"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives." – Annie Dillard
It was darkness. Pitch black.
Up ahead, a glimmer of light. A heavy tome, its pages old and yellowed, sandwiched amidst thick gnarled leather.
Then suddenly, the book flies open, and the pages are flipped open in quick succession by an invisible hand. And all around, a raucous laugh, echoing and unremitting. Not laughing at anyone or anything, but delighting in the act of laughing, with just a hint of menace, a steel edge to the tone of rejoicing.
Then I wake up.
Like many Malaysians, I am looking forward to today’s announcement of a Revised Budget for 2023.
Not so much for the goodies, though. Alhamdulillah God has been kind to me, and I think I’m doing okay. But I know that many people out there are suffering, and for their sakes, I hope the Budget will address their concerns.
For me, rather, this Budget will be the Manifesto that never was: a statement of intent for a government cobbled out of the shattered pieces of the Malaysian political consensus. And it will be, to me, the ultimate litmus test for a Prime Minister who has spent the past 25 years talking about Reformasi. This revised Budget will be acid test of whether those proclamations of reform were of any real substance.
Mari kita lihat, siapa yang kena.
For more than two years of my life, I was a speechwriter.
Speechwriting is one of those strange professions where your job is almost akin to being a translator: to bring forth someone’s thoughts and beliefs and intended promises, and wrap them all up in a speech that will helpful move, motivate, inspire. In politics, where the art of public persuasion takes its highest form (yes I am a romantic), speechwriters are the architects and the constructors of political promise and power.
Speechwriting is also strange because so much of the esteem that you may hope to hold in the eyes of others is really just reflected glory of whoever it was that was reading those words that you had worked on. No one wants to talk about the speechwriter to some aspiring up-and-coming town councilor in some rural state out in some third world country, but the speechwriter to the President of the United States of America will likely find his way into the pages of the New York Times, and into any dinner party in Washington D.C. that would have him.
I genuinely enjoyed the process and the craft of speechwriting. Of course it requires a love and appreciation for politics, but often it also requires someone with the patience and intellectual bandwidth for the minutiae of public policy. Every politicians needs to sell something, and the politician’s speech is the coin of the realm.
Add another interesting ingredient: poetry. The best speeches of our times – “ask now what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”, or “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat”, or “Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” – are not merely words to tell or to promise, but a intricate dance between speaker and audience, a soaring orchestra of rhyme and rhetoric that carries a politicians’ words far above the realm of the sordid, and lifts its audience upwards, to animate and motivate and inspire.
Unfortunately, in Malaysia, speechwriting is still mostly an amateur’s art. There are a number of speechwriters who gain a sort of anonymous immortality through the political acts and speeches of their principals, and any politician worth their salt will often have their own preferred wordsmiths, especially for the “big” speeches: the policy speech at the upcoming party convention, or a nationwide telecast speech in response to an unexpected global pandemic. But for the most part, the recruitment of speechwriters in Malaysia is still very haphazard, and entry into the profession – if it can even be called that, here – is still very much on a who-knows-who, often serendipitous basis.
In such political environments, speechwriting is often for the young political aspirant – willing to accept poor pay and long hours in return for the chance to live out their “Bartlet for America” dreams, and to purchase entry into the knife-fight that is Malaysian politics.
What does it take to be a good speechwriter? I’ve touched on some of these earlier, but it is useful to provide a summary: An abiding interest and passion for politics and history. The patience and grit to dig into the details of public policy. Ability to understand the audience one would be speaking to. Empathy and understanding of the principal’s personality, interests, and political priorities. Intellectual bandwidth and breadth of knowledge, buttressed by lots and lots of reading. A passion for language, poetry and rhetoric – and in Malaysia, the ability to operate fluently in at least Bahasa Melayu and English. Capacity for hard work.
I would like to think I was a decent speechwriter. Sadly I was not one of the lucky few who could carve out a living – let alone riches or fame! – through speechwriting in Malaysia. But I will never lose that fascination for the art and the craft of political speechmaking. (Ok time for another West Wing binge soon, I think!)
