Neuronic Flashes

Retire in the Kampung?

2009-12-05T21:03:00.000-08:00

During the recent trip back to my hometown for Hari Raya Haji, I met an old friend from the kampung who is a petty trader in the town. Almost without exception, whenever I go to town to get cheap fruits and vegetables for the family before returning to Kajang, I would stop by his stall to buy something or just to say hello. This time I noticed he was no longer accompanied by his second wife. He told me she had died of diabetes and that he was now back with his first wife. As usually we talked about our family and life at our respective places. He asked me whether I had any plan to come back and live in the kampung once I retire. This is one of the frequently asked questions I get whenever I meet old friends from the kampung. I think I’d ask the same question if I were in their position. It shows how much attachment we are expected to have to our kampung although we’ve been away for more than half of our life. The expectation is I’d agree with the idea and thus prove that I still remember my roots. It is a simple question but answering it is never easy.

I am grateful that I was brought up in the kampung environment and able to appreciate the difficult life there. But to be honest, no matter how much nostalgia I have of the old days, I prefer the life I have now. I would not be able to feed myself if I was put back in the kampung again. I never learnt how to tap rubber trees although my parents made a living out of that. I used to help them collect latex from plastic cups, mix acid cocktail to solidify it and use the rollers to compress it into corrugated thin rubber sheets before drying. But my fingers were not delicate enough to cut grooves into the trees for the latex to flow. I would not know how to work the paddy fields on my own although as a boy I spent a lot of my time helping my folks to plant it. I used to cut grass for the family herd of cows but my fingers are now more comfortable punching alphabets on the computer. I have lost the limited skills I had of doing kampung work. It will be a struggle for me to have to relearn these skills again at 55 when I reach my retirement age.

I think kampung life is no longer the kind of quiet and peaceful life it was 20 years ago. Crime, which was almost unheard of back then, is now common because of the spread of drugs. It was OK to leave the door unlocked back then, but it would be foolish to do the same now. It is now not uncommon to hear of horrific news from a remote village of a drug addict son killing his parents because they could not give him the 5 ringgit to buy his next fix. And almost every village now has young men dying of HIV and AIDS. The drugs business, just like any other business facing little prospect of growth in the cities, has made great ‘progress’ in the last 20 years in penetrating the rural market where there are so many jobless young men able and willing to be potential recruits. With this menace, I wonder how much promise kampung life can bring to my young kids who will grow up to be teenagers and young adults when I retire.

Whenever I am back in the kampung I try to attend the congressional prayer at the village surau. It is so close to the house that I really cannot miss the azan. So there is really no excuse not to go whenever I hear the azan! Alas, there is no azan for every prayer time. From my brief observation, the only regulars are the imam and the bilal. It is the only surau in the village of hundreds of people but the rest of the villagers are nowhere in sight. The local surau is an excellent place to gauge where future generations will take Islam. I do not see any improvement in people on the ground living Islamic life although the leaders of the state have been preaching Islam for two decades. By contrast, based on the occasional visit to my local surau in Kajang, it is more lively with religious learning programmes and very well attended. Again I wonder what future would kampung life bring to my kids if I were to move back to the kampung after retirement. I guess the answer here is quite obvious.

This coming year, three of my four kids will be going to school here in Kajang. Except for the first one, all three were born here. All their life they have been here. Their schools, playground, favourite shopping complexes, fast food outlets, library and circle of friends are all here. Except for the occasional school holiday trips to spend a few days in the kampung, they lead a city life. I cannot think that one day they’d want to ‘go back’ to the kampung and spend their life there. For them, their home is here about 30 km from KL City Centre. And it would be odd if you leave your children in the city to go live in your kampung when you’re old and need their support the most. So the way I see it the option of retiring into quiet life in the kampung is probably not for me.

I think life in the city is more competitive and it pushes our children to be their best. During weekdays, most of their time is fully occupied with school, religious school and tuition. This leaves them with less time to indulge in negative activities. Although I am not really fond of rote learning, it is much better than loitering around, doing drugs or watching endless programmes on satellite TV.

It is said Kelantanese have strong feelings and attachment with their home state. They refer to non-Kelantanese as ‘orang luar’ and as far as I know no other state burn the stadium when they lose a football match! We speak unique budu dialect which other people make fun of. But I know many young men from other states would try hard to master Kelantan-speak because they would not want to miss the chance of wooing pretty Kelantanese girls! So as a Kelantanese, I would not want to be accused as a traitor. I love my home village but some of the people that I knew, the friends that I played with or my own family have either died, migrated to the city or moved and built their own family in other parts of the country. I will not forget my roots in the kampung whenever I go back and visit my parents’ graves. But I am not sure if I would want to live there after retirement, or be buried there myself when my time in this world is over.

6-dec-2009

Letter to 69ers

2009-09-18T09:17:00.000-07:00

The writer turned 40 recently. This letter is specially dedicated to those born in 1969.

Reflections on what it means to turn 40…

Dear Sixty-niners,

Good morning! I hope this letter reaches you while you’re in good health. Sometime this year each of us should hopefully be able to celebrate the fortieth year of our birth. I reached that milestone sometime last week! It’s a significant milestone indeed. We have spent more than half of our life’s expectancy. It is time we took stock of our life so far and started charting how we would like to steer it into the future. For the optimist among us, life begins at 40. For the less so, life begins to go downhill.

Nineteen sixty-nine was a memorable year. Man was finally able to escape the Earth’s gravity and set foot on the Moon. I was still in my mother’s womb when Neil Armstrong made that giant leap for mankind. In the Malaysian context, it was the year which would be remembered as a single date, the 13th of May. The year in which racial differences exploded into bloody riot culminating in the New Economic Policy, the policy that gave so much for the average Malay like me, but also caused so much resentment among our fellow non-Bumi Malaysians.

From now on we will be expected to lead. Prophet Muhammad began to lead his people to Islam at this age. This is the age when you stop being called a youth and finally embraced into the mainstream. By now we should be prepared to be called “Pak Cik” by more and more people. If you still keep your hair, don’t fret too much if more of it turns grey. It’s the colour of wisdom, experience and durability.

They say most major discoveries in science and mathematics are made by men in their 20s and 30s. So for those of us who aspire to crack Einstein’s unfulfilled dream of Theory of Everything, well…perhaps we can just let the youngsters carry the torch. But on the other hand, being 40 doesn’t mean we should be pushed aside and labeled as those who have passed their sell-by dates. Perhaps we lack the speed and risk-taking spirit of youth but we can make it up with patience, wisdom and lessons from our own experiences.

Most of us have attained stability in our income and family life. For those men who feel bored with this stability and would like to handle more challenges, go ahead, rock the boat and get another wife! But before you take that big decision bear this in mind. Scientific study shows that man’s testosterone level drops by 1 to 2 per cent per year from the age of 40. So to those who say “Life begins at 40” and start thinking about taking another wife, I’d say they’re in a state of denial. They’re denying the fact that they’re having a severe MLC – mid-life crisis. They think that because their financial status is now more stable, therefore their sexual status must also be at the top of the world. But in actuality they’re just trying to hide their waning sexual prowess.

No doubt many would like to turn back the clock and be a twenty-something again. So much is placed on youthfulness these days. The media is entirely to blame for this. Look around you. Except for pension scheme for senior citizens and new diapers design for people with bladder control problems, all advertisements picture young, smiling faces full of energy and testosterones. Makes you wish you could be 25 forever. But time keeps its forward march and our body ages along with it.

Dear Friends,

Let’s thank God for taking us this far. And let me again remind you that we have used up more than half of our life! So friends, let’s say good bye to youth and welcome the age of wisdom. We have been taught well by our elders and now is the time to pass on the knowledge and experience to the youngsters. So, on this auspicious morning, let’s step out of the house on the right foot, take a deep breath, look straight ahead and enjoy the journey into the next 40 years of our life! May God bless all of us.

Ameen.

Outbreak of a new virus B1N1

2009-08-29T08:01:00.000-07:00

There is widespread concern among health professionals that the dreaded Influenza A(H1N1) virus has evolved into a more virulent strain which has yet to be given official name. Health experts are still arguing what to call the virus but many believe it should be identified as B1N1, the B signalling a more widespread and vicious form of the swine flu virus A(H1N1) while the absence of brackets in the name indicating a more free and easily transmittable form of the virus. The virus is not particularly deadly as it rarely causes physical pain to both carriers and those infected. Instead, it can bring tremendous psychological suffering as it can drain out sufferer’s financial resources. According to Dr John Swine, a virologist who leads a team of researchers at Imperial College London, the virus has been in existence since the first human walked the Earth. Strangely though it has only infected the male of the human species.

A study published in the journal Nature by epidemiologists at the John Hopkins Medical School concludes that the virus starts to infect men in their 20s and more prevalent among men in the developing world. Muslim men are particularly vulnerable with possibility of infection reaching up to four different strains – B1N1-1, B1N1-2, B1N1-3 and B1N1-4. It is estimated that only a small percentage of Muslim men were infected with B1N1-2, B1N1-3 and B1N1-4 although as much as 95% of them will get B1N1-1 at some point in their lifetime. Studies are still on-going to find out why men of Islamic faith have not become immune to the infection. In a recent case in the state of Selangor in Malaysia, a popular Islamic religious preacher and TV presenter who had B1N1-1 for more than a decade is reported to have managed to free himself from the virus and just last weekend confirmed widely circulated rumours that he had now contracted B1N1-2. The 40 year old ex-rock singer is said to have contracted the virus from a 30-year old female singer who’s famous with her Arabic songs. He seems to show all the symptoms of the B1N1-2 infection – unexplained burst of energy and great psychological boost in the first six months but gradually become fatigue and longing for infection with the next strain B1N1-3 after a few years. So far, he seem to be at the top of the world and visibly happy carrying the 30-year old virus B1N1-2.

Various investigations conducted in US and Europe point to the conclusion that Western men have acquired resistance to B1N1 with less than 50% of them infected by the virus and even when they do, they become free of it after one to two years of suffering various psychological stress brought by B1N1. As is normally the case for virus of this nature, experts are looking at certain groups which have shown strong resistance to the bug. The Imperial College team is still investigating why a small group of highly religious men –priests, monks and the like – have zero infection rate to the virus. It is believed that their strong religious conviction and discipline is key to understanding this strange medical phenomenon.

Authorities at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, USA have been struggling to get reliable data to develop a vaccine for the virus as those infected are susceptible to lying and unstable mental conditions. Men in their 50s and 60s have been known to resort to the sex-enhancing drug Viagra to boost their performance to fight the virus B1N1-1. They have been known to need more dose of Viagra once infected with more complex strains of the virus -B1N1-2, B1N1-3 and B1N1-4. Pfizer, the drug company which holds the patent to produce Viagra, has been reaping up huge profits with the spread of the highly infectious bug. When asked to comment on the sudden increase in the sale of Viagra, Pfizer spokewoman declines to comment citing possible interference with on-going lawsuit against the company.

Thoughts about Work: Freedom and Innovation

2009-08-15T21:38:00.001-07:00

By this time next week, I will be left on my own in the office. My senior colleague who has been acting as Team Lead for the past 8 months will be moving on to a new assignment. I will be reporting to my American boss, who is based in India and he in turn reports to his boss in the Netherlands. When I joined this company two and a half years ago, I worked under a British boss. He left late last year and his post was filled by my current boss, an Indian expatriate whose 4-year assignment here in Malaysia is up and is now moving on to Europe. Such is the dynamics of working in a multinational company. If you wish, you can travel the world, go to different places for an assignment, see different cultures, meet various people and have a healthy bank account along the way too.

Before I joined this company, I worked for a GLC and a consultancy. In my previous jobs, I have always worked with a Malaysian boss. What I find interesting about working with expatriate bosses is that not only do they allow you to express your ideas, but they also expect you to challenge their ideas or decisions. During discussions, when he comes up with an idea he’d urge me to challenge him. Being Malaysian, we tend to respect and not argue too much with our boss. Bosses are expected to be right and subordinates are to take their words as gospel truth. These expatriates must have been quite surprised to find how little we Malaysians argue with our boss even when we’re encouraged to do so. In fact, having been brought up in a culture which puts so much respect to our elders and people with authority, it’s very difficult to disagree with your own boss. There is hesitation to say directly to them that they could be wrong even when it is perfectly all right to say it without fear of retribution. This is one cultural clash that I find interesting and perhaps something that we can learn from.

I remember in my previous company, when the VP spoke nobody dared to interrupt even though he’d been babbling for 3 hours non-stop. In fact nobody seemed to be able to lift their full bladder from the chair and visit the toilet in those 3 hours! And nobody touched the food or drinks before the old man did it. How can you expect the subordinates to argue with the boss when they would not even dare to touch the curry puffs which are yearning to be eaten in front of them! In contrast, in this European-based multinational, I was shocked to find that an expatriate, who was just a mere senior engineer could raise his voice and express his disagreement on the policy taken by the company’s president in a meeting seating just beside the VP. I know I sound a bit exaggerating but I just picked two extreme examples from my own work experience.

I think the freedom to express their opinion is one of the reasons why Western companies are successful in innovation. It encourages cross-fertilisation of innovative ideas and creative solutions. This is what our education system should inculcate in our young generation’s mind. We should start from the time when our children are still at pre-school. They should be encouraged to express themselves and build up confidence in presenting their ideas and arguing their case. Based on my own experience and casual observation, I find this confidence lacking in our students, employees and people in general. We are victims of our own authoritarian culture. The emphasis on respect for authority might have worked well for agrarian society in which common people relied heavily on their rich and powerful landlords to provide for basic needs. But we have gone past that stage. In today’s modern world, the success of a country depends very much on how innovative and resilient it can be in the competition for foreign investment and the best talents. Our country’s leaders always espouse “Asian Values” where respect for people with authority is held as the glue that keeps our country’s stability. Critics say that this is just an excuse for authoritarian leaders to keep their restless people under control. Perhaps there is truth in both arguments. But as far as innovation in a company is concerned, I’m of the opinion that freedom is a necessary ingredient for innovation to prosper.

Remembering my mother

2009-05-16T07:43:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow is Mother’s Day. I never knew there was such a day when my mother was still alive. And even if I knew, I would not have cared much anyway. It’s just another modern day invention to allocate one day to remember the person who gave birth to us while for the other 364 days of the year she is treated like she never existed. Then again once in a while, thoughts of mother do come to our mind as we deal with trials and tribulations of bringing up our own children.

My mother’s time in this world ended on the same day as for the last Agong who died on the throne. While the whole Malaysia was mourning the loss of a people’s King, I was grieving the passing of my own mother. While all radio and television stations stopped entertainment programmes and played Quranic recital instead, our family also had tahlil to pray for her soul to be placed with those who are blessed. That sad day 8 years ago, is long gone. And my own family has grown so much since then.

With all the comfort and convenience that we live in today, it’s difficult to imagine how hard it was for a single mother to bring up 4 young children but that’s what my mother did. I was too young to remember, but I was told she separated from my father when I was only five and my younger sister was two. We were brought up by her own mother (my maternal grandmother) as she had to go away from the village to tap rubber trees on the hills of interior Kelantan, and later work in sawmills in the interior of Pahang. I can’t remember exactly how often she came back to visit us and grandmother, but I remember we were more attached to grandmother because of the separation.

While living in Pahang around the late 70s, she married a man who later became the father of my younger brothers. By the time I was sent to sekolah asrama in 1982 she gave birth to my youngest brother. Her husband, my stepfather, ran off months after my brother was born and never came to visit us again. Life had always been difficult for her, and it took a turn for the worse. That was the time my mother, a divorced 33 year old woman, penniless and jobless with four young kids, without a man in her life had to go through a difficult journey into the future on her own. From then on she never left home to work in foreign places. I guess she felt she had left me and my sister for too long and that from then on she wanted to bring up her children by herself. She never remarried again until her death 19 years later.

When I was learning to be an adult at the sekolah asrama, I understood early on why mother could not visit me that often. The journey from home to the asrama must have been difficult for her, perhaps even more so when she thought about not being able to leave as much money as she wanted to if she visited. Instead, I was the one making my trip home once in a while to see mother and my younger siblings.

I remember to this day, one weekend I went back to the kampung. Moments before I left home to take my bus trip back to the asrama, my mother went into the bedroom and closed the door. Later, not knowing what she was doing in there, I opened the bedroom door and found her counting coins on the house wooden floor careful not to let the coins slip through the gap between the planks. I saw the bamboo piggy-bank which she had been saving the coins in was broken in halves. She said to me she had to break it to get her only savings as she did not have any money left. All she had was the coins. She asked if I would not mind carrying the heavy coins around and told me to be careful not to drop them. I looked at her and held back my tears. I did not want to show her my sadness and I suspect she was concealing hers too. I can’t remember what I spent the money on but that small incident is still etched on my memory to this day. It was one of the defining moments in my growing up teenage life. One among many which helped to teach me early on the importance of being prudent with money. To be honest even now while writing this, I have to take a breather, hold back my tears and pretend to be strong just in case my kids come barging into my study room without knocking.

I did not have the courage to tell my mother all this when she was still alive. I wish I had told her how thankful I was about all the sacrifices that she had made to bring up the four of us. If your mother is still alive please do tell her how much she has done in your life. If you didn’t have time to do it in the last 364 days, tomorrow is a good day to say it.

Happy Mother’s Day!

9 May 2009

2009-05-02T21:57:00.000-07:00

As a law-abiding Malaysian citizen, I, together with 2 million others filed my tax return within days before the deadline. The e-filing was overall convenient although I had to wake up at 4.30am in the morning to avoid slow server problem as many other taxpayers were also rushing to file in their tax returns. This is a tremendous improvement from the pre-e-filing days when I either had to submit it a few days before the deadline or go to the LHDN office myself to meet the deadline.

As the amount of tax that I pay grows by the year, I become more incensed by the gross wastage of money by some of our decision makers. They treat our hard earned money as their entitlement spending millions on expensive overseas “lawatan sambil belajar” trips. Some even brought his family and maid to Disneyland under the pretext of learning how to run a theme park, while some others charged half a billion “consultancy” fee for procuring some expensive foreign made weaponry. And yet, we the rakyat, are asked to tighten our belt to weather the current economic downturn.

One way to avoid our money from being squandered by these scoundrels is to pay all of our tax in the form of zakat. Although I’m not sure how transparent the zakat institution operate, and how much of the money actually goes to the right people, at least we can be sure our money will not go into financing somebody’s shopping trip to Harrods or to some middlemen trying to sell expensive toys to the government. And you can give it to any zakat institution that you feel comfortable with. I myself have been contributing my zakat to the Kelantan Islamic Religious Council since 6 or 7 years ago. No narrow Kelantan-centric chauvinism here. I believe people from rural Kelantan need more help than people from urban Selangor or KL. Since I’m not contributing directly to the economic development of the state in which I spent the first 20 years of my life, this is my way of “repaying” it.

Surviving in a Flat World

2008-11-12T23:52:00.000-08:00

The other day I had a problem with my laptop. It was after office hours. I dialed the company’s IT helpdesk number and a man with a foreign accent answered the call at the other end. He asked me a few basic computer questions, requested me to do a few simple steps and within seconds he took control of my computer screen. He copied files onto my laptop, deleted old ones and replaced them with new ones. About 15 minutes later, the problem was fixed and I was back at work again. Well, nothing so unusual about that except that I was sitting comfortably in my office in Kuala Lumpur and he was controlling my cursor from Bangalore, India!

It turns out that, as a global company constantly looking for the cheapest way of doing things, the company I work for has outsourced some of the operations which used to be done here in Kuala Lumpur to India. For IT support, during normal office hours calls are directed to Cyberjaya but after hours calls are transferred to other call centres around the globe. When I want to invoice customers for completed work I just need to send an e-mail to instruct the accounts team in Chennai, India to prepare an invoice. They will process the invoice, print out a hardcopy in Chennai, courier it out via DHL to the customer, even though the customer office happens to be only 3 floors below my office here in Kuala Lumpur. Now you may think it does not make sense to have the invoice issued out from another continent when the recipient sits in the same building as you. And perhaps you are wondering why I’m telling you this story and what lessons can we learn from all this? The answer is in the word “globalisation”.

In an interconnected world where business is conducted at the speed of light there is no guarantee that we will keep our job. Millions of qualified people in India, China and other emerging economies are eager and willing to take our job if we do not equip ourselves with specialized skills that differentiate us from them. Already they can do the same job much cheaper. Any job that can be digitized and discretised into packets of data can be sent over a broadband cable to find the cheapest place where it can be done. Transfer of data is virtually free. As an economy which has been growing steadily since the early 80s, we are no longer a country with cheap labour. We must realize this and we have to prepare our people to move up quickly on the technological ladder. Otherwise, we’ll lose out to them just like we lost to China, Vietnam or Laos in manufacturing.

Thomas Friedman in his book “The World is Flat” wrote about the emergence of countries like India and China and the forces that enabled them to compete with industrialised countries like the US and Europe. These forces, which he calls flatteners, feed the next stage of globalisation or Globalisation 3.0. He observes that while Globalisation 1.0 turns big into medium, and Globalisation 2.0 turns the medium into small, the third stage of globalization is turning the small into tiny. And unlike the first and second stages where the forces rested with countries and companies, it is now driven by individuals. What this means is that, with the IT and Internet revolution, millions of people are now able to work and collaborate with other people sitting half a world away and produce results which are far better than the sum of each of them working alone. Work is no longer confined by distance or geographical boundaries. A Malaysian company cheque for a customer here in Malaysia, may be prepared in the Philippines. An American secondary school kid’s homework may be checked by his tutor in India; or perhaps in future your house sales and purchase agreement will be prepared by a lawyer in Eastern Europe whom you never meet. The bottom line is if you have the necessary skills and can offer the cheapest service, you can be in any corner of the world, yet will still be able to perform jobs for customers from half a world away.

Friedman’s book is aimed at his fellow Americans whom he thinks have been sleeping while the rest of the world is stealing their jobs. He was referring to the waves of outsourcing and offshoring jobs that went to India and China because of much cheaper labour costs in the two countries. What he says in his book sometimes can be a bit of an exaggeration but he has made a loud wake-up call for Americans to realise that the rest of the world is catching up while they are losing their competitiveness. There are lessons for us too. Malaysians, especially the Bumiputras and Umnoputras, should wake up as well and realise that the big wave called globalisation is affecting us all. We cannot live in a protected environment forever. The rest of the world is preparing themselves with boats and ships to ride out the storm. We have not even started learning how to swim because we are scared of water. In a flat world, the faster we hit the water, the better are our chances of survival.

Balik Kampung

2008-10-11T18:37:00.000-07:00

It was the time for the exodus again! Not because the Sun would not rise from the East, nor because of an impending hurricane. But because the new Syawal moon was coming out in a day or two.

I made my northward journey together with my family on Sunday before Raya starting from Kajang around midday. I had not visited the kampung for almost 8 months. The last time I was back in Pasir Mas was in February for my aunt’s funeral. That visit was unplanned and was a very brief one.

The journey from KL to Pahang was surprisingly smooth despite the fact that thousands of vehicles were using the trunk road going through Bentong, Raub, Kuala Lipis and Gua Musang. The new road from Raub to Kuala Lipis cuts the distance by more than 30 km and straightens what used to be winding tracks and dangerous curves along the way. More needs to be done to improve its notorious safety record but for now we just need to take more care.

Along the way, perhaps because of fasting, everyone else fell asleep. I kept to the speed limit rolling up and down the hills of interior Pahang while listening to the radio and some podcasts I had downloaded from the Internet. This year Raya falls in the middle of the week giving people more time to make their journey home. There were no accidents or long queues along the road unlike in previous years when everyone had to rush home only one or two days before Raya. I saw Raya greetings from politicians from both sides at strategic junctions in towns along the way. This is the time to show to the people that they care. In Pasir Mas, our own independent MP, the maverick Datuk Ibrahim Ali, back in the lime light after winning the March 8 elections on a Pas ticket, had put up banners at the entrances of mosques in the town affirming his rise and fall with his people (“Jatuh Bangun Bersama Rakyat”). I am quite sure I can get one or two pieces of 50 ringgit notes if I go to his open house. I was told he is a very rich man.

