Rehman Rashid | New Straits Times, Columns 2002 to 2010 (PROPOSAL)

REHMAN RASHID NST COLUMNS 2002 TO 2010

Scorpion’s Tales | Mid week | Rehman Rashid on Friday

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An initiative made possible with the assistance of

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REHMAN RASHID NST COLUMNS 2002 TO 2010

Scorpion’s Tales | Mid week | Rehman Rashid on Friday

Edited by Abdul Jalil Hamid

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Preface I know Rehman since his early days of writing, when we were cadet reporters at hgsenem hui consiciam adem publicu pplinat usquam por ut di, crio, timis quod mensus for unt, caequas aperis autum ia Seremur oximihi, se que cre tem temniae sserors cus dios, noximpratium ine conum quam. eger que iam auconsu licampliur ut esi sciocum tarides siliemus, catasdacchin Itam octatimum traride mquam sum nimum orterni peri, eo publius etrevis.

Niqua proximo rissis, accipiemulin Italicaes ero consum atu estius ex spio, ut ocupiori, nit adducon vil hacturnit quost horusquam furnihi cupio, teat, noximena quam qua re, abem ublictu ssolicaed cut es turoptiam stervivis ad acrus, vatu cus, se quos artere rebesse consulis iae tamdie pere coertud enterur niribes ublictu ssolica sinatiliam omprorei stri.

Clabent ienatia publiac res se poreses tiemquon ta ressolus consces moratil invehendi isserficae cles erorterfic finent. Bena, ore publica peroxim praterum immoris sentra vium auciem tacmacio ubli publico nlocus. Simura, quemne cotem murionon te fatusus.

Ute tem opul ut ne es itabus comnemurnum, vivere befes. Considemum patifer teberituita egerenius si publicast gra re inam inculles vit.

Abdul Jalil Hamid CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER The New Straits Times Press (MALAYSIA) Berhad 7

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The 20th century’s long goodbye OPINION | TUESDAY | 30 DECEMBER 2008

One wishes to see the chrysalis emerging, but right now all that’s visible is the shredding of the cocoon.

Perhaps something new and wondrous will step forth and take wing from the torn remnants of the incubatory past; perhaps a phoenix will rise from the ashes of the old order. So far, there’s only been the tearing of the shroud.

But perhaps it’s tremendous enough that the remnants of the 20th century should finally be swept aside. The post-Second World War order had grown as old and tired as the imperialism that preceded it. The world wanted change and sought out its agents, testing many, discarding most, settling on their chosen ones — Barack Obama, Muntazer al-Zaidi, Raja Petra - to channel their qi into ripping apart the stifling old blanket of history.

This was the year of the last hoorah of the Last War Hero, now a snowy-haired septuagenarian with a heart that prevailed over failure, defeat and torture. John McCain was himself a farewell, still defending and protecting his tribe as he ushered them away into history, gently protesting, “no, no ma’am, he’s not an Arab”.

As with the departures of Lehman Brothers and Woolworths’ department stores, it didn’t seem so much the humiliation of obsolete business models as their inevitable exit after long lifetimes of REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

honourable service. For John McCain and Merrill Lynch alike, their time, quite simply, was up.

For this was the year a black man with an Arab middle name was elected to the White House, and the global economy tilted on its axis.

When the driving force is for “change”, pure and elemental, all that is certain is that the status quo is unacceptable.

After half a century of restructuring civilisation and driving global industrialisation and the democracy enabling it, Western capitalism peaked when household debt ended up backed by zero savings, rendering meaningless the very concept of wealth.

The price of a barrel of oil spiked to historic highs approaching US$150 a barrel in mid-year, then plunged to 1975 levels by December, a wild bungee-jump bespeaking a suspension of reason that effectively disqualified it as a global economic indicator, devolving that responsibility entirely onto the financial sector.

Which lacked the wherewithal to bear that burden, thanks to decades of easy credit to consumers encouraged to live beyond their means on loan sharks’ dreams, and so had to turn to governments.

Which had to act in ways that drove the last nails into the coffins of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. In their 60th year of existence, the Bretton Woods institutions were essentially disassembled 9

for reconstruction in a new world order far different from the post-war shambles they were mandated to manage by dint of the Allied victory in 1945.

As ever, that order would be determined by the three-way interplay of resources, production and consumption. Now production had shifted from the West to Asia, and resource bases from Asia to Africa. With the Western consumer basically broke, this shift was costing trillions and catalysing sociopolitical agitation in dozens of countries.

Including this one. Malaysia’s general election in March 2008 delivered a message identical to that of May 1969: the electorate saw fit to reiterate that this nation was, as it had been at birth, equally apportioned between Indigene and Immigrant, and neither could be deemed overlord.

Four decades ago, that message had led to blood in the streets. This time it didn’t, and pre-eminent among the many reasons for this was the existence now of what did not exist then - an alternative political vehicle for the centrist Malay. Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim’s Parti Keadilan Rakyat became the monsoon drain and retention pond for the overspill of Malay dissent he himself played such a role in rousing.

This was the most significant party-political development in this country since independence, and Malaysia’s democratic, electoral and parliamentary processes experienced a spurt of accelerated evolution so jolting, screws were shaken loose and it seemed the ship of state might fall apart.

The Barisan Nasional, cast in the wholly unpractised role of government in retreat, struggled to regain its bearings and acquire a new vocabulary of inter-communal compassion, accommodation and compromise - feeble as such efforts seemed amid minority communities more vocal, self-referential and uncompromising than they had been for REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

40 years.

But BN’s retreat to a simple majority of Parliament was not a total defeat, and Pakatan Rakyat’s advance to governance was not complete.

In this no-win situation, it’s proving difficult for PR partner Pas to continue biding its time, sitting on its hands and biting its tongue. United with PKR and DAP purely for the purpose of ousting BN, Pas is unlikely to continue the alliance once that objective is achieved.

Or even before - the Kuala Terengganu parliamentary by-election on Jan 17 may reveal Pas’ eagerness to break away from the pack and run the final stretch alone, unencumbered by its adamantly secularist partners of electoral convenience.

In a strange twist, therefore, what seems to be emerging from the ripped cocoon of our own national myth is not new and promising but atavistic and primitive - the old divides and distinctions of yore, not gestated and metamorphosed but grotesquely mummified. What some hail as a “new dawn” or an “awakening” for Malaysia seems alarmingly like the rising of the zombies in Night of the Living Dead.

Still, the die is cast, the chips are down and the wheel’s in spin. This has been the year of the great gamble. Watching these games play out will be the foremost pastime of 2009.

Some are surer bets than others, of course. Tiger Woods returns to competitive golf, having made 2008 an excellent year for everyone else in the game, especially Rocco Mediate. Lance Armstrong, having sired another child just to stick it to his rivals, will return to the Tour de France (which gets under way on the Fourth of July, just to stick it to them further).

And Datuk Seri Najib Razak will become Malaysia’s sixth prime minister.

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The great wet T-shirt contest PRIME NEWS | FRIDAY | 16 NOVEMBER 2007

We have to get one distinction clear. The issue arising from last Saturday’s Bersih rally at Istana Negara was not electoral reform, but freedom of assembly.

Electoral reform is a non-issue in this case, because the Four Demands printed on the backs of all those yellow tee-shirts are readily enough addressed.

Indelible ink. Done.

Clean electoral rolls. Being done. (As part of the process, all registered voters should check their MyKad to see if they’re still residing at their registered addresses.)

Free and fair access to media. Fair enough. (Though we’d need to discuss further the definitions of “free”, “fair”, “access” and “media”.)

Abolition of postal vote. Potentially unfair; how about “free and fair postal vote”?

In any case, the avenues of recourse in these matters are not only open but waiting — if only for the present administration to practise the sincere conciliation it advocates.

The basic premise of a public rally, however, is to involve as many people as want to be involved, and impact the rest. Several thousand joined in (the numbers, shall we say, are disputed) and uncounted tens of thousands more were impacted.

Mass-transit train stations were closed, while taxis and buses were immobilised in the huge traffic jams that coiled around the city like dead serpents in the rain.

On the peripheries of the throng at Istana Negara, KLites stood still in stoic clusters, sheltering in the underpasses.

On the roads and highways, motorists waited, grateful for once for the rain, which at least kept their engines cool. As well as, perhaps, the heads of the protesters and the police.

It was, indeed, a well-conducted bit of rebellious anarchism. As is my wont, I had gone to where the party was not: Dataran Merdeka. A group of about 300 protesters had gathered there, held back on Lebuh Pasar Besar at the Loke Yew Building, just short of the square. They stood and chanted slogans for about 30 minutes, during which time most of them slipped off in the direction of Istana Negara.

A rear guard of a couple of dozen stayed on for another 30 minutes, then thanked the police line, apologising politely for having kept them standing in the rain. There was a brief chorus of “Hidup Polis! Thank you Polis!” — what they were demanding was as much for the sake of the police as for all Malaysians, they declared — and then they adjourned to the palace.

There was none of the violence of Bersih’s previous rally, in Batu Burok, Terengganu, two months before. No burning flags, no wild gunplay in the teeth of gang-mauling mobs.

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After the protesters’ “memorandum” was handed over to a palace official (the Agung being at the time back home in Terengganu) the rally broke up and dispersed, leaving not even litter in its wake.

With all this admirable restraint, it’s understandable that the rally organisers should blame the disruptions of that Saturday afternoon on the police.

Understandable, but not acceptable.

Having declared it an illegal assembly, the police were bound by law, first of all, to prevent it. Hence, the roadblocks that jammed everything in a five-kilometre radius of the palace. They were not entirely to identify potential rallyers (although five coachloads of Pas supporters were filtered out on their way into town) but, much more simply, to stop everyone equally.

Secondly: Maintain public order. I got to Masjid Jamek half-an-hour after the water cannon and tear gas, and so cannot tell you whether the mood of the protesters warranted it. The police said yes, the protesters said no; you had to be there.

An AlJazeera English TV crew was, but I can testify they were wrong in declaring the incident “democracy Malaysian style”. They should also have properly identified their studio analyst as a Malaysian blogger and member of the opposition, neither of which designations are necessarily less credible than “journalist”.

That was what Information Minister Datuk Seri Zainuddin Maidin was trying to get across in his subsequent phone interview with AJE, but the message was garbled by a bad connection and Zam’s incoherent fury.

Other than that, protesters, police and bystanders alike maintained their discipline. The protesters had their moment, their message was delivered, and the disruptions and distress of that afternoon were due to only one thing: the illegality of public assembly without permit in this country.

The Right to Assembly is included in Article 20 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Hence, it is also contained in Article 10 of our Federal Constitution. It is on this basis that the event’s organisers and advocates contend that the rally was not illegal.

But what they were really up against were the provisions inserted into the Constitution as a caution against mass rallies turning into mass murder.

Perhaps the 47 years since the Emergency and 38 years since the May 13 riots are sufficient to prove that Malaysians can be trusted now to assemble without let or hindrance; that the police should be expected to perform only traffic management, not crowd control.

Had that been the point of it, Saturday’s rally might have helped proved that point. Breaking the law to change the law may be justified if “the law is an ass, an idiot”, as Dickens’ Mr Bumble fatuously remarked in Oliver Twist. But “electoral reform” missed the point. Changing the system to change the law is oxymoronic.

You might as well throw the baby out with the bathwater, cut off your nose to spite your face and burn your mosquito net to foil a mosquito. Whatever else you achieve, you’d look a right berk.

In language lawyers understand, here is a motto all are welcome to cut out and keep: Respice finem (res-PEE-kayfin-EM). Keep the end in view.

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The value of keeping the end in view PRIME NEWS | FRIDAY | 16 NOVEMBER 2007

Also to be noted was the role of the political opposition at last Satuday’s rally. Leaders of Parti Keadilan Rakyat, Pas and the Democratic Action Party were at the head of the phalanx in front of the palace gates, but their presence seemed practically ceremonial.

The protesters’ memorandum on electoral reform was passed up from the ranks to the palace officials receiving it, with the party chieftains granted the honour of handing it over. It was a benediction; they bestowed their blessings on the demo memo.

But it wasn’t their show. Party politics merely went along for the ride, expressing moral support for a noble cause, while making the most of a photo opportunity for which they could also abdicate responsibility.

These leaders did not lead, they followed. In relegating themselves to a coalition of NGOs on an agenda of reform, our honourable parliamentary opposition handily reformed themselves out of the picture.

Which might explain why Pas president Datuk ?Seri Hadi Awang immediately threatened another rally back on his home turf in Batu Buruk, Terengganu. Perhaps stung by his relegation to hanger-on outside Istana Negara, what with his party having done so much for the two Bersih rallies, Hadi seemed bent on reclaiming ownership of the issue.

(His apparent desire to make a Waterloo or Valley Forge of Batu Buruk shows that Hadi either lacks irony or is richly endowed with it — the place couldn’t be more appropriately named.)

One might understand his frustration. For all its orderliness, the Bersih rally at Istana Negara was a spaghetti bowl of causes. Bersih comprised 67 NGOs, jollied along by the political opposition. Not much could define a single cause that could rope together advocates of everything from religious fundamentalism to gay rights. “Electoral reform” fit the bill.

What really united the protesters, from the neglected rural peasantry to the middle-class urban intelligentsia, was their unhappiness with the Establishment. “It’s not about changing individuals any more,” said a friend I met watching the rally. “It’s about changing the system.”

I disagreed. I believed humanity constructs its institutions on our highest aspirations expressly in order to protect us from our basest natures. The System was neutral. What mattered was how it was operated and for what purpose — not even by whom.

In that sense, though, my friend was right: it wasn’t about changing REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

individuals. The record is replete with instances of individuals, whatever their strengths and weaknesses, being subsumed by The System and rendered helpless before its bidding, regardless of their own will or intentions.

The System can be a corral of sacred cows, hobbled by myth and convention. The System can demand compliance and obeisance from even its most radical or idealistic components. The System writes the script and prescribes the rituals they defy at the peril of their prospects.

As such, the idea of simple human decency redeeming the loss of faith in our judiciary, civil service, legislature, police force and electoral process is, well, quaint. The honest judge or good cop is an anathema to the reformist impulse. “The police are a hundred per cent corrupt,” said my friend, flat out.

That seemed quite unfair. Former inspector-general of police Tun Hanif Omar had only said 40 per cent. But if witnessing corruption turns a witness into an accomplice, then my friend would have been right. The other 60 per cent would have to be held guilty of complicity, and corrupt by association.