Hi, my name is Ziad, and I am a bookaholic.
Like, yeah, addicted to books.
I should be specific, of course. I have been a reader since I first learnt my alphabet, back at the age of 3. (My mother never fails to remind me of the story of how she was told by a pediatrician that Yes, your son is short-sighted, and Yes, you need to teach him his ABCs real quick so that we can get him tested. And that’s why all my toddler photos are of geeky Ziad in too-large glasses.)
So yes, I have been reading for as long as I can remember. And it makes my reading habit even more inevitable that my mother was, for many years, a librarian at a teachers’ training college. My entire childhood has been surrounded by, comforted by, engulfed by, and flooded with books.
But around about the time I had just finished graduating, and started to work, I fell prey to a related, but far more pernicious disease: I became addicted to *buying* books. The constant logic is that Oh, at least I am spending my hard-earned money on Knowledge, rather than frivolous things.
And that is how my books at home kept piling up.
When I moved into my in-laws’, and later on when I moved into our own home, I kept up the habit. Whenever I got depressed, my usual destinations would be McDonald’s, or Kinokuniya. On really bad days, both.
It got to such a ridiculous level that I now have books piled up on bookshelves, by my bedside, on my working desk, and on the floor, flush to the wall near our patio. I have books in the car, books on my working desk. Everywhere. We have started to donate books to charities and non-profit bookstores, but it has hardly made a dent in our ever-growing pile of books.
So, as a New Year’s Resolution for 2023, both Kat and I resolved not to buy any new books for the entire year. The only exception was for books that we could buy if we were travelling overseas. (I have recently discovered a loophole – downloading books on my Kindle! – but I reason to myself that I haven’t broken my resolution since no money is changing hands. Yeah, very Clintonian, I know!)
It helps that I now try to focus my reading via my Kindle, which of course is more portable, and can contain many more books that my bookshelves at home ever could. I miss those moments of “bookbathing” in Kinokuniya, and I still make my way there from time to time, though so far I have been very steadfast with my resolution.
Yes, my name is Ziad, and I am, indeed, a bookaholic.
Aku mau hidup yang bermaruah Bukannya takut hidup susah Cuma mau bisa berdiri tegap Aku tak mau merasa malu atau gagap Bila umur mula menjangkau senja Dan nyawa mamai dimamah usia Aku tak mau merasa ini semua sia-sia Dan aku tak mau pula berselindung dusta Tak mau bertongkat pada kisah olokan Yang membungkam indera dan perasaan Aku tak perlu tangis kasihan Apatah lagi bengis hukuman Tak perlu engkau menghitung budi Cukuplah aku menghukum diri Aku mau merasakan segalanya Sedih gembira perit bahagia Juga rasa malu dan bangga Segala nikmat serta sengsara Semuanya terkandung dalam Aku Insan yang bergantung penuh pada-Mu Aku mau mati yang bermaruah Ertinya tiada takut menyerah Setiap jiwa pasti merasa Masa yang tentu pastinya tiba Bila umur genap selesai Aku pulang mengharap damai.
Aku diajar tentang Fitrah
Tentang naluri teras ciptaan
Yang terukur teratur indah
Jadi batu asas sang Insan
Mereka diajar tentang Fitrah
Kalau lelaki begini jadinya
Kalau perempuan begitu pula
Semuanya lazim mengikut lumrah
Kita diajar tentang Fitrah
Seolah insan wataknya mudah -
Kalau lelaki: ketua keluarga
Kalau perempuan: dapur tempatnya
Kalau lelaki: jadi pemimpin
Kalau wanita: menyalin lampin
Tugas lelaki: mentadbir buana
Tugas wanita: menggoncang dunia
(Nun jauh rantai asbabnya
Kononnya buaian mencerna kuasa)
Ini ajarku perihal Fitrah:
Setiap insan pelbagai lumrah
Maksud Adil penuh ma’rifat
Setiap sesuatu terletak tepat
Kalau Rafidah: jadilah Menteri
Jangan disorok tepi perigi
Kalau Zeti: jadilah Gubenur
Pasti iktisad cantik teratur
Kalau Jemilah: jadilah Doktor
Harum nama negara masyhur
Ini hakikat ertinya Fitrah:
Setiap insan dicipta Allah
Lengkap kamil dengan cirinya
Setiap seorang tiada sama
Tanda hormat sesama insan:
Mengukur kain pada sang badan
Tinggi budi tinggilah maqam
Itulah janji Allah Yang Akram!