The early break I took gave me some time to spend the last days of Ramadhan in the kampung. I have always enjoyed Kelantanese kuih for its sweet taste but this time I was shocked to find that the price of my favourite Kuih Akok had gone up to KL level just because of the influx of cash-rich city folks coming back for the big day. I did communicate with her in Kelantan-speak but it did not help. May be she knew that I was not one of her regular customers and that it would be fine if I did not buy her kuih next time. Makes me think that when it comes to money, folks in this Ulamak-ruled state are anything but generous! Pak Lah’s gesture in reducing fuel price just before Raya and his plea for traders to bring down goods prices did not seem to work. The often repeated phrase - what goes up must come down – simply does not apply here.

I spent the first day of Raya visiting relatives in the kampung. I only get a chance like this every other year as my nurse wife has to work on alternate Raya. Hospitals always seem to be busier during festive seasons! I took the opportunity to see cousins, uncles and aunties. The eve of Raya was the time to pay my dues in the form of zakat. Four of my young cousins have just lost their mother, four years after losing their father. They are now orphans and in need of monetary support from the extended family. I thought growing up with divorced parents was tough for me. Difficult to imagine that the four of them have lost both parents at such a young age. I remember how happy I was as a child wearing new clothes during Raya, going round from house to house playing firecrackers. I wanted to make sure that they too enjoy the same experience in their childhood.

On the second day of Raya I paid a visit to the graves of my mother, grandmother and father, the three most important people in my life. Their graves lay silent waiting for visits from their children and grandchildren. It was late afternoon and nobody else was around. The quietness seemed to understand the sadness of their loss many years ago. I cleared some weeds that had grown wild since I visited the place last Raya Haji. I read some verses from the Quran and spread out my hands while utterring some doa. After so many years, the sadness of their loss is now bearable. It was almost maghrib time and I had to leave. I looked back at the graves as I took my steps out of the graveyard area. I could not help but feel very sad again as I was leaving them behind. It will probably be another year when I come and visit them again. But this I’ll always remember. I may be working in the tallest buildings in the world, but I'll never forget my roots are here. You people were the ones that made it all possible.

Ulasan Buku: Tuhan Manusia – Faisal Tehrani (2007)

2008-06-08T09:10:00.000-07:00

Novel ini adalah novel yang bukan novel. Kenapa saya berkata begitu? Sebenarnya novel ini adalah sebuah perbincangan tentang agama dan kelahiran golongan liberal di kalangan penganut Islam. Ia hanya diolah menjadi novel dengan menyelitkan sedikit kisah dan watak-watak supaya menjadi sebuah cerita. Namun lebih 90 peratus isinya adalah fakta-fakta agama, sejarah, falsafah dan ayat-ayat suci al-Quran dan Hadis. Jika tiada diselang-selikan dengan cerita, watak dan dialog, ia akan menjadi hambar dan mungkin tidak ramai yang akan membacanya.

Novel ini menyelam dalam ke lubuk masalah yang menimpa sebahagian umat Islam terpelajar di Malaysia di mana mereka lebih cenderung kepada ajaran yang dilabelkan sebagai Islam liberal. Golongan ini adalah golongan yang terdidik dengan asuhan dan pandangan yang mengatakan bahawa semua agama adalah benar dan Islam hanyalah salah satu daripadanya. Watak utama novel ini dijelmakan dalam diri Ali Taqi, seorang remaja Islam yang pintar dan amat sedar dengan masalah Islam liberal kerana abangnya sendiri, Talha menjadi murtad selepas dipengaruhi Encik Aris, seorang intelek yang memperjuangkan Islam liberal. Bapa Ali, Mohamad menjadi seorang pendiam akibat teramat sedih setelah anaknya sendiri murtad. Watak Talha tidak banyak diceritakan, malah disentuh sedikit sahaja. Talha hanya wujud dalam dialog Ali Taqi dan watak-watak lain di dalam novel ini.

Kisah berkisar sekitar perbincangan intelektual Ali Taqi dan kawan-kawan sekolahnya tentang Islam, sejarahnya, falsafah dan hubungannya dengan agama lain. Keseluruhan dialog mereka adalah selang-seli antara ayat al-Quran dan kupasannya serta fakta-fakta sejarah Islam yang diolah lancar dalam perbualan dan perdebatan yang dipaparkan di dalam cerita ini. Cerita ini juga mengemukakan watak Andrew Tse, kawan karib sekampung Ali Taqi yang akhirnya memeluk Islam kerana terpesona dengan keindahannya.

Walaupun watak utama ialah seorang remaja namun soal cinta remaja disentuh sedikit sahaja. Zehra, anak intelektual Islam liberal Encik Aris, jatuh hati dengan Ali Taqi. Mereka selalu berbahas dan berbincang tentang Islam liberal di dalam pertemuan mereka. Zehra banyak mengajukan soalan seakan menguji pengetahuan dan hujah-hujah Ali Taqi yang mengganggap Islam liberal adalah suatu barah yang merosakkan umat Islam. Hubungan mereka tidak mekar kerana Ali Taqi tidak boleh menerima orang yang menganut Islam liberal. Kesudahannya berakhir dengan mereka menuju laluan hidup yang berbeza; Ali Taqi kemudiannya menjadi professor ilmu Islam dan falsafah dan watak Zehra tidak diceritakan dengan jelas laluan hidupnya.

Buku ini sarat dengan kupasan ayat al-Quran, hadis, sejarah Islam dan pertentangan dengan dunia Barat. Ia ditulis pada tahun 2007 di mana isu murtad dan penghakiman Lina Joy diperkatakan dengan hebat di laman-laman perbincangan Internet. Saya berpendapat, watak Encik Aris dan Talha mewakili golongan cendikiawan Muslim yang membela Lina Joy, IFC dan isu-isu sepertinya manakala watak Ali Taqi adalah mewakili sebahagian besar Muslim yang berada di pihak yang menentang. Novel ini mengambil persamaan dari apa yang berlaku di dalam hubungan Muslim dan non-Muslim di Malaysia. Ia berhujah membela pihak yang menganggap Islam liberal adalah ancaman kepada keharmonian umat Islam di Malaysia. Sebagai seorang yang berpendidikan bidang syariah Islam, Faisal Tehrani sememangnya dididik dengan pandangan sedemikian.

1 Jun 2008.

Ulasan Buku: Kekasih Sam Po Bo – Faisal Tehrani (2007)

2008-05-26T07:12:00.000-07:00

Buku ini adalah salah satu kumpulan cerpen yang dihasilkan oleh Penerima Anugerah Seni Negara, Faisal Tehrani. Di dalamnya termuat 30 cerpen yang membawa berbagai tema dan latar. Memang boleh dikatakan semua 30 ceritera yang dihidangkan oleh Faisal adalah unik dan berisi. Semuanya membawa mesej yang tersendiri, mengupas isu penting Masyarakat Islam-Melayu di Malaysia dan cuba menawarkan suatu penawar kepada masalah muslim sejagat. Antara yang paling saya minati ialah Bulan Mengambang Di Langit KL, Setelah Diciptakan Adam…, Sultan Alauddin Belajar Tasawuf dan Nenek Negro di Kota Mekah.

Suatu tema yang amat kerap dibawa oleh Faisal ialah Islam dan sejarah. Saya amat mengkagumi pengetahuan beliau terhadap Islam dan sejarah. Penulisannya menggambarkan lautan pengetahuan beliau yang dalam mencakupi bidang ilmu Islam, falsafah, sejarah dan politik semasa. Beliau merupakan seorang penulis sepenuh masa yang saya anggap berjaya dan telah menghasilkan lebih 10 buah novel dalam usia baru 34 tahun. Anak muda lulusan bidang pengajian syariah dan sastera ini juga menjadi penceramah sastera dan penyelidik dan sekarang sedang berjuang di bidang akademik untuk menghabiskan PhD. Beliau pernah mendapat bimbingan SN A Samad Said dan SN Shahnon Ahmad. Pandangan politiknya mungkin tidak sehaluan dengan sesetengah orang tetapi beliau berjaya mengemukakan bukti terhadap setiap apa yang dipegangnya. Mungkin kita tidak bersetuju dengan hujahnya tetapi kaedah dan rujukannya kukuh dan jitu.

Novel-novelnya bukan novel picisan cinta remaja yang berlambakan di kedai buku, tetapi sarat mengandungi persoalan yang dianggap berat. Kisah kembaranya padat dengan pencerahan diri serta penghayatan nilai-nilai sejarah dan pengajaran daripadanya. Daya imaginasinya yang cukup luas dan pelbagai itu lincah menerobos dunia di sekelilingnya.

Buku koleksi cerpen dan novelnya agak susah didapati di kedai buku tetapi senang dipesan di kedai maya Internet. Tinjauan saya di beberapa kedai buku hanya membawa saya kepada buku-buku cinta remaja yang saya rasa sudah melepasi waktu untuk orang seperti saya. Di perpustakaan juga saya tidak menemui buku-bukunya. Namun di dunia siber beliau cukup popular dengan laman sesawangnya iaitu tehranifaisal.blogspot.com.

26-5-2008

Meeting Pipeline Guru

2008-04-30T19:31:00.000-07:00

Recently I met with a very prominent pipeline engineer when he was here in Malaysia for discussions with an oil company. I was also invited to the meeting. I had always wanted to meet him having read one of his three books and some of his more than 180 papers. Professor Andrew Palmer is well known world wide as one of the most famous pipeline engineers in the world. To my knowledge he is the only pipeliner with the title FRS – Fellow of the Royal Society, the oldest and foremost learned society in the UK. It’s equivalent to National Academy of Sciences in other parts of the world but because of history it held to its current name. It was first established in 1660 and among its most famous fellows were Sir Isaac Newton, Lord Kelvin, Michael Faraday, Charles Darwin and more recently Stephen Hawking. Its current president is Sir Martin Rees, Britain’s Astronomer Royal. The fellowship is a recognition given every year to about 40 of the best scientists and engineers from the UK and a number of foreigners who are regarded as world authority in their own field. If they ever gave a Nobel Prize to a pipeline engineer, Professor Palmer would be one of the favourites to win.

Professor Palmer was a professor of petroleum engineering at Cambridge University from 1996 to 2005. He was also a visiting professor at Harvard in 2002-2003 and a number of other universities in the UK and US. Almost fifty years ago, he was an engineering student at Cambridge graduating in 1961. After compulsory retirement at Cambridge, he decided to move to the Far East and has taken a chair of visiting professorship at National University of Singapore. One might ask why would NUS take a retired old foreign professor to occupy the chair of one of its professorships. Here I think is where Singapore is again going far ahead of Malaysia in lifting the standard and reputation of its universities to become a world class academic institution. They invest a substantial amount of money attracting eminent academics and researchers to their country, providing the right infrastructure and world class facilities. Singapore’s investment is starting to bear fruit. So far their biotechnology enclave, Biopolis has attracted some big names in biotechnology research and push Singapore into biotech world map. NUS is one of the top 50 universities in the world in the Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) list (no. 33 in 2007). So if our Higher Education Minister is looking for a model to follow, he does not have to go on lawatan sambil belajar (or is it belanja?) to Europe or America for ideas and inspirations. Just look down south across the causeway. Come to think about it again, NUS used to be University of Malaya in Singapore. The big gap in ranking between our Universiti Malaya and NUS now tells us something about how Singapore and Malaysia manage their most valuable asset (i.e. brain, bright people) and develop it to achieve its best potential.

After the meeting in the morning, I took the opportunity to have further discussions with Professor Palmer over lunch in a halal Chinese restaurant. I told him how I wished I had met him when I was in Cambridge from 1993 to 1995. But during those years, he took his time off from academic world and spent his time in the oil and gas industry. He set up his own consultancy company, built it up and eventually sold it off before joining the academia again. It’s one good thing all our academics should do – spend some time on the field and learn to appreciate how equations and computer simulations actually work in the real world. It’s easy to pressurize a pipeline or smash it to pieces in the lab or on a computer simulation. But it does not necessary mean that it can be done when you are out at sea hundreds of kilometers from shore.

Despite being optimistic and enjoying his life in this part of the world, I noticed he had some reservation about academic institution in Singapore, and in this region generally. Because of its rigid, rule-based society and limited academic freedom, it does not encourage new ideas and creativity, two important elements in innovation and advancement of knowledge. And despite its energetic push to be at the forefront of research and technology in the world, Singapore is still lagging behind in freedom and democracy. The effects have already been felt in certain areas where some academics and scientists who accepted good monetary rewards and had been working in Singapore for some time decided to leave because of lack of freedom. Singapore probably thinks that it is necessary at the current stage of its development to impose controls on everything. But sooner or later, people are going to demand more individual freedom. Make no mistake. No amount of grain can persuade a bird to live in a cage.

In the middle of our discussion, I noticed that it was Friday prayer time. I excused myself and left the learned professor to continue his lunch with my Chinese friend. It was an honour for me to meet such a great man in my own field of work. He is not just a prolific researcher and successful entrepreneur, but also a dedicated educator who loves his work. Now when I read his book again, I feel as if I could hear his voice talking to me over lunch.

Life Certainties

2008-04-30T02:15:00.000-07:00

They say two things in life are certain: death and taxes. I’m not sure if I am prepared for the first one but with a definite deadline on April 30th, I had to spend almost whole of last weekend going through my purchase receipts and financial papers before submitting my tax return form (Borang BE) on-line. It’s good that it’s now possible to fill our tax return form via the Internet, have our taxes calculated using on-line applications and even get confirmation receipt from the Inland Revenue Board (LHDN). This year LHDN expects more people to use the on-line applications and reduce congestion at its offices close to the deadline.

After 15 years of working life and slowly crawling up the salary ladder I finally find myself paying quite a substantial amount of tax. Like all sensible people, as much as legally possible, I tried to reduce my taxable income. I tried to claim reduction on every item in which I was entitled to. Yet after all the deductions, I still think that my tax amount was too much. With the kind of service I get, I feel I should pay much less.

To be quite honest, I will not have any qualms about paying taxes to the government if I know exactly where my money goes. If I know that my tax money is going to help the poor rakyat, I’m quite happy to contribute. But that is not the case for now. As long as there is no transparency in our government, we never know whether our money is being sucked into a black hole and enrich a few cronies. We see a lot of mega projects which don’t really benefit the people but put a lot of money into someone’s pocket. We see them build roads and highways but they collect tolls. They build five star airports and facilities but goods and service there are also 5-star. They distribute free goodies to kampong folks but only to people with certain political inclination. They use people’s money to pay for TV and radio but throw slanders on their political enemies. When will they ever learn that fairness and goodwill bring more support for them than hurling dirt on their enemies?

I’m not sure whether in the present circumstances taxpayers are getting their fair share. One way to make sure our hard-earned money go to the poor is by paying zakat. Zakat paid to a state religious authority is entitled to full rebate i.e. deduction from tax amount and not just from taxable income. We know zakat will be distributed to certain categories of Muslims who are entitled to part of our wealth and it does not include rich cronies. So it’s a way of fulfilling our religious obligation and at the same time also a really good way of preventing our money from going into the pocket of the rich. And with zakat you can pay it to any state government of your choice, not to the federal government, if that’s your wish. My zakat always go to the state which I think is poor and least corrupt. I would advise my friends to do the same. It does not matter which state you pay your zakat to, but make sure it will not go into enriching rent-seeking cronies.

There are ways not to pay tax. You can either migrate to a tax-free country like the Middle East or Brunei, or earn below the threshold, or put your money in a bag and carry it with you to Australia. Don’t worry too much about being caught. Even if you were, in Malaysia, you could still become a cabinet minister! Looks like for many of us there is not much choice not to pay income tax. So, despite all this anger, I still have my salary deducted every month by the LHDN and come April still have to file my tax return. It’s one of two certainties in life. No escape. Period.

Sedetik Bersama Sasterawan Negara

2008-04-13T09:16:00.000-07:00

Pesta Buku Antarabangsa Kuala Lumpur pada tahun ini berakhir petang tadi di PWTC Kuala Lumpur. Sungguh ramai manusia yang rata-ratanya umat Melayu bersesak-sesak mengunjungi pondok demi pondok di dewan pameran. Mungkin anggapan aku sebelum ini yang orang kita tidak suka membaca buku meleset. Mereka datang bersama anak-anak dan isteri dengan semangat ingin menambah ilmu. Semacam ada pesta hiburan di sana. Dan memangpun ada seorang dua selebriti yang dijemput khas samada untuk mempromosi buku mereka sendiri ataupun sekadar tayang muka di depan kaunter untuk melariskan jualan. Diskaun ditawarkan untuk banyak judul buku. Hampir setiap kaunter menawarkan pelbagai hadiah dan pakej istimewa untuk menarik pelanggan.

Aku datang sendirian dengan komuter. Lokasi stesen Putra amat mudah sekali untuk aku menapak ke PWTC di Bangunan UMNO. Dan aku rasa tindakanku tepat kerana dengan kesesakan yang sebegitu teruk, kalau anak-anak aku bersama, aku mungkin terpaksa menghabiskan masa melayan kerenah mereka sahaja daripada menumpukan perhatian kepada buku dan jurujualnya.

Di kaunter Bernama aku nampak orang ramai berkerumun. Lalu perasaan ingin tahu aku membawa aku ke sana. Rupanya dengan membeli sebuah buku yang berharga RM5 sahaja pembeli diberi peluang mendapat autograf dari angkasawan kedua negara Dr Faiz. Ramai juga yang mengambil peluang bergambar dengannya. Di situ juga bahan cenderamata Radio 24 “Radio Berita Pertama Negara” dan siaran Berita Bernama di Astro dijual. Nasib baik angkasawan pertama negara Dr Sheikh Muszaphar tiada bersama. Kalau tidak lagi sensasi dan sesak jadinya.

Setelah hampir 3 jam membelek-belek buku, aku melewati depan kaunter Wira Bukit Sdn Bhd. Di kerusi sofa di tengah-tengah pondok pameran, aku nampak pemiliknya sedang menyain buku-buku yang baru dibeli orang. Wajahnya memang dikenali ramai. Masakan tidak dialah Sasterawan Negara Datuk A. Samad Said yang mengekalkan penampilannya sejak dari dulu. Rambut putihnya panjang ke paras bahu, janggut dan misainya dibiarkan berjuntaian. Beliau selesa berbaju-T, berseluar slack dan berselipar jepun. Kali pertama aku melihatnya ialah lebih kurang 15 tahun yang lalu sewaktu beliau menunggu bas mini wilayah di stesen Bangkok Bank di tengah-tengah bandar Kuala Lumpur. Lima belas tahun lepas juga beliau berpakaian begitu. Statusnya sebagai seorang sasterawan negara dan gelaran Datuk tidak langsung mengubah zahirnya. Beliau tetap dengan penampilannya yang santai. Bagiku itulah uniknya A. Samad Said selain kata-kata puitis yang lunak menghiasi karya-karya sasteranya. Sebelum aku meminta beliau mengautograf buku yang baru aku beli, sempat aku berbisik dengan jurujualnya apa panggilan yang sesuai sebelum aku mula bercakap dengan orang besar sastera negara itu. Panggil saja Pak Samad jawab jurujual tersebut. Lalu aku terus mengambil tempat di hujung sofa di sebelah Pak Samad dan memintanya menyain buku nipis berjudul “Ilham Di Tepi Tasik”, sebuah koleksi esei sastera Pak Samad yang diterbitkan pada tahun 2006 dan kini dalam cetakan kedua.

Mungkin generasi muda kini lebih menggilai novel cinta remaja. Pak Samad sendiri pernah melahirkan rasa kesalnya dengan tindakan Kementerian Pendidikan yang memilih novel ringan untuk dijadikan bahan rujukan sastera di sekolah dan menyisihkan karya-karya agung sasterawan negara. Kekecewaannya itu diluahkan dengan tidak mahu lagi menggunakan gelaran Sasterawan Negara yang diterimanya itu. Walaupun beliau tidak mahu lagi dipanggil Sasterawan Negara, namun di hati peminat sastera beliau adalah sasterawan negara yang tulen.

Pada usia 73 tahun pena sasteranya tidak pernah tumpul dan karyanya yang merentasi beberapa dekad masih segar untuk dinikmati generasi muda. Beliau telah menghambakan seluruh hidupnya untuk menyuburkan sastera Melayu di rantau ini. Aku merasakan di kaunter jualan petang tadi aku bukan sahaja membeli sebuah buku, malah memetik salah satu dari bunga sastera Pak Samad. Semuga ilham Pak Samad akan terus menjelmakan karya-karya tinggi untuk dinikmati pencinta sastera.

13-4-2008

The Day when I was a Polling Agent - Final Part

2008-03-28T05:03:00.000-07:00

The aftermath of typhoon “Anwar”

At 5 PM, the school gate was closed and our party security worker stood guard just in case the 2004 two-hour illegal extension of voting time happened again. The counting process started right after 5.00 PM and only EC staff and counting agents were allowed in the room. The rest of us waited outside in our pondok just outside the school. There was nothing else we could do apart from praying to Allah to take care of the rest. We were ready to accept any outcome.

Supporters gathered at our pondok while the counting was going on inside the school. At 6.22 PM an SMS came that said we led Channel 2 for state seat by 168 votes. I read aloud the results to supporters and instantaneously a loud “Allahu Akbar” broke the silence. The blue pondok stood still. Seventeen minutes later another SMS came in for parliamentary seat, with BN left behind by 84 votes. Another cry of the takbir pierced through the evening air. The other pondok stood its ground. Exactly half an hour later both state and parliamentary results for Channel 1 came and by that time BN was trailing even further behind. Some youngsters on motorbikes started leaving the blue pondok and we knew we were winning the count for the polling centre. Around 7.30 PM our counting agents walked out of the school gate smiling, bringing the good news to the waiting crowd. It was going to be a long night for BN.

That night supporters gathered again at the local stadium which was used for the nomination two weeks ago. The final results for both state and parliamentary seats would be announced there. After dinner I joined thousands of eager supporters from both sides at the stadium. Again, they were split into two groups each one taking up one side of the stadium with rows of policemen standing guard in the middle. The atmosphere was volatile. The stadium lights were off but everyone’s heart was on fire.

Around 10 PM, all sorts of news and rumours were spread across the field about the fall of big names including some ministers. The crowd on our side of the stadium was getting very excited while the other side fell silent. Out of the darkness, somebody brought in a laptop, connected to wireless Internet and started an impromptu breaking news desk getting feeds from Malaysiakini and PAS websites. Soon people gathered around him like moths around a light and we could not believe our eyes when the preliminary results started rolling in from cyberspace. Early unconfirmed results delivered the son-in-law that everyone loved to hate, KJ, a defeat. It was too difficult to believe but it blew everyone’s mind. Final results were however in his favour. Later, we heard about Khir Toyo losing his seat but it turned out that he didn’t. Things were getting really wild. Then Samy Vellu fell, Zainuddin Maidin was also out and Shahrizat followed suit. A Malaysian friend who was working in the UK called on my mobile phone to confirm the incredible news he was reading on his computer half way across the world. Apparently, the call only cost him 1p or 7 cents a minute. His voice was frequently drowned by the instant burst of takbir amidst the euphoria. I ended up giving him live commentary of the political drama that was unfolding here in Malaysia.

Soon it was clear that the strong wind that blew at my local school polling centre that evening was developing into a full-blown typhoon. And this typhoon is what I’d call Typhoon “Anwar” for this man has galvanized all the various forces of wind, heat, moisture and pressure into a political storm that brought destructions to arrogant power across five states. Many would liken it to a tsunami, but a tsunami has no name. On the other hand, meteorologists would give a name to hurricanes and typhoons. Like Hurricane “Katrina” that humbled the mighty US against forces of nature, Typhoon “Anwar” also knocked the powerful BN off their ego. The people had spoken and their voices could no longer be ignored.

