Beauty Queens and Pirates

JULY 25 — Another week rushes inevitably by heading us towards the fasting month.

We speed towards fasting days and feasting nights, with thoughts, which should be on more ethical matters, spent thinking of the treats to come at the break of fast.

Celebrating 100 days of the new boss’s reign, the nation ticks a “good work, but could do better” box on his report card and moves right along looking forward to learning Maths and Science in Malay, rather than in English.

We shall see how, exactly, this benefits Malaysia’s students, later, when they become graduands. But, at least, according to one parliamentarian, they will not now end up as maids.

This, apparently centennial, week appears stigmatised by also being a seemingly slightly salacious week.

Though protests and perturbation are all around us, I am trying, desperately, not to make mention of anyone’s rear end, bottom or derriere; for it is an ostensibly never-ending fairytale concerning what did, or did not, happen to one man’s posterior.

The story of one damp squib politicians’ innocence, or guilt, has become passé, scarcely worthy of the millions of ringgit spent on the trials and tribulations.

But I did manage to see one interesting snippet, this week, concerning the stripping of one Miss Kum (an unfortunate name) of her beauty title of Miss Singapore. It seems that Miss Body Beautiful and Miss Personality posed with objects of a phallic nature and a rubber doll, for some risqué photos which were subsequently distributed over the internet.

The photos are innocent enough; some taken at a Halloween party, others at a 21st birthday, and would barely raise a spiced titter from the most decent of people, let alone be considered offensive, or beauty pageant threatening.

In the suggestive world of TV’s 30 Rock, or Desperate Housewives the photos would barely have raised an eyebrow.

They are the photos of virtually any group of young people engaged in post alcohol consumption horse play, er without the horse.

Well, if a girl can’t have her cake, eat it, and play with her dollies and sugar daddy too, what is this poor world coming to. It’s not as though Miss Kum was photographed girl on girl a la Miss America 1983, or caught snorting illegal substances, (allegedly) like Miss USA 2006 or having to resign due to pregnancy like Miss N.J. USA 2007.

Other, bigger, celebrities, closer to home, have done much worse and seem to have had their actions condoned by scores of faithful fans and society at large, but then, it’s an unfair and unjust world we live in.

As we are talking of piracy, but not of other women’s husbands; there is no apparent correlation between Malaysia’s first submarine, the KD Tunku Abdul Rahman, recently seen leaving France, and the importation of Apple’s new iPhone 3GS into Malaysia, though it is a remarkable coincidence.

Vendors at Low Yat Plaza, Chow Kit and Petaling Street mobile phone venues were seen scratching their heads, in abject consternation.

There is also no truth in the rumour that said submarine, along with its sister vessel the KD Tun Abdul Razak, are to be used as ferries to the proposed Disneyworld in Johor. Nor are they to be re-painted yellow as potential submersible homes, for aging Beatles fans, or painted red for display in Penang.

While sailors in Lumut are no longer seen puffing on pipes, not even those aspiring to become Prince Namor (homo mermanus) the business of pipes still looms large in Perak, even decades after their disuse.

Heritage buffs wish to cling onto the last few metres of pipeline, around Gopeng, Perak, erected by the Gopeng Tin Mining Company early in the 20th century . Enthusiasts claim artefact status for the pipeline, which is one of the few remaining reminders of the tin mining which made Gopeng, Perak and Malaya great.

The private company, which now owns the pipeline, seeks financial redress should they be prevented from dismantling it and selling it off, possibly abroad, indicating that the Perak state should put that in their piece of pipe and smoke it. Though, of course, we hope that the company and state smoke the pipe of peace, eventually.

In a bid to attract more international tourists into Perak, no doubt to view the last few metres of the old pipe, it has been suggested that tourists are poached from Penang, via a Perak Tourist Information and Promotion Centre.

I’m just not quite sure what Penang Tourism will think of the idea of their most lucrative foreign tourists, being poached. There again maybe this is how Lumut sailors plan to use the new submarines – to transport tourists, secretly from Penang, when those submersible vessels are not being used by students in Alor Star, to navigate their flooded classrooms, that is.

