for granted? A suicide bomber is making a sacrifice when he decides to blow himself to smithereens to make a statement or to martyr himself for the good of those who share the same belief as him? Is he not being selfish as his own remunerations that await him in the afterlife? Is he being selfless or selfish when he plunges the red button?

Is the symbolism of death on The Cross the ultimate sacrifice for the human race? Is it true altruism when able bodies with the spring of youth ahead of them give up their earthly pleasures to serve God and the downtrodden? Can volunteers who endanger themselves in the vein of Father Damien to care for lepers or Franciscan friars signify the pinnacle of human renouncement?

Are politicians or pop stars who clamour to be afront flashes of pixels to be seen giving and caring, spread more goodness to the world? 

Is it sacrifice when a hungry mother willingly serves the only remaining bowl of broth to her offspring knowing well that she can withstand hunger pangs better than her young? Or is the random kindness that one extends to a stranger, but then there is no sacrifice, is there? Should it be just second nature to help?

Should we just send another soul as a sacrificial lamb and claim that we had forgone something close to gain points? Some insist that living a simple life, forfeiting simple pleasures of life beget special considerations for Judgement Day.

Lt. Col. Arnaud Jean-Georges Beltrame (18 April 1973 – 24 March 2018)
killed by ISIS terrorists after having exchanged himself for a hostage. [Wiki]

Or is it in a selfless act of devoting one's life to an obviously bleak situation, knowing pretty well the outcome just because it is your job?

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