A sword of a different temper...

This week a ghost reappered in my life....an old comrade from the old gang...from Uni..I've not seen him in maybe 4 years.

We were close once, damn close, my brother and all that but a girl got in the way. His ex to be exact. They were having some problems during that time as couples would and he used to confide in me. She was seeing someone else and there were other brothers in the gang that had seen them together in the wee hours when my friend was out of town. He confided to me this and i gave him my point of view (that he should just call it quits with proof firmly in hand- i was stupid then and naive then see ;) ..but he was still in love with her i guess) Anyway to cut the manouverings short, he did try to break up with her,after one final toss on the bed (sheesh) and lo and behold he mentions my name as the source of this divine inspiration to break up. And he mentions point by point all the sightings of her and the other guy which she assumed i was the one keeping tabs on her. All hell broke loose and she came and confronted me. It was not a pretty sight. I explained that it wasn't me playing the spy game but how can you explain things to an enraged and slighted women (he broke up with her after one final episode of the horizontal lambada , for God's sake). Any one has any ideas how this can be done nicely, do tell me, its one of life's mysteries still for me.
Anyway the same day that his ex confronted me, he got word of it. So he came to see me. Through all his sorries, i just kept my mouth shut. But my glare said it all. The next day he left KL. Dissappered just like that. No goodbyes no more sorries.

Me and his ex dont have anything to do with each other now, all our friends know what transpired and i guess over time she came to know what really happened. She married last year into a prominent political family (the guy she was seeing on the sly while still with my buddy). Last time we met, things were cool enough for us to smile at each other.

Now my compadre is back in KL. Last 3 years he was in JB and he fell in love and got married to a doctor. He's come back to , as he puts it, tie up loose ends and to bury the past. He is resurrecting an old dream of the old gang doing something (business lar) together. A special enough invitation for me that he sent two brothers to come and persuade me to see him.

For me this is a bittersweet thing. i will make my peace . So these 3 days ive been pondering on friends and friendship and truth and honesty and women . hahahaha. Still as muddled up as ever. But when we embraced each other that night , i guess part of the hurt was assuaged. I did make it crystal clear what i thought of him just walking away 3 years ago...but as the night progressed, we all had a good time reliving old times. Remembering all the shit we got into together once upon a time brings a smile to my face even as im typing this.

So mistakes are forgiven and forgotten over time, and lets just get on with it.

To Sting, welcome home

oftentimes in life, things dont turn out the way way you plan it, in fact i think in the great game of life, things that you plan too much never do. I wanted to write when i grew up, now that ive grown up i seldom do. I wanted to be open and free in life and love, but lo and behold, im a conservative now. I used to throw scornful looks on the rich, elite , powerful, an anarchist in my youth definetely socialist leaning (as in the concept not the economic theory), now i find myself playing the great game to be among the wolf packs. Hahahaha the irony of it all

idealism is the right of the young, for the rest of us time marches on, ideals get buried in the dust. When youre 18 and smart, you want to save the world. If you're 28 and still smart, you realise that the world is beyond saving, better look out for numero uno. I know that sucks but its practical. You can only save yourself and if you're lucky maybe those immediately around you. Friends , family.

it wasnt always like that, at 18 i was gungho, convinced in my invincibility and the soundness of my arguments and intellect. I believed in (lost) causes, in heros, in the infallibility of elders and leaders, anti corruption, no racism, food for the poor, education for all, that right was clearly defined from the wrong, the truth just needed to be uncovered, love at first sight...

Now the operative word is practicality. I still do believe in all this things i guess, but tempered with experience and a clearer understanding of what makes humans tick. I still believe in the goodness of the human spirit but i know many lose their way fighting demons both real and imagined. Ive had my share
The world is not meant to be black and white, its grey -accept it. and yet ...

I hope that my hopes in a younger time can be seen still.
Hanya kepadaMu Tuhan aku memomohon kesempatan, tunjukkanlah jalan , permudahkan perhitungan.
-A daily prayer taken from a comic book ..a long time ago (it just struck me as so beautiful that i incorporate it in my prayers now)



An interesting thing, reading Yaser.org, taken from El Fadl's Search for Beauty in Islam.


You remember your short jalabiyya, and patchy beard, your miswak in the upper pocket a reaffirmation of power and triumph. The sparkling white head cover limited your range of vision and provided with such unencumbered clarity. Back then a single book, Riyadh al-Salihin (The Gardens of the Righteous) symbolized all that the world had to say to you and all that you had to say to others. Parts of Hayat al-Sahaba (The Lives of the Companions) would be read in the mosque and visions of a perfectly ordered, perfectly structured society would relieve the stresses of your mind. When you bought a copy of Sahih al-Bukhari, you believed that all the problems and answers of existence were contained therein. Any contradiction was a challenge and any challenge was a negation of your existence. Every time you would assure yourself, "I will commit the whole of Bukhari to memory and then..."

You remember a world streamlined into self-invented categories--simple and yielding to perfect casuality. You believed that if you do your du'aa well on Friday the rest of the week would be perfect, but if you would forget a single verse or phrase, then the order would unfold and collapse. A simple world--an authoritarian world, comfortable with its diversions, submerged in immaturity.

[...]

Music is Haram you declared...but you did not get the point. It took you years to get the point. What a world--a world streamlined and in its dimensions, fed by ignorance and sheltered by arrogance. An authoritarian world where you are the authority. A world where the magnificence of God is represented through through the authoritarian voice of a self-righteous self. A world where the Divine voice becomes imprisoned by a human voice and the human voice ascends to the throne. An essentially God-less world.

[...]

You grew, and your conscience grew. You are no longer as threatened, but you are no longer as confident and secure. You realize that while we seek to discover the Divine Will, we will never come to embody it. While we search for the truth, we are not the truth.


