Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Humility


(Left: picture of Calcutta's late Mother Teresa)

I was at my in-laws' place last weekend and i suddenly became very annoyed at the sight of used tissue papers thrown carelessly about outside the dustbin, papers strewn everywhere and what appeared to me to be the general messiness of the place. Then i started judging my in-laws with some ill-conceived higher "standard" that i felt they didn't measure up to. I was ready to leave their house immediately and go home to where i felt things were cleaner and a better environment for me and my baby daughter. But i didn't take into account the feelings of my wife. This was her home. Her family. Her folks. And i was passing judgment on her when i passed judgment on them. After leaving the house in a hurry and having gone home i thought over things and decided that i had acted rather badly. I called my mom-in-law the next day while i was at work, spoke gently to her and apologised several times eventhough she made as if nothing had transpired other than our leaving her house in a hurry presumably because i was in a hurry to get some chores done. The point is, i had been arrogant and judgmental. Ever since that day and even before that incident i have been scouring the internet in search of the magic word, "Humility". Humility as i understand it is to be aware of one's self-worth and not have others act in ways you would rather they'd act/be. Humility is about self-control as opposed to controlling others. Humility isn't about putting oneself down in Uriah Heep fashion to gain praise approval and accolade from others for feigned modesty but to take oneself as one is, in full and true appreciation of one's weaknesses and flaws and accepting the Will of God. Humility isn't staged. True humility is what makes one acceptable to God. Humility prepares the way for other virtues. Humility endures like the deep blue sea so that anything thrown into it would merely cause a momentary ripple only to be absorbed and incorporated as a part of the greater whole. So as the year draws to a close and i have some time now to reflect on myself, i ask for God's grace to grow in humility and to become a better person than i was in 2009. This entails many many things and i am just starting on this road of transformation and i realize that i will fall along the way many times but i must with the grace of God persevere and continue until i have reached my goal - to grow in humility. To endure all, to embrace all hardships and abuse real or imagined, not to expect others to conform to my thinking of how things should be, but rather to control myself and to change myself. Happy New Year.

Sunday, December 13, 2009

What happened to the Internet we used to know?



Things have a way of creeping up on you unawares in this here our good old Malaysia. Like how the internet has changed since its introduction to Malaysia in the early 90s to what it is today. www.yahoo.com has become m.www.yahoo.com while www.google.com has become www.google.com.my in the last couple of years (or less if memory does not serve me incorrectly). So while we haven't had full-scale censorship YET, the fact is that with these changes the government can very easily impose censorship a la China. Maybe at first they will cite pornography as an excuse to crack down on the internet. Then after that, "National Security" or whatever excuse they can think of to get their hands on the only channel of freedom we have left in Malaysia. You see, they can censor local newspapers and magazines by threatening not to renew publishing licenses. Even the Catholic Herald was threatened of all publications. But they cannot censor the internet as easily. Well, until now. They can now. I'm betting it is only a matter of time before they pull the plug on the internet. And by golly, do they ever have a thousand reasons not to allow free and unfettered discussion of their policies and actions! Imagine Malaysia being subject to censorship over the internet as China now does. Your search engines will be blocked from accessing "sensitive" sites or whatever is deemed by the authorities to be unpalatable to them and theirs. I remember the internet when it was first introduced, what a beautiful place it was what pleasure to surf, i could browse on any subject, look up on any information, get views and opinions on any subject under heaven. Old Mahathir guaranteed that our internet would be free of censorship. Fast forward 15 years later and the multi media super corridor is almost non-existent, nobody is pouring in money into developing Malaysia's IT industry and so the reason for keeping the internet free, ie. to attract foreign FDIs into Malaysia have all but disappeared. Now slowly i am seeing the internet getting monetised in all its facets and coming in the government's cross hairs for censorship. They may deny it, but don't be surprised if what you search for doesn't come up on screen cos some bureaucratic pen pusher decided it was for your own good. We are already seeing this happening now. Censorship kills independent thought. It is the tool a regime resorts to to stifle dissent and perpetuate its lies. Without questions being asked, without probing, without checks and balances, they can get away with anything. And they have gotten away with quite a lot already, haven't they?