I could sympathise, therefore, with his insistence on “changing the system”. That’s where he and the rally made logical sense: why respect a system you want to change? So my only question of him was: Change to what?

What do these protesters want to see arise from the ashes of what they deplore? A republic? An Islamic state? A confederated monarchy of hereditary rulers? Or would an alternative government comprising the present opposition and its civil-society sponsors suffice?

This needs to be much more clearly articulated than in slogans hailing the virtues of justice, integrity and changing the system.

History has posted a health warning on the intoxicating elixir of “People Power”. When a revolution fuelled on this juice succeeds, the ensuing realities could never be as righteously thrilling. People Power is a heady rush but, like heroin, it’s a fix with a deeply depressing comedown, curable only by another hit.

Thus has it been with the Philippines, 21 years and ?four chief executives since the Marcoses were hounded out of Malacanang and dazed pedestrians wandered around the presidential palace swiping towels and Imelda’s leftover shoes.

This is not to disparage our neighbour. The Philippines today boasts ferociously independent media and a passionate civil society, and remains a sovereign member in good standing of the global community of nations and a valued contributor to their workforces.

But is that what our reformists want? If so, no one’s saying so. “Clean Elections”, “Judicial Reform” or “Burn Baby Burn” all lack the specificity that would help the rest of us know exactly what they’re selling. What exactly do they see as a better future for all? Where would they take us? What’s the end they have in view?

Respice finem.

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Collateral damage of corruption PRIME NEWS | FRIday | 9 NOVEMBER 2007

A young man was staring intently at me in the supermarket checkout line. I didn’t recognise him. He kept staring. I became a little irritated, but pretended to ignore him. As I bagged my groceries and paid the cashier, he accosted me, asking me if I was who I was. This kind of thing happens occasionally; my mugshot’s on this page, after all. I nodded, cautiously.

“Do you remember me?” he asked. I shook my head. “My father is…” and he named a man who’d been in the news lately, in connection with the authorities’ much-lauded intensification of action against corruption.

“Oh my God,” I said. “Please forgive me. I could never have recognised you.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to,” he said. “The last time we met I was seven years old.”

He was 20 now; handsome, long-haired and well-built; broad shoulders and chest, dressed in a death-metal tee-shirt and black jeans. His name came back to me. Having last seen him as a happy, bright and energetic little boy, the only thing I could find to say to him now was: “I’m so sorry. How’s your dad?”

His face darkened. “How do you think he is?”

“I’m so sorry,” I repeated, sincerely, but lamely. “How’s your mum? And your brother?”

“My brother’s gone overseas to study. I’m joining him next month. Mum’s coming with us. We’re not coming back. It’s been crazy here, man. All our friends have abandoned us. We can’t live here anymore. We’re finished here.”

“It’s an investigation,” I said, the lameness becoming crippled. “He’ll get his chance to state his case.”

“Yeah, right,” he said, bitterly. “We’re still finished here. People won’t forget.”

So early in life, he had learned the awful truth about the way it is with charges such as these. When this kind of mud is thrown at an individual, it never washes off completely. And his dad was a man advanced in years, with no time left to redeem his shattered career, restore his ruined reputation, or begin anew somewhere else; somewhere far away from the toxic whispers and snide asides they’d all suffered since the allegations of his transgressions had surfaced.

“But my brother and me, we’ll be earning our own livings soon. We’ll take care of mum and dad.”

I shook his hand — he had a steely grip — and from the bottom of my wretched heart I wished him and his family the best of luck, resisting the urge REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

to add some anodyne rubbish about God having a sense of balance, opening windows when closing doors, etc.; of the “hikmah” or benefits that might emerge from grievous calamity.

This encounter will forever colour my emotional response to the righteous bloodlust that attends the authorities’ action against corruption.

The public’s hang-’em-high demands for retribution, when unmet, turns instantly into indictments of the government for inefficiency, insincerity or, worse, complicity in the “close-one-eye” machinations of the morally suspect.

The Anti-Corruption Agency, for long sneered at as ineffective in its caution and circumspection, has lately received rare acclaim for its intensified efforts, especially against suspect policemen and civil servants.

That is as it should be, no doubt, but in the rush to judgment there should be some thought given to the families and children of those rousted from their homes to be carted off in shackles to face interrogation on suspicion of dirty deeds. These remain, after all, suspicions, not charges, but once their faces and names are known, that’s all it takes. Public opinion is the judge, jury and executioner, impervious to any force of law or reason, and so implacable that the easiest way to ruin someone has become to accuse them of wrongdoing, not to prove it.

This is by no means to suggest clemency or even compassion for the wrongdoers, nest-featherers and outright crooks making illicit hay of public funds and betraying the public trust. But it is certainly to remind the public that due process demands discretion in these investigations. Not all spouses and children would have the gumption to parade in front of courthouses wearing tee-shirts emblazoned with slogans declaring their love for, faith in and support of the accused.

This is, therefore, a cautionary admonition to would-be transgressors tempted to indulge in the backhanded bending of the law and morality. It would be the height of self-delusion to think of such activities as acquiring the wherewithal to benefit their spouses and children, when these are the innocents whose lives will be ruined through no fault of their own.

Lynch mobs are not known for deep thought. The people’s quest for justice, no matter how legitimate, needs to be channelled through due process, with all its checks, balances and safeguards against condemning the innocent or inflating a momentary lapse of judgment — an all-too-human failing — into a cardinal crime deserving of a life’s destruction.

It is not a crime to be the offspring of a criminal. When the accused has not even had a chance to defend himself, a perverse injustice has been done in the very name of justice. The ACA’s redoubled efforts to make good the present administration’s pledge to crack down on corruption should be lauded, but the consequences on their families and friends are hardly to be gloated over.

For the sins of their fathers to be visited on their children is an utterly unconscionable barbarism.

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The phony tones of tony phones PRIME NEWS | FRIDAY | 2 NOVEMBER 2007

Malaysia, it might not surprise you to hear, is one of Asia’s leading countries in handphone usage. Cellphone penetration has topped 82 per cent here, with 22 million subscribers. (“Penetration” is the industry jargon for it; the invasive connotations are coincidental, though not inappropriate.)

This means there are only five million Malaysians left who don’t have handphones. They must be mostly under the age of 4.

It should be noted, for a proper perspective, that it’s possible for cellphone penetration to exceed 100 per cent, as it does in Singapore (111 per cent) and Hong Kong (125 per cent). This is obviously because many people have more than one phone. Singaporeans and Hong Kongers must have several, because their countries too have significant proportions of people under the age of 4.

But Malaysia ranks way above the world average in this respect; a feat achieved, moreover, in double-quick time. It’s taken hardly a decade for mobile phones to go from being yuppie status symbols to their present ubiquity. This makes handphone penetration a significant economic marker — not of the upward mobility of the increasingly affluent, in this case, but the downward mobility of cost.

I’ve made no secret of my personal ambivalence towards communications technology, but I grudgingly concede that I can no more live without it than anyone else these days. Earning a living requires some kind of connection, however tenuous, with the larger economy. And that calls for calls.

No matter how few and far between my calls are, I confess I would be lost without my handphone. (Actually being lost without it might be immensely liberating, but that’s another musing.)

In short, I accept that cellular telephony is a necessary evil. My handphone is a personal convenience enabling me to function more efficiently in society and the economy, even if it is also a baleful portal granting unlimited access to malevolent forces bent on my destruction.

But trying to stay positive isn’t easy when 22 million of my fellow citizens seem infinitely more positive than I could ever be about these devices.

Prominent among them are those who announce their quirky individuality with their own choice of ringtones.

I work in a newspaper office, in a vast open-plan space with no auditory shielding. People here can’t work without handphones.

That’s understandable in this business, of course, but I do wish that young lady on the business desk would get as sick of La Cucaracha as everyone else.

Our colleague on the crime desk, at least, seems at last to have acknowledged how difficult it was for others to listen a dozen times a day to REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

Yoda telling him: “Your phone, ringing it is, press the button you must, and fulfil your destiny.”

I can do a fair Yoda in certain circumstances. “Your phone,” I riposted on behalf of the Jedi Council, “annoying it is.Change your ringtone you must, or meet your destiny.”

I’m glad he took the hint. Now certain other Star Wars characters inform him of calls, and other than R2D2 I can’t recognise them so it’s not so bad.

But it’s still plenty bad enough. What is it with personalised ringtones? Do the opening bars of “Lover’s Concerto” by the Toys break the ice at parties?

Does a ringtone of an accelerating Formula One racing car express the style and finesse of the user, or is it a Rempit thing, entirely to irritate everyone in the vicinity?

Is this stuff meant to be sexy, cute or trendy? Do people win friends, influence people, get dates or find their life partners with their ringtones? Or is it purely because they genuinely enjoy hearing James Blunt tell them “You’re Beautiful” every time they receive a call from someone who may or may not agree?

Some of this is probably rooted in the ancient history of cellphone technology, c.1995, when the standard handphone joke was how everyone in earshot would reach for theirs whenever anyone’s went off, because all ringtones were the same.

So now no two are alike, the ringtone business worldwide is worth RM3 billion this year, and Miss Cucaracha can distinguish her phone calls from everyone else’s in the office or wherever else she may be.

And very soon now, so might everyone she calls. Just when you thought it had gotten as bad as it could get, it gets worse. The vilest innovation in the history of telecommunications has just been hatched. It’s being called “flingtones”, and it’s technology that allows people to send their choice of ringtone to whomever they’re calling.

Take a moment to let the full horror of this sink in. Yes, it’s now possible for any malicious vandal to make your phone perform the Lambada simply by calling you. A Los Angeles company aptly named Emotive Communications just received RM25 million in venture capital to bring this grotesquerie to market.

Imagine what you and George Michael might now do to your boss in the middle of a meeting.

To me, it speaks of the sheer wickedness of what communications technology can achieve. How far are people prepared to go to “assert their individuality” and make their “personal style statements”, as though anyone else cared? Only ICT could empower such utter I-me-myselfishness — while egalitarianly rendering everyone equally vulnerable to its potential for hideous embarrassment.

In view of which, Emotive’s fiendish business plan for cellular providers includes not only charging a fee for their flingtones, but also to block them.

Well, that does it. Before certain first-adopter download freaks take their revenge on me for this column, let it here be announced that mine’s on vibrate.

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The good life in the good earth PRIME NEWS | FRIDAY | 2 NOVEMBER 2007

Re: “Home on the range” (NST, 26 Oct).

Let me first say I have enjoyed reading your writings over the years.

But not today. You said that Mahathir scolded people for mourning the passing of the idyllic kampung scenes of kerbau and padi fields. True, the labour is backbreaking and many live close to poverty. But, guess what, some — and I emphasise the word some — people might actually like making a living using hands rather than modern machinery.

That’s why organic food is now commanding a premium price, as not everyone buys into industrialised agriculture. They realise smallholding farms with traditional methods of growing food are superior.

Thanks for reading.

W.L. Thanks for writing. The point was about de-romanticising poverty, not farming, organic, industrial or otherwise. In the 1950s and 1960s, this country’s approach to poverty alleviation was tightly interwoven with land development under the Felda and Felcra programmes, which eventually translocated a tenth of the population to new agricultural schemes. The Felda concept is still upheld as a model for other emerging countries, especially in Africa.

As part of that drive, however, it was expedient for artisanal fishing and subsistence farming to be spurned as ways of life for rural people. From the outset, there were planners who objected to this, holding that the objective should have been strictly to alleviate poverty, not turn people away from their traditional ways of life as fishermen or farmers.

It should have been possible, such contrarians argued, for poor farmers and fishermen to remain farmers and fishermen without remaining poor.

Perhaps this was an idea that had to wait its time. The newly-launched, multi-billion-ringgit NCER and ECER programmes seem much clearer on this concept than the grand old RED Book was. Farmers and fishermen are at last getting a look-in, with the view that it should be entirely possible for decent incomes to be earned from working the lands and waters of our Tanah Air. Maybe more of them might even acquire palatial mansions, luxury limousines and stables of Arabian horses — but that would probably open a whole new can of worms.

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Saving space for the right stuff PRIME NEWS | FRIDAY | 19 OCTOBER 2007

Tom Wolfe used the phrase “the right stuff” to describe what it took to be an astronaut. It was difficult to define but easy to recognise.

The seven individuals selected for the United States’ Mercury programme in 1959 were all experienced aviators with exemplary backgrounds, academic records and service careers. All were paragons of physical fitness and moral rectitude. And all could transfer their cool heads and steely nerves to proper conduct before the world media.

Indeed, that was the point of their existence: not just to boldly go where no one had gone before, but for the world to watch them going there. America’s Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programmes were not so much about “landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth”, as John F. Kennedy pledged in 1961, but to beat the Russians to it.

Not that the Russians had designs on the Moon. Their interest lay in Earth orbit. Sputnik’s pioneering flight 50 years ago last month had opened the heavens above America to Russian hardware. Just a dozen years after the end of World War Two, a basketball-sized satellite traversing the continental United States 223 kilometres overhead had boosted the Cold War to its final frontier.

When Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space in 1961, the die was cast. The US girded its collective loins for one REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

mighty thrust. The first seven American astronauts were selected, based on whatever criteria combined to give each of them the Right Stuff.

They would become among the most famous individuals of their time; their subsequent successes (and failures) the stuff of modern legend.

They were lionised, celebrated and hero-worshipped.

In those turbulent times, America’s space programme provided spectacular diversions from its conflicts in East Asia and the tensions of the Cold War. The space race offered accomplishment and high drama, culminating in Neil Armstrong’s first words from the lunar surface on July 20, 1969: “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.” (Doomed by momentary transmission drop-out to forever contain those square brackets.)

No such glitch marred Dr Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor’s paraphrase of Armstrong’s words on behalf of Malaysians last week. In the circumstances, it was as good a line as any and better than most. Our Sheikh was probably right to stick to the tried-and-tested on this momentous occasion. The Right Stuff does not generally include a tongue for poetry. (Astronaut Bruce McCandless, who on Space Shuttle Mission STS-41-B in 1984 became the first to fly untethered in space, uttered for posterity: “Hey, this is neat!”)

By the time of McCandless’ neat feat, though, the deification of space 23

travellers was long past. The Moon had steadily faded as a glamorous goal once Apollo 14 commander Alan Shepherd had played golf there.

