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On First and Third Worlds

It was a typical balmy KL afternoon as we were driving towards Mid Valley. The sky was clouded over, and there was a faint promise of rain. As I was steering the car gently towards the basement parking entrance of the Gardens mall, the entrance booth slowly came into view. I did the usual instinctive thing, reaching out to the console on the car’s dashboard where I normally keep my Touch ‘n’ Go card. Just as I was about to lift the card out of its faux-leather sleeve, I noticed, at a glimpse from the corner of my eye, that the parking terminal accepted not only the usual cashless payment of Touch ‘n’ Go, but would also accept credit card payments, including MyDebit, with its distinctive Wifi-looking logo.

“Eh. Can pay with credit card now. I wonder if I can use Apple Pay for parking here.”

“Ooh,” Kat replied. “Try lah.” My wife knew me too well enough by now to know two things. One: I hate unfair and inefficient monopolies on public services, with a level of detestation that Kat herself would normally reserve for cat torturers. Two: ever since I was able to use Apple Pay on my iPhone, I have been constantly delighted at the ability to merely double-press a button, look at my phone to unlock the Apple Pay pay option, and then simply swipe my phone over a terminal to effect payment – my favourite First World-level dopamine shot.

I tried it – and voila, it worked! There I was, happily steering my car past the parking entrance booth with a big smile on my face. Never fails.

Anyways, some minutes later, I found a parking spot not too far from the lobby entrance (another pet habit of mine, the pursuit of which can sometimes drive Kat out of her mind), and as we were heading up the escalators and found ourselves walking past the shops on the lower ground level, a sudden thought came to my mind:

“Alamak! Now I remember: the last time I used Apple Pay to enter a parking lot, I couldn’t exit. This silly building in Bangi hadn’t updated its parking system, and so I could enter the parking with Apple Pay, but the parking terminal couldn’t recognise my Apple Pay when exiting. Hmm. I wonder if I might get stuck when we exit later.”

“Oh well,” Kat said, as she normally would when entertaining my sudden bouts of petty anxiety. “If we can’t exit nanti, you just hit the intercom and ask for help, lah. You’ll be that guy, but it won’t be the end of the world.”

“Hmm, okay.” I shelved the thought away from my mind, and for the next two hours, I didn’t think much of it: the movie turned out to be much more entertaining than I had expected, and by the final joke at the end of the movie credits, the entire hall erupted in whoops of delighted laughter.

“Good movie, huh?? Jarnathan hahah!!!” I was beaming.

“Yeah!” Kat grinned. We fell into talking about our favourite parts of the movie, excitedly. It was a good afternoon.

We did some errands at the pharmacy and the supermarket, and then it was time to head back home. As we got into the car, and I was driving towards the exit, I remembered again with distaste that there was a possibility that I might not be able to easily exit. What I was really anxious about, typically, was that getting stuck at the parking exit would delay others behind me whose lives would be unduely disrupted by something I had committed. The dictum of hidup jangan menyusahkan orang was something I held very closely to heart, and I was happy always to lambast those who would break it. Now it could well be my turn to menyusahkan hidup orang.

As the parking exit booth loomed closer, I slowed down the car to a halt, and pressed the button on my right to roll down the window. (Remember those days when you had to actually wind a crank to bring the window down? Amazing.) I lifted my iPhone from its resting place in the centre console of the car, did the usual Open, Sesame gestures on my phone, waved the front of the phone near the parking console, and winced quietly as the seconds ticked, until –

The exit bar lifted up! It worked! In a fit of delight, I did a little whoop, pumped my fist into the air and yelled out with the car window still down: “Oh yeah! First world, baby!”

As the car eased its way past the exit booth and climbed upwards through the exit ramp into the open air, Kat couldn’t resist: “Hmm. If Lee Kwan Yew could crow about bringing Singapore from Third World to First, I guess we can be proud that Malaysia already has First World moments while still in Third!”