Elsewhere in the land named by Ptolemy as the Golden Chersonese, its environs and outlaying states, amidst the hot, steamy, luscious rainforests revellers gathered to play pipe and drum, guitar, Sape and the haunting vibes of gypsy folk music.

The Rainforest Festival, a magnet equally to lovers of authentic music and to aging hippies, rolled into its twelfth year, adding the carousing sounds of questionable human melody to that already extant within nature’s forest.

No doubt, as they gathered, tribes of man from shores distant and different, many were inclined to smoke their own brand of pipes, when not playing them, but few, I would have thought, would have arrived by submarine.

It is doubtful whether the event was actually planned to succeed a certain gentleman’s hundredth day in office, but the festival was timely nevertheless and maybe even visited by former, present or indeed future beauty queens, with or without rubber dolls, oddly shaped cakes, imbibing copious amounts of intoxicating fluids and having their photos taken, by friends, for the world to view over that wonder of the internet.

Still, it does take the mind off more political matters, the eternal dance of politicians, the showmanship and furore perhaps better suited to a festival.

Butterfly Roars

JULY 18 — Hello dear reader, I do hope that you had a good week, well, not just good — a roaring week, a week as tender as the night, as beautiful as a butterfly.

There is, as many of you may have gathered, no such thing as a usual week. All weeks are unusual, unique, stand alone. Weeks have individual personality, poise, style and attitude.

This past week, in its inevitable uniqueness, has been full.

Frantically flapping, chaotic Amazonian butterflies have wrought their unique forms of devastation around the globe, causing floods and other seemingly natural disasters. While in our own backyard, that odd conundrum of strangely silent roaring has been heard bellowing around Kuala Lumpur, and Selangor state.

There is, so I am reliably informed, a brain stretching causal theory - Chaos Theory, prospered by the likes of one Edward Lorenz, which goes something like - when a butterfly flaps its brightly coloured Lepidoptera wings in the Amazon, a whirling tornado is let loose to wreak its havoc in Indonesia, but I’m not sure why Indonesia, or indeed why butterflies. It’s called, for want of a better name — The Butterfly Effect (aka sensitive dependence on initial conditions).

So, energetic Lepidoptera cause wind, but, in my sun parched, durian sizzled kampung brain, I can’t help thinking — why don’t they, whoever they are — mad scientists, nutty professors and their ilk, just catch all these Amazonian butterflies, if they are so dangerous.

Those entomologists might pin butterflies to little black display boards, label them with white Ariel 14pt text and place them into Natural History cases. The pin-stuck butterflies could sit there, harmless, for inquisitive people to observe, never to flap highly destructive wings ever again. Surely that would solve some of the world’s problems — anyway I digress.

So, maybe it is due to the causal effects of these amazing Amazonian butterflies that a steel grill fell from a window, crushing a car beneath it, in Kota Kinabalu, and for two bikers to be thrown from their bikes, while trying to avoid a road block, again in Kota Kinabalu, this week. Is this, then, the result of chaotically causally bedevilment of mischievous Amazonian butterflies, or is it the end product of supremely foolish people.

It may be the very same foolish people who consider that they have discovered gold in the hills of Alor Star. On examination, one man was told that yes it was gold, well sort of, but not fully matured yet, and needs to be left until it matures, like cheese perhaps, or mangoes in a rice sack. More sensible people prospered the notion that it may be Fool’s Gold (Iron Pyrite), and maybe, just maybe, it is.

More, seemingly impish, butterflies may have been the cause of the mysterious pregnancies of 11 and 12 year old Orang Asli girls, in the Cameron highlands recently. Or, there again, maybe it is entirely non-mysterious Mother Nature and sadly abusive males who have impregnated these underage children, egged on by the addition of Viagra (Sildenafil) to Gombak coffee sachets, and/or secret karaoke sessions.

Are those butterflies responsible for that silent roar which has been released in our beautiful land.

This particular butterfly-wing pumping week, a silent, almost underground, roar was heard over current Kuala Lumpur and surrounding Selangor. Seemingly, this popularist royal roar had been building to its crescendo over ten years, bolstered in bonny Scotland, encouraged in Singapore and finally flourishing in magical Malaysia.

This individual silent roar is not, however, to be confused with the British comical motion picture - The Mouse That Roared, a film about a small European state standing up to, and winning over, that dastardly bully - North America.