Space travel was no longer for daring heroes but technocrats and professionals. The focus was on the much more utilitarian expansion of human industry to Earth orbit, with the Shuttle and Soyuz programmes and the multinational assembly of the International Space Station.

The richest irony of mankind’s history in space, however, is that the Mercury and Vostok spacemen were not the first to fly there. That distinction went to Robert White and Joe Walker. Never to become world-famous, they were among the test pilots of the US Air Force’s experimental X-15 rocket plane programme.

Both men flew the X-15 above the 100km “Karman Line”, accepted as the boundary of space. They achieved this in total secrecy, as usual with such endeavours at the height of the Cold War. (When legendary aviator Chuck Yeager first broke the sound barrier in 1947, no one in the outside world knew of it for nearly two years.)

In belated recognition, Walker was posthumously granted astronaut’s wings in 2005, nearly 40 years after his death in an air crash.

What truly set the X-15 pilots apart, however, was that they flew their aircraft to space and back.

While all the attention was on Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, at the edge of space above USAF bases in the remote deserts of Nevada and New Mexico, test pilots were pointing their aircraft’s needle noses straight up and firing liquid-oxygen rocket engines to sunder gravity and punch out of Earth’s atmosphere into the black void beyond, then turn around, re-enter and glide home.

The X-15 — not the massive rockets of the American and Russian space efforts — was the true precursor to the Space Shuttle. (And indeed to SpaceShipOne, the first successful reusable manned privatesector spacecraft, designed by Burt Rutan, part-sponsored by Richard Branson and flown to space and back by Mike Melvill in May 2004.)

REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

Once safely back on the ground, the X-15 pilots would go off to write up detailed flight reports and later share beers and cheers with peers out among the cactus and tumbleweed in the middle of nowhere; unknown, unsung, uncelebrated — and completely uncaring of that. No ticker-tape parades. No live telecasts. No presidential handshakes. No problem.

Passed over for the honour of becoming the first astronauts in favour of those whose Right Stuff included being mediagenic, these pilots grumbled a little about how astronauts didn’t actually do anything: the rockets shot them up, telemetry controlled their capsules and parachutes brought them back.

There was nothing to it; the first higher life-form in space had been a Russian dog named Laika. A chimpanzee could have done it — and was indeed considered. Sending humans up had been a PR decision. This rankled with the Mercury Seven so badly, by the time of John Glenn’s first orbital flight in 1962, they’d insisted on having some pilot control designed into their capsules.

All the way to the lunar missions of Apollos 11 through 17, much was made of the astronauts actually flying their lunar modules in the final descent to the Moon’s surface. It was the pride of pilots; the egos had landed.

Such is the myth and mystique of space exploration. Dr Sheikh Muszaphar, the 458th human in space, is an orthopaedist, not a Sukhoi pilot. He inherits the legacy of the Mercury Seven, not the X-15. And as it was for the Mercury Seven, his real mission will begin upon his safe arrival back on terra firma.

The celebrity that awaits him will be overwhelming. The demands on his time and person will be relentless. His transition from male model to role model will be complete. He will be a one-man institution; perhaps even an industry.

He’d better have the right staff.

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Shame and scandal in the family PRIME NEWS | FRIDAY | 28 September 2007

It’s been a hell of a week, if you’ll pardon the profanity. (And you might as well; there’s plenty of it around these days.)

It’s turning out to be the hardest Ramadan I can remember since that of 2001. But the bombing of Afghanistan offered an anguish altogether different from the afflictions of our front pages so far this fasting month. These are times of trial indeed, sent to try us, and I fear they find us wanting.

Lawyers condemning judges, if not colluding with them, and in either case defying the police. Policemen charged in court with money laundering. Wives dismembering their husbands. Parents devouring their children. Children abducted and destroyed. An awful lot to swallow on an empty stomach.

It seems only fitting that the surfeit of rage, rape and murder we’ve been suffering lately should throw up the damning reminder that the worst culprits in child abuse are their parents. …

There’s an answer right there.

In one of the less tragic lost-children stories this past week, a runaway 12-year-old was reunited with her mother after spending three nights on the lam with friends. Her mother’s first words on seeing her, as reported in The Malay Mail: “What did we do wrong? We bought you three new baju kurung for Hari Raya while we had none. Everything was done for your happiness.”

Oh really.

There must be far too many children whose parents are raising them under an iron-clad, lifetime contract: We do everything for your benefit, we sacrifice our lives for you, we ask only for your eternal gratitude in return.

On the face of it, this is not an unreasonable attitude for parents to take.

Theirs is indeed a sacrifice. Raising children from birth to adulthood (defined entirely by the ability to earn their own living) is a life-consuming occupation.

Absolutely, children ought to be grateful. Just wait till they become parents themselves, then they’ll know what it takes.

The problems arise when defining “gratitude”. When it becomes the central ethos of a filial relationship, it tends to become a matter of obeisance — whatever a parent doesn’t like in a child shows what an ungrateful wretch that child is, unconcerned with the wishes, needs and happiness of its own parents.

Consider the mother quoted above. Her daughter is sullen, difficult and rebellious. Most ungrateful. This calls for admonition, which the daughter is duly, even routinely, administered by both parents.

But she does not respond in the expected manner, which would be to realise the errors of her ways, genuinely repent, and sincerely beseech her REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

long-suffering parents’ forgiveness. On the contrary, she grows ever more defiant. Her parents fret at the strange “changes” in her behaviour. (She’s 12.

What did they expect? Had they forgotten?)

And so one day the girl leaves home with RM50, her father’s handphone and two friends, the three of them dutifully be-tudung-ed and ostensibly on their way to the surau for prayers, like the good girl her parents need her to be.

She doesn’t come home for three days.

But she’s not a bad girl. On the morning of her fourth day as a runaway she remorsefully calls her grandfather. He calls the police, who arrange to meet her at a convenient LRT station, from where she leads them to a cybercafe where her two friends are waiting. They’re not wearing their tudungs any more, but they didn’t get up to any real mischief on their little escapade (discounting the sin against their parents, that is, though some parental readings hold that to be the greatest sin of all).

The police take her to the station to wait for her mother, who arrives with sirens wailing another admonition — hadn’t her cruelly ungrateful daughter given a thought to her suffering parents, who’d bought her three new outfits for Raya and not a thread for themselves?

Mum had obviously spent the weekend bemoaning her own miseries, not her missing daughter’s. “What did we do wrong?” The plaintive question is almost always rhetorical. When has anyone who ever asked it ever cared for an answer? That’s what she did wrong.

The police are not uniformly heartless. They spend too much of their careers deaing with the consequences of family breakdowns, from runaway kids to butchered corpses, acid attacks, genital mutilation, murder-suicides and international terrorism. Speaking to reporters on this case, Assistant Commissioner Sulaiman Junaidi “urged parents to be aware of their children’s activities and sensitive to their feelings”.

Even when those children are utterly insensitive to their parents’ feelings?

Well, yes. They didn’t ask to be born. Even if they turn out to be hyperactive attention-deficit-disorderly boys or bitch-slappin’ teenage vampirellas in black lipstick.

That said, 934 parents last year who succumbed to the notion that if they could bring these brats into this world, they can take them out.

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild With a faery hand in hand, For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

William Butler Yeats: “The Stolen Child” 27

READY FOR PROOFER

A word from your friendly cab driver PRIME NEWS | FRIDAY | 7 SEPTEMBER 2007

Woi! You think it’s easy being a taxi driver, ah?

You think anyone grows up with an ambition to drive a taxi? Oh yeah, sure, got parents out there say to their kid: “Son, I want you to be a taxi driver when you grow up. It is a noble profession. Promise me you won’t disappoint your mother and me by becoming an accountant.”

So how about some sympathy for us taxi drivers? See how we have to work. Would you want to drive the cars we drive? For us, the Proton Saga is our means of livelihood. For you it’s a punchline. Oh, so you want to complain the windows can’t open and the aircon doesn’t work. What about me? I have to sit in this thing all day!

Go ahead. Call LPKP. There’s the number. Call! Make report. See if I care. Their aircon also not working, and if their windows could open they’d all jump out.

We are completely unappreciated for the service we provide. Of course you don’t want to drive your own car in this mess. See how much you paid for it. You want some pride and satisfaction from owning and driving your car, right? Well, you’re not going to get it in KL at 1pm on a Saturday. Look at your paintjob. Look at mine. Which one of us would hurt more if we had a scrape? I’ll give you a hint: Not me.

Why should I care? It’s not even my car. It belongs to the company. I rent it from them for RM40 a day. I have to make 10 trips just to cover the rent. They might let me have it after seven years, but by then I’ll have to pay a scrap dealer to tow it away.

I’ve been trying to get a permit for myself, but you know how it is. The government says if they gave out permits to individual drivers, we’d just do as we please and work when we like. Maybe some days we wouldn’t drive at all. Well, maybe we wouldn’t. Maybe I’d just like to sit quietly at home and watch my children starve to death.

But I tell you, if this were my own taxi it wouldn’t smell of urine and vomit.

Maybe if you didn’t have a car you’d appreciate us more. It’s either us or the bus, then. Heh heh. Some choice, huh? Sure, now got LRT and Putra and KTM Komuter, but to get to their stations you still need us or the bus. If you don’t mind waiting, wait for the bus. They’re better now than before, or so I’m told. They’re still pau to me.

Or you could try to flag me down. If I’m in the mood, I might pull over REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

for you. Just don’t give me any lip about the fare. See that number on this meter? It says “002.00”. That means two ringgit. TWO! I dare you, go into that Seven-Eleven over there and see what you can get for RM2.Don’t bother, I’ll tell you. A packet of kacang. Peanuts, that’s what RM2 is! And not even a drink to wash them down with.

A taxi ride costs more in Bangalore, Beijing and Budapest than here. If I could make what London cabbies charge, I’d retire to Country Heights and spend the rest of my life writing letters to the editor protesting the killing of monkeys and pigs. Ah, a 50-ringgit flagfall! That would be the good life.

But nooooo, all we’re asking for is a four-ringgit flagfall, bringing us to 30 per cent cheaper than Hong Kong, so I can have a drink of water with my kacang, and all hell’s breaking loose on our heads. A one hundred per cent rise, they protest! Daylight robbery! Look here, one hundred per cent of nothing is…? Correct! How about a little perspective on this issue?

Oh, but we don’t deserve it, you say. We’re a bunch of crooks. We don’t use meters. We haggle fares. We’re rude and smelly. (Like you wouldn’t be if you did what we do.) We rip off tourists. (Look, if you-all didn’t tell them, would they know? I triple my fare also these Arabs think it’s cheap. Come on, show some solidarity. We fellow Malaysians should help each other. It’s good for national unity. Close one eye, lah.)

Besides, you won’t let us charge more legitimately, so what does anyone expect? Don’t want to upset the voters, izzit? Excuse me, we’re voters too. Why isn’t anyone fishing for my vote? Don’t need it, izzit? So don’t mind me if I don’t bother with your legislation.

Oh you poortings, you can’t afford it, izzit? Yes, I understand what it’s like to have no money. I understand you have no alternatives between us and the bus. But hey, life sucks. This is a world of suffering. Why do you suppose I have so much religious iconography stuck to my dashboard, members of certain communities won’t even get into my cab?

Oh, I know suffering. And I’ll make sure when you get into my cab, so will you. But it’ll be up to me whether you get in or not, savvy? Leaving you standing by the roadside in the rain is my prerogative. Determining my own destiny by screwing up yours is the last shred of human dignity I have.

I have to exercise discretion, you understand. We both know there are some seriously psychotic people out there, just waiting for a taxi. One time, I decided to ignore this frantically waving foreigner (he must have been a foreigner because he was, like, eight feet tall and wearing a hat) and boy did he get mad. He came running out into the road and tried to kick my car! I had to swerve to avoid him. Nearly caused an accident.

Oh. That was you, wazzit? Wow. What a small world. Heh heh. Sorry, ah, uncle. What to do, life is so hard.

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On the local book trade PRIME NEWS | FRIDAY | 7 SEPTEMBER 2007

A couple of weekends ago, I inadvertently attended a panel discussion on the local book industry at the MPH outlet in One Utama.

Inadvertently, because had I known it was a panel discussion, I wouldn’t have gone. I’d thought it would be a little tea party for writers, publishers, distributors and retailers of local books. Even that wouldn’t ordinarily have drawn me, as I’m not universally popular in such circles, I wonder why.

But I’d hoped to catch up with the newly-published Datuk Zaid Ibrahim, and did, for all of three minutes before the forum began to discuss directions in local publishing and suchlike.

To me, the “industry” has progressed beyond all recognition in the 15 years since I wrote and published my own book. Back then, there were but a handful of local publishers (none of whom wanted to publish me), a few over-worked printers, a scattering of minor bookshops and a couple of distribution companies, and promotions were what their staff were after, not something to be done for local books.

It’s all changed now. Today there are vast bookstores, independent bookshops and regular book fairs. There’s been a quantum leap in the number of local publishers, authorsand books. Production standards are incomparably better (even if immaculate copy-editing’s a lost cause).

REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

And a company like MPH is not just publishing and distributing books through their own and other retail outlets, they also now produce a quarterly magazine, Quill, devoted entirely to local books and writers, and have a tie-up with NTV7’s Breakfast Show to feature them on TV. They also organise readings, signings and get-togethers like the one I inadvertently attended. Some of the (startlingly many) published local authors present still seemed unsatisfied, though. One wanted to know why MPH didn’t distribute local books overseas; another groused that publicity was still inadequate for local authors.

The lack of such support may be an important reason why, despite all the development over the past decade, local authors still aren’t rich unless they’re Azizi Ali (the leading local capitaliser on the wisdom that one way to get rich is to make people pay for advice on how to get rich) or Zaid, who’s already rich and can sell his book for a song and still benefit 2,000 charity cases with the proceeds.

It’s true that distribution, marketing, advertising and promotion can help get writers and their work known and available. It’s true that without them, books may crumble away on bookshelves unknown, unsung and assuredly unread. Certainly, if books don’t sell, it could be because they’re not hyped, hawked or handed around enough.

Or it could be because they’re not very interesting.

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The never-ending story PRIME NEWS | FRIDAY | 31 AUGUST 2007

Two things unite a nation: a common cause, and a common enemy.

Our first generation had the best of both. They had the common cause of Independence. A cause so great, so good, so sweet that there are still about 3,000 nations-in-waiting thirsting for what 150 or so have tasted in the past half-century: the nectar of their very own Merdeka Days.