Locally, preliminary results showed we won both state and parliament seats by huge majority. The EC did not announce official results even until I drove home from the stadium late that night. And back at home I had my eyes focused on my TV monitor and laptop as official results streamed into the bedroom. My head did not hit the pillow till 3 o’clock that night. The full-scale destruction of Typhoon “Anwar” would only be known the next morning.

Two weeks after, much of the dust has begun to settle. Most state governments have been sworn in and the losing parties have had to do some serious soul searching. It turns out that the all-powerful BN which has been ruling this country since Independence almost lost its seat of federal power. Their share of popular votes dipped from more than 64% in 2004 to just over 50% this time. Were it not for postal votes and the cancellation of the use of indelible ink, they could well have lost the simple majority as well. No wonder the EC chairman looked even more depressed than Pak Lah when announcing the results that night. The massive vote swing had taken him by surprise too.

Looking back at the night of the 8th of March, I realised it was the beginning of a new era. Anwar himself called it the dawn of a new Malaysia. The old Malaysian politics that we used to think was unchangeable disappeared overnight. The threat of repeat of May 13 violence vaporized into the air. It was an empty threat to put fear into people not to change the status quo. Now that the seat of power in some states has changed hands, all eyes will be focused on the five states led by what is now referred to as Barisan Rakyat. Many hope that the newfound power will not turn them into arrogant, corrupt leaders like the ones that they had just pushed out. Demonstration of good governance for the next five years will strengthen their appeal and the once invincible BN also will be pushed to change for its own survival. It has been a blessing to us that we remain peaceful despite the initial implicit threat of chaos and instability if BN was not returned to power with overwhelming majority. People did not fall into the trap and have instead moved on to a system with more check and balance. Perhaps in the next two or three general elections a more stable two-party system will emerge following the model of Washington or Wesminster. This is going to be good for the people.

Across the field that night, many of us screamed so hard that we almost lost our voice. But nobody seemed to mind. We knew that from that day, people’s voice would be heard loud and clear by those in power. I know our democracy in Malaysia is still fragile and like a toddler it is bound to stumble before it can walk properly. But I am optimistic. I believe we are heading in the right direction. Years from now, when I look back on this momentous event, or if my grandchildren ask me about what I have done to this country, may be I can tell them that I contributed in my own small way in bringing this change. That change happened on the day when I was a polling agent.

The End.

The Day I was a Polling Agent - Part 3

2008-03-25T08:04:00.000-07:00

…Part 3 – Witness to democracy

On the night before the polling day, two friends and I spent the night at the pondok keeping watch. There was a lot of valuable stuff – audio visual equipment, VCD etc. – that would surely go missing if they were left unattended. There was no time to pack up as we were going to open early the next morning. In my ten years of married life, this was the first time I had had to spend the night fighting off mosquito attacks under a tent by a roadside. The mosquitoes were 100% on the BN’s side that night. I didn’t remember whether there was a full moon in the sky but we were certainly surrounded by full moons all around our tent...and the shampoo girl posters with a rocket on it.

The morning of the 8th was a beautiful day. The weather was going to be bright all day. After a short trip home to wash and change, I was back at the pondok again by 7.30 AM. By 8.00 AM the school gate was opened and we received our first customer who came to check his name on the electoral roll. The first batch of polling agents went in to start their duty for the next 3 hours. More people arrived at our pondok and some unknown supporters brought nasi lemak and kueh for party workers. Later mineral water came and by lunch nasi tomato was delivered. I never knew who paid for the food and drinks but I am sure they did it with sincerity and not hoping for any monetary reward from us. After all we are poor man’s party. No big company would support us for fear of reprisal from the powers-that-be. Our support came from grassroots who would give but not expecting anything in return. I believe all they want is to see change and contribute to it in their own way. If anybody stopped at our pondok and asked for money, we would just show them the blue pondok where their chances of getting it were a lot brighter.

By 10.30 AM the first batch of polling agents finished their duty and the next batch took over. I helped friends canvassing for votes as voters were walking to the polling station. We took one side of the road and the guys in blue took another. There were occasional chorus of shouts and jeers from both sides but the police were standing close by keeping the situation under control. I could see people were feeling a bit uneasy with the constant touting from both parties. Some quickened their pace into the school as they already made their mind who they would vote for. Many would just give a brief smile, nodded their head and walked past us into the gate. I doubt how effective this strategy would work as I don’t think voters would change their mind just because we stopped them by a roadside and sweet talked them into putting a cross against a certain candidate. But it was fun and the other side was also doing it.

Just after mid-day I cast my own vote. I had waited until the queue became short so I didn’t have to wait too long. Soon after zohor, I went in again to take over as a polling agent from my friend who had been in there for 3 hours. I would be sitting in Channel 1 for the next 3 hours verifying voters’ IC numbers and names and striking them off the electoral list once they’d been given ballot papers. As the electoral list was arranged according to birth date, Channel 1 was made up of elder voters, Channel 3 the youngest voters and Channel 2 those in between. We were told to be extra alert because there had been allegations of phantom voters using other people’s IC to vote, or multiple voters who voted more than once. We were determined not to let them deny us fair results.

There were three polling clerks, each with their own specific task. The first clerk checked the voter’s IC, read the number and name aloud so that the polling agents from all contesting parties could verify and strike out the name off the list. The second clerk would tear off two ballot papers – one for parliament and one for state seat – and give it to the third clerk for punching. The voter would then proceed to polling booth, mark their choice and then slot the papers into two transparent ballot boxes right in the middle of the room. The presiding officer kept everything under control and his decision in case of dispute was final. As polling agent, we watched every step of the voter and made sure that he did not take the ballot papers out of the room. Election rules say that it is illegal to take out ballot papers from polling station or bring in any ballot papers from outside. The serial number on the ballot papers and the pattern of punched holes on them are used as a check against cheating. We were told to raise objection with the presiding officer if we saw that the conduct of voting did not follow proper EC procedures. I didn’t raise any major objection, nor did the other side apart from our demand to take a closer look at temporary IC used by a voter who had reported loss of IC with JPN. The other case was when somebody whose age was 70 plus came in looking like she was 40 plus. However, one of the clerks said she knew the woman and that she was a registered voter there, so I accepted her explanation. I suspect Botox did the magic on her.

There was a concern about the serial number on the ballot papers which could be traced to individual voters. But it was unfounded, as for the first time in this election, the clerk would not be allowed to write the serial number against the name of the voter in the electoral roll. Hence it was not possible to trace which serial number belonged to who. This ensured total confidentiality of voting and people should thank Bersih for demanding this although the use of indelible ink was cancelled at the eleventh hour.

The three hours in the polling room felt very much like sitting for final year exam. In the beginning people were coming in around one every 30 seconds, but after 4 o’clock there was hardly one every ten minutes! There were a total of 350 voters in Channel 1 and by the time I finished my duty 300 had turned up for voting. The turn-out rate was more than 85% and I think that was very good. The other channel registered much less turn-out. It seems like old folks are more responsible citizens as more of them exercised their right. By 4.30 PM, I passed the baton to a fellow party worker and went out the room to sip some badly needed fresh air. The polling centre would close at 5.00 PM sharp and the gate would be locked. I came out of the centre with an experience which was going to be memorable for the rest of my life. Those three hours were the moment when I was a witness to democracy in action.

…to be continued in Part 4

The Day I was a Polling Agent - Part 2

2008-03-21T08:59:00.000-07:00

…Part 2 – Election fever bug in the air

Official campaigning started right after nomination and no time was to be wasted in the next 13 days. We called for first ceramah a few days after nomination. Given that it was on working-day night, the turn-out was fair. Our second ceramah clashed with BN and since our Bilik Gerakan was quite close to theirs, in the interest of security, the police decided to cancel our permit and gave it to the BN guys. Nothing new there since the police had to be fair to them. Determined to hold the ceramah anyway, we moved to a new location and, due to last minute change of venue, the turn-out was less than expected. Not that I mind because there was plenty of extra nasi ayam left.

Two days before the D-day we set up our pondok panas under a big tent by the roadside close to the polling centre. The ruling party had already set up their pondok taking the best spot right next to the junction going to the school which would be used for polling. Their pondok was an airconditioned portacabin sitting firmly on concrete foundation under big blue aluminium roof. We were told that it cost 10 thousand while our pondok was a makeshift tent rented at a cost of around 500 ringgit for 3 days. Clearly we are a poor man’s party!

According to EC rules, the location of pondok panas has to be no less than 50 meters from the polling centre. A draw was done by an EC representative to allocate which party got which spot to build their pondok. We made best use of whatever spot was given to us. Again we set up big screen by the roadside and treated motorists and passers by to our nightly recorded ceramah. While people were watching the ceramah, our volunteers distributed pamphlets and leaflets to housing areas. We got plenty of materials, which came from various sources, to be distributed to houses around our taman. Most were about condemning the present government including pictures of Pak Lah cosying up with some beautiful women – pictures which were widely distributed over the Internet just before the elections. Some were in Chinese and Tamil with pictures of pigs and clippings of articles from Chinese newspapers which we could not understand. We had to practise some form of censorship, lest our aggrasive approach would backfire. Personally I’d rather dissiminate information about our manifesto and what changes we would bring if we manage to govern. But then again, may be it’s fair afterall because they even used taxpayers-funded TV and radio to paint bad image of Opposition leaders.

While distributing the campaign materials, some got rare hostile response but mostly we were given an encouraging smile. At times, dogs barked at us when we approached the postbox in front of the house to slot in the leaflets when their masters were fast asleep. We could tell from meeting people around the housing area that the Indians were very angry with the Government’s treatment of the Hindraf affairs and their own leader, Samy Vellu’s response to it. Many vowed to support the opposition parties as a sign of protest. Their leaders even came to our pondok and promised that he would urge his people to support opposition candidates. The Chinese were less political prefering not to take sides. As business people, they are very pragmatic and would support any party that wins.

The state seat (DUN) in my area was contested by ex-UKM lecturer representing PAS and a contractor Datuk from UMNO. PAS choice was very appropriate as this constituency included two major public universities, a number of IPTs and government research centres. This area probably has the most educated voters and PhDs in the whole of Malaysia. For parliamentary seat, the fight was between BN’s MCA candidate and DAP. The BN candidate was a middle age man while the DAP candidate was a 27 year-old, beautiful single woman lawyer. Her campaign poster was mistaken for a shampoo advertisement! The choice was sooo obvious! They did not even need to campaign hard. But in the spirit of cooperation, we helped look after the rocket posters as well.

There were no untoward incidents in our area. No reports of tearing down opponents posters or bringing down of banners. This I think was a sign of maturity in our politics. In the days leading to the 8th, slowly the roadside turned into green and blue walls of posters and banners especially around junctions and roundabouts. The election fever bug was in the air everywhere.

...to be continued in Part 3

The Day I was a Polling Agent - Part 1

2008-03-19T08:33:00.000-07:00

….Part 1 – “Be prepared for the battle”

I was at the office on the day Parliament was dissolved. Shortly after the announcement, an SMS from a fellow party worker arrived on my phone.”Parliament has been dissolved. Be prepared for the battle”, it said. Before that members of our party in the residential area where I live had been mobilised to prepare ourselves for the imminent announcement of the 12th General Election. Pak Lah had been hinting at it for some time and everybody was expecting he would announce it before April. We knew he wanted to deny Anwar the right to contest and we also knew he could not wait to raise fuel price after getting new mandate.

The next day the much awaited date was announced by the Election Commission. Nomination day was 24th February and Polling day was 8th March. There was to be 13 days of campaigning. Thirteen days of juggling between working in the office during the day and climbing trees to hang posters and banners at night. I tried to contribute in whatever capacity I could. I did not think we would win big but it was fun to be at the Bilik Gerakan every night, putting up posters, distributing campaign materials, watching VCD of ceramah projected onto the big screen over the roadside, and simply talking politics into the early morning when our work for the night was done. The big white screen used for the VCD screening reminded me of the 1970’s when Ministry of Information van would go to villages, put up an impromptu cinema in the village field, play the Hindi blockbuster “An Evening in Paris” and stop the show to talk about how to prevent cholera epidemic when the hero was about to give the villain a good bashing. Campaigning on TV had started way before the official campaign period and nobody gave a damn anymore what came on, as the overdose of government propaganda began to cause numbness on the people.

I forced myself up early on the nomination day even though I had slept around 3 o’clock the night before. It was Sunday and the stadium in our area was used as the nomination centre. I joined thousands of people from both sides marching towards the stadium around 7.30 AM. Calls of ‘Allahu Akbar’ and ‘Hidup BN’ were heard from across the stadium with each side trying to outscream the other. One side with green flags chanting the takbir and the other side waving blue flags singing ‘Inilah Barisan Kita’. The only barriers separating them were about a hundred meters of green grass and rows of policemen in blue uniforms standing guard. Each side was ready for the battle and the battle cry filled the otherwise peaceful morning air.

At 9 AM, nomination was opened and only candidates and their seconders were allowed to see the EC officers. It closed an hour later and from 10 AM to 11 AM the session was opened for objection. We waited on the field with hope and nervousness. We knew we were up against the other side who would try to find any mistake in the form to disqualify our candidate by any means. Our worries were not at all unfounded. There was last minute ruling handed down by the EC that looked like sabotage and the candidates on our side were not taking any chances. They complied with every single ruling made by the EC for they fear being disqualified. The EC head had been under fire for making a U-turn on mandatory Inland Revenue stamping of nomination forms. Initially, it was announced that there was to be strict enforcement of the mandatory stamping. The announcement itself was given at 3 PM on Thursday. This caused a lot of inconvenience to the candidates in Kelantan and Terengganu as they only had a few hours to do the stamping before close of business for weekends on Friday and Saturday. There would be no time on Sunday because nomination would start at 9 AM and close at 10 AM. Some of them had to fly to KL on Friday to get their forms stamped just so that they were not disqualified on technicality. But at the last minute, the ruling was cancelled for no reason. We learnt later that many BN candidates in Johor did not manage to get the Inland Revenue stamps and if the ruling was strictly imposed the Opposition would have won the state of Johor uncontested. That perfectly explained the last minute about-turn by the EC.

By noon on Sunday the 24th, the names of qualified candidates were announced. There was a sigh of relief from both sides as none of the candidates was disqualified. They were to fight as gentlemen.

Book Review: Freakonomics - Steven Levitt & Stephen Dubner

2008-03-02T04:53:00.000-08:00

This is yet another exceedingly popular book by economists for the layman that has sold 3 million copies worldwide (up to 2007). This book actually came out before The Undercover Economist. It is co-authored by Steven Levitt, a University of Chicago economics professor, and Stephen Debnur, a writer for The New York Times. The book does not have one single theme and its chapters are independent of one another, so for people like me who like to flip books or magazines from the back, it’s a blessing. I can read the chapters in any order I like and each one offer its own story. Levitt’s research into obscure subjects proves in most cases that conventional wisdom is not always correct and the so-called experts are as guilty as politicians to say things that serve their own self-interest.

His research into everyday issues includes topics such as the effects of legalising abortion on crime rate in America, how teachers in some schools in Chicago cheat in their students’ exam to boost up their own rating and match fixing among Sumo wrestlers in Japan. He also asks why most drug dealers live with their mothers and probes how much your name is connected with your success in life. Although political correctness does not allow people to admit the positive effects of abortion on reducing crime rate, the authors have shown that by terminating unwanted pregnancies, future crime will be reduced. Babies born from these unwanted pregnancies are poorly raised and are likely to become criminals when they reach their teenage years. By cutting off a major supply of potential criminals (killing them before birth), crime rates can be brought down within two decades. Controversial it surely is, but that is what the data shows. And he can say it because he is a researcher, not a politician.

Crime rates and drug dealers go hand in hand. Drawing from a student’s research into the world of crack, the book discusses elaborate corporate-like structure within the hierarchy of drug dealers’ organisation. While those at the top enjoy great rewards, those at the lower rungs can barely pay for their own apartments, hence forcing most of them to live with their mothers. The book also shows trends in babies’ names and their correlation with level of mother’s education. Less successful communities (African-American in US) tend to imitate and adopt names from more successful ethnic groups (White American). Here in Malaysia, for reasons still a mystery to me, many in the Chinese community adopt Christian names even though they are not Christians. Could it be that the names sound more modern, Western and more cultured? It does not quite catch on in the Malay community though because it’s our belief that a good name should have good Arabic meaning. Hence the trend from our forefathers’ time with names like Bulat, Hitam, Kenit, Minah and Timah gave way to Aiman, Danial or Fathihah as the level of education of the Malays improves.

The findings of the studies are mainly from the US and may not apply here. I wish these were replicated here by our own geniuses to suit our own local problems. Alas, we simply do not have enough money to sponsor such things, nor do we have enough supply of freaks like Levitt to crack their head on solving such seemingly useless problems. We are more likely to spend our money on how high tech stuff like brewing teh tarik at zero gravity or flipping roti canai at 350 km above the Earth than looking into such mundane matters.

Book Review: "The Undercover Economist" - Tim Harford

2008-02-29T20:18:00.000-08:00

I rented this book from Quereazant, a book rental store in Bandar Baru Bangi. It was on non-fiction best seller’s list for quite some time. The author, Tim Harford is a young thirty-something British economist who works for Financial Times and as a presenter for the BBC. He has since come up with another economics-for-layman book called The Logic of Life which is currently on best seller’s list in major book stores. You can listen to his radio show More or Less which is downloadable free as podcast from the BBC Radio 4 website.

In Undercover Economist, he looks into everyday phenomena and tries to explain them in terms of economics. According to many, economics is a dismal science but he puts it in such a language that even laymen can understand and relate it with everyday choices that we make.

The one subject that always crops up in his discussions is coffee. I would say this is a clear influence of American culture infiltrating into British life as the British are usually identified with tea! Take coffee and capitalism on the left hand side of the equation and you get inflated prices plus enormous profits on the right hand side. In economics parlance, you may call the equation the Starbucks equation. There are numerous auxiliary equations which Starbucks itself would not like you to know. These include exploitation and price manipulation on one side and Third World countries plus poverty on the other. You can name this equation Capitalism if you like. I am digressing a bit here because as an economist working for FT, a Scripture of Capitalism itself, Tim Harford would not be allowed to venture into this sort of socialist rubbish. But as an economist and heavy coffee drinker (which I imply because he’s so obsessed talking about coffee) he does explain why in a busy London train station, with hundred of thousands of commuters rushing to step into the office before their boss does, there is only one coffee shop with long queues, charging premium price for a caffeine shot. It seems to run counter to conventional economics theory that there should be many more coffee outlets trying to sell coffee when there is obviously a pressing need for more coffee shops (supply) in the face of so much demand (caffeine addicted commuters). He calls it the power of scarcity – the ability of that one coffee outlet to charge high premium due to unavailability of competition.

Of course he does not just talk about coffee. Economics is not just about that black stuff that people put into their mouth while they start reading e-mails in the morning. He also talks about big things like the mind-boggling pace of development in China and why Third World countries like Cameroon remains stagnant. While economics gives choices to millions of people in China to lead the life they want to lead, corruption is identified as the single biggest problem that is plaguing poor countries like Cameroon to lift themselves out of poverty.

His book has been very popular. He has surprised even himself in selling more than 600,000 copies so far. His initial estimate was that he would be satisfied if the sales figure reached 7,000 copies. With his talents of looking at why people make certain choices and not the other, perhaps in his next book, he can give an analysis of why people choose to spend their money on his book and not others. Or perhaps, why people like me, just choose to rent rather than buy.

The Best Prime Minister We Never Had – In Memory of Adlan Benan Omar (1973 – 2008)

2008-01-31T21:06:00.000-08:00

Malaysia lost two great people on Thursday 24 January 2008. One of them you would by now know very well, and another you probably have never heard of. One had filled the pages of major mainstream newspapers but the other, being on the other side of the political devide, only managed to fill the blogosphere. One was known by the name of Tan Sri Megat Junid and another affectionately called Ben by his friends.

Browsing through the pages of Malaysian bloggers’ community, Harakah-daily and Suara Keadilan, one would not have missed the news of the death of the young Malaysian intellectual, Adlan Benan Omar at the age of 35. He was a man with extraordinary intellect. Educated at MCKK, then Abingdon School in Oxford and later graduated with double degrees in Law and History at Cambridge University. He was the first foreign head boy in his high school having won student’s election beating both Conservative and Labour student candidates for the top post. He was co-founder of Cambridge University Malaysian Association (Cumas), founder of student body UKEC and the 1997 recipient of Malaysia Youth award.

He was known among his friends as a walking encyclopedia because of his wealth of knowledge and his ability to memorise facts. Back in 1994, over a weekend night in the dormitory of one of our friends at Cambridge, we had a conversation about Malaysian history and Ben pointed out that there were a lot of errors in our history books. His knowledge of Malaysian history left deep impression on me as he dived into the depth of it and gave us impromptu lecture with the flair of a story teller. His room at Cambridge was full of books. His love of books and his powerful neurons absorbed everything he read like a sponge. I still keep the book on British politics that he gave me as a souvenir. I was doing engineering and had little interest in history, but he did spark my interest in that subject. I still cannot figure out what he was saying to me as he signed the book in Latin!

He was an excellent debater too, with words flowing smoothly out of his mouth in both Malay and English. On one occasion when the Malaysian Deputy Education Minister visited Malaysian students in the university, he started his speech in English but later switched to Malay because he said, to everybody’s laughter, it was an official function and thus must be conducted in Malay. Since I left Cambridge in 1995, I had not seen or heard of him but I knew that one day this guy would become a great man. Reading from the blogs, people who knew him spoke favourably of him. Everybody who had met him spoke of how impressed they were of him. One of the blogs said that even Dr Mahathir joked to him about how one day he would fill in his (Dr M’s) shoes i.e. becoming Prime Minister. He would be a perfect match for UMNO’s own Oxford-educated whiz-kid Khairy Jamaludin. In fact, some years back Ben and Khairy had faced off in a famous debate at John Hopkins University, USA.

I remember he was telling us back in 1994 that he would die young because of his illness which he had since he was 18. I thought it was brave of him to face the reality of his life and yet still managed to live a happy life, going around telling jokes as if he had no serious health problem. He contributed much to his chosen political party, his ideals and his vision for the development of his race and country. Even while he was quite ill, he gave his ideas in helping how to develop the economy of Kelantan, a state often overlooked by Putrajaya because of politics. Ben, you would have been a great Prime Minister but Allah loved you more. May Allah bless your soul. Al-Fatihah.

Anger over a cup of coffee

2008-01-09T23:40:00.000-08:00

It was raining very heavily outside my office building at the time I was about to leave for home. There was no way for me to get to my car parked in an open space parking a few blocks away without getting myself soaking wet. Without an umbrella, I’d have to wait until the downpour stopped. I made my way down to the shopping mall attached to the building, found a seat at a western-style coffee shop, ordered two doughnuts and a cup of latte while hoping for the rain to stop. I paid 12 ringgit and 50 cents for the snack and quickly settled in a comfy cushion seat to enjoy the expensive drink.

As I was sipping the cocktail of milk and ground coffee, I wondered how much of the money I just paid actually got to the poor farmers of Colombia, Brazil or Ethiopia. According to the BBC, there are as many as 25 million small-scale coffee farmers producing coffee around the world. The market for take-away coffee has trebled from USD30bn to USD90bn over the past decade, and shows no sign of slowing down. In the US alone, it increased 10% last year, when compared with 2005. In recent years however, coffee price hit a 30-year low.

It is estimated that the coffee shops can get 80 cups of coffee for every kilo of coffee beans, each cup can cost up to USD6 in Europe while farmers in developing countries are paid around USD2 per kilo. Some coffee farmers in Ethiopia are earning less than USD1 a day. And it did not make sense that I just paid about USD2 for a cup of coffee when the farmers there had to do 2 days of hard labour to earn the same money.