Ba-dum-tishhhh.

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Tentang Lebai Alphard

(dengan pohonan ampun maaf buat penulis lagu asal)

Sepohon kayu daun berlendir
Lebat bunganya serta buahnya
Walaupun mulut berbuih "takbir!"
Kalau dah tak ikhlas apa gunanya?

Lihatlah, situ, si Lebai Alphard
Kopiah putih, hidupnya mewah
Rumah banglo tersergam megah
Akhlaknya bau bak ubat gegat!

Tunggang agama sehari-hari
Elaun berkoyan poket sendiri
Supaya nanti peroleh undi
Kuasa duniawi dijunjung tinggi.
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Tentang Tenang yang Tiada Tercium

Engkau memandang penuh hukum
Tatkala takdir rahmatmu ranum
Aku bertenang di hilir ini
Meraut seberkas mimpi tersuci 

Semua sindiran berbalas senyum
Tenang hati tiada tercium
Jalan gegasmu penuh gerigi
Mukim hatiku damai abadi

Untuk engkau, jalanlah engkau
Untuk aku, haluan aku.
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On Being Originally Spicy

“I hope you don’t mind, I decided to order KFC for dinner today,” I said.

“Eh, no worries lah. Once in a while it’s ok.” Kat shrugged.

“Fuh, can you smell that?!” I took a whiff of the fried chicken, all jumbled up in the paper box, parts of chicken anatomy of various shapes in assortment like a fragrant game of Tetris. “I hope you don’t mind, I ordered the Mixed option this time around. I know you’ve been preferring the Hot and Spicy flavour lately, but my heart is still set on the Original.”

“Well, the irony is that to be Spicy is actually more Original,” Kat said archly.

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On My First Day of Ramadan

The details are rather hazy to me now (as it often is with memories that bring shame to our minds), but I think I was seven years old, and I was then in Standard One. It was not our first year of fasting, but that year was my first year of fasting while in “big school” (as I thought of it then), and I was very careful to make sure that I would make it through the first day of fasting that year.

We had just come back from school – both Abang Ijan and I were at St John’s Primary in Bukit Nanas, and I think at that time we were in the morning session, because I am pretty sure it was still some time away from Maghrib when this incident happened. 

First, an explainer: Abang Ijan and I are cousins, and we were just a year apart in age, he being just a year ahead of me. I was my mother’s only child, living in my grandparents’ home with another 11 or so cousins in the same house. Naturally, we spent a lot of time together, playing catch almost every afternoon and watching cartoons on TV, but Abang Ijan and I were especially close. He was the eldest of his three siblings, and I looked up to him naturally as a big brother. Despite my rather frail stature and my oh-so-geeky glasses, my primary school years went by largely without much incident or bullying – most likely because most of the kids in school knew that Abang Ijan was my “elder brother”. 

Anyways, as I said earlier, it was probably that time of year when we had morning classes, because this most certainly happened at home, around maybe five or six in the afternoon. Abang Ijan thought it would be a good idea – the day being so hot, and it was our first day of fasting, to boot – to take a shower. And not just any shower, but in Atok’s bathroom! 

Atok’s room was the inner sanctorum of the sprawling bungalow complex that we called home. Air conditioned, wood-panelled walls, carpeting – the room was always cosy and comfortable, and I am pretty sure now that it was only the audacity of well-loved grandchildren that made it conceivable for us to steal into Atok’s bathroom for a shower. Steal in, we did, and – as I am writing this, I can imagine eight-year old Abang Ijan winking at me, with an impish twinkle in his eye – as we were taking turns underneath the shower, Abang Ijan turned his face upwards and proceeded to glug a few gulps of the spraying water into his mouth. Naturally, I followed suit. 

There was a certain naughtiness to it – drinking from the shower in the middle of the day on the first day of Ramadan. I am quite sure that I didn’t tell Umi about it, not that day itself, certainly. We pretended to be fasting as usual for the rest of the evening, and when Maghrib came, we ate as ravenously as our cousins who, presumably, did not quite descend to our level of mischief that day. 