In imperialism, our founders had their founding enemy: the force that had to be repelled — and was obligingly disposed to do so anyway, now that colonialism had become a bit of a tiresome embarrassment to the colonisers.

Besides, in Malaya the White Man’s Burden had shown itself sufficiently adept at consociational politics and usefully appreciative of the finer points of a British education and administration.

Hardly had the Federation of Malaya Agreement spelled the end of British Malaya, however, when by fortuitous historical happenstance, a perfect new common enemy emerged. What could be more useful in uniting a nation than an armed insurrection?

The Malayan Communist Party’s baleful escalations of 1948 were a death-or-glory play: They would unite Malaya in a communist “people’s republic” or rip it apart in the effort. But their timing sucked. Malaya was still enough of an outpost of Empire to deal with obstreperous REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

natives — especially murderous ones.

In the decade leading to 1957, a time of new visions and New Villages, this nation-in-waiting played common causes and common enemies like a string quartet with Vivaldi.

Our founding generation achieved their common cause 50 years ago today. Just three years later, in 1960, they were able to declare the defeat of their common enemy, the communist insurrection, and the end of the Emergency.

But the band immediately struck up another unifying tango of cause-and-enemy: The formation of Malaysia and the Indonesian Confrontation. Another common cause attained; another common enemy foiled.

We celebrate our first generation’s success today, and remember them with fondness and gratitude. But we do not forget the darker consequences of their success in attaining stated goals and overcoming sworn foes. The nation’s moral compass swung freely in the absence of the polar gravities of cause and enemy, and people found them where they could.

After the riots of 1969 emerged the second generation of an independent nation, no longer Malayans but Malaysians, Bumiputeras or otherwise; a generation redefined for redesign. There was a new 33

common cause for this nation: the New Economic Policy’s twin objectives of eradicating poverty and “eliminating the association of race with economic function”.

And there was a new common enemy; one all the more inidiously dangerous for not being a foreign import such as colonialism, imperialism or communism, but deeply internal, home-grown and personal: Race hate.

A much more strictly controlled nation emerged from the restructuring, not just in new policies, legislation and systems of governance, but also in the concerted education of an entire generation to pursue these goals and embody these ideals.

In another of those dazzling historical conjunctions for which this country isn’t famous enough, the tenure of the nation’s second generation coincided with the administration of Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad. The educated discipline of the NEP generation, along with its burgeoning crop of new technocrats and professionals, could therefore be tapped for what history will surely remember as Malaysia’s turbocharged acceleration phase.

Most of the quadrupling of gross national product since 1970 took place on Dr Mahathir’s watch — which means it wasn’t entirely about 22 years, three months, two weeks and a day of megaprojects, but more disposable income for just about everyone.

But that was that. The NEP, as its designers wished, bought time for one generation. Its continuing influence, as they feared, shows that the generation so favoured hasn’t gained the self-confidence to stand unaided.

This passes an onerous burden to the third generation: Anak Malaysia coming online in the 21st century. Their name is We: There are more Malaysians under 25 today than all the people in Malaya at Independence.

They would seem to have inherited common cause aplenty. In some things we’re fast learners, and the years since 1970 have been jollied along by one restatement after another of national principles and purposes: Tun Razak’s Rukunegara, Dr Mahathir’s Vision 2020, Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi’s National Mission.

But what is their common enemy?

Let us here revisit the good and ancient wisdom of “The ThirdGeneration Curse”. All dynastic traditions know and understand it: The first generation gets something going; the second grows it; the third blows it all to pieces.

REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

Break the Third-Generation Curse and your family will live long and prosper, honouring the memory of their ancestors and building the future on a solid foundation of the past. Fail, and they’ll forget even themselves.

Why does this awful threshold, this dire moment of truth, loom into view with the advent of G3? Very simple: G1 is born poor, but is determined not to die poor if he can help it.

So he works like a dog. He marries a good and diligent partner who also works like a dog. They have children and work together to send G2 to school to be educated — not so that they won’t have to work like dogs, but to do so more profitably.

G2 is therefore not born as poor as G1 was, and grows up appreciating G1 for making that possible. Filial piety and respect is genuine between first and second generations. Parents are proud of their dutiful children — whose very existence is testament to their success — and children are motivated to do their parents proud, taking over their family firms and turning them into public-listed companies and multinational corporations.

G3, therefore, is born rich. And it can be astonishing how far away Grandpa’s humble hovel can be to the bemansioned children of the nouveau riche. Grandpa himself is an old codger by now, and Dad, he was always his papa’s boy, everything Grandpa said he did, he wasn’t a founder but a mere executive, and who wants to run this old business anyway? We’re rich spoilt brats with trust funds.

The third generation can feel oppressed and constrained by dynastic burdens. Beneficiaries of their predecessors’ success, they are born into a world wealthier and more comfortable, with greater mobility and better opportunities. They would naturally perceive their future to be far more theirs than anyone else’s to determine, and would surely resent too stifling an imposition of the traditions, ideals and realities of generations past.

Understandable. They should be given rein. Let them chart their own paths. G1 and G2 did what they could; it’s up to G3 now. All their forebears might hope, as they exercise their right to a future of their own design, is that they see how selfishness, ignorance, arrogance and disrespect invalidate the very notion of common cause.

After burying imperialism, communism and poverty in surviving our first 50 years, our common enemy now is the Third-Generation Curse.

We must break it. We have no choice. Otherwise, there is no “we”.

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REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

READY FOR PROOFER

Naming the national language Prime News | FrIday | 31 AUGUST 2007

Anthony Burgess (1917-1993) may have embodied much that was odious in a colonial writer, but he loved us, you know. His grumpiness was a foil against the lush seductions of this country. Malaya in the 1950s had an irresistible hold on his soul: its green, blue and gold; its women with “faces like open flowers”.

Miserable, cynical, supercilious Burgess loved, studied and cared about this country. He feared for it, too, this impossible amalgam of ours. He could not see how this chimera of a country could have the audacity to even consider self-rule — but was beguiled all the more for it.

Burgess was wrong about some things, but his genius was such that when he was mistaken, he was great-ly mistaken.

About 30 years ago, back when Bahasa Melayu first became Bahasa Malaysia, Burgess grumbled about it in an article for a London newspaper. We meddled too much with ourselves, I think he felt. He noted the irony of the Malay language becoming the “national” language by removing the word “Malay” from its name.

He recalled when this had first happened, in 1967, the stipulated 10 years after independence, when Bahasa Melayu officially became… but here Burgess got it wrong again. It had become “Bahasa Kebangsaan”, “Language of Nationality”. Burgess thought it had been renamed “Bahasa Negara”, “Language of the Nation”.

Perhaps it should have been.

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The Merdeka Gang’s last stand PRIME NEWS | FRIDAY | 24 AUGUST 2007

Some of our 50-somethings seem to be in fine fettle and feisty form these days, have you noticed? Some of my generation seem to be making a late charge up the back straight in a break for the finish. It’s the Last of the Baby Boomers’ last hurrah; the rumble of the silverbacks and grizzlies.

They’re the Merdeka Generation, show some respect. You may not have given them much thought all these years, sandwiched as they were between the Founding Fathers and Generation Wee. All those quiet, hardworking, self-sacrificing mums and dads of Malaysia now marrying off their children and watching their grandkids arrive may not seem to have amounted to much compared with what went before and might come after. But there’s a good reason for that.

Born with the nation and coming of age with the New Economic Policy, the Merdeka Generation learned to defer.

They deferred to the new realities and priorities of their nation, and the policies emerging therefrom. They deferred to the new national objectives and adopted the new terminology: “Rukunegara”, “Bumiputera”, “Barisan Nasional”. They understood that the burdens would always be greatest on those most able, and that they’d been granted the privilege of bearing that burden, if they were able.

It seemed a hard-won honour. They humbly accepted the onerous REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

task that had been bestowed upon them: To remake their homeland in a stronger, better, more just and durable way.

Perhaps they shouldn’t have been so deferential. Educated at the people’s expense to eliminate the ignorance and immobility that had taken just 12 years to ravage the system, perhaps they should not have kowtowed so deeply to the system upon their dutiful assimilation into it thereafter.

But many accepted that the only way to repay the gift of a universal education was to support what had enabled and paid for it, and made the compromises necessary for their subsequent “national service”.

A few made fortunes out of it, some had the life sucked out of them, others got by as best they could. But mostly the NEP’s lead generation abided by received wisdom and stated policy, upheld national ideals, and submitted to the will of the majority as expressed in the electoral process.

After 30 years or more of this valiant self-denial, some of them are mad as hell and aren’t going to take this any more. (To invoke Peter Finch in his most memorable cinematic moment, as Howard Beale in Network, 1976, showing either that Beale was a generation ahead of his time or this is a permanent social condition.)

It’s about time, too. Some kind of mojo fires up at 50. It’s the new 39

40, all right. Life begins - if only because everything else has ended.

Ambitions, hopes, dreams, illusions, delusions, fear of the future - heck, the future - done, gone, over. In their place looms retirement, the end of EPF and the beginning of prostate concerns. With or without all the money in the world, the final fantasy is of somewhere comfortable to sit.

Small wonder that for some of us, going gentle into that good night is not an option. Datuk Seri Nazri Aziz, 53, seems to be pulling out the stops and going hell for leather, damn the torpedoes and mix the metaphors, he’s Finched.

Raja Nazrin Shah, 51, meanwhile, is dazzling his audiences with ideas polished to crystalline clarity by long contemplation. Now he’s letting his thoughts fly to such magnificent heights, Raja Nazrin must guard against deification. (Too late as that may be for legions of smitten schoolgirls.)

And then there’s Datuk Zaid Ibrahim, 56, lawyer and member of parliament for Kota Baru, who this week launched his book In Good Faith (Zaid Ibrahim Publications, Kuala Lumpur; 364pp; RM30).

It’s his usual brilliant stuff, somewhat off-handedly tossed together as a compilation of his speeches, interviews and published articles on governance, the judiciary, the media, human rights, politics, culture and religion.

It serves as a handbook of principles; a reminder not just of some important ideals and realities but of how learned, lucid and very well argued Zaid can be. (He’s sold me on a Judicial Commission, for instance. On municipal elections and syariah jurisprudence, we-e-ell, we should talk, Datuk, let’s do lunch.)

But there’s a problem with advocating systemic remedies for institutions vulnerable to deeply human limitations. (Such as, say, a burnt-out judge with a backlog so impossibly huge his spirit breaks and he gives up, waiting only for some kind of axe to fall.) Human institutions are only as good as the human beings operating them, and we’re human-capital challenged.

It would be unquestionably good to double the number of High Court judges, as Zaid recommends. Perhaps it would be easier to find 50 suitable candidates for the High Court than just one for Chief Judge of Malaya.

But Zaid’s ideas draw on the strengths of principle, not the frailties of man. (He atones for this in real life in an understated but direct way.

Sales of this book will benefit the Kelantan Foundation for the Disabled, REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

which Zaid runs with his wife, educationist Suliana Shamsuddin Alias.)

That’s the trouble with our pitifully few brilliant ones. They’re not necessarily popular with or comfortable among the “grassroots”, especially of those particular varieties that have grown wild and luxuriant in this past generation of deference.

So what do we do with the best we have? We hope for the best for them. Be grateful they did not drain their brains to other countries, and hope the courage of their convictions will gain their ideas the attention they deserve and effect the changes they seek.

We hope they won’t be crushed to dust by the grinding realities against which they tilt their free lances.

To be sure, there’s something to be said for being an heir to a throne, a member of parliament or chairman of the country’s biggest law firm, but it remains gratifying that such educated, eloquent voices rise to their special privileges in taking ownership of the issues and speaking for the betterment of this nation.

Personally, I’m glad at least some of my generation are mounting this heroic rearguard action for all that was lost on our watch: The national unity, commonality of purpose and mutual understanding our parents’ generation had managed to pass to us, but which ours deferred from passing to the next.

Zaid Ibrahim deserves a much wider hearing, but must resist any move to nominate him for Commonwealth secretary-general.

RUKUNEGARA REVISITED IT’s “Rukunegara”, one word; not “Rukun Negara”, two words. It doesn’t matter if that’s how it’s rendered these days even on official signage. It doesn’t matter if no one under 30 gives a toss about the Rukunegara, that’s what it was. Five principles, one concept, one word, as it was in the beginning and shall be at the end. Which may come sooner than it should, if it’s already been torn in half.

AND FINALLY ...

TO H.E. Ambassador L.P. Tavaya of the Republic of Zimbabwe, my thanks to His Excellency for setting the record straight (“Question deserves honest answer” - NST, Aug 23). That was my principal intention with the article (“Robert Mugabe has a question” - NST, Aug 17). By all means possible, let the truth be known.

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Robert Mugabe has a question PRIME NEWS | FRIDAY | 17 AUGUST 2007

Someone told me a rumour had circulated at the Langkawi International Dialogue that I had refused to shake hands with Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe.

I could choose to be flattered by being thought capable of such illmannered righteousness, but it wasn’t true. Not only did I indeed shake Mugabe’s hand, I was pleased at the opportunity to do so. I’d very much wanted to know what his hand felt like.

Besides, in the circumstances of that close encounter - nearly colliding with each other as we threaded between the close-packed tables in the conference hall - it would have been churlish not to.

President Mugabe has a startlingly soft hand. Well manicured, medium-sized, and so soft and smooth it was like he used hand cream.

His handshake was firm but fleeting; more fingers than palm. His eyes were elusive behind those rimmed glasses; his familiar face with its philtrum moustache as unreadable as in every photograph ever taken of him. He doesn’t smile. He doesn’t react or respond. He observes. He apprehends. And when he speaks, he intones.

He moved about the venue with a brisk and jaunty stride giving the lie to his 83 years of age, embedded in a meatpack of half-a-dozen of the scariest bodyguards I’d ever seen. Even in the bucolic surroundings of a tropical island resort where the biggest threats were monitor lizards, Mugabe’s men looked as though they were there not just to protect REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

their president but positively relish the slightest opportunity to do so.

As far as I know, however, Mugabe did not say very much at the LID. In fact, the only time I heard him speak into a microphone was when he posed his now moderately infamous question to our media panel.

“The press and journalists,” he said, as the hall hushed in what might be called The Mugabe Effect, “are they driven by a sense of honesty and objectivity all the time? Or are they swayed from objectivity and truth by certain notions arising from their own subjective views?