The Starbucks Coffee company, one of the biggest coffee chains in the world, opens a new Starbucks Coffee shop somewhere in the world every four hours. The company denies any practice of unfair trade and its website speaks proudly of its record of Corporate Social Responsibility. But behind the huge image building PR through the media, lie some less rosy pictures. In 2006, Starbucks was accused of trying to block Ethiopia’s move to trademark three of its homegrown premium coffee in the US. I imagined how powerful a global corporation like Starbucks could be if it could even take on a Third World government to ensure its maximum profitability. What chance do the coffee farmers have of getting fair deal from their hard labour? It sounds scary when you think about that and imagine how vulnerable our government position would be in the face of fierce negotiation for a bi-lateral Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the government of the most powerful economy in the world.

By the time I emptied my cup, there was so much anger that I felt I needed another cup of coffee to drain out the feeling. The sweet taste of the doughnuts calmed me down. I finished the last bits of the honey coated crumbs and stepped out to check the rain. I saw the mamak stall across the street and thought to myself I should have gone into that shop instead. The coffee would be cheaper and I would not have fed myself with so much anger.

1 Muharam 1429.

Keeping up with Rumour Mongers

2008-01-07T07:03:00.000-08:00

I welcomed the new year with a phone call from my brother a few hours before mid night urging me to go and fill up my car before 12 o’clock. He said that petrol price would be raised by 40 sen at midnight on the new year. He had heard rumours going around and people started queuing up at some filling stations across KL. I said I didn’t see anything unusual when I was driving back from office on New Year's eve. Besides, it would not make much difference if I filled up then or on the next day because the most I could save was only on a tankful of petrol. I would have to fill up the whole of water tank in my home to realise any significant savings from a sudden fuel hike.

Now just days into the new year, people are queuing up again at supermarkets because of rumours that cooking oil price would be hiked soon. It is a pity that we are the world’s largest producer of palm oil yet the government has had to ration it because of panic buying due to rumour mongering. Almost two years back there was severe shortage of sugar in some parts of the country because of rumours that the government would allow the price of sugar to go up. The shortage was severe then, as it is now, closer to border areas because of hoarding by traders hoping to make quick bucks when the price is actually increased. There are also a lot of smuggling activities along our porous border. Utusan Malaysia reports that it is now easier to get cooking oil in the town of Sg Golok on the other side of the border than in Rantau Panjang.

The issue here is not the price hike. Prices will always go up anyway because of inflation. The real issue is people’s tendency to believe in rumours and act irrationally upon hearing them. To me, this underlies public distrust of official sources of news and their natural tendency to believe in pseudo-news spread by SMS or chain e-mails. Recent spread of false SMS about ethnic riots in some parts of KL is a manifestation of this phenomenon. The mandatory registration of pre-paid mobile number does not seem to have the intended effect of controlling the spread of false rumours via SMS. And you cannot blame the public either because our official sources of news have thrown their integrity out of the window and at times they themselves become rumour mongers. If you ask me who started all these rumours, I will not be able to give an accurate answer. But in all likelihood, those who gain most from the spread of a rumour are the ones most likely to start it.

7 January 2008

Journey into Full Moon country

2007-12-24T18:35:00.000-08:00

Dark lumps of cloud gathered above my head as I crossed the border late that evening. The big sign board on my left reminded me that I was entering my home state. ‘Welcome to Kelantan in Peace’ it said. My leisurely drive took me about five hours before I reached the border. With eight people including four kids on board I had to be extra careful knowing fully well that I was on one of the most accident prone roads in the country. There is no highway in this part of the country. I have a feeling that people in Putrajaya, with four-lane highways crisscrossing their small enclave, somehow think people from this part of the country do not deserve good road system. Not while this state is living under the curse of the full moon.

The rain that had been falling for quite some time in hilly areas of Southern Kelantan took its toll on the road too. (I am saying that just figuratively – there are no tolled roads in Kelantan, that’s why its roads are still Third World standard!). The main road from Gua Musang to Kuala Krai, which is used by hundreds of thousands of Kelantanese rushing to get back to Kelantan during festive season, was completely closed due to landslide. Traffic was diverted to the less popular alternative road passing through Dabong and Jeli before one could go to Tanah Merah and Pasir Mas. Lucky for me, I drove back on Monday, way before other people did. I heard they got stuck for hours on Wednesday on the way to Kelantan because of the heavy traffic and half-closed roads. Some used the longer route travelling through LPT to Kuantan and Terengganu with the consequence of paying more for tolls and petrol. Which makes me think that every raya it is not just us celebrating it; Samy Vellu also has good reasons to enjoy the season.

The rainy season in Kelantan was still in its full steam. This year for some parts of the state the yearly flooding was more severe than usual. Excess water from Sg Golok had overflowed to low lying areas of Pasir Mas especially close to Rantau Panjang, a small town on the border of Malaysia and Thailand. Up to ten thousand people living close to Rantau Panjang had to sacrifice the comfort of home and stay at evacuation centres on the day of Raya Qurban. As usual whenever there is a disaster, there are also opportunities, especially to the most opportunistic of them all, the politicians. With general election just around the corner, here is the not-to-be missed chance to smile in front of national TV distributing goodies to flood victims, funded by other people’s money, for their own political mileage. The local daily Sinar Harian was filled with tireless UMNO leaders wading knee deep water with boat in tow distributing packed rice and canned sardines to villages. I am sure PAS leaders also cashed in on this opportunity. After all, it was a time to show that they also cared. But, their face was nowhere to be seen in the newspapers or TV. I guess their face was not handsome enough to be in the newspapers.

I did not stop over at my family house. Instead, my final destination was my mother-in-law’s house, the house which I always go back to whenever I visit Kelantan. After my parents’ death more than 5 years ago, none of my siblings decided to live in the house. Before long white ants claimed it as their own and it is now no more than a skeleton of rotten planks and rusted zinc. I felt less attached to it because it was not the house where I grew up, having spent most of my life either in rented house or boarding school.

My wife’s family house is in a village close to Rantau Panjang, about 20 km from the Thai border. Even without rain, the village is like an island, located quite far from other villages, connected by roads going through paddy fields. When it rains, it is easily surrounded by water from all corners, cut off from nearby villages. This time, the water level on the roads leading to the village was about waist deep. Overnight the roads became Venice style canals and the villagers had to use boats to connect with the rest of the world. The water level inside the kitchen was about 1 foot deep forcing my sister-in-law to move the fridge and washing machine upstairs. Still it was not that bad. They were not forced to evacuate. Thank God it did not go beyond the point of causing slight inconvenience. Quite the opposite, the kids seemed to enjoy it very much when all of a sudden open spaces around their houses were instantly turned into giant swimming pools. There was plenty of opportunity for them to practice double somersaults. For the folks, it was time to cast their nets as there was abundant supply of unsuspecting fish roaming free in the murky water tasting their new found freedom. The water levels however quickly subsided and by the morning of Raya Haji, we were able to go to the village surau without wading through the muddy water, perform the prayer and the Qurban afterwards. The sacrifice was not for me though. The cow which was supposed to be sacrificed for my children’s Aqiqah contracted foot-and-mouth disease and his life was spared.

Because the road to the village was under water, my family and I had to wait for two days for the water to subside before we could reach our final destination. We spent two nights at my sister’s house in Tanah Merah on our way to Pasir Mas. The main road from Jeli to Tanah Merah, part of the trunk road linking Perak to Kelantan, was strewn with potholes and cracks. Drivers had to reduce speed to dodge them. The traffic was made worse by JKR workers working hard to fill in the potholes in time for Pak Lah’s visit to Bukit Bunga, a small border town close to Jeli, on the second day of Raya to open a bridge crossing Sg Golok. There was plenty of opportunity for national live telecast for both prime ministers. And I think it served both politicians because while people from this side of the river would be going to the polls anytime early next year, the Thai would be doing so on Sunday.

Unlike the one proposed across the southern border, this bridge is not crooked. It cost RM9.2 million funded jointly by both sides. They appropriately named it “Jambatan Bunga” probably because it is in Bukit Bunga. It symbolises close connection between the communities living on either side of the border. Communities which share same race, religion, language and even passion for bull fighting, but are somehow separated by red line on a map. If not for unfortunate twist of history, the four muslim provinces in the south of Thailand could well have been a district of Malaysia. Nonetheless, not all is bad. They give us cheap supply of fragrant Siam rice and delicious tom yam while we sell them cheap petrol and sugar.

My visit to Pasir Mas this Raya also included a brief stop at my auntie’s house. She was not well and her children were considering whether to let her go for another skull operation to remove a recurring tumour. If they agreed, this was going to be her fourth time going under a surgeon’s knife. The doctor said at her age an operation on the head posed very high risk. But not doing it might not improve the odds either. She was lying in bed most of the time and her husband was the one entertaining us in the living room. He told me about a recent mock election in selected areas in Kelantan conducted by UMNO to gauge people’s mood in the coming general election. He was transported to and fro the polling station in a car and given free lunch. The organiser was satisfied with people’s choice and declared itself winner of the mock election. I could gauge from the conversation that to folks like him it was bread and butter issue that mattered, not abstract stuff like video clips, fair election or fight against corruption. To be realistic, I had to painfully agree with him too. To people like him, which party can build roads and who can give him subsidised fertiliser is more important than independent judiciary or transparent ACA. So those urban educated elite out there who thinks that a video clip will bring the PM down or a court case will cost a minister his political life, be prepared to swallow a bitter pill.

After a week in Kelantan, my raya homecoming was drawing to a close. More people who had been evacuated in the last few days were then allowed to go home. Visiting my childhood home village was nice but after some time I was also starting to miss my home in Kajang too. I missed the comfort of my own home, the freedom to roam on the Internet and my weekly trip to the shopping malls. When it was time to go back to Kajang, the local radio Kelantan FM announced that the two roads to KL going through Gua Musang were closed to all traffic due to landslide. I decided to believe it for my own sake although in the same programme the announcer gave a more questionable advice urging the people of Kelantan to make a change and vote for a new state government. The road closure forced me to take the longer route going through Jeli, Grik, Kuala Kangsar, Ipoh and then down south via the PLUS highway. I had no choice but to endure the heavy traffic and pay more for tolls and fuel. Samy, looks like you won again! It took me 13 hours to finally reach my home in the early hours of Monday morning.

As I was crossing the Kelantan-Perak border from Jeli to Grik, the sky over the hills was unusually clear. There were some menacing grey lumps above but I was sure they would soon be gone. The Zulhijjah full moon would be shining beautifully in the night as it had always been in the last 17 years. Many would hope dark clouds would permanently cast their shadow on the full moon. But many more would hope that the full moon would keep shining in this state for at least another five years. Driving my car negotiating the sharp corners and stomach-churning curves along the East-West trunk road, I was certain about crossing the border, but less so about which political weather my home state would have to endure.

Kajang
25 Dec 2007.

Bersih Rally - why I felt ashamed of myself

2007-11-10T10:17:00.000-08:00

After reading what happened at the Bersih rally for electoral reform today, I felt ashamed with myself. Instead of joining them at the rally, I decided to go to Hari Raya open house. Today is the last day for Hari Raya open house and I got four open house invitations to attend. I regret that I have opted not to get involved in pushing for change although I am disgusted with the arrogance, corruption and abuses of power of the present government. I felt like I was a coward.

Depending on which medium you get your information from, it is estimated that about 40,000 people turned up for the rally despite heavy rain, police presence and harsh warning from the authorities that the rally was illegal. It was the biggest people’s march since Anwar Ibrahim’s sacking in 1998. The state-controlled Bernama news agency estimated only about 4000 people were involved. The Bangkok Post claimed “many thousands”, al-Jazeera said “tens of thousands” and Malaysiakini.com put the figure around 40,000. Whatever the number the rally did take place despite PM’s warning and IGP's threats.

I regret that I missed the chance to stand proud with those 40,000 people and be part of history in Malaysian politics. I was not there in yellow t-shirt to march together with those people who cared about freedom in this country. I am disgusted with myself because I crave for better Malaysia but am not brave enough to be part of the struggle for change.

The Bersih coalition is made up of 71 NGO and opposition parties calling for free and fair election in Malaysia. Malaysia is expected to hold next general election end of this year or early next year amidst mounting pressures on ordinary Malaysians’ lives because of increase in prices, corruption of high-level government servants, and judicial scandal involving former Chief Justice and a prominent lawyer. Bersih demands changes in the electoral process including elimination of postal votes, use of indelible ink during voting, fair use of state-funded media and clearing of phantom voters from the electoral roll. These demands are essential to be fulfilled for a truly democratic election and legitimacy of the elected government.

The rally ended without any untoward incident and the people’s memorandum to the Agong was handed over to the king at 4.00 pm by PAS president Hadi Awang. Although Tuanku was not there to personally receive the memorandum (Tuanku was in Terengganu for official business), his secretary accepted it on his behalf. It is the people’s hope, especially those from the opposition side, that Tuanku will have a close look at the demands and truly act as king for the people. Indeed, the rakyat have nowhere else to turn to when all power of Parliament, Judiciary, the police and other government agencies openly and shamelessly side with the powers that be even in matters for which they are supposed to be independent.

Looking at how important today is in the history of democracy in Malaysia, and it happened right on my doorstep here in Kuala Lumpur, I cannot feel anything else apart from shame, guilt and cowardice that I was not there today. Even more so when I saw women among the crowd. I pray that this yellow revolution will start a fire of reform and the institution of Monarchy will once again act as a check and balance against excesses of power by our political leaders.

Daulat Tuanku!
Daulat Tuanku!
Daulat Tuanku!

10 November 2007.

Teh tarik with an old friend

2007-11-02T20:42:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I had a teh-tarik session with an old secondary school friend. The last time I met him was in 1991 - 16 years ago. It's been a long time since then. Both of us have changed in appearance. I think if we brushed shoulders in a pasar malam somewhere before we met, I would not have thought that was him, and I am quite sure he would not have recognised me.

He initially contacted me through our ex-school e-group. We exchanged a few e-mails and found out later that we were living in the same municipality. In fact he works in a nearby area as a government servant. It seems like this e-group is an excellent thing to keep old friendship alive and bring people together again.

After isyak on Saturday we sat at a kopitiam and talked about our life since SPM. He went to a local university and I was sent to London after two years of A-Levels to do engineering. He told me how he enjoyed himself a lot during university days and did not really push hard. All he wanted to do was just getting through university. After university he started working for the government. His interest in academic studies grew and he eventually obtained his master’s degree and a diploma. The next logical step is to go for a doctorate, which is the highest academic qualification that a university can offer.

He learnt recently that his application to do a PhD in the UK had just been approved and he would be flying to the UK by end of the year. I think his past work performance must have been very good to qualify him to be considered for overseas postgraduate studies. Not many people get the opportunity to study at the highest level with all fees fully paid by the government. So he said he was not going to let it go. Now that he has been given a chance to do a PhD, he wants to make up for the lack of attention he paid to his studies during his undergraduate years. According to him, in his area of work, Malaysia still needs people with expertise to be at par with other developed nations. He also told me that it was not just for him. Apart from getting his qualifications, he wanted to expose his children to life and education in the UK too. His children will also benefit from getting four years of free UK schooling. They will be able to experience an education system that is certainly different from what we are used to in Malaysia.

I cannot offer any advice on how to do a PhD because I have not done it myself, but I know that to complete it, one needs a lot of commitment, mental determination, enthusiasm, and perhaps a little bit of luck. Talking to friends who have got a PhD, I was told that in most cases it would not bring monetary returns commensurate with the effort and sacrifice that you put in. But the personal satisfaction is priceless. The joy of discovering new knowledge for the benefit of humankind is what drives some people to go through those four years of mental torture. I admire his enthusiasm to continue his studies to the highest level. Unfortunately for me, as my age approaches 40, I feel my stamina to go through the riguors of formal learning has waned down.

At this age, both of us have moved into a different phase of our life. We are now a father of four. Most of us are now pre-occupied with bringing up our children. And to most of us, after so long living in our comfort zone, having to go through another four years of burning midnight oil is just unthinkable. I think it is a lot harder to consentrate on deep thinking and research when we have so many other commitments at this phase of our life. That’s why I admire and salute those who have decided to take up the challenge.

Time seemed to run very fast. We did not realise we talked until the early hours of the morning until the coffee shop and the tomyam restaurant nearby were closing. It felt really nice to be sitting around one table again, sipping black milk coffee reminiscing about our school life and the places that we had been to over the last 16 years. Good luck to you my friend. I hope in three to four years time we’ll meet here again, sipping coffee, eating more toasts, while telling stories about your intellectual adventure. And by that time, I am sure I will be calling you a doctor.

Koleksi Pantun Raya SMS 1428H

2007-10-20T20:04:00.000-07:00

Raya tahun ini saya banyak menerima SMS Raya dari kawan-kawan. Saya telah cuba menjawab setiap satu dengan rangkap-rangkap pantun di bawah. Setiap pantun dikirim kepada individu berlainan mengikut situasi masing-masing.

(untuk seorang kawan KL Boy)
Anak teruna pergi ke pasar,
Ikan bawal dijual Cina.
Sekian lama tingal di bandar,
Tiba syawal raya di mana?

(untuk seorang kawan dari Terengganu beristerikan orang Perlis)
Anak bilis dimakan penyu,
Ikan aya ikan gelama.
Anak Perlis anak Terengganu,
Bila raya balik ke mana?

(untuk seorang kawan yang beraya di Pasir Mas)
Pulau Chenok airnya dalam,
Hantu raya mati lemas.
Walau seronok tinggal di Kemaman,
Sambut raya balik Pasir Mas.

(untuk kawan-kawan yang bekerja di Kertih)
Burung merbok minum teh,
Buaya mati di tepi telaga.
Memang seronok duduk di Kertih,
Raya nanti di kampung juga.

(untuk seorang kawan yang beraya di Batu Pahat)
Baiki rumah paku besi,
Hujan turun paku berkarat.
Ramadhan sudah berlalu pergi,
Tuan berkampung di Batu Pahat?

(untuk kawan-kawan seangkatan yang dah lama tak dengar berita)
Pergi mengail pasang pelita,
Pelita dipasang dalam perahu.
Lama tak dengar khabar berita,
Sibuk memanjang setiap waktu.

Pulau Merbok di tengah lautan,
Lima dara duduk berkawal.
Walau sibuk tugas harian,
Bersama keluarga sambut syawal.

(untuk kawan yang ditugaskan ke Turkmenistan)
Paya Chini di hujung titi,
Paya Pekan di tepi hutan.
Raya ini di KLCC,
Raya depan di Turkmenistan?

(untuk kawan yang akan meninggalkan Bangi)
Paya Chini bersih dan wangi,
Paya Pekan merah airnya.
Raya ini masih di Bangi,
Raya depan hijrah ke mana?

(untuk seorang yang menetap di Ampang, tetapi berasal dari Dungun)
Tanam kurma di tepi hutan,
Buka puasa tercekik timun.
Sekian lama tinggal di Ampang,
Hari raya balik Dungun?

Hantu raya penunggu rumah,
Alarm dipasang lampu dibuka.
Di jalanraya pandu berhemah,
Elak kemalangan selamat tiba.

(untuk seorang yang beraya di Pasir Mas)
Kalau tuan belayar mudik,
Belikan hamba segantang beras.
Dari Kajang hamba balik,
Sambut raya di Pasir Mas.

Stories from my Kitchen 3 - "Sedekad di bumi ini"

2007-07-21T20:53:00.000-07:00

Bulan ini genap sedekad aku menetap di sini. Tahun ini juga genap dua abad bandar ini ditubuhkan. Pada mulanya aku hanya mengenali Kajang kerana kemasyhurannya sebagai pekan sate nombor satu di Malaysia. Ia juga pekan yang berhampiran dengan UKM, salah sebuah universiti awam yang unggul di Malaysia. Persekitarannya dikelilingi bukit-bukit sederhana besar di kawasan Hulu Langat yang menjadi kawasan tadahan hujan dan tasik-tasik takungan air di Semenyih. Lokasinya bersebelahan dengan Bandar Baru Bangi, sebuah kawasan elit dan bandar baru yang didiami ahli akademik, profesional dan usahawan Melayu baru. Anak-anak Melayu baru hasil didikan DEB seperti aku.

Bermula dengan hamparan estet-estet getah dan kelapa sawit, tuntutan pembangunan menggantikannya dengan deretan rumah-rumah pangsa dan teres. Bukit-bukit dipotong, hutan ditebang dan pokok-pokok hijau dilupuskan. Ramai pemilik tanah menjadi kaya raya dengan nikmat pembangunan ini dan lebih ramai lagi yang terpaksa membayar harga yang tinggi untuk mendapatkan satu lot tanah tapak rumah mereka.

Pada lewat 1990an tiba pula bandar pusat pentadbiran kerajaan di Putrajaya. Ramai kakitangan awam bekerja di sana. Lalu ada di antara mereka yang tinggal di bandar Kajang ini samada menyewa ataupun membeli kediaman dengan pinjaman kakitangan kerajaan. Bandar ini menjadi bertambah pesat membangun. Bangunan tinggi dan kondominium mewah tumbuh dicelah-celah lereng bukit yang diratakan. Kos hidup mula naik, harga rumah melambung dan lalu lintas juga menjadi sesak. Lalu pada tahun 2004 lebuhraya Sistem Lingkaran Kajang (SILK) mula dibuka untuk menyuraikan kesesakan di pusat bandar.

Pembangunan melangkah begitu cepat di bandar ini berbeza dengan perubahan di kampung. Dalam sedekad aku di sini wajah bandar ini berubah dengan mendadak sekali. Gedung-gedung besar tumbuh di sana-sini, ada yang subur maju dan ada juga yang akhirnya ditinggalkan kosong kerana lokasi yang kurang sesuai. Segala kemudahan awam terdapat di sini. Masjid, perpustakaan, taman permainan, pejabat-pejabat kerajaan dan pusat-pusat hiburan. Lebuhraya baru menghubungkannya dengan Putrajaya. Kini Putrajaya hanya 15 minit dari rumahku dan ia adalah destinasi utama kami bila saudara-mara dari kampung datang berkunjung.

Di Bandar Baru Bangi, sebuah bandar baru yang terletak di kawasan Kajang, bertumpu pusat-pusat latihan dan penyelidikan bagi bank dan agensi-agensi kerajaan. Kedudukannya di pinggir bandaraya Kuala Lumpur menjadikannya lokasi yang ideal untuk tujuan latihan dan kajian. Di sekitar kawasan ini juga terdapat pusat pengajian tinggi awam dan swasta. UPM, Uniten, UKM, Universiti Multimedia, Unitar, KLUIC, MFI, Limkokwing University dan Nottingham University (Kampus Malaysia) semuanya berada di kawasan berdekatan. Di kawasan ini mungkin terdapat tumpuan bijak pandai berpangkat PhD paling padat di Malaysia ini.

Perpindahanku ke sini pada pertengahan tahun 1997 adalah kerana mengikut lokasi baru syarikat tempatku berkhidmat. Pada awalnya aku menyewa rumah teres bersama dengan beberapa orang kawan seangkatan yang sama-sama belajar di universiti. Namun pada lewat 90an, seorang demi seorang dari kami melangkah meninggalkan zaman bujang dan memulakan hidup baru dengan pasangan masing-masing. Aku sendiri berbuat demikian pada awal tahun 1998 dan menyewa rumah sendiri. Namun aku masih berada di kawasan ini kerana ia berdekatan dengan pejabatku dan juga tempat kerja isteriku. Akhirnya, kami membuat keputusan untuk membeli rumah sendiri di kawasan ini.

Selepas sekian lama dengan syarikat lamaku akhirnya aku meninggalkan pejabatku di Bangi untuk berhijrah ke syarikat baru. Namun tempat tinggalku tetap di Kajang kerana aku telah memiliki rumah sendiri di sini. Isteriku juga bekerja di bandar ini. Anak-anakku dilahirkan di sini dan bersekolah berdekatan dengan kawasan perumahan kami.

