cookie-cutter comments

Looks like Dr Ongkili’s getting a bit more careful with his comments. The Star ran a story today about students from, apparently, other universities who are encouraging the wearing of the tudung in the IIU to be optional. The link to that article is here. Dr Ongkili says:

He said the IIU, as an Islamic university, made the wearing of tudung as part of its dress code during graduation ceremonies and on campus.

“Because it is a university ruling, students have to adhere to it as a matter of procedure and discipline.

“They were aware of this requirement before they chose to study in IIU,” said Dr Ongkili.

And it’s something I’ve said here yesterday also. It’s only logical, and questions of “multi-ethnic” sensitivity are best asked of universities which purport to be “public” in the sense that they hold no specific faith-based or ethnic-based agendas. No offense to LKS per his blog post , but I must humbly disagree.

Catastrophe has become such a marketplace word. The four syllables in succession ring and amplify your own localized version of bad news, making you feel like the world’s caving in.

Maybe it is.

I think there’s something deep-seated that gets moved when your own institutions of higher learning are given the once-over and then summarily dismissed. Cuts even deeper when it’s foreigners who are being dismissive. Head over to Jeff Ooi’s post about university rankings, and read the comments. Most deplore the state of universities in Malaysia, and I think we all know the reasons for such a low ranking.

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What is it about the need to assert a sense of “religious attachment” nowadays? Mission schools in Singapore have been doing this for ages, though I don’t know how it’s practiced in Missions schools in Malaysia. There are prayers each morning and they provide various other religiously-motivated programs.

What sparked the above is the fact that now ‘tudungs’ will eventually become mandatory for students to wear in the International Islamic University (IIU). How to think about it objectively? I don’t know; the situation’s pretty charged in ‘multi-religious’ Malaysia, I suppose, and any view could always be seen as partisan.

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It might be fair to say that the recent bombings in Delhi, India might have something to do with the current talks, reported by the BBC on the same day, between India and Pakistan over easing restrictions along 5 points in the Line of Control (LoC) that separates Indian- and Pakistani-controlled sections of Kashmir.

Or does it? The news coming out of Reuters is pretty confused at the moment, and no one’s claimed responsibility for the blasts. It wouldn’t be difficult to imagine something like this happening with specific reference to current talks; some parties may have an interest in keeping things tense across the LoC. Then again, it’s just more fruitless speculation; it may just be general anti-Indian / anti-Hindu insurgents taking drastic measures.

I wanted to write some thoughts down about Ops Lalang, today being its anniversary. I find I can’t say anything that hasn’t already been said by those more able and closer to the events of those days. It’s been about 18 years since Ops Lalang by my reckoning. I was barely a teen and only interested in badminton and comics from the Sunday Star, which was I noticed it missing at the time.

I don’t know if the memory of Ops Lalang remains a rallying point for anti-ISA activists, or just plain normal folks who think giving the government the wherewithal to lock you up without question is wrong. Do Malaysians even bother, these days?

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t remember Ops Lalang at all. It just doesn’t form part of my memories of those days. I wasn’t as obsessed about politics then as I am now, I suppose, and more’s the pity. It became a non-event for me, and straddling as I am between a generation that grew up under the spectre of the ISA and a generation that grew up on a staple diet of MTV music videos, I find my position in the larger scheme of things rather disturbing.

I suppose old events fade like a bad stain over time: a residue of memory lodged deep in the collective consciousness, but slowly fading like a candle burning down to its roots. Here’s to the 106 arrested and held without recourse to the most basic of rights. I just hope more people would remember.

I hate Wednesdays.

It sits smack in the middle of the week like a smirking excuse of a mental marker; not quite the end of the week, and not quite the begining of the week. It mocks you by sitting on the fence, being in the middle, taking no sides - among other creative cliches. It stands like a big, fat Juno with arms on her hips sneering, “You’re not there, yet” in the most grandmotherly-naggy tone (substitute “wife” if married, I’m sure). And this has everything to do with tonight’s programme: it’s drink till you not-quite drop, listen to loud music and make an ass of yourself night.

I’m sitting in the office now with the miasma of my own bodily odours assailing my mostly-blocked nose, contemplating between slitting my wrists or engaging in a more socially-acceptable form of suicide. Liver failure, crossed-eyes syndrome, smelly puke and disgraced name. Oh, the humanity.
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I’ve just got to blog about this today. It’s long, but abit of drama got lah. It began at 9.00 am, just barely after I checked in. I signed the register, part of the childish imperative of the higher-ups no doubt for keeping track of us worker bees. Anyway, not a minute after I settle down in my cubicle than I get the call: our morning appointment had arrived.

I got my boss (good boss, the friend boss) with whom I had worked a case. The details of the case itself must remain private for non-disclosure reasons, of course, but it’s nothing dramatic lah nothing hush-hush and definitely no national secret (you’d have gotten the point by now). The hush-hush bit about the case was the fact that we suspected foul play.
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I got this article from Salon.com off Mrs. Bakar’s post here. It really is a picture of misery being shovelled promise after promise only to be disappointed. I’ve always wondered what getting a rejection slip felt like, but never had the requisite wherewithal (some say “courage”) to actually get down to arranging stuff so I can then send messy jumbles of words off to publishers.