One of the most difficult things that I had to get used to, when I first came up to boarding school in Melaka, was the cussing. It was not just that it was casual – friends would greet each other by the side of the road with “Woi, sial! Lama tak nampak!”, faces beaming – but that it was constant and unthinking. Everyday, everywhere, all at once, you could hear a chorus of Babi and Lahanat and Celaka in a hundred parallel conversations at any given moment.
Cussing was a big part of the culture – the price of admission to be part of the tribe.
I remember one afternoon, a couple of us played a stupid parlour game to see who can let out the longest unbroken stream of expletives, like a string of polished pearls of excrement – gleeful wannabe rappers with a bad case of Tourette’s, going babikaulahanatcelakapukimakpantatlancaucibaimakkau! at the utmost top of our voices.
Swearing as an art form: we were incorrigible.
Not long after boarding school, when I went overseas for A-Levels, I became the unfortunate existential trial that God inflicted on my pious, budak-sekolah-agama housemate. He would wince at every profanity that came out of my foul mouth. Certainly he was too polite to tell me off, so I had to find out from someone else that he was seriously considering moving to another house to get away from my baleful influence. Of course, I found this mortifying – I thought of myself as a good boy, and my housemate was such a gentle soul that the very thought of him moving out, because of my cussing, was a painful thought.
I cleaned up my act, and my potty mouth, pretty quickly.
This classic book by Carl Rogers, first published in 1961, will likely be the most important book I read this year.
Useful and enlightening, Carl Rogers’ approach to psychotherapy resonates with what I believe to be my own take on life: that humans are deeply unique, and that one of our most primary tasks in Life is to give full expression and flowering to the most singular and delightful aspects of our human existence.
Unlike other luminaries of psychotherapy such as Freud and Jung, Rogers believed in a far more grounded and almost ridiculously basic approach to therapy: that the primary responsibility of the therapist is to provide a safe and confidential space for persons to learn to listen to themselves, and to fully experience the entire spectrum of their emotions. His belief was that when patients rediscover what it means to become and be themselves, they will learn that they already have the resources within themselves to recover their own dignity and self-worth.
Most importantly: Rogers walks the talk. Through his flowing and honest prose, the reader gets a sense of who he is – humble, curious, empowering, democratic, authentic, sincere, perhaps even a touch naive.
Rogers also brought two novel approaches to psychotherapy. The first was his conviction that the efficacy and usefulness of what he called “client-centred therapy” or “person-centred approach” could be proven scientifically, through rigorous experiments which were carefully documented and published in the leading psychology journals of his day. His other innovation, which was to grow to become a leading preoccupation for him in his later years, was that the basic principles of his approach to psychotherapy had real and vital applications in fields far beyond the therapist’s room: in the classroom, amongst married couples, and even in the drawing rooms and conference halls of high diplomacy. He was certain that the greatest problems of his age could be solved by an appeal to the fundamentals of human creativity and decency.
Most importantly, from my point of view, his perspective on human communications suggests that we already have the tools we need to form a better life for ourselves:
Some books come along at the moment when you most need them. Reading this book gave me further validation that the way I see the world is a way that could work well, and I finished the book with the hope that here was a roadmap that I could walk in my every day to become a better person.
In other words, this was a 5-star read that I would highly highly recommend to anyone interested in an engaging and coherent approach towards living a Good Life.
For years, I had made it a point to drive some distance away from my workplace in order to attend Friday prayers at ISTAC – an outpost of the International Islamic University Malaysia, where the khutbahs are delivered in English, and (for most of the time) the sermons are prepared and delivered in person by a member of the academic staff of ISTAC, rather than the usual regurgitation of the bland and inane texts provided by our esteemed religious bureaucracies.