Nor is it Silent Roar, a wildlife film concerning predatory Himalayan snow leopards, nor indeed that popular effluent produce of lions which is dried into pellets and used to deter cats from your garden. No this is an entirely different kind of roar, albeit silent, it is the roar of a virtual paper tiger, more akin to that Qi-Gong ‘roar of silent protestors’ in Beijing, 1999.

This textual roar, clear in black and white, has the hand of a united front about it, the hand of change, of collective power and flapping butterflies. A raised appendage, perhaps by a later day Sultan of infamous Mysorean tiger heritage, but this leader is no hapless royal but a staunch protector of the rakyat.

An elevated fisted hand perhaps in continuing salute to the concept of reformasi — once the sole prerogative of opposition politics, but now embraced by the opposition’s opposition — cries for reforming are now being bantered around the hallowed halls of the government collective, where once it was the unique, and seemingly indelible, mantra of opposition.

A hand maybe designed to punch the very heavens — should it come to that, for that silent roar to be taken heed of. A hand maybe in the vanguard of hands of fellow travellers, all held aloft silently roaring to be heard by the seemingly deaf governmental, political monolith.

Is it me, or is there something distinctly V for Vendetta about that concept.

So the roar echoes on, around courts, in halls, around malls, heard in places where the rakyat gathers over teh tarik, or a quiet beer or three in seasonal restaurants, to chat innocently about those matters which concern them, their friends and families, on-line and off, engendered, perhaps, by extremely active Amazonian Lepidoptera.

And so a butterfly flaps its four chitinous thoracic wings, various tigers give vent to a variety of roars, silently or with full voice, and each unique (unto itself) week, melds into the next and rolls us all on toward the fasting month.

Fools seek, and perhaps find, their own particular variety of gold; innocent children are abused in the name of race/culture and steel grills, meant for sturdiness and protection, come crashing and crushing down.

That was the week, that was, and if all goes well we shall have another, soon.

Senses of Malaysia July 2009

Journeying

JULY 4 — A week is a long time in politics, so it is said. This is strange because it really is just seven days whichever way it’s stretched. It is not as though you can add a bit here, and subtract a bit there, a week is a week, but I take the point. The all-pervasive point is — a lot can happen in one seven-day stretch.

This week I have dragged myself, practically kicking and screaming, cold turkey shivering away from my ever active computers. Divorced myself from the impressively handy yet awfully addictive Internet and therefore also separated from frankly fascinating Facebook and gigantean Google.

Instead, I have been journeying physically and spiritually, as opposed to virally virtually through cyberspace, on my own external and internal odysseys.

I journeyed physically — to Kedah. I was accompanying my stepson north on his first day at university, a fresher beginning a startling new journey into the twilight world of late teen education — a wannabe Lat, possibly a Zint or Puyuh, but probably not a Redza Piyadasa nor an Ibrahim Hussein — his star yet to shine.

Each kilometre of travel brought a fresh revelation, with said teenage stepson ever busy saving his energy, for what I know not — sleeping on the rear seat, and my wife, bless her, navigating not the highway I was travelling, but her way through dreamland.

In that sense, I journeyed with a car full of passengers — but solo.

This week I also journeyed spiritually, in the sense that, due to the week’s momentous events, I was forced to take pause, catch my breath and reflect upon other people and their own, equally engaging and yet very disparate, journeying.

In one extraordinarily full week, but still only holding the regulation seven days, two celebrities, in Los Angeles and California respectively, took their final transcendent journeys across the Styx from the land of flesh, moving inevitably on to other, more ethereal, intangible places.

The once black, but increasingly whiter, moon-walking, healer of worlds, stranger in Moscow Michael Jackson and the larger-than-life, coiffure-bouncing Bionic Man marrying, ex-Charlie’s Angel posing Farrah Fawcett left for their own individual journeys beyond this mortal coil.

The King of Pop was finally deposed by his own heart, which, ever too large for one gentle man, gave out and reluctantly ushered in the uniquely unimpressive post-Michael Jackson era.