Now that I am older, I think of this incident almost every time Ramadan comes along. We are older now, and I don’t talk to Abang Ijan as much as I should, or would like to. I’m not quite sure what happened – although a lot certainly have, over those difficult years. But we’ll always have Ramadan, Abang Ijan. 

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On Guns, Israeli Settlements, and Other Sacred Cows

I woke up in the morning yesterday to read about yet another fatal shooting in America. This time, it was three children and three adults shot dead in a school in Nashville.

Every day, 111 people are shot dead in America. Every day. It seems like madness. For someone living in Malaysia, who has grown up rarely even seeing a gun, let alone seeing gun crimes being enacted, it appears like a collective form of psychosis. “Thoughts and prayers” have become the cynical refrain, every time someone is killed: some politician will promise gun control reforms, some other politician will claim that it is a mental health issue, then amidst the claims and counter-claims, more others will die at the end of the barrel of a gun.

I am no expert in gun control laws, but what little I know seems to suggest that it is very difficult to solve what might appear to be a straightforward problem for most other countries, when the obvious and proven solutions are in contradiction to some deeply-held public narrative.

In the case of the US, the story of America as a land of pioneers, and the ideal of “rugged individualism” has, over recent decades especially, cemented the belief amongst many Americans that owning and carrying firearms is somehow a constitutional right. That brandishing and unleashing a weapon is considered a sacred and treasured act in the name of self-defence. Never mind that most Americans no longer live in the frontiers with the threat of armed natives hanging over their daily lives. Never mind, either, that many other countries have ended the gun violence that continues to be a regular occurrence in America, through gun control laws that have curbed widespread ownership and usage of arms, without diminishing the sense of public security and peace amongst their citizens.

Stories matter. Our founding myths, so crucial to the binding together of people into a united and coherent nation, can also become a psychological stranglehold that locks us into repeatedly and unrepentantly inflicting inhumane and mindless acts of violence on each other.

Take another example: the ongoing proliferation of Israeli settlements in Palestinian lands, displacing native populations and heaping insult and violence on one’s own neighbours, on the pretext that “this land is mine.” How could it be that honouring a Covenant with God ought to lead to such ungodly destruction and brutality?

But perhaps every nation struggles with this – the original sin of public narratives that lead us to believe that our unjust and inhumane actions have some justification in some ancient code, or some social contract. The hammering-together of peoples into one can often lead to the forging of exclusionary and narrow-minded narratives that lock us into a descending spiral of inhumanity.

In Malaysia, we too suffer from a similar bind. The narrative of Malay-ness, crucial to the forging together of a united identity across the Malays of the several colonised states of the Peninsula, was expanded somewhat into a larger conception of Bumiputera-ness, but still leaves a significant segment of the Malaysian population feeling as though they are being treated as second-class citizens. It has been more than half a century since Independence and the formation of Malaysia, and we are still unable to break out from the vise of ethnic exclusion, even when most of us Malaysians, no matter where our grandparents and great-grandparents have come from, can now imagine no other home other than our own tanahair.

And the vicious spiral visits itself ever onwards and outwards. Today, we are seeing more Malaysians being unafraid (and frankly, unashamed) to act in a racist fashion to the many migrants who have come to Malaysia to earn a living by helping to clean our homes, serve us in restaurants, haul our palm oil to the mills, and build our skyscrapers. Granted, the idea of citizenship is by its very definition exclusionary, but that does not give us the right to then treat non-citizens less humanely.

Guns. Settlements. Racism. These are all unjust and inhumane forms of violence, wreaked by Man unto Man, for the very basic reason that we have told ourselves stories that make us believe we are justified in performing random and consistent acts of inhumanity on our fellow humans. And human history has shown us, that sometimes no amount of reasoning can rid us of these warped beliefs. Often, it takes violence and revolution to erase past narratives, and to forge a new – and not always enlightened – founding myth in its place.