Memang aku akui keseronokan tinggal di kampung tidak diperolehi di sini. Di kampung tiada pagar dan tembok konkrit memisahkan kita. Di sana jiran adalah saudara mara. Di sini kita tidak mahu diganggu ataupun mengganggu. Aku dengan urusanku dan kau dengan masalah kau. Sekali-sekala kita bertanya khabar, itupun hanya sekadar di pintu pagar. Bukan hanya tembok batu yang memisahkan kita, tapi mungkin juga jiran kita berlainan bangsa, agama dan adat resam dengan kita. Walau apapun kita tidak akan mendapat segala-galanya. Kita hanya mampu membuat pilihan selepas menghitung segala kebaikan dan sanggup menerima sedikit kekurangan.

Aku masih ingat arwah ibu-bapaku juga merantau untuk mencari sesuap nasi. Di mana ada pokok getah untuk ditoreh di situ mereka berhijrah untuk membesarkan anak-anak. Namun kedua-duanya pulang ke kampung asal mereka sebelum menghembuskan nafas terakhir. Sekali-sekala aku akan pulang ke kampung untuk menjenguk sanak-saudara. Bila tiba hari mulia Insya-Allah jika ada peluang aku akan cuba bersama mereka. Namun ibu-bapaku sudah tiada. Kunjunganku ke kampung kini tidak istimewa seperti semasa mereka masih ada. Selepas sedekad, tempat yang dulunya asing kini sudah menjadi taman mainan anak-anakku. Di Kajang ini juga tempatku mencari rezeki dan membesarkan mereka. Aku sedar bahawa aku telah bertapak kukuh di sini. Di sini aku mula berhijrah dan di sini aku ditakdirkan menetap. Mungkin di sini aku akan bersara dan menghabiskan hari tua. Suatu masa nanti mungkin di sini juga hidupku akan menemui noktahnya.

Kajang
22 Julai 2007.

Stories from my Kitchen - 2 - "From Departure Hall to Labour Room"

2007-07-16T20:06:00.000-07:00

I was deep in my dreams when I got a call from my wife Friday morning at 6 o’clock. She told me she was having labour pain. I didn’t know what to do. It would have been simple if I was lying next to her, but I was in a hotel some 1000 km away. Panic rushed through my head. What would I do? My scheduled flight home was 6 o’clock in the evening and all MAS flights were fully booked. I already told myself to be with my wife to receive the baby because this was going to be our last child. I felt that having four young mouths to feed was enough. I am grateful to be blessed with beautiful and healthy children and having four of them is a good point to call it a day.

I jumped out of the bed, turned my laptop on and got connected to the Internet. At RM26 per hour, the hotel Internet charge was a rip-off but it was not a time to think about money. I needed to be home for the baby. I typed AirAsia.com to book a ticket to KLIA because my original MAS ticket would be too late for me to see my wife deliver the baby. The Internet site did not respond. Maybe the server was down I thought. The address could not be wrong. It’d been etched on my memory. It’s written big and clear on the Airbus fuselage. I couldn’t get it wrong. I tried to call the hotline number but the response was confusing. May be I was so confused by then that I could not even understand a simple instruction. I called my wife again at about 7 o’clock and told her to ask my younger brother to take her to the hospital. I was still hoping that her pain would just go away and that the baby would not come out so soon. After all, she had false alarms a few times before and the due date was still 2 weeks away.

After failing with the website and the confusing hotline, I already gave up hope of getting home on time. From across the South China Sea, there is no other mode of transport to get home except by air. I was away on a project for a sister company, a subsidiary of an oil and gas giant. I had planned to be home for 2 weeks starting today so that I could be with my wife in the labour room. Although the due date was the end of the month, experience from the past three children told me that our baby would arrive early this time. Two weeks was enough windows for the arrival of the baby I thought. Now that my wife was already in labour pain, the only thing on my mind was to get home immediately.

There was one option. I could just go to the airport and try to get an earlier flight. I might just be lucky to get one from somebody who cancels their flight at the last minute. After breakfast I called the AirAsia number again. I was told that there was a flight to KLIA at 10.05 am, and that I needed to check in by 9.15 am at the latest. The other flight to KL was at 7.00 pm in the evening. That would be too long for me to wait. The clock was showing 8.40 am and I only had 35 minutes to check out from the hotel, take a cab to the airport, buy a ticket and check in for the flight. I prayed to Allah to help me beat the odds. I’ve not heard of anybody who does all this in 35 minutes. Whatever the odds I felt I should pursue this to the last possible option.

I quickly grabbed my stuff and dumped it into my travel bag. There was no time to fold things and put them nicely as I would normally do. I went straight to the hotel lobby, checked out and called a cab. There was already a taxi waiting and I needed to get to the airport by 9.15 am. I kept watching the car clock while the driver was telling me stories about his daily routine. Honestly, I was not paying attention to what he was saying. I pretended I was interested in his story by saying yes when I thought he expected me to agree with him. My only focus was to get through the gate by 9.15 am as I knew AirAsia was very strict with check-in time. I was refused entry once early this year and I had to buy a new ticket for the next flight even though I felt I was there on time.

I reached the airport at 9.10 am and rushed through to AirAsia ticket counter to ask for the 10.05 am flight. The man at the counter pulled out his walkie talkie and spoke to somebody to get confirmation whether they could still allow another passenger to buy a ticket and board the plane. I held up my breath as I listened to the confirmation from the voice coming through the device. I was given all clear. My worst fear was over. I would be flying home on the morning flight. Although AirAsia was well known as a low fare airliner, at that last moment, I was not hoping to get a RM9.99 ticket anymore. The fare was actually about the same as MAS flight and no in-flight meals were served. It was fine for me. I was not really hungry anyway.

Again I rushed to the check-in counter and saw there were still several passengers checking in. My spirits were up again. I was going to be allowed to fly. I went through the Immigration counter to get my Immigration chit stamped. Barely five minutes in the departure hall, we were called to board the Airbus bound for KL.

They say AirAsia is well known for delays. But my flight was right on time. The flight over the South China Sea took about 2 hours and 15 minutes and around 12.30 pm we touched down at LCCT. I usually have a slight fear of flying but this time I was so focused on the baby that I forgot everything else. I was prepared for any eventuality. Most likely I thought I would not be able to receive the baby in the labour room. In the past, it never took my wife more than 4 hours and she had been having the pain since 4 o’clock in the morning. It had been more than 6 hours. I did not know whether my wife could wait any longer.

Upon reaching LCCT, I told the cab driver to take me straight to maternity ward at Kajang Hospital. It was Friday prayer time and the road was packed. I think it took about an hour to get from the airport to the labour room. When I reached the hospital my wife was already lying in pain in the labour room. The nurses said that she had asked them to delay the birth because she wanted to wait for me. I was asked to wait outside the ward and they would call me when the baby was about to come out. It is not a normal practice in government hospitals to allow husbands to be in the labour room during delivery but I think they made an exception for me. My wife is a nurse at the hospital and among those in the labour room were her own colleagues . I was asked whether I would be fine seeing a lot of blood. After getting my assurances they agreed to allow me to be beside my wife during the delivery. My prayer was answered. At exactly 2.26 pm a baby boy was born weighing 2.8 kg. My life is now complete. I have 2 pairs of children – 2 sons and 2 daughters. I could not ask for anything better from God.

When I look back at the whole episode, I remember it again. As my bag slid into the X-ray machine and I went under the metal detector gate at the airport, I was overcome with emotions. I was so thankful to AirAsia for carrying me home. The face of its founder Anthony Fernandes, better known as Tony Fernandes came to my mind. Had it not been for his visions, many people would not be able to fly today. If there were no AirAsia alternative flights, I would not be flying home on time to be with my wife when the baby arrived. Thank you very much Tony! If you had a muslim name I would have named my baby after you. The closest muslim name to yours that I can think of is Ahmad Firdaus. It’s Arabic for “Heaven”, a name that has very good meaning indeed. It rhymes well with Anthony Fernandes too! I have come across many Firdauses in my life, and as far as I can remember, they are all generous and well mannered people. Maybe it was just a coincidence. A week earlier I was sailing to an offshore oil platform on a superfast crew boat named “Firdaus II”. I am not superstitious and I don’t believe in any signs. But I think it’s a nice name and I will not run the risk of not having enough spaces when I fill up the forms at the National Registration Department.

Not many stories these days end with a happy ending. I am glad mine did. Alhamdulillah, it all went well and God safely took me home from a departure hall some 1000 km away to the labour room at Kajang Hospital to welcome my baby. Welcome to the world my son. Welcome to the world Ahmad Firdaus!

At home in Kajang,
Currently on paternity leaves.
17-7-2007

07.07.07

2007-07-11T19:47:00.000-07:00

They say this date comes only once in a century. But actually all dates only happen once. Every moment that has passed will never come back. That is why every second of the day is special. So what is your memory on this special date? Well, mine is quite exciting to me because at 7.07 am that day I was traveling on a super fast crew boat to an offshore platform off the coast of Sabah. I was on a day visit to the platform to do a review on some offshore pipelines – those big cylindrical pieces of metal that carry so much of oil and gas from beneath the surface of the Earth through the bottom of the sea down to an oil/gas terminal on the mainland. We don’t see them that much because they are usually either lying deep in the ocean or buried a few feet beneath our feet. They are mostly invisible but are indeed lifelines for the oil and gas industry. I’d say they are everything that a politician is not - silent, low profile, unglamorous but yet do their job in the most efficient way.

Many people grabbed the opportunity to hold important events on this date. Couples tie the knots. Expecting mothers pray for their babies to come out. Punters queuing up for hours to buy the number only to be told that somebody else already bought it. It’s funny why some people are so obsessed with numbers. I remember almost 19 years ago when it seemed like half of the world’s Chinese got married on 8.8.88. Supermarkets held super sales with items selling from as high as RM8888.88 to as low as RM8.88. I was still a student then. Didn’t really have money to go on shopping spree.

On a different note, people in the UK were remembering their 7/7 bombing in London 2 years ago. Security was tightened, as there were fears of another attack on the second anniversary of the deadly underground terrorist attack. Again, it’s funny why they think the terrorist would choose to attack again on the same date, when any thinking man would figure out that their potential victims would be most alert! If the terrorists were somehow connected to al-Qaeda, why would they choose a date of attack that coincides with an anniversary according to the Christian calendar, something, which I assume, is the last thing for them to follow. If they do celebrate anniversaries and somehow plan to attack again on the same date, I would assume they would use the lunar calendar instead. The terrorists might be using weapons made by the West, or technologies developed by the Infidels, but most probably they don’t give a damn about the Western anniversaries or calendar system.

I think it’s just us being human. We like parties and celebration. And this seventh day of the seventh month in the seventh year of the millennium is another excuse for us to celebrate. Punters loved it because they felt lucky that day. Capitalists embraced it for the profits and terrorists chose the date for reasons known only to them. The rest of us liked it simply because it was easy to remember. I wonder what reasons we can come up with to welcome 08.08.08 next year. Till then, keep celebrating!

Miri
12-07-07

Stories from my kitchen - 1

2007-06-30T00:13:00.000-07:00

To go or not to go – a dilemma

Dedication: This post is specially dedicated to SK and KTS – you guys are now global pipeliners! And to all Malaysian expatriates out there.

“Hujan emas di negeri orang,
hujan batu di negeri sendiri”

By the end of the month (June) two of my ex-colleagues, who are both pipeline engineers, will have left the country and landed in a foreign land. One will be going to the Middle East and another to Europe. Their overseas adventure will be temporary as I believe they never intend to permanently live in those countries. Theirs is merely a journey for new opportunities to learn, experience different culture and of course much better pay! They will join many Malaysians before them who have stepped out of their comfort zone into unfamiliar life in a faraway land.

Both of them, and the majority of people I know who have left the country, are in oil and gas industry. No doubt it is doing very well these days because of the high oil price. More fields need to be developed and more crude oil needs to be extracted. Everybody is thirsty for oil, but China and India, driven by the need to power their industrialisation, are sipping up more and more barrels by the day. While supply of this fossil energy is limited, the demand seems to be endless. Crisis in Iran and Iraq, both being major oil producers, pushes the price even higher. But not all is gloomy. My friends in Petronas are all smiles. Only yesterday Petronas announced record pre-tax profits of RM76 billion on the back of strong oil price. With another 6 months bonus (hopefully), my dear Petronas friends, that new Honda Accord is no longer beyond your reach!

If you look at the recruitment section of popular newspapers, there has not been a week without job advertisements for posts in the Middle East. Some of them even go on recruitment roadshow here in Malaysia to attract experienced people to join their company. I am not sure why they need to look east this time around. Traditionally they would naturally seek help from the West to help extract their oil. Maybe because of fear of terrorism, more Mat Salehs find it less attractive there, and we are more than willing to fill the vacuum.

But not all is “brain drain”. In the current age of globalisation, Malaysia, like other countries, has seen a lot of foreigners coming in to seek better opportunity and life in this country too. Millions of workers arrive on our shores to work on our plantations, factories, petrol stations and our own homes. This phenomenon has been widely discussed in the media partly because of the increase in crime rate and social problems brought in by the flood of immigrants, and probably not less, by the misterious dissaperance of stray cats and dogs on our streets! What is less discussed is the fact that this country is also host to about 100,000 expatriates from developed countries who work at senior positions in our banks, hotels, IT companies, engineering and other high-tech industries. Within the company I work for, more than half of the staff are expatriates. As part of a global oil and gas giant, most of them are here on a 3 to 4 year assignment, and will move on to a new location after that period. But to Malaysia’s credit, a recent survey in Expatriate Lifestyle magazine reported that they are staying here for longer period and many actually buy houses under the Malaysia My Second Home incentives. With average income of about RM32,000 per month, and insatiable appetite for Malaysian food, sand, sun (and sex?), their contribution to our economy is not insignificant.

All those wonderful stories about fat salaries, overseas vacations, big cars, nice house and the all glamourous expat life sometimes make me ask myself why I am still here. My RM salary will never be able to buy that kind of luxury. Not that I have never been enticed into it before. A few years ago I was asked by an engineering manager of a Middle East petroleum company whether I would like to be considered for a position at his company. I said I would give it a thought but after considering potential inconveniences to my family and other matters I decided to decline the offer. I guess I am too confortable in my current life. I am afraid to take the plunge into uncertainty. I don’t deny the opportunity for better life that is available there. I wish my friends and all those who have taken up the challenge best of luck. I am sure they will come back with invaluable skills for the future of Malaysia. As for me, I am comfortable here. Yes my current job offers less money and the KL traffic gives me stress. I agree our schools could be better and our society needs to be more equitable. I can tell you I hate paying expensive tolls or putting up with rampant corruption. Our government officials need to do more and our politicians suck. But, despite all the imperfections, I am still here because it's the only place that I can call home.

Kajang
30 June 2007

Iklan Makanan Ringan di TV diharamkan

2007-06-23T02:10:00.000-07:00

Saya amat mengalu-alukan keputusan kabinet untuk mengharamkan sepenuhnya iklan makanan segera seperti Maggi, Mamee, KFC, McD dan yang sejenis dengannya di kaca TV. Sebagaimana iklan rokok dan arak sebelumnya, saya berpendapat ianya memang keputusan yang tepat. Kepentingan kesihatan rakyat Malaysia perlu mengatasi keuntungan syarikat-syarikat TV dan juga syarikat makanan ringan berkenaan. Statistik kementerian kesihatan menunjukkan peningkatan masalah kesihatan yang berkaitan dengan pemakanan kurang sihat di kalangan golongan muda di negara ini. Malah saya berharap kerajaan bertindak lebih tegas lagi dengan menaikkan cukai terhadap makanan tersebut untuk membendung gejala peningkatan jualan makanan segera yang merosakkan kesihatan itu.

Suatu ketika dahulu kita lihat bahawa syarikat rokok menguasai stadium sukan kita dengan menaja acara-acara sukan besar. Kebimbangan bahawa sukan Malaysia akan merosot disebabkan kehilangan sumber kewangan nampaknya tidak berasas kerana sukan kita memang sentiasa di tempat tercorot pun!

Namun usaha untuk menggalakkan orang Malaysia mengamalkan pemakanan sihat tidak perlu terhenti setakat pengharaman iklan makanan segera sahaja. Budaya makan di luar di mana kita dihidangkan dengan serbuk perisa MSG, garam dan gula yang berlebihan juga perlu dikikis.

23-6-2007

Book Review: "I am Muslim" by Dina Zaman

2007-06-23T00:57:00.000-07:00

I like reading slim books that I can finish before I lose interest in it. And this 236-page book fits well with the definition of a slim book. It’s been on the local non-fiction best seller list for quite a while. The author is a well known writer on the news website Malaysiakini.com. The book is not exactly a continuous story but instead a collection of previous writings by the author which have been rearranged under different chapters with different themes. It is obvious from the writings that the author is a liberal muslim. She was educated in the UK and had been to many places around the world as she followed her diplomat father but somehow could still relate with her hometown in Terengganu. I think her upbringing inevitably shaped her worldview and liberal interpretation of Islam. Generally, people tend to be more liberal when they mix with people of various cultures.

She writes on various dilemmas faced by modern urban muslims trying to fit in with modern secular life. As a journalist she is not afraid to spend time in a different community in order to find out about their belief and practices. She has been able to juggle her seemingly contradictory lives pretty well. She spent a month with a zikir group in Indonesia (Nursyifa) to purify her soul, hung out with gay friends in KL and talked openly about it, consulted her local ustaz on religious matters and, being Malay, also sought the help of a shaman (bomoh). There are also pieces about her struggle to grasp the meaning of life after her divorce.

If you are looking for guidance on Islamic law or way of life, this book is definitely not a source. It is just a Muslim woman’s personal experience of seeing Islam through her own Western-educated liberal thinking and trying to make sense of the society in which she lives.

"I am Muslim" is published by Silverfishbooks and priced at RM30.00

Kajang
23 June 2007

You are still my Wira

2007-06-08T22:23:00.000-07:00

(Read a story about a man's love affair with his car)

Our love affair started in a Proton showroom somewhere in Selayang back in December 1997. It was a particularly disastrous year for the rest of the country. Malaysia was choking with thick haze, the worst environmental problem that this country had ever faced. Our ringgit was tumbling down into what was going to be the worst financial disaster as well. With the help from somebody who had connections, we were officially engaged three months earlier after I beat some other prospective buyers in a normally 6 month long waiting list. Your lot was that popular back then. Your more curvy sisters, the Gen2 and the Savvy, and your more muscular brother, the Waja, were not yet born. They painted you blue, not because I couldn’t differentiate red and green but because blue was my favourite colour. We started our life together on the first day of Ramadan that year. It was the first time I entered the world of mobility.

Just over a month later, we greeted the coming of my other life partner, somebody who would occupy the front passenger seat for most of your working life. You were witness to some of our romantic times together as newly wed couple. I was on top of the world. I had a brand new car and new wife too! What else could a man want? Friends joked about the similarities and differences of a new car and new wife. One said I needed to treat both of them gently. One I paid cash while the other was on a loan. I was told to avoid going into potholes with one but not the other! And whatever they said, truly I enjoyed both.

Exactly one year later you faithfully took my wife and me home through the jungles of Pahang and Kelantan while the baby inside her could pop out any moment along the way. She wanted to deliver our first baby with family members around and you safely delivered us home. We celebrated the third member of my own family, somebody who would be occupying one of your seats at the back. No complain from you and you kept performing like new. I took you to a Proton service centre for regular check-ups. Just the normal lube and filter change. I complained about them charging too much but I knew I had to go to them because you were still under warrantee. You clocked more than 20,000 km in the first year, a distance far enough to go around the world. Your water pump started making abnormal noises but you were perfect again after I was forced to replace it. You drank very little – a 30 ringgit fuel would take us from Kajang to Pasir Mas. Of course as you get older, you drink even more. Now you need 60 ringgit worth of fuel to go the same distance. But I know it’s not just because you drink more, it’s also because fuel price has increased a lot in 10 years.

Because of my lack of driving experience, you had a number of bruises and a few near misses in the first few years of you life, but so far you have spared me from any bruises. I got your broken bumpers and dent mudguard replaced, repainted and you became spotless again. The roof started to show signs of blisters after a couple of years. Over the years it corroded even more and I had to replace it. That was the time I decided to change your colour. It was time to give you new clothes I thought. But underneath I know you are still you.

Three years after you came into the family you proved to be useful again. I will never forget taking my ailing mother from Pasir Mas to Kajang to spend her last days with me. I also remember how well you performed when we trailed the ambulance from Kajang to Pasir Mas bringing my mother home when she was gravely ill and wanted to breathe her last in her own home. Though she is no longer here, I am sure she enjoyed the ride taking her to places that she had never been the whole of her life. The family went to Melaka to see Hang Tuah, to Pangkor and Port Dickson for holidays, to KLCC to see the tallest twin towers in the world. I could see how appreciative she was going to these places after spending nearly 50 years of her life in rural Kelantan.

Over the years I have been tempted to dump you for a new one. There are so many attractive new prospects in the market with various easy payment schemes. The temptation is always there. Probably something that can carry more people as my family has grown in number and size. Perhaps something more comfortable from the MPV species. But every time that thought comes up, I look back at how faithful you have served me and my family and I quickly find reasons to still keep you in my garage.

I admit I have not been a good owner. I am not the man who spends two hours every Sunday morning caressing his car. I am sure you will understand that I’ve got other more important things to do. Sometimes you go for months without bathing, left in the hot sun to bake yourself or soaking wet in the afternoon thunderstorm. But you should know by now our relationship is based on a simple motto: you are here to serve me, not the other way around. They say the average Malaysian changes their car every four to five years. Our relationship has survived twice that long because you have become so sentimental to me. We grow old together. I have raised my family with your help. You make me feel guilty to dump you for something new.

Yesterday I went to the JPJ office to officially cancel the ownership claim from my previous employer who had financed the loan. I know I have fully repaid the loan two and a half years ago but I kept postponing the trip to JPJ until yesterday. They put a stamp on your registration certificate and now you are officially my Wira. I don’t know how much longer can I keep you in the face of so much temptation out there. But for now at least, after almost 10 years, you are still my Wira.

Kajang
9 June 2007.

Four Weddings and A Funeral

2007-06-07T10:22:00.000-07:00

I remember this expression as a popular British romantic comedy movie in the early 90s starring Hugh Grant. It was hugely popular in the UK around 1994 and if I am right it was the movie that established Hugh Grant as the best romantic comedy hero that Britain has ever produced.

This time around, the school holiday season was greeted with wedding invitations from friends and relatives. The first wedding I attended was that of a friend who works at the engineering consultancy company where I used to work in KL. I must say that the wedding invitation came as a surprise for me as I did not expect him to get married that early. But then according to him “the call has come” (sudah sampai seru). It was on Sunday so it was a breeze to get to central KL where it was held. The ceremony was accompanied with the beating of kompang and later followed by a live band playing songs from the 60s.

Later in the evening I was again attending a wedding of an old friend. This one was a rather grand one as it was held at a golf club in a KL sub-urb. It was the first time I attended such a grand wedding ceremony. I did not know the way to the place so I decided to get a lift from a friend who also got invited. Five of us who attended the same university as the groom were seated around the same table. It was quite an experience since some of us had not met since we left the university. Twelve years of stories to catch up in a space of about 2 hours. Not so much to catch up with the groom though as he was busy with the bersanding ceremony. But never mind, instead we were entertained with jokes and pantuns from a very well known TV presenter, Wardina Safiyah who was the MC and happens to be a student of the groom. My friend, the groom who is now an architect with his own practice, has chosen one of his own workers, as his wife. I knew him as the most hardworking and committed student during his university days. With that kind of passion in his craft, I am sure one day he will be a very successful architect and businessman. I wish both of them the best of partnership.