I had a group of friends, myself included, who wanted to get something ‘out there’ and published because we all had aspirations. One wanted to make lots of money (”I will be the next Tom fucking Clancy lah! I’ll dream up missiles that fly like seagulls!”). Another was more immersed in genre fiction, coming up with short stories of that ‘romantic fantasy’ strain. What to do, she was one girl, we were three guys, so we were always putting off reading her stuff.

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Xiaxue’s not apologetic, and not going down without a fight. But that’s not what caught me off guard. What caught me off guard was learning that Peter Tan has written to Xiaxue’s endorsers complaining about, among other things I gather, her insensitivity to disabled people, giving wrong impressions, influencing impressionable kids, etc. Her most recent blog entry can be found here. Shoalin Tiger’s also got a post up about the whole thing. An excerpt:-

It should be silenced, she shouldn’t be moulding the minds of the next generation, she’s turning them to pulp.

She should not be endorsed, nor respected, go ahead and read her blog if you enjoy it, that’s your prerogative, just don’t try and tell other people what she says is right, because it’s clearly not. I’m not telling you not to read her blog, I’m not saying her blog is bad, I’m just saying she’s a stupid ignorant, bimbotic, stumpy limbed naive bucket of shit. That’s all.

Yeah she annoys me, I might write to her other sponsors and voice my opinion, according to the oh great Xia Xue, that’s what life is all about right? Voicing your opinion, because it’s ALWAYS right, and not giving a shit about the repercussion or anyone elses rights/feelings.

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Tired but happy today.

On a whim, I invited my father along for a trip up to Mersing on-the-job. Not very professional, yes, but he wasn’t around for the meetings and such. It was a strange feeling, since this was the first time he decided to follow, and I had a few moments of doubt as I was reversing out of the house.

My father’s one of the old-timers we talk about, either in derision or awe. A repository of historical events having witnessed history in the making in the heart of our country. Over beers and cigarettes, we would sit ourselves down and talk about the ‘State of the Union’, discuss politics and how things have changed. Today was no different, and it was speckled with anecdotes about the past, as seen through his eyes.

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“Higher criticism”?

MENJ’s appeal to the historical-critical method is a red herring. He wasn’t applying ‘higher criticism’, he was applying his own version of some form of ‘meta-something’ criticism which has lost its footing. “Higher criticism” has closer relations to hermeneutics than polemics, dear sir, and I can’t see how in any way it falls under the ambit of discussion. At all.

And I see you’ve now deleted your offending post, since I can’t find it anywhere on your blog.

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It was like war.

Two days under the radar. One day in insertion, and the next whipped past like a bad backlash. I smelled. Sweat, heat and desperation. The jungle was pungent with the alien and the green. Two days under rain and more rain. I smelled the rain, and the ozone of lightning-activated air.

Thinking. Thinking, thinking, thinking.

And it almost had that kind of drama. He wished me well, and I smiled. Our cars were parked outside. We waited, fidgetting with our pens. I considered the ways they could fuck us over. The first day was an open question. The second was a closed case.

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I’m thinking it’ll be more responsible to take a short break and focus on what I’m doing before I have to face the firing squad.

The thought scares me. Yikes.

In any case, I don’t think I’ll even be surfing much for the whole of this week. But that’s another story.

Update 18/10/05:
LOL.. luthien you farney

• thoughts on the caprice of some bosses
• thoughts on the usefulness of an education
• thoughts on security guards who don’t bathe, don’t wash their clothes, and who need women to look after them.
• thoughts on the virtues of procrastination. (am I spelling this right?)

Update 19/10/05:

• Saddam refuses to give up his name. Defiance? Identity? Names, naming and control.
• Control and games. Mind games. Games in departments. Work games. Games in the family. Projection.
• Neverwinter Nights 2 will be out soon enough… can’t wait…!
• Backtracking: Xiaxue? hoo-haa?

Update 20/10/05:

• Condolences to PM Abdullah Badawi
• I can’t even get fuckin’ ‘reversing’ and ‘overruling’ right, now can I?
• My boss recommends that I go pay for wild, unbridled sex and then sit for my papers since that would, in his words, “release tension”. Ha. Ha. Ha.
• Kassim Ahmad’s posted the rest of his thesis online, here! go read!!

When you get past the cliches of expression, I suppose you begin walking abandoned roads in a nowhere land. I wonder how novelists do it; finding in language an expression that is fresh, new and yet striking at the heart of its own truth. I’m not equiped with examples this early in the morning, and I don’t think I’ll be pottering around my books to look for good ones; it’s just an idle thought.

Rock music. 90’s grunge, STP and glorious clamour of guitars accompanying Scott Weiland’s voice. Back when I was holed up in my hostel studying for exams, Core would be on constant repeat, load and drowning out everything else on my first RM 75.00 radio-cassette player. It was my first radio, this rectangular, boxy thing. My father bought it for us when I was about 12 years old. It’s still around, these days droning out the monotony of news from the BBC. It had black dials and contraptions modulating output.
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I am stressed, therefore I blog. Now, how would that translate into Latin, I wonder? Any help, here?

Do you know how strange it is? When you get stressed out you take out your fried braincells on bits and bytes hoping to god what bleeds from your keyboard aspires to something cathartic. I probably wonder if the ‘masterpiece’ I end up writing deserves its 2-minute spot on my own blog.
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