Older people, saddened by yet another departed star, recalled where they were when they heard of Elvis Presley, or John Lennon, dying; younger people, not caught up in the moment, wondered just what all the fuss was about “‘cause it’s not like he was Bono or the Jonas brothers or anything”.

Michael, now Mikaeel Jackson, has began a fresh journey, one of the soul/Ka/Atman alone, sans the other four Jacksons, sans Bubbles, sans everything.

Farrah Fawcett, once Farrah Fawcett-Majors and pin-up to the 1970s, finally succumbed to the cancer which for so long had been held in abeyance, denying her chances of ever appearing in Playboy magazine, again.

And while the world looked to America, and wept a crocodile tear or three, 26-year old Neda Agha-Soltan was gunned down amidst the Iranian election protests. Her death, in Tehran, enabled her to achieve the fame she was unable to realise in life. As her death whipped around cyberspace on Facebook and YouTube, outraging those who needed to be outraged by her death, many thoughts were spared regarding legitimate protest and undue repressive force.

Where fans of the two media stars — Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett — had wrung their hands and engaged in some degree of self flagellation over their deaths, the death and ultimate journey of Neda Agha-Soltan inspired yet more political protests against overwhelmingly oppressive injustice. Though, ultimately, Neda’s 15 minutes of fame will dwindle as more, and yet more, atrocities come to life, there will be one corner of the Internet which will be forever — Neda.

Closer to home, one small silvery insect — the lepisma saccharina — was much lauded in the Bangsar suburb of Kuala Lumpur. This tiny blue/gray lover of papery environments — newspapers, magazine and even old books — 10 years previously had lent its common or garden name to a newly nascent enterprise begun by one Raman Krishnan (T.R.R. Raman)

During tenth anniversary celebrations The lepisma saccharina (Silverfish) or to give it the proper title — Silverfish Books — celebrated 10 years of its existence in publishing and bookselling. This highly successful enterprise was spearheaded by the much loved and frequently misunderstood Raman Krishnan, organiser of literary festivals and controversy.

The first Silverfish decade is over, and, while small publishers everywhere are cautious and concerned about their futures, Silverfish marches on. Having brought fresh writing to eagerly waiting bibliophiles and launched many local writers, including yours truly, into Malaysia’s stellar orbit, Silverfish Books now takes its first, tentative, baby steps, journeying forward into an undoubtedly continuing illustrious future.

There is a sense of new lamps for old, of decay and re-birth in the air as that celebrated chanteuse, lissom, multi-talented Fly FM DJ Hunny Madu finally said yes to Khairul, and now begins a wholly different journey towards marriage, being a spouse and fecundity.

To the immense disappointment of many Malaysian men, and no doubt many others worldwide the delectable Hunny, aka Hani Farhana binti Mohd Hatim accepted to become affianced to Khairul Azhar Abdul Wahid. At some point in the not-too-distant future, they will marry and journey together.

Change is everything, and everything must change. Change is the one definitive factor in this world, nothing remains as it was. I move from my post in front of endless reams of information, on the Internet, teenagers move on, media icons pass from this world to the next, young protesters too. Anniversaries are celebrated and new partnerships solidified.

Ideas change, relationships change, we move forever forward on our own personal odysseys, going towards the unknown and unknowable, forever metamorphosing towards destiny/fate/Kismet and forever journeying.

Not Published Today

Yusuf Martin says those people searching for my column in The Malaysian Insider today will be disappointed as, for some reason un-communicated to me, it has not be published.

New Malaysian Essays 2

Hopefully coming to a bookshop near you soon - my essay; Colourful Language

Tin Pot Crooks

JUNE 27 — One week on and still this silvery state is as dry as a snake’s underbelly wrapped in sand paper slithering across parched, hot sand at midday, during the dry season.

It is dry in the sense that there has not only been no rain, but even the memory of rain is buried so deep within the collective subconscious that it would take a particularly adept hypnotherapist to delve there, wade through amassed dream symbols, cultural icons and stigmas to retrieve it.

However, this week has not dried in the news sense. But before I launch into this week’s theme I would like you, dear reader, to reach into your mind, grab hold of your imagination and give it a good hard tug, stretch that stiffening imagination for all it is worth. Now, if you are ready, read on.