“I say that in the light of reports quite often deliberately intended to tarnish and deceive. Should journalists really indulge in what they know to be misleading stories, and, therefore, stories that go against objectivity and the truth?”

This query has had a certain mileage since then, judging by subsequent citations in the African press. You wouldn’t think it deserved that much credit. It’s a simple question, after all; directed at one of the most basic conundrums of this business. It’s the common lament of those who perceive themselves misquoted, maligned and misunderstood by mischievous, scurrilous, agenda-driven media.

But this also bears out the truism that it’s not just what you say or how you say it, but who you are. If the answer to “Lu siapa?” is “Robert Gabriel Mugabe”, the question attains a peculiar gravity. In the storied course of Mugabe’s 27 years in power so far, he’s been by various 43

quarters branded a tyrant, despot, dictator and a Hitler. He thinks he’s been wilfully misrepresented.

Zimbabwe’s been having a particularly difficult time since 2000, when Mugabe’s government launched a radical land reform programme by returning white-owned farms to natives. To Mugabe and his fellow former freedom fighters, this was the triumphant culmination of their lifelong battle to liberate the so-called Rhodesia from its long and rapacious heritage of white mastery, led at the last by the recalcitrant Ian Smith.

Zimbabwe was redressing a 100-year injustice; making good the colonial rape of these territories and the plunder of their resources by returning them to the descendants of those who had originally toiled on this soil.

A century after Cecil Rhodes, however, those descendants had much more enthusiasm for expropriating the white man’s farms than farming the white man’s way. Agricultural production plummeted, while Western indignation led by Britain censured Zimbabwe and imposed travel restrictions on the country’s leaders in Europe and America.

Western loans, aid and investment stopped.

Mugabe insists that it is this belligerent bias, exacerbated by a years-long drought and the subversions of political oppositionists in cahoots with Western busybodies, that has caused the deterioration of Zimbabwe’s economy from one of the strongest in Africa in 1980, when REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

he came to power, to the basket case it is today.

Still, the answer to his question is the same regardless of who’s asking it: No, journalists should not indulge in what they know to be misleading stories.

But yes, they can be swayed by their own subjective perceptions, which is why professional journalists do not work in isolation. They are directly responsible for the accuracy of their facts, but their spins and angles must pass muster among their peers, editors and publishers before seeing the light of day, to be ultimately answerable to their readers. They are, in a word, accountable.

Journalists swayed too much by their own subjective views should lose their credibility, standing and audience, but not their freedom, lives or limbs.

Ultimately, misinformation is better neutralised by sound information than goon squads. President Mugabe should not be distracted by the insults, lies and calumnies levelled against him at home and abroad. His real challenge is his country’s 80 per cent unemployment, 4,500 per cent inflation, 33.7 per cent incidence of HIV/AIDS and, not unrelatedly, life expectancies of 37 years for men and 34 for women - the world’s lowest, according to the World Health Organisation.

Unless such data, too, are deliberately intended to tarnish and deceive.

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The curse of the step-forward wives OPINION | TUESDAY | 7 AUGUST 2007

The last Umno general assembly I attended was the one at which Puteri Umno was formed and the party president announced his resignation. The two were not related, and both have since made good on their promises at that 2003 assembly. This week’s musing is prompted, however, by a conversation I had there with a few members of Umno Youth.

That, and a particular glance I saw Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad cast at his wife as they happened to pass each other in a lift lobby at the Putra World Trade Centre, he to enter the plenary hall, she to adjourn somewhere with a retinue of ladies. In a quick smile, a pulled face and an inaudibly whispered exchange - all the more poignant now for knowing what was to come when he took the stage - I was reminded again that these two were one loving couple.

I always had the impression that Dr Mahathir could not look at his wife without still seeing the pretty girl he’d married in 1956. I’m sure this made all the difference. A cursory glance at great careers in political and public life seems to reveal that happily married folk have much better innings than the rest.

Ronald Reagan, for instance, truly and simply adored Nancy. His presidential diaries, written in longhand in five leather-bound volumes, offer fascinating glimpses of his inner thoughts on the Cold War, the strategic defence initiative, the Middle East, various world leaders and events, and this: “Wed, March 4 [1981]: Our wedding anniversary. 29 years of more happiness than any man could rightly deserve.”

It’s a bit of a stretch imagining similar sentiments for Hillary appearing in Bill Clinton’s diaries. This is not to say he didn’t love her, of course; it all depends on what the “is” is in “what is love?”

The sustaining bond of a good marriage works no matter which of the pair is in power. Queen Elizabeth’s exceeding fondness for her husband Prince Philip has remained steadfast since she was a proper young princess flustered by a tall and handsome naval officer; as enduring as her great-greatgrandmother Victoria’s for her darling Albert.

Even Iron Dame Margaret Thatcher placed on record her affectionate appreciation for her husband Dennis, whose quiet, steady satisfaction with a zero-profile existence helped empower his wife to launch history’s second invasion of the Falklands.

Tellingly, the hypothesis also holds when tested in the reverse, in considering movers and shakers whose marriages are not among the more REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

salutary passages of their life stories. Donald Trump’s continued success as a businessman, as it turned out, included monetising disastrous marriages by leveraging their cost against his own notoriety. (Call it the “Art of the Heel”.)

Boris and Naina Yeltsin tended to be a bit like Socrates and Xanthippe - at least from the former’s perspective. Difficult marriages easily enough drive a man to drink, and drinking men easily enough make for difficult marriages, so there’s a bit of a self-reinforcing disaster there.

With the likes of Raisa and Mikhail Gorbachev, however, we draw a little nearer to the essential problem: Wives with designs on their husbands’ careers. The last word on this kind of power couple should have been written by Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette or Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, but no. Among the blinged-out, Botoxed, henna-haired and designer-bagged Mak Datins and Tai-Tais of the present day, we survey the great unspoken bane of nations: Desperately Ambitious Housewives.

Imagine what it must be like to share a nightly bed with someone who wants ever more; who demands to know why other wives have such cars, houses, jewellery or overseas vacations, and how is she expected to show her unlifted face to the world?

Consider the torment of being a straight arrow, an honest man, a good and decent bloke in a society where nice guys finish last only if they get to run at all. Consider being reminded, last thing every night and first thing every morning, of what a pathetic loser you are - and knowing you believe it, it’s true, you were never competent enough to trust your own judgment, given the evidence of what you married.

At a table among the refreshment stalls outside the PWTC that June afternoon, the ambitious young men of Umno Youth had impressed upon me that they had learned many important lessons in politics over the previous decade, while they were gestating in their schools and colleges.

For example, they said, they had learned not to go into politics to get wealthy, but to get wealthy before going into politics. This meant they would not end up beholden to patrons, and might even become patrons themselves - rightly so, because they will have proved that they had the potential to succeed with or without party-political connections.

Very good, I thought. Then, as good neophyte politicians should, they kindly asked me if I had any advice for them.

At which precise instant, a vision of heavenly loveliness wafted past on four-inch heels. She was wreathed in swirling perfume (I think it was Ralph Lauren), her tumbling cascade of auburn hair concealed not at all by a diaphanous white selendang; her Puteri-pink corset glowing through a gauzily translucent kebaya over a tightly wrapped sarong of Indonesian batik in a Sido Mulyo motif.

Male heads spun so fast their necks cricked and eyeballs swivelled laterally out of sight amid the clatter of jaws dropping to the floor.

“Gentlemen,” I sagely intoned, “love your wives.”

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It’s not what you say but how you say it OPINION | TUESDAY | 31 July 2007

There’s an intriguing parallel between the globally-waged “War on Terror” and this locally-brewing “War on Bloggers”.

(To begin with, it must be acknowledged that both these phrases are establishment-oriented. The terrorists targeted in the “War on Terror” are more likely to bill it a “War on Infidels”, just as the blog-posters concerned in the present controversy might see themselves as waging a “War on Repressive Laws”. That’s the way it is when history is written by the winners of wars, and laws by the winners of elections.)

But notice: In both these conflicts, a minuscule minority causes disproportionate grief by seeking to destroy what they don’t like, while garlanding their motives in grand principle. To justify intensely personal motivations, entire ideologies are invoked. This does deep disservice to these ideologies.

For instance, does the typical suicide bomber really hope his selfimmolation will liberate this world for his people and culture, or is he hoping to liberate himself from this vale of tears, trading mortal futility for the eternal bliss of oblivion?

Similarly, are the allegations posted by certain anonymous persons to certain Internet forums intended to reveal the truth, for the sake of a more honest and less corrupt society, or simply to cause trouble to gloat over? Is there a legitimate political impulse here, or mere pyromania?

It’s critical that a distinction be made between these motivations, especially when hauling into play such precious concepts as “freedom of speech” and “censorship”. Such terms steal the show when invoked, inflating the matter to the mythic proportions of the eternal battle between good and evil; between brave Davids and their right to free expression, and establishment Goliaths bent on silencing them.

The matter is not so fraught. As is often observed, Malaysians in general have a practised capacity for common sense and are by-and-large able to winnow the padi from the husks in their media, whether “mainstream” or “alternative”. The inflammatory, sensationalist or scandalous does draw attention, but mostly in the way crowds are drawn to scenes of gory traffic accidents: For macabre entertainment.

Moreover, “netizens” note, the untrammelled freedom of the medium is its own best regulator. Woe betide anyone who uses it brazenly to lie, delude, mislead or confuse, as witness the opprobrium lately heaped on an oppositionist who posted a “doctored” photo of a political leader on his REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

website.

In time, assure the defenders of virtual media, liars, defamers and troublemakers will be seen for what they are and accordingly shunned, flamed or blasted by hackers and denial-of-service attacks.

However, that very same vox bloguli would also cast flaming derision on any official attempt to curb them. So why not just let things be?

One reason — though it’s not a very compelling one — is that the chattering cyberclasses in this country are still relatively new and immature.

This can be seen not just in the quality of argument but also in the apparently under-developed ability of some sections of the media-consuming public to tell fact from fantasy.

The question is: In this formative period, should there be a touch on the rudder (if not a tight slap in the face) for those who abuse the Internet for mischief?

My answer would be: No, let’s not be foolish about this.

It’s not possible — and not because of any legislative provision or solemn governmental promise not to censor the Internet.

It simply can’t be done, and any move in that direction would only draw worldwide ridicule. Accusations of the government seeking to censor the Internet are wrong-headed. This is not about freedom or censorship, but about predictable objections to objectionable statements.

Legal provisions against defamation, libel and slander, though they tend to be lumped among the laws deemed inimical to freedom of speech, exist just as much for the sake of truth, fairness and justice. If someone lies about someone, the aggrieved party has a legal right to seek redress.

The concept of sedition is weightier; it seeks to guard national constructs, institutions and ideals held sacrosanct by common consent, in obeisance to the constitution. In this country, this would include the matters that have led certain parliamentarians to call for action against the owners of certain websites for allowing postings of certain unconscionable assertions.

These assertions may not have been made by the individuals having to answer for them, who may indeed have found them just as offensive. Perhaps they might co-operate, therefore, in tracing the real culprits through the very medium they abuse. Smoke these cowards out of their IP holes and proxy servers, blame them, name them, shame them — if it’s worth the trouble.

In all likelihood, as authorities in Singapore and China have found, such miscreants will turn out to be quite pathetic when hauled blinking out of the shadows: Angst-ridden youths, alienated misfits, friendless recluses. They may need to be helped, or at least kept a safe distance from firearms and explosives, but they are hardly the staff of revolution.

What good may come of collaring them — though this, too, is but a feeble hope — would be in restoring a modicum of decency to debate in the public domain.

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Advice to the young reporter: ‘Lu siapa?’

Opinion | Wednesday | 25 JULY 2007

Last weekend, I went to Taiping to talk about writing to a group of third-, fourth- and fifth-formers of Sekolah Menegah Sains Raja Tun Azlan Shah. The school wants to commemorate this 50th Merdeka year with an anthology of articles written by its students, and they had volunteered for the project.

I thought it was an excellent idea, and agreed to talk to them about what to write about and how to write it. They seemed attentive and interested, although I’m not sure they fully caught my drift when it came to what made for a good story — and good story-telling. I would therefore like to use this space to attempt a summary of my nearly three-hour session with them.

What I tried to do was “pass forward” the transformative advice I’d received when I started out in journalism a quarter-century ago. Delivered to me by Tan Sri A. Samad Ismail, the grand old man of Malaysian journalism himself, it can be summed up in a single, pithy colloquialism: Lu siapa?

This incisive inquiry does not entirely translate into a mundane “who are you?” It’s richer and meatier; questioning not identity but credentials: “Who do you think you are?”

Pak Samad didn’t actually use the phrase, but his advice was to that unmistakable point: For the young reporter, everyone else in the world was more important. The humblest peasant, rubber tapper, fisherman, hawker, sex worker, drug addict, beggar or common criminal was infinitely more interesting than any reporter, with a far more important story to tell.

Therefore, urged the Old Man, get out. Get out of the office, out of the house, out of the comfort zone and out to where real people lived real lives in the real world. Get them talking and listen to them, taking notes.

This was not about “giving voice to the voiceless”, as the self-righteous slogan would have it. This was about not being so conceited as to think people didn’t have voices, just because we’re too distracted, preoccupied or arrogant to hear them.

And so the Old Man contrived to have me spend my first New Year’s Eve as a journalist stumping up a backroad in Hulu Perak looking for a rubber tapper to write about, instead of partying the year away with the rest of the grooverati in KL. REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

I remember feeling rather hard done by and depressed by the cruelty of it, trudging along a lane under the broiling sun in the back of beyond, until I came across a ramshackle house with an elderly man sitting under a tree in the yard, next to a rusty iron mangle of the sort used to flatten coagulated latex into sheets.

After an hour with him, I had my story and sensed I had undergone what’s called a “life-changing experience”. The fellow was a sage, of sorts.

Blitheringly ordinary in so many ways — narrow-minded, uneducated, ignorant and mistrustful of so much that was modern — but what he did know, he knew so well that there seemed nothing about it he didn’t know.

After that encounter, I’d scrawled two lines into my notebook that didn’t make the final feature package on rubber smallholders: “Everyone is the world’s leading authority on something”, and, “Everyone you meet can teach you part of what you need to know”. (Decades later, I added a caveat to the latter: “You need to know some horrible things.”)