And such is the nature of the crooked timbre of humanity.

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On the Books I Would Write if I Had All The Time in the World, Part II

What do you do when you have grand plans of writing grand books, but have neither the time nor the discipline to actually write them? You just list down the titles, and berangan that someday you might miraculously find the time to write them, or (perhaps more realistically) inspire someone else to actually take the trouble to write them out. 

Here’s another list from my overactive imagination:

  1. One Must Wait Until the Evening: The Life of Rahmat Harun
  2. Mahathir dan Anwar: Sebuah Novel Puisi
  3. Malay Republican: Ibrahim Yaacob and His Legacy
  4. Candu Rakyat: Pengaruh Konservatisme Islam dalam Masyarakat Melayu di Awal Abad ke-21
  5. Sesak: Perancangan Bandar di Kuala Lumpur, 1974-2020
  6. Pak Lah & Endon: Damai Abadi
  7. Khairy Jamaluddin: Hang Jebat atau Hang Nadim?
  8. Novel Modern Melayu: Dari Ahmad Rashid Talu hingga Abdullah Hussain
  9. Monkey: The Life of a Well-Loved Cat
  10. Bumiputera: The Biography of an Invented Identity 
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On Writing Everyday

The other day, a friend of mine asked, “Where you find the time to write/update your blog on a regular basis?? Kasi tips sikit!”

I was tickled by this question, because of course writing is writing – you just pick up your pen (or keyboard, choose your poison) and write away. 

But then, upon further reflection, I realised that my friend did have a point: after sporadic bursts of writing for more than a decade (and when I mean sporadic, the gap between my writings were usually numbered in months, even years!) I have finally gotten into a regular rhythm of writing. It may not necessarily be elegant or beautiful writing (though I do aim to write well, or at least, progress towards eventually writing better as I get more practice), but this morning I checked my Jetpack app, and it greeted me thus:

“You’re on a 46-day streak on Essays / Esei!”

Astounding, even to me, because this must surely be the most sustained period of public writing I have ever managed in my life. 

Of course, I have been writing almost daily in my journal for almost a decade now, but this bout of public writing is a recent phenomenon. I would say two things have spurred this recent turn.

The first is reading Montaigne’s Essays. (Yes, my current blog title is directly inspired by that legendary Frenchman.) Writing in a time of great religious and political upheaval, Michel Eyquem, Sieur de Montaigne retired from the turbulent politics of his day to take refuge in his castle and in his books, and began writing a series of essays that has not only enshrined him in the literary canon of the West, but has also inspired legions of similar writings across the centuries, including Francis Bacon and every other blogger today. Presaging the Renaissance, Montaigne made it an explicit aim to focus on himself as a subject of writing – glorying in his own joys and sorrows, his own rationalities and idiosyncrasies. He wrote about friendship and learning languages and parenthood and wisdom and literature and heroes and simple folk and fame and memory and marriage and death. He was certainly the world’s first true essayist, and reading Montaigne today, even in translation, would remind us of how modern his thinking was. Those of us grappling with issues of burnout and consumerism and the meaning of life, would find ourselves nodding vigorously, as I did, on reading Montaigne’s prognostications.

Reading Montaigne (the present continuous tense applies here – I am probably still only a quarter of the way through his voluminous writings) is inspiring to me. I have always wanted to write, and I have always known, since childhood, that I had it in me to write. Certainly not Shakespearean or Proustian levels of writing, but I have stories that I want to tell – like many of us. 

It just always baffled me, the art of writing: I would have moments (usually during holidays, when my mind suddenly has the space to roam, outside of the daily strictures of corporate life) when I would be inspired to write about something, or even struck by the idea of a grand writing project – a memoir, perhaps, or a novel in verse about Malaysian politics. As my own paltry output would testify, these were often mere angan Mat Jenin that would take root in my imagination, but die ignominious deaths, out of a lack of any real tangible action. 