Thursday, December 10, 2009

Burn baby burn



We live in the Age of the Gloss. Form over substance, appearance over content. Nothing is what it seems. The government speaks in doublespeak we cannot trust our institutions our leaders lie. We must scrutinise, examine and do due diligence or be prepared to be SHAFTED. Words are just words, lip service is easy, no one gives a Good God Damned so long as the party and the music plays on. Hey Maestro, let the good times roll! Then someone whispered: "we live in steadily coarsening times, bro". This is not just because people do not care anymore or they're just too tired to care. The culture glosses over everything. Instant gratification instant oats instant love instant sex, you see it on TV (I keep switching channels but one show isn't very much different from another). Lift up the carpet and you'll see a writhing pile of maggots feasting on the decayed bloated corpses of Prime Ministers past. Blue veins pop all over their dead pale decomposed skins like a dead man's body floating on the river in the hot afternoon sun. When the man dies, let him be cremated in a giant funeral pyre. No Worms, i hear. Fire cleanses, fire purifies everything. Prometheus' gift to mankind it's the BEST.

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

a fool and his money are soon...



...PARTED! I am by nature an easy-going person. I like to do things in my own time, unhurried and maybe dilly-dally when I can. However, when it comes to buying stuff, i am always in a hurry. I don't really know why. Yesterday i went out on another matter and along the way i saw this new baby shop opened along the coastal highway that a salesgirl from another shop had recommended to me in glowing terms. Once inside i was disappointed for i had been led to believe that this shop would have most products anyone would need for babies. This one was in fact poorly-lit and looked like a small shop. Behind the counter was a pleasant Malay lady and her 2 -year old daughter. I asked for breast milk storage bottles and she showed me what her shop stocked. I looked at her product and immediately knew that this wasn't what my wife had in mind when she asked me to buy some breastmilk storage bottles. But against my best instincts and seeing as there was nary a customer in that shop, seeing that lady and her little girl and that little shop, i was moved to buy something from her to support her little business. And so i bought the product and sure enough later that night my wife having examined and opened the package told me that she couldn't use it. The storage cups were too wide/impractical and the mouth wouldn't fit in with the breast pump she was using. Incidents such as these have happened to me before and yet i never seem to learn. I'm a lousy shopper, I admit. Only i hardly shop for stuff other than books for myself and some clothes come the Chinese New Year. I do not have the eye for good products but i do know instinctively when something is a bad deal. And yet i go ahead and buy it for all the wrong reasons. This made me feel really stupid and small last night. My wife told me that money was hard to earn and i couldn't agree more with her. It wasn't a lot of money, but it was a bad deal. Is it because spending money makes one feel good? Shopping for relief? I thought that only happened to women. I'm like a deer surrounded by lions whenever i go out in search of something to buy. Very bad decisions. I need the gift of discernment in this. It is a real puzzle to me why i do some things the way i do them. Human beings can be irrational but surely we learn from our mistakes? What the heck is the matter with me??