Beautiful aint it?

On my last post, that untermeshen remark got one of my visitors( yay i got a visitor) in a twist. Let me just clarify this. Hitler referred to the slavs (read russian), the jews, the poles, everyone else under the sun as untermeshen- subhumans. Their place was to toil and work while a great Germanic-Aryan master race lorded over them. Thus the Third Great German Empire (Reich) would last 1000 years in all its glory with the foundation built by the conquered peoples. Now i did not mean that we are Nazi's, never in my mind did it cross me that our foreign workers were slaves or untermeshen or whatever. Just thinking out loud that our achievements especially during the boom of the 80's and 90's were in part due to the efforts of foreign workers that the press, the government, us simple folks feel uneasy about.
When i was in Uni, i did a paper on Indonesian workers and their contributions to our economy. My professor said something that i remember till this day: Malaysias borders are artificial, it is porous, people of the malay stock have crossed the straits both ways since time immemorial. The Indonesian foreign workers share much in common with us- culture , religion, race. And thats why they are apt to dissapear into the malaysian malay populace-absorbed and welcomed. We intermarry, we assimilate.
And yet we feel uneasy of their presence. I think this has much to do with our perceptions that they are somehow inferior, in the same vein that singaporeans think of us as country hicks. We shake our heads at the ninja killings, the riots, the restlessness over there and reach a concludsion that we are superior. We are more sophisticated, more educated, more orderly, more rich. In Malaysia, everytime theres a buglary, a robbery , a fight- its the indonesians at it again. Point is we are uneasy.

I take back the untermeshen remark - apologies all around. (My first blog critique - how exciting!)

Today as i was driving to work, i saw a bunch of indonesian workers resting by the roadside. They were probably waiting for a pickup to work. As i drove closer, one of them motioned by pointing to the front of my car. True enough checking the dashboard, the red door open light was on. With a wave and a smile i drove on for about a kilometre, away from them, then got out and set the hood.
The truth is i was afraid. So many horror stories about foreign workers that my first instinct was to get away from them. So an act of kindness on the chaps part, made my heart beat faster. What does this tell about me? What does this tell about my perceptions of them?

Our relationship with our foreign workers is a troubling one. Never really comfortable with their existence here on our soil, yet understanding that without them our industries would grind to a halt. Will all our glories be borne on the shoulders of other nationalities? After all our crowning achivement, the Petronas Twin Towers was designed by Koreans and built by Indonesians. Damn this sounds too much like the 'untermeschen' philosophy of Hitler.

Taken from Bartleby.com

A. E. Housman (1859–1936). A Shropshire Lad. 1896.

XXX. Others, I am not the first


OTHERS, I am not the first,
Have willed more mischief than they durst:
If in the breathless night I too
Shiver now, ’tis nothing new.

More than I, if truth were told,
Have stood and sweated hot and cold,
And through their reins in ice and fire
Fear contended with desire.

Agued once like me were they,
But I like them shall win my way
Lastly to the bed of mould
Where there’s neither heat nor cold.

But from my grave across my brow
Plays no wind of healing now,
And fire and ice within me fight
Beneath the suffocating night.

I read with great interest the writtings of sharizal and najah , the husband and wife team who are in my opinions among the foremost bloggers in Malaysia. The topics are great, opening minds to a greater discourse about myriad topics.

I picked up poetry on account of a girl a long time ago a lifetime away. She was a real Lit buff and there was this tree just outside her dorm. Innocent (and dumb) at 19 we'd sit under the tree and read while the afternoon clouds rolled by. Thinking back it was stupid and hot (plus dangerous in UTM skudai circa 1990), but there's something about that girl and the stupidity of first love, that made me forget the hours . But even after it all fell apart, I still enjoy poetry even now. So on this Friday , i'd just want to put this down, because i dreamt of her last night and remembered...

In Memory of WB Yeats
I
He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.




III

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.


From Another Time by W. H. Auden, published by Random House. Copyright © 1940 W. H. Auden, renewed by The Estate of W. H. Auden.

Yesterday had an evening out with Promuda. My first time attending such a thing. Seems like a nice bunch of people- smart and opiniated. Anyway the topic yesterday was on Religion and Politics.

There was this one chap who spoke from the minority point of view- specifically on Christians in this country being persecuted. Not enough churches , foot dragging when it comes to applications and all that. If its true, i think it puts us all to shame. I believe sincerely that a state that denies the right of its people to worship freely , are opening up the posibbility that the people become godless in the end. If we can have so many troubles on account of religion, imagine the state of man if we didn't have any. Am not saying all atheist are evil, a good buddy is one, but am really sure that no form of religion would teach their followers wrong.

Islam and Christianity , two faiths from the same root that have been going at each other for 700 years. I guess the root of the problem is that the bereaucrats fear that Malays will be attracted to embrace Christianity if no brakes are applied. I think with the impact of globalization, this problem is accentuated today. The MTV generation worship the West and as such the pesudo Christion culture finds more acceptance. That is what is feared most. our youths without iman flocking to the cross. I think that this problem is already upon us now, rather than the 'problem' of a rise of Islam, its Islam under siege now. So we put a brake on it by stopping the expansion of the Churches and all that.

That i think is wrong, rather then strenghtening the faith of our own, we put a spanner in the works of other faiths. There is no complusion in religion- Tiada paksaan dalam Islam. But Islam is under siege , hence creative solutions must be found to address the rot.

The rest of the speakers, I will comment in due course. Hey im in the office, have to make a living too...

I was born in Melaka. Now i make my home here in the Klang Valley. I go back every month but it seems that every time i go back, its like time travelling. Things slow down . Here in the bustle of the big city, every thing moves at lightning speed.