The problem is that the blank page would always stare at me, almost taunting me: Kau siapa, nak tulis semua ni? Apa kau tau? My own insecurities and lack of courage would embarrass me into silence.

And this is where the second point of inspiration came along. One evening, several weeks ago, while glancing at the permanent pile of books hidden underneath our coffee table in the living room, I glanced at a copy of Carl Roger’s On Becoming A Person. I think I must have just finished a rather well-written book, because my common and ineluctable pattern is that right after reading a particularly satisfying book, I get into a restless and rather flailing mood. Gratified by the recent high of beautiful and profound writing, I would be casting around for another bout of the same intellectual and spiritual high. Often, after reading a very good book, I would be going through one book after the other, flitting through several pages, and eventually casting off one book for another, dissatisfied at not being presented with yet another magnificent read. (I know, it’s rather sad.) 

So it was in this mood that I discovered Carl Rogers, and sat down to read through his philosophy of client-centred therapy. His approach, apparently radical for his time, was almost laughably simple: he believed that the main task of the therapist is to provide a safe and non-judgmental space for the patient to fully express herself, to find within themselves the courage to try to live out their own unique individual self. Carl Rogers taught me, as he has certainly taught many others, that the path towards truly living is to have the courage to explore one’s own authenticity, and to embrace all sides of one’s self: the good, the bad, the sad, the happy, the glorious, the mean, even the most shameful parts of who we are. Being truly human is to accept our humanity, in all its ineffability.

I have written about Carl Rogers earlier, and I should not belabour the point. But what reading Carl Rogers did to me, was to encourage me – literally, to give me courage – to embrace who I am, and to decide: I want to make this journey towards better acceptance of who I am. And I want to use my writings as a means to explore this. 

And so I picked up my blog, which has been around since, oh maybe 2012, but had lain fallow through long periods of abandonment, and I promised myself: whatever and however my day would be like, I would make it a point to find time through the hours and days to make sure that I write enough to be able to publish something, every day. It would be wonderful if every day I could publish something profound and meaningful and elegant and beautiful – but if on some days, or many days, I don’t, that would be okay. I just need to write, and use that space to discover who I am, and this world that I live in. 

So that’s it. That’s the “tip”. I simply decided that of all the things in my life, this exercise in writing would take precedence, and be up there in my list of daily priorities, like taking a shower every morning, and praying five times a day (not always succeeding on this one, tapi bro cuba), and telling my wife everyday that I love her. And part of achieving this is also to let other, less important things, drop out of your life. I try to cut out TV and Netflix from my life. No more computer games – even Marvel Snap and Mini Metro get little time on my calendar now. I don’t go out much at night, except to have dinner with close friends and family, and even in that latter, it is mostly just spending time with my wife. I get into bed around 10, often even earlier. 

It’s nice to know that it’s been 46 continuous and unbroken days of trying to write more honestly, more openly. In the same way, I am trying to be more honest, more open with my own self. To accept my failures and disappointments, as much as I take comfort in my “achievements”, however grand or meek they may seem in the eyes of others. 

Some years ago, bereft in what was certainly depression, feeling disappointed at how my life had turned out, I took refuge in a series of books about palliative care and mortality. I remember reading the final pages of Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air, tears streaming down my face at two in the morning. I came out of that particular period of reading with a determination, almost grim in its steely grip, of wanting to learn how to live well, so that I could die well. I wanted it so that when I finally come to the final moments of my life, I can look back at a life well lived. 

These writings are part of that project, and perhaps that also explains the tenacity of these past few weeks. To use the much-loved metaphor of a much-beloved mentor of mine, if this is my “Game of the Impossible”, then I want to play it well. I want to be present for every inning that each new day presents to me. 

And this is how I find time every day to write.