These suppositions have withstood the test of time for me, and so I’d like to pass them on to those 44 young men and women of SMS Raja Tun Azlan Shah who are now venturing into letters themselves. Yes, it is certainly possible to make yourself comfortable at your favourite wireless broadband workstation, plug an iPod in your ears, Google this or Wiki that and merrily surf along cutting-and-pasting notes until you’ve compiled enough received wisdom to essay a keyboard opinion on one weighty matter or another.

But even that’s better done after walking real paths in the real world and getting to know real people and what they’re really like. (I mean, really.)

Otherwise, there’s this awful danger of opinionation developing before understanding, or even knowledge. Which is, let’s face it, absolutely useless; serving no purpose whatsoever; a complete waste of space, time and what might otherwise have been a perfectly good mind. Unchecked, it leads to self-referential narcissism; I-me-myself-ishness: the croaking of frogs under coconut shells. Lu siapa?

But all one has to do to cut out the multitudes of meddling media middlemen and their second-hand goods is talk to someone first-hand. It takes some gumption to do it — this society sets great store by people minding their own business. But with the proper credentials and a crusty old editor cracking the whip, it’s not hard to stick to it once you’ve learned the trick to it: Everyone’s their own favourite subject.

And most aren’t averse to talking about themselves to anyone who’ll listen. The trouble is, so few listen. When they do, the stories tell themselves. All that’s needed is to pay attention, suspend judgment, and write them down. The rest, believe me, will be history.

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Salute to a failed venture in waste disposal OPINION | TUESDAY | 17 July 2007

The final a-Broga-tion of the RM1.5 billion incinerator project evoked in me mixed feelings of relief and regret.

Regret, because I’d met some of the technology’s developers, having visited Japan in 2003 on a fact-finding tour of their operations. I am sorry that my Japanese acquaintances had to spend five years of their lives and careers in the limbo of this project, only to wind up having to pack up from their KL condos, get their kids out of international school and go home with nothing sold, nothing built, nothing done. This won’t look good on their resume.

Relief, because having seen how well this technology served its purpose in Japan, I deeply doubted it could work here. The Ebara Corporation of Japan had offered Malaysia incinerator technology that was all about phase transitions. Operating at higher temperatures than other systems, the process melts solids into liquids, vaporises liquids into gas, then breaks down gasses to reduce emissions to a tenth or less of World Health Organisation standards.

What ash remains is itself melted into an inert slag that can be turned into paving bricks and road surfacing. They were thinking up new uses for it all the time.

The Japanese were rightly proud of their technology. Their plants were spotless; their floors polished to the semblance of still waters. They were run like supertankers: totally computerised and automated; operated by about 20 technicians in glass-walled control rooms.

Apart from the receiving bays and conveyor belts where the garbage was sorted on its way to fiery oblivion, all spaces occupied by humans were hermetically sealed, smelling of naught but a muted hint of air freshener. Yet, the entire process from silo to smokestack was visible on banks of plasmascreen CCTV monitors. There were even cameras trained on the top of the chimney, or “flue exhaust”, out of which there appeared nothing at all; not even a heat shimmer.

Sato-san, my corporate guide (not his real name, of course, he has enough troubles as it is) told me sticking one’s head down that pipe would be less harmful than smoking a cigarette. (He later provided data to back up that assertion, along with the WHO factoid cited above.)

But this did not accord with the anxieties of the people of Broga, Semenyih, Selangor, who feared a cancer factory on their doorstep; a monstrous polluter outrageously posing as a pollution solution. Their campaign made graphic use of Industrial Revolution imagery: Black clouds billowing from a 19th-century factory chimney.

REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

Sato-san was deeply hurt by this. His company’s plants, though not exactly inconspicuous, were physically no more obtrusive than modest shopping malls, to which he’d noticed scant aversion among Malaysians. In some parts of Japan, they were shopping malls. There was one model project where a revolving restaurant had been built halfway up the incinerator flue.

The safety of these facilities and the innocuousness of their emissions was clear for everyone to see. After all, said Sato-san, resting his case, weren’t the Japanese the longest-lived people in the world, with the lowest incidence of cancer and heart disease?

Ruefully, I had to tell him that, despite the best efforts of certain former administrations, Malaysians had not demonstrated much of an aptitude for turning Japanese. For instance, see how Japanese households so neatly separate their rubbish into colour-coded bags of glass, plastic, paper and organic waste.

See how garbage trucks are really vans, compact enough to scuttle about the narrow warrens of Japan’s neighbourhoods, serving communities and not conurbations. See how waste incinerators snuggle up to municipalities, located conveniently enough for people to drop off their rubbish themselves.

This was why the incinerator had been originally slated for Puchong, smack-dab in the middle of the Klang Valley’s industrial suburbia. The system was designed to operate in intimate symbiosis with trashmakers.

But though “small is beautiful” in Japan, Malaysia had been raised to think mega. The plant was to be four times bigger than anything Ebara had built before. The people of Puchong had protested mightily, and the project had been relocated out of town to the rural enclave of Broga, whose people had also protested mightily.

In the end, after years of trouble and expense for the project contractors, maintaining offices and staff here, diverting resources from other projects, and suffering terrible public relations, the Malaysian government axed the project on the basis of unacceptable cost.

This was the right call. For the 1,500 tonnes of garbage a day the plant was to have processed, 1,000 lorries a day would have had to lumber and splatter to and fro, wrecking existing roads and requiring new ones. While the plant itself could be run by a couple of dozen technicians, a small army of manual workers would have been needed to sort the rubbish Malaysian households will probably never bother sorting themselves.

And the protests. And the lawsuits. And the political fallout: manna from heaven for the opposition; flaming meteorites for the government.

Sayonara, Sato-san. It’s not that your technology is not fit for this country; this country is not fit for it. We’ll have to find other ways to avoid living amid mountains of garbage with lakeside views of cesspits. Our most promising innovation in waste management so far: The Klang municipality’s offer of 10 sen per kilo for rubbish, encouraging the theft of garbage instead of scrap metal.

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Life is an act of the creative imagination OPINION | TUESDAY | 10 July 2007

Human beings can lie, researchers have found, by the age of 6 months.

This may seem startling, but not when you think about it. We’ve been in denial. We must have always known we couldn’t be trusted for the truth.

Lying is quite a complex act, involving an intricate gearing of perceptions and desires. It was assumed that the human brain needed about four years to develop the sophistication for it.

This now seems almost charmingly naive. With self-reflective consciousness turning on at about three years — the age of most people’s earliest memory — it was somehow kind to believe it took just a little longer to learn how to lie.

That was a sad conceit, if a team of behavioural psychologists at Britain’s University of Portsmouth is to be believed. Six months from umbilical severance, people, that’s how long it took you to start pulling fast ones.

The UK’s Daily Telegraph last week quoted researcher Dr Vasudevi Reddy explaining how this was concluded by observing how babies wail for attention, then pause to see if such attention is forthcoming before deciding whether more wailing is called for. This indicates deliberate manipulation of what was always thought to be involuntary. The devious little cheats!

Infants 8 months old lie to distract their parents or “conceal forbidden activities”, and by the age of 2 can perform the conceptual acrobatics of lying to avoid punishment.

Consider what this may mean. Learning to bluff before you even know you exist implies you don’t “learn to” at all — this is hardwired. It comes bundled with the programming. It’s instinctive. We are born with a capacity to mislead, exercised for desired outcomes.

Even from an evolutionary standpoint, there would seem to be clear advantages in instinctual lying. (“They went that away!” “Food? What food?”)

Presuming that by the time our brains turned on to rational thought we’d been practised little liars for a couple of years, among the first thoughts we could coherently formulate must have been: “The goat ate my homework.”

The later questions — Who am I? Where am I? What’s the meaning of all this? — would, therefore, have been open to definition from their very onset. Hence, after hundreds of thousands of years: Ethics.

It must have dawned on mankind very early that the fluid nature of the human conscience made for unstable social structures. If “you are what you REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

pretend to be”, as the late great Kurt Vonnegut observed, we must, as he warned, “be careful what you pretend to be”.

Hence, the great constructions of law and constitution; the exalted edifices of state; the architecture of civilisation within which we exist: The institutional scaffolding we entrust with containing our shape-shifting, manipulative, innately deceitful natures.

The more we learn about the ad hoc nature of human consciousness, the less we should condemn politicians, activists, zealots, bloggers, lawyers and advertising executives. (Oh, all right, and journalists.) They’re not all liars per se (or at least no more so than everyone else); they are designers of reality.

For if reality is a matter of perception, then it is prone to persuasion: The marketing of ideas; “that vision thing”. When assailed by the ideas of people who seem to be living on a totally different planet, bear in mind that they are. The world is entirely as you, and you alone, see it. Might as well be, if everyone else has also been lying since birth.

Speaking at a forum in Kuala Lumpur last week, anti-corruption crusader and NST columnist Tunku Abdul Aziz Ibrahim struck a chord when he lamented that in this country, “we’re not outraged enough” by the base deceits of our fellow citizens. The usual reasons ventured for this are ignorance, cynicism and apathy. I suggest another: Empathy. Who among us, liars all since birth, might profess not to understand the impulse to dishonesty?

We are distinguished only by our personal thresholds of moral repugnance. To understand is by no means to accept or, God forbid, admire. But not one of us wouldn’t understand. “Let he who is without sin,” therefore, “cast the first stone.”

This should be humbling. Those of us (and we are legion) who cling to our principles, ethics and moralities through the wildest tempests and challenges, or clutch them to ourselves like a child with a teddy bear in the deep dark night, do so because we know that without them there’s no saving us from the treacheries of our own nature.

For we were born liars. Reddy observes that it’s like exploration, only not of the real world but the one the infant human is already crafting for itself: Babies want to test how much they can get away with, so they can learn the consequences. But when facing those consequences, the little devils also know how to fake tears.

If this is our nature, thank heaven for nurture. What dignity, nobility and honour there is in life must be entirely due to that quaintly antiquated notion, “character”: A consequence of upbringing, manners and education.

Without which, we’ll have to retrieve William Golding’s Lord of the Flies from the bonfire of the vanities, get a DVD of Children of the Corn and ponder the full and awful implications of “kurang ajar”.

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Follow-my-leader wherever he goes OPINION | TUESday | 3 JULY 2007

Lessons in life are everywhere; the best of them unexpected. Here’s what a diving excursion taught me about leadership: A few years ago, an old friend and I went diving. He’d given his teenage daughter a birthday present of diving lessons, and had decided to accompany her, ending up a certified diver himself. For her first open-water dive, off Terengganu’s Pulau Tenggol, he’d generously invited me along.

Happy was I to accept, until I saw the water. By then, I’d been a diver for 25 years and done hundreds of dives in the seven seas, several lakes and even a river or two. It had all led to a healthy respect for, not to say kneetrembling fear of, difficult water.

By which I mean deep, dark, turbulent or any combination thereof. My early experiences had even included Tenggol, which was among those that had taught me this healthy respect. The island’s underwater topography is complicated: Boulder tumbles and rocky ridges, around which swift currents swirl in layered confusion. The water can be moving in one direction on the surface and another just a few metres below.

On a non-optimal day (such as the one recalled here) with low cloud and blustery wind, experience had taught me it would be better to muse on my life’s adventures while reclining with a cigar under a ketapang tree on the beach, where memories of pure terror might even offer a certain smug satisfaction. Been there, done that, thought I would die, didn’t. Hah. But no. Let’s Go Diving, as the hysterical slogan goes. I approached the divemaster and respectfully informed him of the situation. He was going to lead half-a-dozen fit young novice divers on a training exercise. My friend and I were, well, Old Guys. We would prefer a nice, shallow drift; nothing strenuous, nothing hairy, with boat cover. Can? Not. The divemaster, a lean whippet in his early 30s, needed to concentrate on providing instruction, confidence and leadership to his novices. (In my time, they were called “sprogs”. An impolite naval term, I was told.) He instructed us to jump off the boat into the water and regroup on the surface for an equipment check before descending.

“It’s awfully choppy on the surface,” I observed, warily. This constituted a challenge to his leadership, which the divemaster did not appreciate. He turned his back on me to address his eager sprogs. “Look,” I persisted, urgently whispering over his shoulder. “Why don’t I jaga my buddy, and the two of us just piddle about in the shallows until you-all are done? We watch you from above.”

He made a remark that might have been construed as sarcastic, to the REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

effect that with my experience that shouldn’t be a problem. Then we all jumped off the tossing boat into the tossing water.

The moment I hit the water I knew it would be foolish to resurface into a half-metre chop. So here was a dilemma. In recreational diving, especially with sprogs, it is standard procedure to conduct a final check on the surface. But in practice, when the surface is rough, it is better to dive straight down.

Then again, neither sprogs nor Old Guys should be diving in rough water in the first place. Looking up through the blowing murk, I saw a forest of flapping fins as 12 legs thrashed towards their master.

“The heck with this,” I thought angrily to myself, having sworn years before never to put myself in scary situations underwater ever again, and jack-knifed downwards to the bottom some seven metres below. The thing to do in such conditions is to seek shelter, which is not above on the roiling surface but below among the crevices of the seabed, which break up the currents and afford some calm.

As I thankfully reached such shelter and paused to catch my breath, I turned around and was startled to see that the sprogs had all followed me down, and were now looking at me expectantly through their nice new facemasks in hypoallergenic silicone and a variety of fashionable colours.

There came from above a furious clanging: The divemaster, alone on the surface, was snapping his alert - a piece of hard plastic on a bungee cord around his tank, used to attract his students’ attention. They looked around and back at me, in some bewilderment. I signalled them to group together and ascend slowly to their sifu. This they did, meeting him in mid-water, from where their excursion subsequently progressed, I presume, without incident.

As my friend had not been among them, I abandoned my dive and surfaced to see the boatmen fishing him out of the water like a large green turtle.

Having never actually left the surface, he was alive, but badly needed to vomit.

I wasn’t too much better.

Later, it transpired that the divemaster would never speak to me again. My friend - a successful CEO in real life - explained what had happened. I, he told me, had acted like a leader, and the sprogs had instinctively followed. This was the worst insult to the divemaster that could be imagined.

I was astounded. “Say what?” I said, hiply. “I was scared! I acted in selfpreservation! What kind of leadership is that?!”

“But you looked like you knew what you were doing,” he said.

Ah so. I did know what I was doing - but I had done it with no thought of anyone else. I was saving my own skin; a coward, mutineer and deserter. But they had trailed me as though I were leading a revolution.