I finally gave up the ghost some months back, after realising that even in that intellectual oasis, the government-sanctioned text has begun to rear its rather boring head. To be fair, there were still many occasions when the sermons were prepared and delivered by ISTAC academic staff – as a treat, sometimes ISTAC would even open its khutbah platform to external speakers. On one memorable occasion, an Australian Uyghur preacher was invited to speak, and he gave such an impassioned sermon on the plight of his fellow Uyghur brothers and sisters, that many of us were moved to tears. (Needless to say, there are no tears involved when it comes to the usual gomen sermons – most of the jama’ah would be busy trying to stay awake, instead.) But recently, more often than not, the officially-approved text would be delivered, and in the usual tones: either the typical uninvolved drone of the bored state-employed imam, or the declamatory faux-politician style of the wannabe celebrity preacher.
So recently, as I started reading Khaled Abou El Fadl’s excellent compilation of his Friday khutbahs, I was reminded of how the subordination of Muslim scholars to the needs and wants of the State has truly led to the current sorry state of the intellectual stagnation and sheepification of the Muslim ummah. With the excuse of trying to prevent the politicisation of our masjids, our religious apparatchiks have rather succeeded also in preventing any sort of enlightenment for the ummah on these weekly occasions when we would gather as one people, down our tools and close our shops, to attend the masjid and glorify His Name.
I can only take solace from the hope that, with the Friday sermon forever entrenched as a core pillar of the Muslim experience, the time might come, one day, when these moments of gathering would rise from their current sordid state to become what they were in the time of the Prophet Muhammad: a constant madrasah for the education and edification of the Muslim ummah.
When I graduated, and started my first job in a Fortune 500 oil & gas company (yup, that one lah, mana lagi?) the idea of shareholder value was all the rage. My company had even hired the folks at Stern Stewart & Co to teach our managers the concepts behind Economic Value Added. GE’s Jack Welch was the hotshot corporate hero of the late 1990s / early 2000s, and his book taught us the value of being No. 1 or No. 2, stack-ranking your folks as A, B or C players, and the virtues of being a larger-than-life CEO.
Fast forward 20 years later, and the landscape of corporate thinking has certainly turned a tide. The Global Financial Crisis in 2008 has forced a radical rethinking of business ethics. Milton Friedman’s mantra of shareholder value has given way to a more comprehensive idea of corporate responsibility. We are now told that a balanced approach to business – honoring not only shareholders but others who also lay claim to the corporation – can actually generate value. The Covid-19 pandemic has forced another radical shift, this time amongst workers who begin to question the meaning of work (although it has been pointed out that this is something every generation needs to negotiate in its own time.)
Of course, a signal example of how thinking around corporate values has shifted is the reputation of Jack Welch, that lion of Corporate America. When he retired, the succession of Jeff Immelt was seen as the culmination of a rigorous, almost scientific approach to succession planning. Can the Next Guy emulate the great Jack Welch? It turns out, as William Cohan writes in his latest book, that Jeff Immelt’s career as CEO of GE ended being a long and costly exercise in unwinding the mess that Neutron Jack had left him. Costly, especially because Jeff Immelt ultimately lost the confidence of his shareholders, and lost his job as CEO.
Today, GE is on its way to being split into three entities (much like how our own Sime Darby has been split into plantations, property and motor businesses).
I would not be surprised if, decades from now, the wheels of corporate fads turn yet again, and another generation re-discovers the urgency of putting shareholders first (or solely) in the eyes of the corporation.
(I would also not be surprised if, decades from now, some enterprising investment bank decides that it would be a neat idea to merge the Baby GEs and the Baby Simes back together again. Show me the money!!!)
For now (and personally I hope for some time to come) we can and ought to insist that our corporations remain tethered to the human values that make up the community of people who work for and derive value from our corporations – values of decency, respect, and shared prosperity.