Fast forward six days later, I was back in my kampong attending the wedding of my cousin. She is the daughter of my uncle who had played host to my brother’s wedding a year ago. I felt that I was very much indebted to my uncle’s family as he had acted as “our parents” in all matters that needed presence of family elders since my parents’ death. The daughter had also helped baby sit my children for 3 months before I got a maid. So it was a kind of obligation for me to be home for the occasion. Fortunately, my wife’s leave was approved and the whole family could travel up to our home village for a few days.

The wedding was held in full Kelantanese tradition (plus a bit of Thai influence as we were in Pasir Mas!). The kompang and live band of KL is not the taste here. Instead the couple was greeted by a performance of silat cantik followed by tomoi (Thai boxing) complete with traditional musicians playing gendang (goat skin drums), gedombak, serunai (flute) and gong. I thought this was the time to meet all my relatives in one place all within one day! And I did meet most of them that day. One that I also met was my mother’s cousin who invited me to her son’s wedding the day after. So off I went to the fourth wedding in a space of one week! I couldn’t escape it as I was personally invited by the Mak Cik herself.

The next morning I got an SMS from a friend informing me of his grandmother’s death. Unlike weddings, one can never plan to attend a funeral. But it’s something that must happen when the time comes. I knew my friend’s grandmother as a rice trader in Pasar Pasir Mas. Until a few years ago, when she became ill due to old age, I used to buy rice from her before my trip back to Kajang. The rice from Pasir Mas, which mostly comes from across the border, is special not only because it’s cheaper but also because it tastes better. Her passing symbolises the passing of one generation of Pasir Mas woman traders from the scene. No doubt, new generation of Kelantanese woman traders are already hard at work. Life must go on. From Allah we came, to Allah we Return.

Kajang
8 June 2007

An observation of European and Malaysian work culture

2007-05-18T21:23:00.000-07:00

I work for a European-based multinational company at their
regional office in KL. Let me try to explain what I
find interesting about European work culture and
Malaysian (or Asian generally) work culture.

Half of the staff in my offcie are Mat Salleh and they
bring their work culture here i.e. we are not
monitored on how long we stay in the office, but
instead on our deliverables. The first day I reported
for duty my boss told me that he was not going to
monitor where I work. All he is interested in is I
deliver what I am supposed to deliver in the given
time.

We practise "work from home policy". I can work at
home if I like. I just need to inform my boss that I will
not be in office, but I will be working at home. We
have Virtual Private Network by which I can get access
to all my office files on the office server. I can
check my mails, run applications, and even have
telephone conference with people in office as if I was
in the office. Not just that, some depts within the
company (mine not included though) even get their
broadband Internet bills paid by the company so that
they can access their mails and office files from
home. It's quite a "culture shock" for me being so
used to the Malaysian way of monitoring the person and
not the product!

The other culture is "work life balance". I dont think
I can ever get used to this practice after a decade of
spending 10 hours a day in the office. We place too
much emphasis on how much time we spend in office. To
us spending long hours in office is good, honourable
and productive to the company. They have completely
different view. They feel guilty if they spend too
much time in office or don't go on holiday when they
are supposed to. Many times I was asked why I was
still in the office late in the evening by the boss on
his way out. And I can tell you the way he asks the
question is definitely not like he's going to give you
a pat on your back!

To encourage staff to live a balanced life, all staff
are entitled to use the well equiped gym located on
the ground floor of the office building. Most of the Mat
Salleh use this facility. As for me, getting stuck in
traffic jam or getting squeezed in an armpit of a
fellow commuter in the KTM train is enough to raise my
heartbeat as much as I could get from running on a
treadmill!

They try their best to make the office environment as
relaxing as possible. That may sound conflicting as
you are supposed to work in the office, not to relax!
But you won't belive me if I tell you that they plan
to install a massage chair in the office so you can
sit on it and treat youself to a relaxing massage
after long hours at the workstation. Just recently
they installed a Starbucks-like coffee brewing machine
( I heard it costs as much as a Kancil) so staff can
treat themselves to freshly-brewed coffee in the
office. Instant Nescafe is just not their taste!

They also place top priority on safety. Every week an
electronic newsletter will be circulated with reports
of incidents, near misses, and lesons learnt. As most
of us are consultants and need to travel a lot to
client sites, they issue Travel Alerts every week
advising staff of possible dangerous situation in the
place where we're going. And according to company
policy, we have to fasten our seat belts even if we
are sitting at the backseat whenever we travel on
company business.

In some of these work aspects, may be we are already
moving in the right direction. But I think there's
still a lot we need to catch up with them.

Kajang
19/5/2007

Komen terhadap emel "Mekah dan Las Vegas..."

2007-04-21T08:26:00.000-07:00

"Makkah sekarang sudah seperti Las Vegas”. Mungkin tajuk emel itu tidak sesuai kerana kota suci Mekah diletakkan seolah-olah sama dengan Las Vegas. Semua orang tahu bahawa Las Vegas adalah ibukota judi dan maksiat dunia sementara Mekah dianggap oleh orang Islam sebagai kota suci mereka. Namun saya percaya apa yang ingin disampaikan oleh penulisnya adalah untuk membuka mata umat Islam semua bahawa mereka sedang diulik lena dengan kesenangan dunia di tempat yang paling suci bagi mereka.

Mari kita kupas satu persatu kebimbangan yang diutarakan oleh penulis.

Komen 1: “Ka'bah yang terletak di tengah masjid Haram dan menjadi arah sholat Muslim sedunia, semakin tenggelam oleh berdirinya gedung-gedung tinggi.”

Sebagai kiblat umat Islam secara simboliknya ia tidak patut ditenggalami oleh bangunan lain yang mencabar simbol ketinggian syiar umat Islam. Bahkan di Malaysia sendiri jika kita perasan, banyak masjid dibina diatas bukit atau di tempat yang lebih tinggi dari tempat ibadat agama lain. Inikan pula kiblat umat Islam, sudah tentulah jika ia ditenggelami oleh bangunan kommersial ia menampakkan umat Islam sendiri yang lebih mengagung-agungkan dunia dari akhirat. Dan yang lebih penting ialah, Kaabah adalah kiblat umat Islam. Jika ia dipenuhi gedung-gedung komersial yang sinonim dengan dunia, bukankah secara simboliknya juga kiblat kita sudah berubah kepada kebendaan?

Komen 2:“Makkah saat ini makin penuh dengan bangunan-bangunan tinggi mulai dari hotel, pusat perbelanjaan dan toko-toko besar yang menjual produk Barat. Sebut saja kedai kopi Starbucks, Cartier and Tiffany, H&M dan Topshop.”

Apa yang juga membimbangkan umat Islam semua ialah dengan popularnya jenama dan produk-produk Barat itu, bukan saja ia mengagung-agungkan keduniaan melebihi akhirat, malah kita umat Islam dijajah minda dan ekonomi. Minda kta dijajah dengan mendewa-dewakan jenama Barat dan ekonomi kita dijajah kerana membelanjakan wang yang dikumpul seumur hidup demi menunaikan haji sebaliknya untuk memperkuatkan ekonomi Barat yang sememangnya anti-Islamik.

Komen 3: “…mempertahankan peninggalan- peninggalan bersejarah di Makkah, Madinah dan tempat-tempat lainnya di Arab Saudi.”

Ini satu lagi sebab mengapa kesucian tanah Haram perlu dipertahankan. Kita tahu Mekah adalah penting di dalam sejarah umat Islam. Dengan membina bangunan tinggi mungkin ada peninggalan sejarah Islam yang musnah samada secara sengaja atau tidak. Ingat pada zaman ini, musuh tidak perlu melancarkan bom atau roket untuk menakluki Negara Islam. Mereka hanya perlu melekakan kita dengan produk dan budaya mereka yang memuja-muja dunia. Bila kita sudah leka dengan sendirinya kita akan menerima apa saja yang mereka bawa tanpa perlu paksaan lagi. Malah cara halus ini lebih berkesan dan merbahaya kerana kita akan terus leka tanpa menyedari bahawa kita sebenarnya berada di bawah telunjuk mereka.

Strategi Barat, terutamanya Amerika, untuk menjajah umat Islam dan menguasai sumber asli hasil bumi kita tidak pernah berakhir. Kalau sebelum perang dunia kedua ia diketuai oleh British kini tugas itu dipegang oleh Amerika. Pada awalnya Negara Arab mundur dan ekonomi mereka langsung tidak bergantung kepada orang lain. Namun setelah penemuan minyak, mereka mendapat kuasa ekonomi baru. Strategi Barat untuk menindas Negara Arab berada di saat genting pada tahun 1973 apabila pihak negara-negara Arab telah bersatu dan mengenakan sekatan ekspot minyak ke Negara-negara Barat yang menyokong Israel semasa perang Arab-Israel. Pada ketika itulah setengah pemimpin Arab sedar bahawa minyak boleh digunakan sebagai senjata. Sekatan tersebut telah membuatkan harga minyak naik mendadak di Amerika dan negara Barat. Sedar dengan hakikat itu, Barat telah merangka strategi untuk menguasai Timur Tengah yang kaya dengan minyak itu dengan cara halus jika boleh. Tapi kalau tak berjaya mereka akan gunakan kekerasan seperti mana di Iraq.

Selepas peristiwa pahit itu, Barat juga mahu menggunakan minyak kepunyaan Arab itu sebagai senjata mereka. Mereka sedar bahawa Arab selalu berpuak-puak dan selalu berebut takhta dan wang. Mereka telah membuat pakatan dengan pemimpin Arab untuk “menolong” membangunkan Negara Arab yang mundur dengan membawa masuk segala bentuk kemodenan yang berorientasikan Barat. Barat berjanji mereka akan membantu Negara Arab keluar dari kemunduran dengan membawa teknologi mereka untuk membina prasarana di Negara-negara Arab. Tapi pertolongan mereka bersyarat; Negara-negara Arab mesti memberi kontrak pembinaan kepada syarikat mereka dan melaburkan semula hasil durian runtuh kenaikan harga minyak di Amerika. Maknanya walaupun Amerika terpaksa membayar harga minyak yang tinggi, mereka mendapat balik wang mereka melalui syarikat-syarikat mereka yang “membantu” membina jalan, lebuhraya, lapangan terbang, bangunan dan sebagainya. Malah mereka dapat lebih dari itu kerana pemimpin-pemimpin Arab ini “diminta” melaburkan semula wang hasil minyak mereka di New York, Wall Street, Chicago, Boston dan kemungkinan juga di Las Vegas! Sebagai balasannya pihak elit pemimpin Arab ini akan dipastikan terus memerintah Negara mereka selagi mereka sanggup melaksanakan agenda Barat itu. Dengan cara itu lama kelamaan ekonomi Negara Arab ini menjadi lebih bergantung kepada Amerika dan Negara Barat lain. Dan dengan kebergantungan ini, adalah mustahil Negara-negara Arab akan mengenakan sekatan minyak terhadap Barat kerana ekonomi Negara Arab juga akan musnah jika mereka mengambil tindakan itu.

Strategi di atas adalah penjajahan secara halus. Namun jika cara ini tidak berjaya atau dihalang oleh pemimpin Arab yang dilihat sebagai ancaman, cara kekerasan akan digunakan. Lihat saja apa yang berlaku kepada Saddam Hussein di Iraq yang dahulunya merupakan sekutu Amerika semasa Iraq memerangi Iran. Hukuman yang diterima oleh Saddam merupakan amaran kepada pemimpin Arab bahawa mereka akan menerima padah jika cuba melawan Amerika.

21/4/2007

The 1A Grand Prix

2007-03-17T22:04:00.000-07:00

17 March 2007

The SPM results were announced last week. Students throughout the country finally ended their wait. Again there was brouhaha as to who scored the most number of 1As in the country. Some people jumped the gun by announcing to the whole country that a student from their neighbourhood had obtained 19 1As even before the results were officially announced by the Ministry of Education. They later learnt an embarrassing lesson that they should have been a little bit patient when the said student fell a little short of expectation by getting only 14 1As 2 2As and 1 3B. Even the PM was dragged into the ensuing row when he told the Malay paper which published the story to apologize to the student and her family for causing false hope.

At the other end of the country a student from religious stream scored 17 1As and 1 2A, which even beat the current record of 17 1As achieved in 2004, did not get publicized in the mainstream newspapers for reasons known only to them. When asked to comment on it, the Education Ministry DG said a student was considered the best only if she got all 1As. The logic of the DG completely baffles me. So folk, next time tell your kids not to take more than the minimum subjects because she’ll risk getting a 2A, ruin her chance of becoming a best student and your chance as happy parents to put your pictures in the newspaper too.

With so many smart students trying to outsmart the others, it is a matter of time a student will try to get 25 1As and commit suicide because she only gets 24 1As. Some quarters are pushing the authority to put a cap on the maximum number of subjects to stop the rat race of top scorers. It seems we are putting too much emphasis on our girls to get more As than the girl next door. If the number of As is any indication of our improved quality of students and education we will have no problem of producing 20 Noble laureates by 2020 as inspired by our former PM. But education is not just memorizing and regurgitating facts. It needs creativity and new ideas and somebody who is dare to push them forward and challenge existing convention. A student who thinks she is worthless because she only gets 24 As out of 25 is unlikely to pursue something new because she is afraid of failure. All her school life she expects and gets perfect score but real life is not an exam with specified curriculum. Failure is part of life’s learning process. The Americans and the Europeans do not take as many subjects in their secondary school but come out as inventors and pioneers in almost all fields of knowledge. The richest man in the world for 13th year in a row, Bill Gates, failed at university and yet contributed so much to our daily life. What originality have we achieved in the field of knowledge other than blatant copying of software and intellectual property of other people? With so much emphasis on rote learning, sometimes I wonder what kind of childhood my five year old son will have when he is burdened with homework every day.

The other thing I was wondering was whether any boy took SPM last year. Does SPM really stand for Sijil Perempuan Malaysia? All the top scorers are girls. What is happening to people of my gender? Are they going towards extinction? Are we evolving into Mat Gian and Mat Rempits? Are we becoming dumber and dumber? Hey you guys out there, I need some answers.

On good economic figures, jobless graduates and the next general election

2007-03-09T07:11:00.000-08:00

There have been a lot of speculations about the date of the next general election in the press lately. I am not sure whether this is a sign of an impending general election or just another news item to divert the public opinion from a real issue. The signs are there: good economic figures, victory from recent by-election in Batu Talam, and talks within BN coalition members of seat allocations. But despite the good economic indicators being splashed in the papers almost everyday, living expenses are up, foreign factories are closing down leaving for cheaper countries and more graduates find themselves going after fewer jobs.

I am not sure if the majority of the people are benefiting from the supposedly good economic performance. Toll rates are up and so are prices of essential goods. Unemployment is rampant. Only today the NST reports that too many people are chasing too few jobs in the public sector to the point that graduates are also applying for jobs which do not need university qualifications. For every vacancy advertised by a government department the number of applicants easily exceed the number of available places by 100 to 1. Although looking at the positive side this can be interpreted as more people are now choosing to work for the government possibly because of better perks, it could also mean these people are unmarketable in the private sector. In other words, they have no other choice. They simply are not at par with the demands of the better paid private sectors. As for the date of the next general election, I think the best indicator so far would be to look out for Umno flag poles being erected, their branch office signboards being put up or repainted, and Umno men roaming around with party membership forms. It proved to be accurate in the 2003 election. Most likely it will be accurate again this time around. I believe that when the Umno flag poles are up, the poll will soon follow.

5 March 2007.

Koleksi SMS Raya Saya

2006-10-28T08:49:00.000-07:00

(Koleksi SMS Raya yang saya hantar tahun ini. Setiap SMS dihantar kepada orang yang berlainan)

Kalau gelang biar emas,
Hiasan lengan tuan puteri,
Dari Kajang ke Pasir Mas,
Berangkat pulang saya bercuti.

(dihantar kepada seorang yang dikurniakan rezeki yang lebih)
Hisap rokok di pagi raya,
Rokok dibawa dari China,
Pohon maaf terkeji terkata,
Duit raya aku mana?

Kalau gelang biar emas,
Hiasan lengan tuan puteri,
Puteri jelita muda belia,
Dari Kajang ke Pasir Mas,
Berangkat pulang saya bercuti,
Cuti raya sama keluarga.

(dihantar kepada seorang kawan yang bergelar Doktor)
Sakit hati jumpa dukun,
Sakit jantung jumpa doktor,
Sepuluh jari amba susun,
Mohon ampun jika terlanjur.

(dihantar kepada seorang kawan penganut Hindu)
Makan roti sapu kaya,
Makan tosai kuah kari,
Kami sini sambut raya,
I wish you all happy Deepavali.

Dini hari pergi dusun,
Lepas sahur padam pelita,
Sepuluh jari kami susun,
Tangan dihulur duit diminta!

Makan ketupat daun palas,
Enak dimakan bersama-sama,
Ana beraya di Pasir Mas,
Anta pula beraya di mana?

Anyam ketupat tepi sungai,
Daun palas digulung-gulung,
Kalau mandu jangan cuai,
Ingat nahas tidak beruntung.

(dihantar kepada seorang yang bernama Fitri)
Anak kecil makan megi,
Puasa yang yok makan sembunyi,
Berkat mulia aidil fitri,
Semoga Fitri selalu diberkati.

(dihantar kepada seorang yang beraya di Shah Alam)
Tasik Chini banyak garam,
Tapi lautan lagi masin,
Tahun ini raya Shah Alam,
Tahun depan raya di Aberdeen?

(dihantar kepada seorang yang berasal dari Batu Pahat)
Pergi kedai beli gamat,
Beli gamat di kedai pak man,
Tahun ini raya di Batu Pahat,
Tahun depan raya di Oman?

Syawal 1427.

Singapore vs Malaysia

2006-10-28T08:38:00.000-07:00

(in response to Malaysia being highly rated as compared to Singapore by their ASEAN neighbours as reported by a survey)

Singapore is just like Israel...always has siege mentality...always thinks highly of themselves, surrounded by hostile neighbours...close relation with the US...and militarily strong...I am not surprised if one day they secretly develop nuclear weapons too.

But in many ways we should emulate them. Their universities are among the best in the world (NUS is top 25 in the world) while our best can only be no.192nd? On this I think our Government should allow at least one university to be truly based on Meritocracy. Let them choose their own VC, take in students based on merits (regardless of race), practise true democracy in student elections, promote professors based on academic excellence and do away with bumiputera quota just for this one university. Let's see this university can be as good as NUS. The outcome will prove whether or not our poor ranking is due to absence of Meritocracy and lack of freedom due to Univ & Univ Colleges Act. If the ranking improves then we know the real reason why we are rated so low on the world ranking.

Other things that Malaysia would do well to emulate are their achievements in biotechnology. In fact, the have created Biopolis, something like our MSC but forbiotech where they attract famous professors/researchers from US and Europe to do groundbreaking research in biotechnology. Some years ago Malaysia also has a scheme to attract Malaysian professionals working abroad to return and contribute to development of this country. But I hardly see any "brain gain" coming our way. What I see is the reverse - "brain drain". I can testify to the fact that some of my Malaysian friends and many others who are now in Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia etc.?

On world ranking for corruption perception they also do better than us. While we claim we are true Muslims (model for the Muslim world), we don't do well on the corruption index either.
And, by the way, two other muslim countries have won the Nobel Prize for this year: Turkey for Literature and Bangladesh for Peace. What happened to this model Muslim country of ours?

17-10-2006

Book Review: “The Diarist” by (Tan Sri) Abdullah Ahmad

2006-10-06T16:35:00.000-07:00

Another book that is in my travelling bag these days is a political diary by Tan Sri Abdullah Ahmad “The Diarist”. He is a veteran journalist and was Editor-in-Chief of NST before he was sacked in November 2003. His book is slim (120 pages) but packed with anecdotes and witty comments about Malaysian politicians and politics in general. He is very secular and very much anti-American as he is anti-Pas. I sometimes wonder how he can reconcile both extremes. As a politician he has tasted the sweetness of power as an UMNO Supreme Council member as well as the bitterness of the lack of it after five years under ISA detention in Kamunting from 1976 to 1981. He is a Cambridge-Harvard educated “old guard” of post-Merdeka Malaysian politics who served under three PMs.

His job as NST Editor-in-Chief took him to various places interviewing prominent politicians, covering VIP visits or simply playing golf with his golfer buddies. He was MP for Kok Lanas, Kelantan and a Deputy Minister at one time. But, alas, in Malaysian politics and business, what another former Editor-in-Chief of a Malaysian daily (Datuk Johan Jaafar) once said prove to be right. Speaking from his own experience after he was axed following the sacking of Anwar, JJ observed that in Malaysia one whole generation of Malay businessmen would be replaced when a new UMNO leader came to power. The NST diarist was unceremoniously dismissed from his paper in 2003 soon after Pak Lah was made PM. Obviously, he was not one of Pak Lah’s favourite editors. Without a full time job, perhaps he can concentrate on writing his memoir. I notice, unlike politicians in the UK or US, not many of our retired politicians engage in writing about their experiences for future generation of leaders to learn. It would be a waste if their wealth of experience followed them to the grave.

p/s: Have yet to read LKY’s “The Singapore Story” and still waiting for our Tun Dr M to sit at home and write his memoir rather than trading insults with the current PM.

Kajang
7-10-2006

Book Review: Goerge Soros - "The bubble of American Supremacy ..."

2006-10-06T16:23:00.000-07:00

I bought this book at a discount price on a business trip to the City of Miri, Sarawak (actually I don’t think this place qualifies as a city at all, but that’s another story).

Goerge Soros is a student of Karl Popper, the famous philosopher of Science, so his writing is very much philosophical as it is political. He made a lot of money from currency speculation (once he speculated on the British pound and made 1 billion pound profits in one day! He's eventually known as the man who broke the Bank of England). He sees opportunities in movement of currency exchange and deals with it to gain profits. Some would say he is a modern day robber – may be a Robin Hood in reverse, as in the case of Asian monetary crisis he robbed from the poor (us) and gave it to the rich (them). But he's not regarded as a criminal because, I guess, he's not gone against any international law.

He wrote "the bubble of American Supremacy ..." just before the 2004 American election in order to persuade American people not to vote for Bush. He's very much anti-Bush, anti-neo-cons and anti-War. He supports the Democrats. He says in his book that the Iraq war had been planned by the neo-cons since 1997 when a group of neo-cons urged the then President Clinton to increase American military spending. In effect, these neo-conswere pushing for the president to exercise American military might to maintain American Supremacy ("Project for New American Century"). He's saying if these neo-cons are able to control America and the world by influencing Mr Bush's decision, American image to the world will be hurt. He agrees that the US should exercise leadership in the world but that it should not adopt a heavy-handed approach. America will be more respected by showing leadership through diplomacy than military action. Unfortunately, as we all know, Mr Bush got re-elected and he's going to carry out the neo-cons plans to attack Muslim contries with huge oil resources whose leaders are not yet undertheir control. Only history will tell whether the American Empire, based upon coercion and military force will rule the world, or like empires before it, will crumble into the dustbin of history.

So that's the gist of it. I am sure many have heard/read about this before. The Malaysian press is not really fond of him after he broke the Bank Negara in 1997 sending this country and the region into a regional financial, and later political crisis. Mahathir wrote a very fiery book on the 1997 crisis and hurled a lot of bad accusations against him.Surprisingly, he only had one sentence reference to the man who had called him a moron. He called him a repressive ruler.

23/9/2004

On Writing

2006-09-22T19:31:00.000-07:00

Life in oil and gas industry is very hectic now that oil price is above USD60 a barrel. I barely find time to read and even less to write. But when the urge comes I have to put my pen to paper (or rather fingers to keyboard!) and let out what is going on in my mind. I suppose because I am not a man of spoken words, I have to somehow release what I have to say in writing. That’s what got me into writing. I started writing on irregular basis (whenever I feel like it) when I was a student abroad, about 10 years ago. When I did my post-graduate degree, I was left alone by my undergraduate friends who had gone back home right after their graduation. There was plenty of time for me to read, ponder and observe. I was also fortunate to live in a university town with whole community associated with academic life.