Imagine, just for one second, imagine, way back to the days when tin was a household word across the world. Imagine if this silvery state, which had produced enough of that particular metal, had placed a trademark on the word tin. Imagine the revenue that word alone would bring.

From L. Frank Baum’s original books there would be enough income, but when Victor Fleming and Judy Garland made the Technicolor film, the profits would have soared exponentially, over the rainbow in fact. The yellow brick road would have led all the way to the silvery state coffers with every mention of the Tin Woodsman (or Nick Chopper as he is oft called).

Every time that hero dog Rin Tin Tin bound across the silver or TV screen, bent on rescuing small boys from wells or big boys from even bigger boys with guns, money would trickle in. From Belgium to Europe and across to the Americas, the merest mention of the boy detective Tin Tin ( pronounced Ton Ton) would aid the state bank account and bolster the treasury.

Then, with our country so rich, there would be no need for crime, no need for hapless individuals to ram forklift trucks into ATM machines, with the thought of enriching themselves at others’ misfortune. No need, indeed, for these characters with little imagination, then to abandon their project having slammed the forklift truck into said ATM, to no avail.

The attempted, and failed, robbery makes me wonder, if after ramming the vehicle into the wall the wannabe robber, dressed in helmet and jumpsuit, then sat around like one of the vultures in Disney’s “Jungle Book”, obviously in two minds, saying to himself

“What am I gonna do?”

“I don’t know, what you wanna do?”

“I don’t know, what you wanna do?” unable to make a decision.

The same could be said for those enterprising fellows who, having attempted to break into a jewellery shop, in Seremban, gave up after discovering that there were two walls to drill through, not one. Obviously their hearts were just not in it.

Perhaps they too had been lured into a life of crime by Tamil films, as three Serdang robbers were reported to admit. Only Tamil films – I am certain that both Bollywood and Hollywood might be quite upset that their combined efforts had come to no avail – and that it is only Tamil films (or Kollywood, as the South Indian film industry is referred to) that have the power to turn clean-cut, honest, everyday citizens into ferocious criminals.

Perhaps the courts, in their in-depth understanding of the human psyche and forensic psychology, may seek either to turn these men’s minds around by using reverse psychology, or plump for the tried and tested horrors of abreaction trauma theory.

In the former, the criminals may be made to watch nothing but love stories with Rajinikanth, Kamal Hassan and Vijay singing and dancing around trees, protesting their undying, and non-violent, love for the likes of Trisha, Meera Jasmine and Jyothika, to A.R.Rahman tunes. The idea being that, if Tamil films about crime can make honest men criminals, then nothing but Tamil love films would do the opposite.

In the second scenario, said criminals would be strapped to chairs, with small electrodes attached to their bodies, in a small cinema. They would then be force-fed a diet of the worse criminal Tamil films ever, but every time a criminal act was committed an electric current, strong enough to hurt, but not cause any additional mishaps, would shoot through their bodies, resulting in a conditioning so severe, that they could never watch another criminal act without jumping with shock.

But then, maybe I am too unkind to all these apprentice criminals, maybe it is the fault of the police themselves that so many individuals are trying out for a new career. Perhaps if police personnel spent less time sending 900 of their number to gatecrash functions like the 43rd anniversary of the DAP, in Klang, or arresting innocent bystanders talking in mosques, there might be more of them to patrol the streets and deter people considering a career change into criminality.

Certainly if more police were on the streets, then they would have been on the lookout for the notorious ‘Arab’ gang – three men and two women wearing purdah, who stole RM50,000 worth of jewellery from a goldsmith’s shop.

It is curious, is it not, that many stores, banks, etc., request people not to wear crash helmets, so that their faces can be readily seen by surveillance cameras, but do not give a second thought to women covered from top to toe. Perhaps that may change now.

Still these Middle-Eastern, possibly Arab criminal women may have secretly been hankering after a refreshing spa, or the salon services now offered by seven inmates at Kajang Prison. According to sources there is a queue for such services and desperate people may resort to anything to obtain them.

But as the heat continues all I really want to break into is a cold drink, to arrest my thirst. And, as I do so, I must remember not to watch any Tamil films and to stop pontificating upon revenue lost by not trademarking tin.

As seen in The Malaysian Insider