cookie-cutter comments

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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What I said to him must have been like an incurable itch.

He frowned at me, his face creasing up like his skin was paper-thin and ready to tear. I remember his shock of white hair above a commanding brow. At the time, he was still leading the Malacca-Johor diocese.

Anyway, this was years and years ago. When I was barely a teenager, barely a boy, barely the pubescent pervert I was to become. I had, at the instigation of my Sunday school teacher, taken goodly advice to heart, and went ahead and read the Bible like it was some old, gaffy storybook. You’ve got to understand: I was goofy in that way.

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I’ve got to admit: I’ve been a fan of things post-apocalyptic since I played Fallout 2, a geek-ish staple of mine each year. Ok, I’m not that much of a fan: I don’t chant mantras to the dead Black Isle Studios, I don’t foam at the mouth over Madmax and I’m pretty dismissive about future-present realities.

But fast forward to September this year and take a look at the situtation in New Orleans. I can almost hear undergrad political science students musing “war of all against all” like some profound take on such a william golding-esque situation (or not; we shouldn’t deny them the right to make such spurious comparisons).

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It’s like devolution. Opinions have an interesting way of degenerating into so much idle chatter on the airwaves. For those unaware, bloggers in Singapore have been brought on charges and sentenced. An overview can be read here. The most interesting comment would not be easy to pick out:
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You couldn’t pick a more melodramatic setting: by the light of a single table lamp, listening to Depeche Mode’s “Precious” on constant repeat, mulling over the events of the day and thinking of the allegorical implications of building construction.

A mite more pathetic than that character in Nick Hornby’s ‘About a boy’. That Hugh Grant whats-it vehicle. More like a moped on go-kart wheels.

Quite a bit happened in the morning which made me furious at the time, which only makes me feel sad and resigned. I’ll spare myself the details here, simply because there are none. I sat by my desk in utter incredulity. I’ve had it happen before, seen it happen before, but I couldn’t have imagined being a victim in my office.

So much the better, at least that peculiar illusion is now shattered.

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Just a personal observation: I found it somewhat gratifying that LKS eats and sleeps like the rest of us; more, that he has a new found addiction, if his recent post is anything to go by:

I had never gone without a wink in previous parliamentary debates whether on the budget or other major issues. Blogging is the reason, for it really eats into one’s time.

Oh god, it’d be so easy to get cynical with that statement above: my itch tells me LKS is trying to portray a more humane side to his public profile, but really, the situation above is just the sort of thing I guess bloggers face everyday.
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don’t you just love labels? Little bits of stereotyping nonsense that just magically develops when a group of people reach critical mass — kinda like the one about intelligence, monkeys and a whole boatload of time. the worst are stakeholders who, like astronauts out on the moon, plant flags all over the place. let’s all deplore the fact that complete, utter, unmitigated nonsense is no longer allowed.

it’s so bizarre, it’s like a scene out of the first few sections of the PI: a baby in nappies pointing at a block saying, “That. That. That.” over and over again while other babies in nappies huddle around with sober expressions on infantile faces, repeating “This. This. This.”

bloody hallucinating.
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“On the theme of the military uniform Bertrand could have supplied some such theory as this:

Once upon a time it was the Church alone that was exalted as judge over mankind, and every layman knew that was a sinner. Nowadays, it is the layman who has to judge his fellow-sinner if all values are not to fall into anarchy, and instead of weeping with him, brother must say to brother: “You have done wrong.” [more..]

The word “tolerance” has various meanings. My favourite is its characterization as lying between that of soft-headedness and narrow-mindedness, per Aristotle. I’m wondering how this is evaluatively different from the very romanticized ideal of the word “tolerance”, and one at the core of democracy, that one should tolerate the other, in the other’s interests and goals, while respecting one’s own. As discussed previously, multi-culturalism is basically the bracketing of one’s own interests and goals to appreciate the other’s. Multi-culturalism: it has become a precept, dogma of democracy.

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Machiavelli once described Moses as an astute person who, in the quest to consolidate his power, found in the idea of an absolute, singular God the means to wield control over the israelites under his charge. Moses’ only virtue was the fact that he had a direct link to God. Now, whatever we may believe the matter to be, it’s somewhat fortunate for Moses to have such access, isn’t it? And right down the ages, we have the papacy wielding such immense power by virtue of the fact that christian kingdoms of the time required the divine sanction to rule that only the pope could provide — else, such a king would not be recognized.

Quite a bit of power there, ya? An excerpt from The Prince:

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There’s probably nothing more exhausting than fighting for what you believe in. I know, I know, my view is mostly contrarian, since it’s become an anecdotal fact that if you do something you believe in, it shouldn’t drain you to the point of inaction. The flip-side is, I suppose, that when you’ve expended a great amount of energy into something - physical, emotional, mental - things begin to take a toll.

I watched my friend scramble up the slopes of his career, and there were times when I wondered where he got the strength to keep going, keep at it. His answer, delivered in his immovable, laconic style, was: “My family”. It’s the way he’s said it. When he said it I looked for cues indicating if he did it for his family for real or not, and I couldn’t detect anything past his impassive face. I’m pretty sure family men know the full weight of that expression: “My family”.

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The good doctor alerted me to the fact that he’d been posting instalments of Kassim Ahmad’s thesis here. It’s been very, very interesting so far; a brief foray into methodologies of interpretation, and then a brief overview of a pre-Islamic Malay community. I think the meat of En Ahmad’s interpretation comes in later chapters, but the initial layout of the terrain has been interesting in and of itself.

Go check it out!

I was inspired after visiting M. Bakri Musa’s blog where he discusses the work of Kassim Ahmad, a man I do not know, but whose ideas I am now begining to read about. Mr Ahmad’s seminal work, it appears, is an honours thesis on the characterization of two Malay heroes, that of Hang Jebat and Hang Tuah. He basically turns the common interpretation of that legend on its head, in an analysis of principles and loyalty in these two giants of Malay myth and legend.

Check out M. Bakri Musa’s blog here.
En Kassim Ahmad’s blog is here.

Do visit them, you will find yourself pleasantly surprised by the insights therein.

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It must be all well and good to sympathize with the victims of tragedies, and in my more cynical moments, I wonder at how people can pour their hearts out in response to such lyrically “beautiful” disasters. They evoke the sentiments, the feelings. It would be a blanket observation to say that we all commiserate with heart-felt words and then dismiss the whole thing with a whisk of the keyboard, or the errant remote control.
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