I started reading non-engineering stuff after spending so much time during my undergraduate years staring at figures and equations. So that was how I developed my interest in reading which I have kept alive ever since. Reading has helped me a lot in improving my language skills. I read anything that I can lay my hands on, whenever I have free time (which is not much these days), and wherever my absolute focus is not required somewhere else (like while driving or talking to a beautiful woman!). My best companion while reading is a good dictionary. If I come across an unfamiliar word more than twice, I will stop and look it up in the dictionary. I am a poor memorizer but if I can remember 2 or 3 out of 10 new words that I come across I would call it a success.

I believe no matter how technical (in engineering/scientific sense) a person is, deep inside her, there is the “art” side. Some people express their creativity in making music, writing songs, lyrics, novels, painting etc. I suppose mine is just writing about myself. If I was younger I would probably sign up for Akademi Fantasia! If I had good looks I would probably try my luck at acting. After all, singers and actors seem to be the Idols of the young these days! If I was a rich divorced businessman with killer moustache, better still I would probably marry an attractive young singer and invite a TV station to telecast my wedding live! But I am just ordinary man trying to raise a family.

I don’t know what I want to do yet. One moment I am thinking of working overseas and earn more money. Some of my friends have already packed up their bags and flown west to the Middle East. Some take the risk and venture into their own business. Some just stay here and simply run through the 9 to 5 routines. I stepped out of my comfort zone last year by leaving big and established company to join an engineering consultancy. I think that taught me some lessons in taking risks in life. In time, I hope it will prove to be a good decision.

Kajang
21/9/2006

Stories from My Childhood

2006-09-18T08:34:00.000-07:00

The other day I was scanning my old photos on a newly bought scanner after years of neglect and in danger of fading into oblivion. I had planned to do it for quite some time but never really enforced unto myself any definite deadline. But I had lost a lot of my old colour photographs. Over time the chemical used in processing the photos reacted with moisture in the air and slowly eating up the colours. All of my secondary school days memories captured on camera are now gone. So are those of my undergraduate days in London back in the late 80s and early 90s. Now I have to visit my friends during those years and look at their pictures hoping that I am somewhere in there if I wanted to glance back into my younger days. Fearing the same fate would befall the memories of my research days, I decided not to put the photos in albums. My decision proved to be right as most of the pictures of me riding my bike to the turbomachinery research lab are still untouched. I hope my new scanner will save the day and whatever is left of my photos will be preserved for my children to see.

As I was flipping through the dust covered photo albums, I laid my eyes on a black and white photo dated around early 70s. Perhaps because of different chemical used on the paper, it was not affected by the same process that had destroyed my other colour pictures. It was a picture of me at about four years old sitting on a mengkuang mat, looking down with my left hand touching my little sister. The day was hot and the photo session took place in front of a coconut tree just outside our wooden house. I was shy of the camera but my little sister stared straight into the lens. My mother made me wear a worn out shirt and shorts, probably the best my parents could afford at that time. Draped around my sister’s neck is a locket attached to a gold necklace. In those days it was not just mere ornament but more importantly a means of survival to be taken to a pawn shop whenever we ran out of rice. And I imagine my family must have lived through days and months without the necklace during rainy seasons when my parents could not work on the rubber trees. It must have been tough living through the days when our daily survival hung on that piece of gold kept in a pawn shop. Sitting on the mengkuang mat, I could not look into the camera even with constant request from the cameraman. I remember the cameraman was a travelling photographer who went to our village from house to house selling his service. I imagine it must be an unnecessary indulgence to get a family portrait in those days considering the same money could be used to buy the family dinner. But I am glad my parents made that decision. The memory is still with me and I will be able to pass it on to my children.

I have moved places quite a lot since the picture was taken more than 30 years ago. Some years ago, I visited the place again. The kampong is now barely recognizable; it’s now part of the rapidly expanding township. The sight of buffalos bathing in mud ponds in the paddy fields is now replaced with rows of terraced houses. The old sawah padi, which used to fetch a few hundred ringgit a piece is now going at tens of thousands. The piece of land on which my family’s wooden house was built is now taken by TNB for the National Electricity Transmission Grid. Whole neighbourhood had to make way for the Grid. It was not my parents land; it belonged to my uncle. We were allowed to live and work the land, but the land title was not in our name. The places where I had spent my early childhood are now covered with bushes and shrubs spanned by long overhead cables carrying high voltage electricity. Unless you are an archaeologist out on an excavation trip, it’s hard to notice even traces of past human activities there. No sign that families had actually grown up there. I walked up to an old man cutting grass for his cows and introduced myself to him. He did not recognise me but said it rang a bell when I reminded him about my father. He asked about my father who was waiting in my car parked close to the main road. I told him that my father was not well enough to walk up this far. The man sent his best regards to his old friend and neighbour and I left him there to continue reaping grass for his cows. I continued to walk, trying to find traces of our old wooden house. Later I realised nothing existed anymore except in my own memory. I took a long deep look at my childhood playground, snapped a few pictures and slowly headed back to my car. As it turned out, it was the last time I took my father to visit his old farm and the place where he raised me as a small boy. His health condition never improved and he died a year later.

The place in the old picture is no longer there. I don’t know what eventually happened to the necklace. Perhaps, there were times when things got so tough that my parents had to just let it go. The mat probably became so worn out later that it had to be thrown away. The shirt and shorts that I wore that day probably met the same fate. But the picture somehow survived to tell stories from my childhood.

Kajang
8 September 2006

Merdekakah kita?

2006-09-18T08:28:00.000-07:00

Kebelakangan ini saban hari di kaca TV, di akhbar dan di Internet berita pembunuhan umat Islam di seluruh dunia disiarkan seolah-olah mereka dilahirkan untuk dihina, dicap sebagai pengganas dan dibunuh sewenang-wenangnya. Di Lubnan, Palestin dan Iraq negara mereka dijajah dan perang saudara berleluasa. Negara mereka dipecah-pecahkan, suku kaum yang berlainan dilaga-lagakan supaya mereka senang untuk diperintah. Taktik kotor penjajah British pada kurun ke-19 yang memecah dan memerintah diulang tayang semula di negara Arab oleh penjajah baru Amerika. Kalau dulu alasannya menyebarkan agama Kristian dan peradaban Barat kepada dunia Timur yang kuno dan mundur, kini ia diadun semula dengan kulit demokrasi, kebebasan dan perang melawan pengganas. Kalau dulu muslihatnya ialah untuk mendapatkan bahan mentah dan membuka pasaran baru, kini habuannya adalah kuasa ke atas minyak dan sumber tenaga dunia. Mereka semua adalah sama. Tapi kita tidak dapat berbuat apa-apa kerana mereka menguasai segala-galanya. Kuasa media digunakan untuk mengaburi mata dunia, ekonomi untuk mendesak sokongan dan ketenteraan untuk menghapuskan negara Islam. Aku rasa rakyat biasa dan umat Islam sedar akan penipuan ini, namun kita tidak dapat berbuat apa-apa. Tangan dan kaki, mulut serta telinga pemimpin-pemimpin kita diikat lalu mereka bagai lembu dicucuk hidung yang akan mengikut saja apa yang diperintahkan oleh tuan mereka walaupun rakyat menderita.

Sebagai individu yang lemah apa yang boleh kita buat? Ramai antara kita lupa bahawa kita sebenarnya menyokong ekonomi mereka dengan menggunakan produk-produk mereka. Apa kata kalau kita semua sedar dan bersatu untuk memulaukan barangan mereka dan berubah menggunakan produk alternatif dari negara-negara yang tidak memusuhi Islam? Ini sajalah usaha yang dapat kita lakukan di dalam keadaan serba kekurangan sekarang. Sedarkah kita bahawa banyak produk yang mereka perkenalkan kepada kita sebenarnya tidak diperlukan untuk kelangsungan hidup. Siapa perlukan kopi Starbucks yang berharga RM10 secawan sedangkan pekerja ladang kopi di tempat asal bahan tersebut di Colombia hanya diupah RM10 sehari? Siapa perlukan burger McDonalds sedangkan nenek-moyang kita dulu dapat hidup sehingga 80 tahun tanpa pernah mengidamkan makan daging dengan roti bun. Dan siapa perlu minum Coca Cola kalau air nira kelapa kita pun lebih enak dari minuman berasid itu? Namun media di sekeliling kita mengubah persepsi dan membuatkan seolah-olah barangan tersebut sekarang adalah suatu keperluan. Media massa melalui iklan yang bertubi-tubi mempengaruhi jiwa kita supaya menggunakan produk yang tidak perlu. Kita sudah terlalu bergantung kepada media untuk memberitahu kita apa yang kita perlu makan dan bagaimana menjalani hidup supaya kita nampak bergaya dan tidak ketinggalan zaman. Akhirnya penjajahan minda sudah lengkap dan kita hanya mengikut telunjuk mereka. Kalaulah kita seperti orang asli di hutan yang tidak kisah dengan TV dan radio. Kalaulah kita seperti mereka tidak tamak mencari duit untuk bergaya dan mengejar gaya kehidupan yang kebendaan. Tentunya kita akan lebih merdeka.

Kajang
31 Ogos 2006

I'm lovin' it

2006-07-28T22:24:00.000-07:00

I have been quite depressed lately. My fellow muslims are being killed in Beirut and Palestine. Their homes are bombed, their country surrounded and citizens taken hostage. My brothers in Iraq are killing one another. Lunatics blow themselves up in mosques in the name of Islam. They seem to like killing one another than fighting their enemy as one. My friends in Iran are being threatened with bombs and sanctions. We are told that the whole country is led by a suicidal extremist who will threaten the whole world if he gets his hands on a nuclear bomb. Another fellow muslim country, Afghanistan, was bombed to pieces, the old regime changed and they still could not get public enemy number 1. Closer to home hundreds die in killer earthquakes and tsunamis in the most populous muslim nation in the world. Barely have they been able to recover from a disaster when another one follows. It seems the life of people who embrace Islam is cheap these days. So cheap that we can be killed at will and nobody stands up to defend our rights. Even natural disasters seem to prefer muslims to other people.

There is no doubt that as a people we are very weak. We are not united and bent on killing. So bent on killing that we engage in killing each other when we should join forces together in defending our land from our common enemy. I have never seen muslim being in such a low and weak position as we are today. And I am quite sure during my lifetime I will never see our enemies stop killing defenceless muslims. I don’t think I will ever see during my lifetime muslims rise up again and stand up to defend their rights. Our leaders are merely puppets, unable to even say out their disapproval of what is being done to their own people. Most of them keep their mouths shut lest they are next to be subjected to regime change. Our Shia and Sunni camps are always ever ready to blow themselves to smithereens in order to kill the other camp. Little do they realise that while they are fighting among themselves their oil is being pumped out to fuel development in some faraway countries.

As I am writing this the Israel military are preparing for ground invasion of Lebanon. More bombs from USA are being sent to their closest ally in the Middle East to ‘neutralise’ Hizbollah capability. We will see more muslim blood being shed. Another muslim country is being invaded on the pretext of disarming ‘terrorists’. The invader, the strongest army in the Middle East, is yet again on expansion mood backed by the only superpower in the world. Militarily we are too weak to fight back.

They say the least we can do is perhaps stop buying American products. But that’s difficult, isn’t it? I mean how can I do it when I am typing this on a Dell laptop, using Microsoft Word and now posting this on Yahoo! I don’t see our future. It’s all so bleak. Shall I just shut my eyes and pretend that this is all not happening? Perhaps I should just stay tuned to Akademi Fantasia 4 or read more of Siti Nurhaliza’s wedding on Harian Metro. Yes, perhaps that will cheer me up while I sit tight in front of my TV watching Superman on HBO, sipping Coca-Cola and gorging a McD. I’m lovin’ it!

22-7-2006
Kajang

Pantun Minyak Naik

2006-04-13T21:17:00.000-07:00

I got to the office late again
Too many people, I couldn’t board the train
Thought of using my own transport
But fuel price is high I can’t afford

My boss was angry and wanted explanation
Write show-cause letter or he’ll take action
He wants things to change for the better
But how can I do that when everything’s pricier?

The Government announced fuel price hike
Too much subsidy, the Govt don’t like
They want people to change lifestyle
Sure we have to but it’ll take a while

30 cents per liter is highest increase
Never in history had it gone up like this
But who are we to say no?
Perhaps the Opposition, consumer groups and NGO

My teh tarik price will surely go up
It will cost more to enjoy my favourite cup
Mamak stalls association says it has no choice
I want to complain but nobody hears my voice

Transport operators are also complaining
They cannot believe that this is happening
How can they absorb the mounting costs?
They ask,” Who wants to operate at a loss”?

Electricity tariffs are up next
TNB wants approval of the Cabinet
It’s been ages since last revision
But they’ve been making profits by the millions!

Last night the DPM came on TV
To explain to the people why it was necessary
Fuel price is up to reduce subsidy
Haven’t we heard that many times already?

Compared to them, our fuel is still cheap
So we are told by Datuk Seri Najib
But why compare with other countries
Stop blaming our neighbours, pleeez!

Embracing globalisation is the way to go
Open your market so says WTO
Increased efficiency the desired result
Reducing subsidy is a good start

People’s benefit always in mind
The rich, the poor will all be fine
Reduce subsidy to finance projects
But rich contractors get all the contracts!

Many people will feel the pain
Endure it now for long-term gain
I think this trend will be maintained
Until one year before Election

Don’t drive your car to save fuel
Talk to your friends and go on car pool
Or even better just take a bus
Save on toll, less money to PLUS

So next time you take a bus ride
Don’t feel so bad, do it with pride
Less jam, less stress, no worry about toll
That’s very good we’ve all been told

I am a little man with no power
Always saying yes and meant to suffer
What can I do to make a difference?
Don’t give them vote in next Election?

No matter what people say now
They will forget it, you and I know
There will be goodies in Election year
And they will return this government to power!

March 2006

(Streamed out of my mind during a suffocating train journey to work from Kajang to KL Sentral, while staring at the roof, on an unusually crowded coach, nervously wondering whether I would be late)

My new year resolution

2006-01-09T03:33:00.000-08:00

It is going into the second day of the year and I am watching the Hollywood blockbuster Pearl Harbor on TV. My nurse wife is working on night shift and I am left at home taking care of my three little kids. I don’t normally stay up this late to watch a movie, but tonight I feel like giving the Americans the chance to explain why they had to drop the Bombs and stopped World War II. Now I know they had to annihilate Hiroshima and Nagasaki because two young men were fighting over a beautiful nurse! When the movie ends at half past one, my kids – 2 daughters and a son - are all fast asleep. I carry all of them – one by one – upstairs to the bedroom and I begin typing these words.

At this hour everyone is deep in his dreams. I don’t feel like sleeping as my mind sieves through the things that I have done in the past 12 months. In February 2005, I moved into my own home after 10 years of being a tenant. I had been saving some money for this move. Within two months I used it all on renovation work and some furniture. I think with the same amount of money I could buy a bungalow in Pasir Mas. But no one in Pasir Mas would employ me as an oil and gas pipeline engineer. Not until they find oil in Pantai Sabak or gas in Sungai Kelantan!

It’s been more than ten years since I got back from studying abroad and served the company who had sponsored my studies. I felt like I needed to decide what to do with my professional life. I had reached a crossroads and I had to make a choice. I am not the type who likes doing anything drastic to my life. But last year I did break from my normal routine and made a major decision. I thought I would continue to be comfortable in my familiar environment, going about my 8 to 5 routine. But series of things happened and I was pushed into making the major decision. I thought if I did not do it then, I would be consigned into a life of predictable routine. So I resigned from my fairly secured job which promised relatively easy life. I left a big government company to join a small private consultancy. I resigned at the point when my former employer was at the top of their performance, and when they were at their most generous moment. A crazy decision many would say. But I followed my heart and did what I did.

Last year saw two deaths in my extended family. My drug addict uncle died at the age of 34, suspected of HIV/AIDS. That was early in 2005. He left behind 4 small kids and a wife. I still see them every time I visit my kampung, just to see how they are coping with life. I make sure I leave them some ringgit notes, but my contribution is just a drop in the ocean in the face of their uncertain future. Another uncle died unexpectedly just 9 days short of the New Year. Unlike the other uncle, his children should be fine. He was a retired teacher and owned some pieces of land. I went to his house to see him 10 days before his sudden death but he was not at home. He was up and about even two days before his kidney and other vital organs failed, so nobody expected this to happen. Sadly, I missed the last chance to meet him. The last time we met was during Hari Raya Puasa of 2004. Fate has it that I was never going to see him alive again after that.

On a happier note, there were also some weddings and births in my extended family. On most occasions, I was not able to attend the ceremonies. I just hope they understand that because of the distance it is not always possible for me to be there. Two thousand five also saw the birth of my third child, Sofea. Now my family is five people. An ideal size considering the mounting costs these days. After celebrating some births and mourning in funerals, I can’t help but realize that the old generation is being gradually replaced with new one, and I am pushed one step higher in the pyramid of responsibility. If this worked like a multi-level marketing scheme, pretty soon I would be a millionaire!

The school holidays are drawing to a close. I wish I had spent more time teaching my children – especially the eldest one who is now moving to Standard Two. I had let my children watch too much TV. I know it will be hard but I hope I will be able to teach them to see less of Disney Channel and help them to pick up books to find enjoyment in reading. On Tuesday, I will join thousands of parents across the country taking their kids back to school after the long break. This year, I will have to dig deeper into my pocket to pay for my daughter’s school fees, books and transportation. Definitely a lot deeper than last year as prices of things have gone up. The school bus Mak Chik now demands 50 ringgit per month, a raise of RM20 from last year’s RM30. I thank Pak Lah for reducing my car road tax by half but I am afraid he is going to have to do better than that to win my vote. The savings from one year’s road tax can only pay for two months of my daughter’s school bus fare! School books will cost another RM100 on top of two hundred or so already spent on uniforms, stationery and other accessories. Now I understand why my brother, who works as a factory security guard with three children attending school, is having a hard time.

As the clock struck 12 last night, fireworks were launched to the sky. My daughter and son begged me to take them outside our home to watch the distant firework display over the hills of Kajang. And so I watched fireworks exploding in the sky with my children as 2005 disappeared into the night. This new year, I hope there will be more time to see my kids grow. More time to teach my daughter ABCs, to watch her struggle with her homework and to see all of them blow their birthday candles. I wish I could play these golden moments in slow motion. But I know as soon as those 365 days have passed, another 365 start counting down. I’d like to live this moment and slowly appreciate it. I know if I don’t the kids will be all grown up in no time. Soon, when they leave home for boarding school, or pursue their dreams at university, the fireworks display will probably still be there. But it’s not going to be the same. I dread the time when I may have to watch it alone. The day when the kids are all gone to lead a life of their own.

Hope for Pasir Mas

2005-12-22T21:02:00.000-08:00

I did not plan to go back to my hometown Pasir Mas this time around but it so happened that I had to visit my mother-in-law this weekend. My sister, brother and mother-in-laws were about to leave forMekah to answer God’s call for pilgrimage. It is customary that whenever members of your extended family go for Hajj, you attend the doa selamat andthen see them off at the airport. This one is no exception. Everybody who did not want to be disowned made his journey home, no matter how far. And thus all members of my wife’s family gathered at the family house in our village in Pasir Mas. The eight hour journey through the interior of Pahang was not a stroll in the park, but it gave me a rare opportunity to talk to my brother who acted as co-driver.

I have made journeys like this countless times ever since I started working and living in the west side ofthe Peninsula. I wished they had built a four-lane toll-free highway from Kajang to Pasir Mas so I could cut short the journey by half. I am still wishing.

Nothing is interesting about this trip except for the fact that this town had just received nationwide attention after a bitterly fought state seatby-election last week. The election was forced by the death of Pas rep for the seat of N12 Pengkalan Pasir.Until last week, this town had been under Pas control for the past 15 years. It was one of their remaining strongholds after the big swing to BN in the last general election. The town looked different from usual. Its usually dark streets are now flooded with tall spotlights with visible signboards reminding people of which party installed the damned things. Election posters for all parties were still hanging on trees, power cable poles and buildings. The usual dacing and bulan purnama fought for space at every corner. The independent candidate, ex-Umno stalwartDatuk Ibrahim Ali chose umbrella as the symbol of his side, perhaps mindful of the frequent rain that can happen here all of a sudden at this time of the year.

This by-election was crucial for both parties. For Pasit was about maintaining their razor thin majority. For BN it was about showing the people that the tideof change from the last general election was inevitable and irreversible. Eventually BN managed to wrest the seat from Pas who had ruled over the last 15 years, thanks to postal votes. The majority was thin but at least the efforts of their federal leaders, including PM, DPM and various ministers, with the help of all government machinery, money and the media did not come to naught. Pas blamed it all on Pos Malaysia and phantom voters. Some say the new rep is not wakil rakyat but merely a wakil pos. As for Ibrahim Ali, he disappeared together with all his umbrellas. Somebody told me he spent two million ringgit to split the BN vote. They took his money but apparently did not need his umbrella. Pas offered RM15,000 to catch pengundi hantu but I am quite sure BN can double that to set them free again! Either side, they had the opportunity to make money. Big money.

It is one of the ironies of democracy. In a communitywhere party politics run in their blood, sometimes victory is decided by a minority group. In this case, the small Chinese community vote was vital as the split among the majority Malay voters was about thesame. Perhaps feeling appreciated by their community leaders who took time to visit, the Chinese community votes went to the BN. This would not be surprising outside Kelantan, but in this state, politics can go against the norm. It is not unusual to see non-Muslim Chinese campaigning for Parti Islam in Kelantan. In the heat of the election campaign, both sides promised to bring changes to this town. BN promised to tackle traffic, drainage system and lack of cleanliness problems. Pas said they would build a flyover to replace the existing level crossing across the railway tracks. Both sides promised to make good on their election promises. And they better do it, or else they will see the people’s wrath in future elections.

As somebody who was born and bred here, but earns a living in KL, I only hope for the better. I think the people of this town also share my views. The barber I visited did not seem to care who got the seat. He just wanted to make a decent living. With cheap goods crossing the Thai border at Rantau Panjang-Golok, he could still afford to charge me six ringgit less than my Kajang barber did. The petty trader I talked to was certain he would go to the kenduri to celebrate BN victory even though he was reluctant to say who he voted for. Politics apart, whoever wins, I hope they will bring the much needed development to this town. It used tobe Kelantan’s second biggest town in 1970s but has since been overtaken by other Kelantan towns likeTanah Merah and Gua Musang. The town has not had a proper wet market ever since the Pasar Besar was razed down by fire in the mid-1980s. Instead its market is located in wooden buildings next to the town railway station. Perhaps due to lack of funds its cleanliness has had to take a back seat. When it rains, especially this monsoon season, the wet market really lives up to its name as shoppers hop from one stall to another trying hard to avoid the puddles. It is not very much different from Pasar Besar Kajang on a wet day!

After three days of visiting family and relatives, Ihad to drive back to Kajang. This time I did not have a co-driver. My brother had to go back to Shah Alam for work one day earlier than me. I had to do all the eight hours of driving on my own. Plenty of time forme to think and ponder as I went up and down the hills of southern Kelantan and Pahang. Plenty of time too to compare the development of the town of my birth with the rest of the Peninsula. Perhaps wishing for a four-lane toll free highway from Pasir Mas to Kajang is too wild a dream. But I’d like to see that some of the promises of the last by-election become a reality the next time I go back to my hometown. I hope theywill make it worth my while going through the long drive.

16 December 2005

UMNO dan penyakit orang Melayu

2005-07-18T02:09:00.000-07:00

Terpampang di dada akhbar Mingguan Malaysia hari ini tentang temuramah dengan PM sempena perhimpunan agung UMNO minggu depan. Isu hangat yang dibincangkan ialah agenda Melayu dan rasuah politik yang menjadi-jadi dewasa ini. Aku sebagai orang Melayu sendiri tak berapa pasti apa itu agenda Melayu. Yang aku tahu agenda pemimpin-pemimpin UMNO ialah mengaut kontrak-kontrak kerajaan dan menyerahkannya kepada bukan Bumiputra dengan harapan untuk dapat untung atas angin. Itu persepsi aku setelah sekian lama mendengar PM dulu dan sekarang meluahkan rasa kekecewaan mereka dengan bangsa Melayu yang enggan berubah sikap.