“So what,” I asked my friend, “would you call those who mistake a fool for a leader?”

Sprogs, I suppose, to be polite.

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Loneliness of the long-distance runner-up OPINION | TUESDAY | 19 JUNE 2007

One feels so sorry for Fernando Alonso.

After battling for five years to claw his way out of the shadow of Michael Schumacher, he gets the merest glimpse of a break in the clouds of his career — and is then drenched to the bone by Lewis Hamilton.

After just two seasons as F1 champion to Schumacher’s seven, the Spaniard could be forgiven the odd hissy fit.

To be at the peak of your powers in a career that makes you a global celebrity earning millions — and to be forever remembered as a runnerup; a podium finisher; an also-ran. That’s got to chafe.

Britain’s Daley Thompson, ?1984 Olympic decathlon champion, grinningly described javelin-thrower Fatima Whitbread’s happy jig on coming second as her “silver-medal boogie”.

Bogey, more like. Cycling’s Jan Ullrich won’t even talk about the seven years he battled in the Tour de France, outclassing everyone but a certain Lance Armstrong. Ullrich rode on for two years after Armstrong retired unbeaten, but was dogged by doping scandals and retired last February, aged 3x and looking forward to living the rest of his life on bratwurst.

It’s gone, it’s over; the window of opportunity creaks shut. The Godgiven talent and ancestrally bequeathed genetics that made you capable of being the best in the world is wasted, lost, cast into oblivion because of just one other individual being better, for just long enough to keep you from your goal past your prime.

It’s like missing a three-foot putt after reaching a par-5 green in two.

Speaking of Tiger Woods, we live in an era remarkable for such paragons. In Woods, Armstrong, Schumacher, Valentino Rossi and now the astounding Lewis Hamilton, sport has its “phenoms”: miracleworkers; unbeatable foes; phenomenal champions, beginning, living and ending their careers at the top of their game.

Their several advents initially sparked a debate that seems largely settled now: On the whole, phenoms are not good for their sports.

Performing at a different level from all others, they evoke awe more than admiration. They frustrate more than inspire. They are marvels, not models, for they are demonstrably superhuman. Behind them, in the pack, peloton or field, is everybody else.

Cut the breakaway sprinter out of the picture as he soars alone REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

up the Alpe D’Huez, and the real race is run. The game is played in the brutal scrum of the pack, where Jan Ullrich lived, Graeme Obree attempted suicide and Marco Pantani coked out, in a sport driven to a decade of drugs and despair by Lance’s deadly dances.

Purgatory is one bend behind the yellow jersey; one rung down the leader board. Phil Mickelson might rule and Vijay Singh be the Lion King, were it not time for a Tiger.

Purgatory is second row on the grid, the lower step on the podium, the penultimate handshake. The Eternal Second, that’s where they play that funky music of the silver-medal boogie as the fat lady sings.

They grow old as apprentices. Year after year, they wait for the phenom to falter, lose stamina, reflexes, or just the will to win. But as their own years pass sucking rear wheel, they realise phenoms don’t flag. Phenoms first sap their challengers’ will by outclassing them, then break it by outlasting them.

In doing so, phenoms crush their sports into sorry shambles of second echelons presided over by a deity.

Tennis, at present, is the notable exception. Part of world number one Roger Federer’s popular appeal is his fallibility. He can lose. He is a more appealingly human champion than, say, Pistol Pete Sampras was.

True, the rest of the Fedex’s appeal comes from being good enough to keep Rafael Nadal from getting too smug too soon. But so is Xavier Malisse. In world tennis today, the field is even and open. On any given day, any given Top 20 player can beat any other. Everyone in the leading pack has a fighting chance. This, it is said, is good for players, and good for sport. (Though it must surely suck for Spaniards.)

Frankly, it isn’t great for spectators. One leggy European blonde after another wafting across the lawns of Wimbledon; young orientals chirping up the fairways of the Ladies’ PGA tour; it’s all a bit of a blur.

It’s the phenoms who stand out in sharp focus and give definition to their game: the flying vee at the finish; the pumping fist on the victory lap; the ball flung triumphantly into the stands.

It’s the phenoms for whom the crowds gasp, as the ball falls out of the sky to the feet of a Ronaldinho, the head of a Zidane or any part of a Maradona or Pele, anticipating magic.

What’s mere world-beating skill and decades of dedication in comparison? Fernando Alonso might want to consider diversifying into designer apparel. It worked for Greg Norman.

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Making the most of being the most OPINION | TUESDAY | 12 June 2007

“I have no animosity toward Hollywood or the demands of the red carpet, all that silliness. That’s my job, and I’m happy to have it. But when I die, do I want to be remembered as an actress? No.” — Angelina Jolie.

Don’t worry, darling, that’s not likely. Not when you can be remembered for that silver wetsuit you wore in Lara Croft: The Cradle of Life.

You’ll also be remembered as a Cradle of Life yourself, of course, having given birth to the Ultimate Baby, so to speak, the unprecedented Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt.

(These names! What’s wrong with “Mary”, “Patricia” or “Linda”? Any of the most common female first names in America might have been splendidly elevated by being applied to such a refined genetic specimen as the offspring of Brad and Angelina Jolie-Pitt. Imagine what they might have done for Barbaras the world over. But no, they had to name her after an ancient Jewish city, renovated.)

Arcane history and genetics obviously played a celestially significant role in Angelina Jolie’s birth, and continue to shape her life. Being the daughter of Jon Voight and the French-Canadian-Iroquois Marcheline Bertrand was indeed a singular coiling of DNA. But Angie will also be remembered for the phial of Billy Bob Thornton’s blood she wore as a pendant while married to him, during the first three years of this century.

At the time, it seemed an almost sober gesture compared to the statement she’d worn for her first wedding, to British actor Johnny Lee Miller in 1996: Black leather pants and a white blouse with his name written on the back in blood.

The problem with such cries for attention so early in a career is the attention they draw. The likes of Paris Hilton, a scraggy old jailbird at 26, and Lindsay Lohan, zombied out at 21, prove the point. They moved grizzled but still Gorgeous George Clooney to say: “If I were as famous as some of those kids who are on the magazines right now at 21 years old, I’d be shooting crack under my eyeball.”

Aware of the sheer inanity of such fame, the likes of Angelina Jolie and Madonna (and, for that matter, Gorgeous George) realise that global celebrity is but a means to be of service to mankind. No one is born that beautiful and talented, or narcissistic and exhibitionist, for no reason.

It’s all about being role models, as Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and Nicole Richie well know. Some roles lead to ravaged lives and early death but hey, everyone has their part to play on this world’s stage, as Shakespeare mused.

And as Helen Gurley Brown added: Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

everywhere.

For those who survive conical brassieres and lip cleavage beyond adolescence, however, procreation does seem called for. The geneticist Richard Dawkins contends (as he would) that you might as well forget about Love, it is indeed about Lust, and lust is about DNA desperately wanting to get hot, sticky and entwined in replication with the right sequence of amino acids.

Accordingly, fabulous paragons of human perfection, selectively refined through uncountable generations to recombine in our time into an Aishwarya Rai and Abhishek Bachchan, understand that for them, breeding is a service to humanity.

Madonna selected the genes of Carlos Leon (interesting choice; she could have had Dennis Rodman’s). Angelina, never one for half-measures, chose Achilles.

Service to mankind and People magazine accomplished, the mission continues. They adopt children who might otherwise starve to death, perish of disease or be eaten by animals or blown apart in wars, relieving hapless Third World families of burdensome little bundles henceforth to be raised in London, Beverly Hills, Biarritz, Gstaad or any combination thereof.

Angelina Jolie will also be remembered for splicing double helices with Brad Pitt, who summed up the epiphany of fame with respect to impoverished Africans by observing that “we’re never out of the spotlight, they’re never in it”, offering certain possibilities.

Someone else who knew this, dead a decade now but, like Angelina Jolie, neither to be forgotten nor remembered as an actress, was Princess Diana.

Infernal camera lenses dogged her entire life and ultimately maybe killed her for the thrill of recording her death. But by then she had dragged them by their own leashes into AIDS wards and refugee camps, forcing them — and everyone else — to look and see.

Enough time has passed now to know that Diana has not really been remembered as the unloved wife of an heir apparent to Britain’s throne and the mother of the next. (As much a blessing, no doubt, to the Prince of Wales and Princess Consort, and Princes William and Harry, confronted again with media retrospectives of Diana’s life and, especially, death.)

Diana, who wore Chanel so well, is remembered for her catwalk through an Angolan minefield in a stunning military-issue polycarbonate number designed to protect the parts for which Lara Croft will be best remembered.

So here’s wishing all the best to Madonna and Good Guy Ritchie, to Angelina and/or Brad, to Gorgeous George and Bono and the whole luminous lot of them. Go ahead, guys and dolls, let your limelight bounce off the dark, despairing faces of the world’s afflicted and endangered. Do it because it’s the least you can do, and the best you can do.

Diana Spencer did, and she couldn’t act either.

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Riding the lawless avenues, red in tooth and claw OPINION | TUESDAY | 5 JUNE 2007

Now it’s personal. Lydia Gomez is a colleague; she was attacked just up the road in our own neighbourhood, and isn’t Putera Umno supposed to be doing something about this?

Perhaps all that “exuberant mental energy” of the Mat Rempit is more resistant than previously supposed to being channelled to such worthy activities as jumping out of Russian helicopters over the North Pole.

Perhaps even climbing Everest or orbiting the planet in a space station can’t beat the thrill of coming across a woman alone in a car stopped at deserted traffic lights in the middle of the night.

It’s not the purse on the passenger seat they want. It might not even be the woman herself. These are just bonus prizes; trophies. It’s the power that’s turn them on.

The alarm and fear in the eyes of the victim; the prey’s sudden perception of helpless vulnerability; the predator’s liberation. This isn’t snatch theft; it’s rape.

Please let’s stop glamorising these felons. They’re not maladjusted youths dealing with overspills of exuberance. They’re animals, playing both ends of the food chain: They hunt in predatory packs, like jackals or wolves, ganging up and attacking in concert a single prey target. And they flock and shoal, like starlings or sardines; aggregating in a rolling mass that reduces the odds of any particular individual being itself singled out by a bigger fish, or law enforcer.

The Mat Rempit are not a sociological phenomenon or underclass or demographic sector of society, requiring analysis, understanding and accommodation. They are a force of nature, like storms, floods, earthquakes or rampaging wild beasts, to be anticipated and withstood.

It’s touching, somehow, that this wild bunch of reprobates could be portrayed as some kind of unsung national resource. We might attribute that to our wonderful Malaysian inclusiveness; this need to ensure that every last one of us, no matter how alienated, disenfranchised or outright nuts, has a place in this country that is not necessarily a penal institution of some kind.

Sociologists and psychologists urge us to consider the “root causes”: See how criminality, vandalism, anti-social behaviour and global terrorism stem from poverty, deprivation, inequality and injustice. Address these REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

“root causes”, they imply, and these scourges of society will inevitably diminish and perhaps even disappear.

Yeah, right. Something of the same earnest logic underlies efforts to get poppy growers in the Golden Triangle and coca farmers in Central America to switch to coffee and potatoes. Where’s the fun in that?

But if protecting innocent road-users trying to get safely home calls for corralling the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, perhaps it would be logistically less daunting simply to arrest these lesser hell-riders, confiscate their steeds and confine them to quarters.

Due process should allow them their day and say in court, whereupon they or their counsel can put to the bench all the sad neglect and lack of parental care and community acceptance that drove them to their present lives of criminal intimidation.

But no, our authorities organise them into parades and pestas, laud their “exuberant mental energies” and talk of “mobilising” them into useful community servants. Our film-makers make movies of them, to slightly higher professional standards than they can attain for themselves on YouTube (though with far less extensive distribution).

And Putera Umno takes a bunch of them to the North Pole to show everyone what common juvenile delinquents can achieve if properly motivated.

All well and good, but this does nothing to make life on urban streets any less fraught with risk and danger to common folk — especially women alone in cars at deserted traffic lights in the middle of the night, as vulnerable to helmeted hoodlums on souped-up two-strokes as a zebra foal to the wild dogs of the Serengeti.

For the benefit of those who seem not to have noticed, a seething rage is quietly building among the citizenry of this fair nation of ours.

What appear to be open-and-shut hit-and-run cases turn out to be due to terrified perpetrators not daring to stop for fear of having their vehicles torched and themselves beaten to death by eyewitnesses and passers-by.

The villagers of Kampung Kubang Ulu near Bukit Mertajam have even erected signboards warning that they will throw stones at overloaded lorries on their roads. Taking the law into their own hands, they contend, should be acceptable if the law isn’t asserted on their behalf by those licensed to do so.

They are wrong. For anyone to take the law into their own hands is to nullify the law entirely. But surely they too deserve the sympathy, kindness and consideration granted to other trangressors on our lawless avenues.

No one’s likely to invite them to join a political party, have a mass rally at Bukit Jalil stadium or mount an expedition to some out-of-the way adventure zone, but the message they send is clear anyway: If it’s become a jungle out there, it’s a question of kill or be killed.

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I think, therefore I’m wrong, I think OPINION | TUESDAY | 29 MAY 2007

Have you ever noticed that whenever someone says something beginning with the words, “I thought”, the subsequent statement is almost invariably wrong?

“I thought you wouldn’t mind.”

“I thought I brought the keys.”

“I thought you were going to stop at the lights.”

“I thought Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.”

I thought so. It’s almost instinctive. Whenever people try to defend themselves for doing something silly, inconvenient or wrong, they persistently insist they’d actually thought about what they were doing before they did it. Policemen hear this all the time.

We’ve all done it. Perhaps it is a purely desperate attempt to impress upon wounded parties and sundry inquisitors that we were in fact thinking, and not simply blundering along without a pertinent thought in our damfool heads, at the material time.

To give ourselves the benefit of the doubt, let’s say such statements are in fact the simple truth: We did indeed genuinely think and believe the things that proved so sadly mistaken: We thought wrong, Yang Arif.

This should give us pause. Moi? Wrong? How can?

People err because they don’t have all the facts, or when they base their assumptions on inaccurate data. Or they make the wrong connections, interpretations and analyses of what little they do know, by factoring in things they think up It’s a well-known truism, especially in this business of journalism: As the same load of bricks can be turned into any number of different structures, so can the same bare facts be turned into any number of possible scenarios — only one of which corresponds with reality.