Thursday, December 3, 2009

Sugar is bad for you so let's raise its price



The funny thing about the government's latest proposal to do away with sugar subsidies (over RM720 million a year to maintain the price of coarse sugar at RM1.45 per kilo) is that it was something i had expected after reading the news not less than a month ago, that former Sugar King Robert Kuok's Perlis Plantations Berhad had disposed off all its sugar making business/lands in Malaysia to Felda. I thought at the time that the government must SURELY let go of sugar price controls and let Felda raise the price of sugar. Otherwise, how was Felda going to make its sugar-making business profitable? After decades of controlling the price of the sweet stuff and not budging to even allow sugar manufacturers to raise prices by a lousy 5 sen, as soon as Felda gets into the sugar business the government gives the green light to raise prices all for the sake of our GOOD HEALTH. Now that the sugar business is in the hands of its offshoot Felda, the government will bend over backwards to accomodate them. For years and years sugar manufaturers' pleas to the government to allow them to raise sugar prices fell on deaf ears. But now, lo and behold, it is decreed that sugar is bad for our health hence raising prices will force Malaysians to consume less sugar. They even got the Consumer's Association of Penang people to come out in support of this proposition. Baloney. This is about the same kind of reasoning as the imposition of a RM50 service tax on credit cards to stop allegedly irresponsible/profligate spending amongst Malaysians. It is now confirmed by those in the credit card business that the RM50 service charge on credit cards will have NO EFFECT whatsoever on the volume and value of credit card transactions. Wither the government's justification for all these plain bullshit, scraping-the-bottom-of the-barrel-for money, desperado policies? You want money, go ahead and say it out loud. You need the money to waste on your hopelessly inefficient projects, to pay off your party warlords, to pay whomever has a hold on your scrawny little necks which i am sure lots of people do, judging by your lousy record and administration.
You need money cos it is never enough to pay off the trail of errors you are leaving behind with each mistake that you make. You need lots of money to stay in power. You're a bottomless greed pit for money which will never be enough for you to waste. Your shit don't stink but the money will cover the smell long enough for you to move elsewhere for your next dump. Good for our health indeed.

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Cold Hard Cash is like PURE OXYGEN



Everybody is hungry for liquidity and there is not one banker/financial planner/insurance agent/unit trust manager/salesman/living breathing human being who will say no to cash and isn't lying at the same time, no one in his sane mind will say no to cash, the love of money is the root of all evil but NO ONE will say NO to cash. Recently i read in our local papers that a couple was caught feeding cut-off dollar bills into the bank's automated teller deposit machine. Their modus operandi was to cut a genuine bill in half and paste the other half using a photocopy fake bill. That way the teller machine can't tell the difference and accepts the deposit. If you had RM100, you could double it and so on and so forth. They were busted. Then of course there are the usual assortment of robberies (legal and ilegal), purse-snatching, drilling holes in the wall to rob a pawnshop, all sorts of shennanigans people get up to just to lay their hands on the cash. We NEED cash to live, no less than we need oxygen to breath. We need it to eat, to house ourselves, to put our little ones through college, to give our selves a decent lifestyle, to buy a car, to buy that branded hangbag for your wife so her friends will not look down on her (or not), we need cash and we can never have enough of it. So how come a guy comes along and tells us that love of cash is contrary to Heaven (see: Jesus Christ). I mean, if i don't get the cash i suffer for the duration of my life in this world. And when i die, i get to go to heaven as my reward (IF). So does that make me happy? I dunno. But let's not get righteous and take a vow of poverty just yet cos there are so many other things that one wants that one wants to get and the only way to get it is by cold, hard CASH. Jesus died on the cross what, when he was in his early 30s? i'm 40 now and earning very little, too little. I need to find a way to make cash and i need it badly cos cash equals freedom to me and my little family. Cash means i can buy a decent roof over my head for my little one and my wife. Cash means i can be independent and not take shit from whomever or whoever. If this sound selfish, it is. It SUCKS not to have cash and i need a brain overhaul now to turn me into a money-making machine just like the other chinamen in town. Why should this chinaman be any different? Screw the righteous. EVERYTHING revolves around CASH. Don't let nobody ever tell you otherwise cos they're lying through their teeth. If i can make a product that sells like hotcakes, i'd get to work immediately. I love Jesus, but i don't think that Jesus and money are incompatible. Not unless Jesus himself appear before me like he appeared before Thomas and told me in person that it's all bullshit and i should just live gladly like a poor righteous slob and wait for my reward in the afterworld. But Jesus is not going to do that so i need to work real hard to make the cash so that my life will take on a semblance of reality i can live up to. I need to snap the hell out of my stupid head dreams and start living like a real man. A man who makes money. Oxygen, for my little one, for my wife, for me. I am now officially a money-whore and i love it, so help me God.