Di sebalik Islam Hadhari yang dicanangkan oleh kerajaan sekarang, belum nampak tindakan drastik yang diambil untuk menghapuskan rasuah. Seorang bekas Ketua UMNO Bahangian dan bekas Ketua Menteri yang berhutang judi sehingga RM7.1 juta di London tidak dikenakan apa-apa siasatan oleh BPR. Bagaimana dia boleh mengumpul harta sebanyak itu sedangkan rakyat di negerinya sendiri masih ramai yang tinggal di rumah air. Aku sedikit optimistik bila seorang naib presiden UMNO dikenakan tindakan disiplin baru-baru ini kerana memenangi jawatan itu dengan politik wang. Nampak seolah-olah ada semangat baru untuk membersihkan parti itu dari najis politik wang. Namun aku kembali pesimistik bila kes bekas Ketua Menteri itu ditutup begitu saja.

Seperti tahun-tahun sudah, kali ini mereka akan bersidang lagi dan meluluskan resolusi dengan berapi-api. Kemiskinan Melayu akan dibincangkan. Keciciran pelajar-pelajar Melayu akan diperdebatkan. Masalah pengangguran dan gejala sosial remaja Melayu akan dilaung-laung. Nasib kontraktor-kontraktor Melayu yang bilangannya hampir memecah rekod dunia itu akan diulas. Ekonomi orang Melayu akan dikaji dan Islam Hadhari akan diteliti. Namun sebaik sahaja kereta-kereta mewah mereka meninggalkan hotel lima bintang tempat mereka menginap, apabila imej Dewan Merdeka yang gah itu mula hilang dari cermin kereta mereka, mereka akan teruskan hidup mengejar kemewahan. Kertas-kertas kerja kemiskinan Melayu mungkin akan ditong sampahkan. Kemiskinan Melayu? “Ah, itu bukan masalah aku. Aku orang Melayu kaya”. Kepada mereka yang membangkitkan isu ekonomi Melayu, mereka akan berkata, “lihatlah aku orang Melayu yang berjaya dalam ekonominya”. Apabila diajukan persoalan masalah gejala sosial Melayu jawapannya mungkin “mana aku ada masa memikirkan itu semua. Otakku perlu diperah untuk memenangi kontrak bina sekolah yang berharga puluhan juta itu, dan bagaimana untuk menyerahkannya kepada Ah Chong untuk disiapkan”. Bagaimana pula dengan konsep Islam Hadhari? Aku pasti jawapannya, “Islam Hadhari tidak menghalang kita menjadi kaya raya!”.

Dan mungkin ada yang bertanya kenapa aku memikirkan senario yang begitu mengecewakan ini. Aku tak pasti jawapannya. Dr Mahathir dulu dan Pak Lah sekarang juga melahirkan perasaan yang sama. Jikalau merekapun tidak dapat memberikan jawapan, biarlah ia kekal menjadi soalan.

17 Julai 2005.

The ultimate price of freedom - oil

2005-07-12T03:10:00.000-07:00

Four bombs exploded in Central London on Thursday 7 July 2005 killing at least 50 people and injuring up to 700 others. The timing was chosen to coincide with the G8 Summit in Scotland where leaders of 8 most industrialised countries meet to discuss global warming and poverty in Africa. Tony Blair in his immediate response to the atrocities hit out at the attackers by calling them terrorists and that the purpose of terrorism was killing innocent people indiscriminately. Just like Bush and John Howard of Australia, whose people had similar experience of being targeted by terrorists, he quickly pronounced that the terrorists were out to destroy freedom and Western civilisation. As if borrowed from Bush speech in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attack in America, he also repeated that the Western way of life would prevail over the terrorists who seek to impose their extremist idea on the world. It was a good platform for the powerful to appear on worldwide audience and potray themselves as victims.

Yes, I do symphatise with the victims of this indiscriminate killing of innocent people. They are just ordinary people like us who just want to get on with their lives. Most of them are probably against the war in Iraq and subjugation of other Muslim countries; the very reason the terrorists say they were avenging. But if the leaders of powerful Western countries simply ignore the very roots of terrorism and turn their deaf ears to the resentment towards foreign dominance in Muslim countries the growing problem of terrorism is not going to be solved. Yes, we should not talk to terrorists but the longer the Western powers control their land and oil, the stronger their resolve become. Perhaps they will not win in the end, but many innocent people will become victims. The daily bombings in Iraq which kill dozens of people each day is not news anymore. More than 100,000 ordinary Iraqis have been killed since the American-led invasion in March 2003. Nobody cares about this number. They just lost count. It’s only news when American or British troops are also killed. They only count the dead if it’s American or other foreigners. But then I should have known better. The people who bring the news to my TV set are BBC or CNN. I should not expect them to tell the Muslim side of the story. After all they say they are sacrificing their lives in bringing FREEDOM to the oil-rich freedom-poor states. I think the world appreciates their effort but if I were the Arabs I’d say, “YES, thanks for your help. But, we still have this cynical feeling that you want something more in return - our OIL”.

9 July 2005

Modern day pirates and old day explorers

2005-05-24T02:39:00.000-07:00

The management of the company I work for wants all staff to delete all unlicensed software from their computers. This follows pressure from the top who themselves must have been pressured by higher authority. The higher authority may be instructed by government official to clean up or face consequences. And our government is probably acting after being pushed by certain foreign government with some threat of retaliation. To encourage creativity and entrepreneurship, those with excellent ideas and willing to take risks should be rewarded. So say the advanced countries whose main export are ideas, creativity and high-tech stuff. They produce the stuff so it’s only logical that we pay them to get the product. Those who are involved in selling software, movies or CDs without license are labelled as pirates. Fair enough. Except when you look back into history and start asking questions.

The other day I was watching a documentary on TV about the stealing of Egyptian treasures by Western collectors. Among the most prominent is the Rosetta Stone, the finding of which made it possible to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs (ancient writing using symbols). The stone is now in the British Museum in London after it was brought from France. The French took the stone together with countless Egyptian mummies to Europe during their colonisation of Egypt. One of Egypt’s own prominent scholars in Egyptology was calling for the return of the stone to Egypt because it is Egyptian national treasure and rightly belongs to Egypt. The British has so far turned deaf ears to his request. He was sad and angry because while the British could enjoy the beauty of stolen Egyptian priceless artifacts, the Egyptian themselves had been deprived of pieces of their ancient civilisation.

The theft of ancient Egyptian treasure is just one example. There are countless other treasures taken from less developed part of the world during the colonisation of these countries. Malaysia was not exempted. Many documents of historical significance to us are now jealously guarded in the major libraries of Europe. A serious scholar who would like to study about pre-Independence Malaysian history has to visit the British Library, Oxford, Cambridge or Leiden for original manuscripts. Similarly, one has to visit Britain or France to study Egyptology. God knows how much of less developed countries’ wealth was used to build their countries into advanced nation status. In old days, they might just have taken it for free knowing fully well that the uneducated natives did not appreciate the significance of their own heritage. When they came back after long journeys with all the priceless stolen items, they were hailed as great explorers and conferred titles by their monarchs.

So it’s a bit hypocritical of them now to accuse countries of the East of stealing their intellectual property when their ancestors took away our treasures as if they belonged to them. At least they should return all our priceless treasures before they ask us to pay for their ideas and so-called intellectual property. Instead, they keep it safe in their museums, claim it as their own and dare to impose fees for visitors, including the rightful owners of the artifacts, who want to see it. So next time you go shopping for VCD or computer software, bear this in mind. They have been robbing our wealth for centuries. For us, now is the time to explore.

22 May 2005

Pipeline Engineers Wanted

2005-05-15T18:14:00.000-07:00

The rising world oil price has some good effects for people like me. Oil companies want to produce more oil and transport it to their customers. Every barrel sells at higher price and they make better margin. The big oil companies all report hefty profits. The company I work for also is expected to announce bigger profits. More fields that were not economically viable may now become more attractive for exploration and production. More development activities need more engineers.

It’s the supply and demand thing. The supply of engineers, especially those with experience, is fixed while the demand suddenly jumps. It’s not a surprise therefore a mainstream newspaper today advertises posts for pipeline engineers for two international companies – one big US company and one Middle East operator. They must be paying handsome amount of money to those qualified. I am not sure if I am qualified but the offer looks really interesting. It’s going to be a big change from my daily routine if I decide to take the plunge. A friend took the challenge more than a year ago and is now glad that he made the choice. But, on the other hand, I know many people are willing to give the world just to work for my current employer. It seems so nice looking from outside. But from within the other pasture appears greener. It’s probably normal human nature.

They say separating with your first company is like, well … your first wife. It’s difficult going from one to two, but any number after that is no sweat. The embarrassing thing later is probably when you are desperate to get back with your first wife after she has improved her figure and by then is married to your ex-gardener!

Being in this company for so long has created so huge a “comfort zone” that is almost impossible for me to leave. Yet I feel the need to make some major decisions about my career now that I have been here for more than a decade. I need to learn something new and increase the breadth and depth of knowledge in my chosen field. My learning curve here is almost flat. And with that so is my career development. I need to get involved in doing something fresh, make more contacts and see the whole wide world. I cannot let others or circumstances decide what my future is going to be. I don’t want to look back ten years from now and find myself still in the same place, with more hair on the floor than on top of my head! With so many questions demanding difficult answers in my mind it’s no wonder why the ads caught the attention of my casual browsing. Suddenly the words printed on the low quality brown paper appeared unusually attractive.

Saturday
14 May 2005

Aggression pays

2005-05-09T17:01:00.000-07:00

Tony Blair, the British prime minister won a historic third consecutive term in the UK election held on 5 May 2005. He became the first Labour leader to return to power for third consecutive term. He was the last of the three main architects of the war against Iraq in 2003 to be reelected into government despite strong opposition to the American-led aggression in their own country and the world over. The first re-elected was John Howard of Australia, then George Bush and finally the charismatic Blair.

In addressing his nation after the victory, Blair acknowledged that he lost a lot of ground because of the split over Iraq. However, the opposition was split into the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats with the LDP gaining most of the ground lost by Labour. Based on the recent elections, the conservative Republicans in the US increased their support while in the UK support for the Conservatives had weakened.

So as far as foreign policy is concerned it is obvious that at least in the three countries, the majority of the people do not seem to mind whether their leaders attacked another country and killed more than 100,000 ordinary people as long as those people were foreigners. And they all seem to agree that the world’s largest oil producing countries – which happen to be Muslims - must be firmly under their control in order to maintain their superiority in the world. The stated justification for their continued subjugation of Muslim countries is terrorism and democracy. The real reason is control of their oil wealth. You just have to look at Saudi Arabia to prove the point. How much more democratic are the Saudis than Iraq under Saddam? But why was one country attacked with the pretext of “bringing freedom and democracy”, while the other, almost equally dictatorial, still enjoy warm relations with the world’s biggest oil consumer? And, what about countries of Africa, who don’t have much oil and still mired in dictatorship. Don’t they also deserve freedom and democracy? If the desserts of Arabia were just sand and stones would the so-called champions of freedom care whether the Bedouins are democratic? The answer perhaps will become clear when they have pumped out all the oil and all that’s left are really sand and stones. But according to current estimates, at the current rate of oil consumption, that will not happen for another 90 years. In the mean time, as far as those countries are concerned, oil is a curse to their ordinary people.

The re-election of the leaders of these Anglo-Saxon descendants prove that all their talk about freedom and democracy is only rhetoric. Deep down it is still about the struggle for control of limited resources. In our guts, we are still wild animals. And in the animal world aggression really does pay.

Saturday
7 May 2005

Harga Minyak Naik Lagi

2005-05-04T18:05:00.000-07:00

Rakyat Malaysia terperanjat lagi. Selepas mesyuarat mingguan kabinet semalam, harga runcit minyak dinaikkan lagi sebanyak 10 sen seliter. Kenaikan ini agak mendadak kerana sebeleum ini pun sudah beberapa kali harga minyak naik. Mengikut kerajaan subsidi minyak yang terpaksa ditanggung kerajaan akan dikurangkan dan harga runcit di negara ini masih rendah jika dibandingkan dengan negara jiran. Pengeluaran minyak Malaysia sekarang ialah lebih kurang 650,000 tong sehari dan pada harga pasaran dunia 50 dolar Amerika (lebih kurang RM190 setong) pendapatan minyak Malaysia sehari ialah RM123 juta! Atau RM45 billion setahun. Kenaikan mendadak ini akan menyebabkan harga runcit barang-barang keperluan harian juga naik. Tambang bas naik. Kadar tol naik. Angin naik. Tekanan darah pun naik.

Mereka yang paling tertekan ialah yang berpendapatan rendah. Tapi apa mereka boleh buat? Dengan 90% majoriti di Parlimen, kerajaan sekarang boleh buat apa sahaja yang mereka suka, sekurang-kurangnya sehingga tahun 2008. Jadi memang sudah dijangka sebarang tindakan kurang popular akan diambil sebaik sahaja memenangi majoriti besar pilihanraya. Menjelang lima tahun akan datang rakyat akan lupa dan mereka akan dipilih semula. Betul kata Dr Mahathir, Melayu memang mudah lupa! Masakan beliau tidak tahu. 22 tahun dia memimpin bangsa yang pelupa ini. Jadi memang patutlah apa yang mereka dapat sekarang ini. Orang Malaysia sepatutnya tak perlu merungut jika semua harga Barang Naik. Mereka telah memilih BN. So, you stupid Malaysians, shut up your mouth and get back to work!

Happy 10th Anniversary

2005-05-03T03:26:00.000-07:00

As far as my employment with this company is concerned 2nd May is very significant. On this date 10 years ago (yes! that’s right, it’s TEN, and I did not add any unnecessary 0 to it) I formally joined this company. And stuck with it ever since. After completing a post-graduate degree I was very eager to practise what I learnt at university. I opted to be transferred into this company, the research arm of our big company.

Since my days at university, I have developed interest in in-depth study of engineering problems. When described with mathematical equations, with some simplifying assumptions, physical phenomena are beautifully modeled into sets of abstract symbols and numbers. Wow! I felt like I had been given a privileged taste of God’s beauty as manifested in nature. It’s God’s work as revealed to us in the science of mathematics. I thought everybody was highly involved in high-powered cutting edge research, finding new solutions and contributing knowledge to the world. I was an idealist.

Lawatan ke MINT

2005-04-27T23:36:00.000-07:00

Pagi-pagi lagi aku kena pergi ke MINT untuk tengok kemudahan penyelidikan di sana. Tempatnya menarik, di atas bukit, di tengah hutan dikelilingi pokok kelapa sawit. Agaknya rimau pun masih merayau dalam hutan tu.

Pusat penyelidikan itu agak canggih. Banyak tapak dan bangunan baru sedang dibuka. Dalam perjalanan ke tapak, lori-lori sedang mengangkut tanah ke sana-sini. Bukit ditarah untuk pembangunan. Pembinaan sedang rancak dijalankan. Malah kalau dilihat keadaan jalan di sana, mungkin tempat yang kami pergi itu masih belum diserahkan kepada tuan punya (belum comissioned).

… Malam tadi sekali lagi aku terpaksa tidur lewat. Aku menghabiskan masa untuk membaca arahan dan mengisi borang cukai pendapatan untuk tahun taksiran 2004. Tarikh akhir untuk hantar borang BE ialah 30 April, hari sabtu ini. Sudah dua malam aku selongkar kotak dan almari untuk mencari semula resit-resit pembelian buku, resit zakat dan sebagainya yang aku buat tahun lepas.

Sistem terbaru yang diperkenalkan tahun ini ialah Sistem Taksir Sendiri. Ia memerlukan sedikit masa sebelum pembayar cukai selesa dengan kaedah baru ini. Tidak seperti tahun lepas-lepas, resit asal tidak perlu disertakan dengan borang BE dan ia perlu disimpan selama 7 tahun untuk disemak jika diminta oleh LHDNM. Akhirnya Malaysia juga sudah berubah kepada sistem yang lebih berlandaskan ketelusan dan kejujuran...

My car tyres blew up

2005-04-25T17:34:00.000-07:00

Early yesterday morning, I blew up two of my car tyres after falling into a big hole in the middle of a busy road going to city centre. I guess I was unfortunate because I never took that road. I wanted to avoid paying expensive parking charges if I took the road that I usually use. But I ended up paying for two tyres and expensive labour charges to the mechanics. I can’t understand why such a gaping hole can exist in the middle of city road. According to the workshop owner, there were other cases – two at least – in the past few days. And they all ended up in her workshop because it was closest to the scene. If I was riding a motorbike I could end up dead underneath somebody’s car. Based on my own quick look, I think the hole was formed by a defective grating on a manhole on the road. It looked deceiving because at first I thought there was nothing wrong with the grating. Only when I came closer did I realize that there was a big hole in it, and by that time I did not have time to avoid it. The tyres went into the hole, hit the sharp broken metal grating and went flat. Two holes were punched into each of them and there was nothing I could do except replace them with new ones. I apologized to my host for being late for our meeting.

Meeting old friend

2005-04-25T03:30:00.000-07:00

Last Wednesday (20-4-2005) I met one of my seniors at university. He is now teaching geology at a university in the north of the country. He came to my place on a consultancy project for the geology people. Met him last year but at that time we did not have enough time to talk longer. It's been close to 15 years since we went our own ways to pursue our dreams. He got his doctorate while I fell short by one level. Didn't know he liked teaching, research and engaging in intellectual discussions. Things that I also share. We spent some time catching up with old times. Yes, we went separate ways on our career path, but we still share a lot of things in common.

He was inclined to religion and still is. Good mix I think. A PhD in science and a deep interest in religion. We need this type of people in today's world. A balance between material side and spirituality. Somebody who can offer some thoughts on how to see things from both angles.

He is supervising several post-graduate students and one of them is from Libya. I guess post-9/11, people from Middle East began to look to the Far East in many areas including education. That's good. We need support from them. It's time that they invested their money in this part of the world.

Trip to PMO

2005-04-20T03:41:00.000-07:00

Had to wake up very early today to catch a plane to KT. Arrived at the airport about 35 minutes from departure time and found long queue waiting to check in. I did not expect the line would be that long but they told me it was usual for early morning flights. Half an hour before flight, the latecomers were called to go through an express counter. I was not going to be left behind after all.

The plane was packed full with what looked to me like business people on a day trip just like me. The take off was delayed because the plane also had to line up and wait for its turn. I grabbed a paper on the way in and found myself engrossed in reading when the plane was eventually cleared to fly.

The journey took about an hour. It was smooth and the weather was fine. It touched down at about 8.45 am. The airport itself is small. No match with the huge KLIA. But a signboard informed visitors that that would soon change. A new airport is going to be built. I think it’s about time. It’s about time that people from this part of the country saw some decent infrastructure. It looks possible now that the politics here has changed to be aligned with the federal government. Along the way, I saw new development projects springing up like mushrooms. Good for the local people. In the past, development in this oil rich state has not caught up with the rest of the country. Not much evidence of the 5% oil royalty. But hopefully this time, the money does not concentrate into just a few hands. They should not repeat the same mistakes of the past.

The coastal road from the airport to my destination is long, sometimes winding between the hills. I was in no mood to enjoy the view. There was something that I had to read. I was on the third page when I suddenly slipped into dreamland. The early morning rush to the airport eventually got the better of me. I was forced to compensate it with some rest. ZZZzzz

My new home

2005-04-18T02:42:00.000-07:00

I like Sunday mornings. I can sleep a little longer than usual and wake up to enjoy breakfast in my home kitchen. I can read the Sunday paper, or Reader’s Digest at my own lazy pace. I don’t have to rush to take my kid to school. There is no need to beat the traffic jam. Just one whole day of free time to do whatever I like.

I moved to my own house one month ago after so many years living in rented property. I spent some money widening the kitchen, installing kitchen cabinet, plaster ceilings and dining lights. Even with my less than perfect colour differentiating capability, I tried to get matching colours – or at least what appear to me as fitting.

Moving into own house does not happen everyday and it’s worth the effort to make it comfortable and pleasant to look at. There is still poorly done paintwork that’s waiting to be re-done. My contractor friend has promised to fix it free of charge. The kitchen fan has to be repaired because of a leak coming from a dislocated tile on the roof after recent very heavy rain. The old 200 ringgit dining table is still waiting for something better, perhaps marble, to take over its job. The faithful fridge, bought when I was still single, has been doing good job for close to 8 years. But now it is begging to retire, tired of being packed full every time we go shopping. The stove, a relic of my town house days, seems to do its job better now that it’s accompanied by a smoke exhaust fan fitted into the kitchen cabinet.

The list of things to do is even longer for the living room. There is not a single picture or decoration hung on the wall yet. It gives me time to admire the empty space and consider the many ways of how I can make it beautiful. Every day after office, I stare at it as if offloading all the burden of work and pouring it onto the virgin wall. Only four of the ten down light bulbs are still working after one month of service. The first blew up within days of our move. I feel like I have been conned by the saleswoman. They were all made in China, just like almost everything else these days. Even famous names like Phillips and Panasonic can’t help but outsourcing their manufacturing there. There is some space for another set of sofa. I am thinking of filling it with some teak furniture but that can only come if my employer is kind enough to give me some bonus in a few months’ time. That teak set has to compete for money with a display cabinet under the stairs, however. I saw in one of the other houses, a very elegantly done display cabinet under the stairs going up to first floor. Instantly I fell in love. I’d told myself I would order one for my home. I need something to take my sight off from the ugliness of the corners under the stairs. Then again, I better spend my money on nice curtains. They are windows to the outside, blocking the punishing afternoon sunrays and shielding my privacy from the people passing by.

It’s ironic. When I was small, I used to live in wooden house and used to dream one day I would be living in concrete walls. Now, I prefer many of my house stuff to be made out of wood. Except that I can’t afford all of them. Only last week I spent quite a sum of money to put on some awning on the first floor balcony. The awning, just like almost everything else in the house is copied from my next door neighbours. But, while they spent more than 100 thousand on renovation, I can only afford a fraction of that. He’s a businessman with auto workshop specializing in service and repair of Mercedes. I am only a wage earner.

My home is about three quarters up a hill somewhere about 30 km from KL. One hot night I went outside and took a look at the lights from houses in the valley below the hills. It was so beautiful, quite and peaceful. My mind took me back to my old kampong. It was nice to live there. My grandmother, the only close living relative I have there, visited me some weeks back. After some weeks she could not wait to get back to the kampong although she was going to be alone there. My brother and I persuaded her to stay a little longer. I could not understand why she was in a hurry to get back home. But slowly I realized that after some time your home becomes part of you. The furniture as well as the living people in it become the context in which you live. They give meaning to your life. That night, after seeing the beautiful stars, hearing the distant noises from cars on the highway below, feeling the cool night breeze flowing among the trees, I began to realize that, despite the nostalgia of twenty years living in a village, I am going to settle down here. This house is now my new home.

Sunday
17 April 2005

Second day at this

2005-04-15T08:36:00.000-07:00

Hurrying to take my kid to school this morning...but once we got to the school gate she told me she only got one shoe. The other one was left at home. Arggggg! Tension. How could this happen to me. My kid was late for school and then I was in danger of arriving late to work.

Luckily the newly built highway from home to office is superb. 10 minutes and I was swiping my card at the office gate. Still got time to send this blog. Back to work.

Terima Kasih Arif Aiti

2005-04-12T17:14:00.000-07:00

Dalam perjalanan ke tempat kerja hari ini aku dengar Nasional FM. Encik Arif Aiti spoke on how to create a blog. So I am trying now to create one...if it works a big thank you to En Arif Aiti.