It follows that there is only one way to be right and any number of ways to be wrong. Why something this obvious hasn’t led to greater caution against leaping to conclusions is a mystery — but only if we assume that people do, in fact, look before they leap.

There isn’t much evidence for this. In her book The March of Folly, the historian Barbara Tuchman meticulously dissects the brute stupidity that led to everything from the fall of Troy (enemy leaves large wooden horse outside your gates, you haul it in) to the Vietnam War (it’s not even your war).

REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

Tuchman’s book was published more than 20 years ago, but her clarion warning could hardly forestall folly marching ever onward into Afghanistan, Iraq, crowded Mediterranean cafes and — oh, anywhere else it’s possible to make a stupendously bad decision and then expend enormous resources upholding it, throwing good money after bad; flinging good bodies onto the pyres of bad policies.

But the benighted history of man is merely the personal experience of each and every one of them, writ large. Because information is never adequate, consultation never conclusive and deliberation never complete, every decision we make can only be a leap of faith from the known to the unknown. (I.e., the very opposite of a sound education).

From getting a haircut to casting a vote; from changing jobs, citizenships or religions to changing lanes on the highway, the signal purpose of any decision is to alter present circumstances.

The change itself is the thing, not its consequences, because having such feeble knowledge of our present circumstances, there’s not the slightest hope of knowing what will happen when we alter them. (Why life without prayer is best lived cowering in a corner of a locked and lightless room, if not a padded cell.)

The irony is that no one ever wilfully decides to make things worse.

(Ever felt a need to join the longest line at the supermarket checkout?)

Yet, the world is scarred with the consequences of disastrous decisions; leaving it “more full of weeping”, in W. B. Yeats’ lament, “than you can understand”.

That “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” (H. D. Thoreau) would indicate that pitifully few decisions ever pan out as hoped. Life’s a crapshoot, buddy; you need luck or loaded dice.

This becomes something of an indictment against thinking. Or thinking too much. Or thinking you’re thinking, when something else entirely is going on inside what you think is your head. Not knowing enough to think, the world is dense with people filled with “notions they think are thoughts” (S.K. Toh).

“I think, therefore I am” was Rene Descartes’ famous “explanation for everything”: Cogito ergo sum. That’s where the matter should rest, I think. Because if what we think we are leads us to act accordingly, as Hamlet so gravely pondered, peril is unleashed.

If we’re still conscious as the ambulance takes us away, or when wondering what happened to our take-home pay, or standing aghast on Judgment Day amid the ruins of our best intentions, we’ll say: We thought we knew what we were doing.

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Yes, no, maybe: Malaysia truly in the middle opinion | TUESDAY | 22 MAY 2007

In the nursery tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, the Baby Bear’s the one for whom everything is just right.

You remember the story (I hope): As the innocent blonde trespasser Goldilocks explores the bears’ house, she finds Papa Bear’s bed too hard and Mama Bear’s too soft; Papa Bear’s porridge too hot and Mama Bear’s too cold and so on, with Baby Bear’s stuff perfect in every instance.

And so, not unreasonably, Goldilocks eats Baby Bear’s porridge and sleeps in Baby Bear’s bed and generally usurps the absent infant’s optimal conditions for her own delectation and comfort, until the Three Bears come home and either scare her away or eat her, according to who’s telling the tale and why.

There’s a special moral in this for Malaysia. By many of the measures that matter, we are the Baby Bear among Asean’s 10 member nations: Malaysia in the Middle. To wit: Asean’s poorest member is Myanmar, with a per capita gross domestic product of US$1,800 or RM6,120. Its richest, pound-for-pound, is Singapore, with a GDP per capita equivalent of RM105,000. Malaysians’ RM43,200 puts us right in the middle.

Asean’s smallest nation is Brunei, with 400,000 citizens, and its largest is Indonesia, with 280 million. Malaysia with 27 million sits more-or-less halfway between them, with Cambodia, Laos and Singapore smaller and Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines larger.

Infant mortality: Laos loses more than 80 infants per 1,000 live births; Singapore fewer than three; Malaysia, 16.

Life expectancy: Laotians can expect to live 56 years; Singaporeans, 82; Malaysians, 73.

Literacy: Low-end Laos, 66.4 per cent; high-end Brunei, 94 per cent; midrange Malaysia; 89 per cent.

Unemployment: Indonesia, 12.5 per cent; Vietnam, 2 per cent; Malaysia, 3.5 per cent.

Poverty: Cambodia and the Philippines, 40 per cent; Singapore and Brunei, none to speak of; Malaysia, 5 per cent.

On any given scale, Malaysia tends to take the middle rank or centre slot; we are drawn towards the pivot, the fulcrum, the point of equidistance.

Even with less quantifiable criteria such as, say, “freedom of speech and expression”: Cambodia, Indonesia and the Philippines are at the end that delights libertarian loudmouths; Brunei, Myanmar and Singapore are at the other end with the three monkeys speaking, hearing and seeing no evil, and REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

Malaysia’s in the middle, perhaps peeping at, eavesdropping on and whispering a bit of it.

“Halfway up the stairs is the stair where we sit,” to cite A.A.Milne; “there isn’t any other stair quite like it.”

Here, where the northeast and southwest monsoons meet, the Indian and Pacific Oceans wash into each other and the northern and southern hemispheres clang together, where days and nights were allotted 12 hours each all year round, the planet itself seems to have engineered The Place Between.

With the way the winds blew, small wonder our entire population and its multitude of ancestries came to be the product of mingled worlds. For millennia, the place now called Malaysia was simply so convenient for the purpose of meeting and mixing; the great bus station corner tea stall of the Eastern world.

I sometimes wonder if this helps explain why the principles and processes of consultation, compromise and consensus have such durable currency here.

Malaysia as a nation seems almost gyroscopically inclined to balance.

It might be called “dynamic equilibrium”: forces pulling in opposite directions holding the centre in place; the centripetal spin of a whirlng top keeping it steady on its axis.

Certainly, deliberate socio-political engineering has helped this along over the past half-century of nationhood, but it also seems to have come naturally to generations of Malaysians. There appears to have been forever an innate understanding that in this nation, the highest ground would be the middle ground; neither here nor there would be where it’s at; the road to glory would be the middle path, the one most travelled.

This encourages moderation, tolerance and accommodation as national traits. While good for keeping the peace, this does not conduce to worldbeating excellence.

Indeed, it cossets mediocrity, encouraging a tendency to cut down tall poppies and be leery of non-conformity, even while avidly compiling contrived “records” and whooping and hollering Malaysia Boleh! as though anyone above or below gave a toss.

Methinks we holler too much. In this world, for any nation to occupy the moderate, average, median middle rung constitutes a towering achievement, worthy of admiration, emulation and a spattering of polite applause.

Not too hard, not too soft; not too hot, not too cold; not too young, not too old — “halfway up the stairs isn’t up and isn’t down; it isn’t in the nursery, it isn’t in the town….”

No wonder people having been coming here to eat, sleep and seek shelter for 2,000 years, and still they come, little lost blondes among them. “Malaysia Truly Asia”? Yes, I’d go along with that. Add up the Asean 10 and divide by the sum of their parts, and you get us.

Malaysia’s a Baby Bear market.

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Who put the mock in democracy?

OPINION | TUESDAY | 15 May 2007

When this stupendous image of the Taiwan legislature flashed around the world last week, I dearly wished to be a fly on the wall of Beijing’s Great Hall of the People. I could imagine the revolutionary cadres rolling in the aisles and clutching their midriffs, howling with laughter at this hilarious demonstration of the farce of democracy.

Of course, I’m sure they were more restrained than that. The National People’s Congress of the People’s Republic of China comprises some 3,000 representatives of 1.3 billion people. They perform their function with severe dignity, skilled at rhythmic applause and fluent in a selection of mass chants.

A wry chuckle or rueful shake of the head might have been more their typical reaction to the disgraceful spectacle enacted by what appeared to be a significant minority of the 255 members of the Legislative Yuan of the Republic of China (or Chinese Taipei or Taiwan, depending on who’s asking).

Advocates of central planning, command and control, whose last remnants survive only in isolated pockets of Cuba, Myanmar, North Korea and the fifth of mankind that is China, have long warned that democracy’s seductive freedoms were but a mask for sanctioned thuggery.

Democracy, they sneered, would not only ensure the survival of society’s most venal, manipulative and treacherous elements, it would end up relying on them. Granting freedom of speech to everyone instead of a carefully groomed stable of skilled orators — what could more surely guarantee that no one would actually hear anything amid the cacophony, or listen to anyone if they could?

Yes: “Let a hundred flowers bloom!” proclaimed Mao Zedong; “Let a hundred schools of thought contend!”

But what’s a hundred among a billion? Unable to tell flowers from weeds, they found it more expedient to mow down the lot of contentious blooming idiots.

Democracy, they warned, would prove more effective at creating and prolonging conflicts than ending them, because in democracies losers were not necessarily executed; often, they were allowed to live free to contend again.

REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

Democracies would dawdle and dither, swinging uncertainly from one alternative to another; altering priorities to suit fads and fancies; changing governments at every election — or being criticised as “flawed” if they didn’t. Democracies were just too short-term and fickle for the continuity of governance and policy that would allow for generational timescales of development.

Hence, democracies would inevitably grant control over such development to the military/industrial/corporate complex, holding even elected governments in thrall and removing even further from the people any semblance of the “power” democracy so deceitfully promises them.

But you wouldn’t let just anyone drive your car, transplant your heart, operate your military hardware or desludge your septic tank, so why would you let just anyone control your legislature or run your country? As with everything else, it ought to be left to professionals.

Only in this business, the pros are known as “politicians”, and we’re supposed to give them the respect due to all professionals: That of letting them do their jobs without our amateurish interference.

We must trust that these people know what they’re doing. They know the codes, protocols and lingo — the secret handshakes; the finger gestures; the coded allusions to anatomical structures, bodily functions and certain species of wildlife — on which our democracy operates.

In their own peculiar ways, in all the democracies of the world, politicians get their points across. (Literally, I’ve been told: In London’s Westminster, mother of all parliaments, the distance between the benches of Her Majesty’s government and those of her loyal opposition is just greater than the combined length of two drawn swords.)

In France, they’re proud of their process: Nicolas Sarkozy defeated Segolene Royal by an appropriately slender margin after a well-fought campaign followed by several days’ rioting — which they see as part and parcel of their healthy and mature democracy, rather than a threat to everything they hold dear.

In Timor Leste, Jose Ramos-Horta’s unambiguous victory may mean they’ve had enough of the politics of poverty and violence; in Zimbabwe, apparently not.

In Taiwan, they work the system by gang-mauling. Over here ... well, enough of that for now. Let’s just console ourselves once again with Winston Churchill’s reminder that “democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried”.

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The lady’s not for returning OPINION | SATURDAY | 12 May 2007

Zahi Hawass, secretary-general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, wants Berlin’s Altes Museum to return the famous bust of Nefertiti they’ve had on display since 1923. The museum won’t let her go.

Nor should they. Not that she’s their “property”. But neither is she modern Egypt’s. She belongs to the world. Whoever has her is obliged to keep her well protected, and the Altes Museum can claim to have done so for 84 years.

True, that is but a sliver of the time Nefertiti’s existed in this form, fashioned out of clay, plaster and paint 3,400 years ago by a genius named Thutmose, in whose Amarna workshop this piece was unearthed by a German archaeologist, Ludwig Borchardt, in 1912.

The Nefertiti sculpture is by common consensus (i.e., blindingly obvious to anyone who sees it) among the finest works of art ever created in the history of humanity. And this stunning apotheosis of the sculptor’s craft was fashioned so unimaginably long ago. Nefertiti’s cool and haughty beauty — the hooded eyes in that fine-boned face, her softly smiling lips, her head and headdress impossibly cantilevered atop the sweep of her swan neck — is among the evidence that leads some to contend that mankind has been in nothing but a long decline ever since Ancient Egypt.

The gulf of time between then and now is so vast as to render faintly ludicrous the contention that any sort of proprietary nationalism could be asserted in this regard. Hawass is not after just the Nefertiti, but a vast hoard of ancient treasures taken away from Egypt over the past couple of centuries of imperial pillage.

Greece, too, has fought famous battles with such outlander custodians, demanding Britain return the so-called “Elgin Marbles”, bas reliefs that once adorned the Parthenon in Athens and removed to London in 1806

by Thomas Bruce, Lord Elgin, on completion of his tenure as British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire.

Most of these sculptures remain at the British Museum, which also continues to house marvellous treasures that have left decapitated statues and holes in temple walls from India to Cambodia. Spoils of war? Imperial loot? Sure. But they’re still there, fresh as the day they were found, in climate-controlled, closely guarded environments accessible to the public, while their original sites have succumbed inexorably to the pollution, deterioration and tourism of the ages.

Some of our own antiquities are abroad as well — most notably REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

documents. Francis Light’s 18th-century treaties with the Sultan of Kedah, for example, are stored in the archives of the East India Company south of the Thames in London. Anyone can examine them; all you have to do is go there, show a valid i.d. and ask.

The treasures of ancient Egypt, however, are at a whole different level of unparalleled antiquity. Nefertiti, in particular, has global significance.

She whose name means “the beauty who has arrived” was the wife of Akhenaten, the Pharoah Amenhotep IV, who changed his name when he changed Egypt’s religion. He scrapped the Egyptian pantheon — or more precisely, brought the gods down before one great god, the Aten. This heresy was history’s first instance of monotheism.

On Akhenaten’s death after a 17-year reign, Egypt reverted to its traditional polytheistic worship. Akhenaten’s legacy was hardly to be carried forward by his son and heir, the boy pharoah Tutankhaten. Just 9 years old, the boy changed his name to Tutankhamun a couple of years later, under the tutelage of his chief vizier, Ay, and died at the untimely age of 18.

Ay himself then became pharoah and set about the systematic eradication of all traces of Akhenaten’s One God idea — literally hacking out from the stelae all references to his monotheistic predecessor. For millennia afterwards, Akhenaten and his queen were hardly mentioned in the Egyptian histories, until Borchardt uncovered that beautiful face less than a century ago.

This is where the speculation grows intriguing. With Akhenaten having been the first leader in history to light upon monotheism, and with Moses having been a close contemporary of his in Egypt, scholars have wondered whether the Aten concept opened the door to Moses’ conveying out of Egypt the monotheism that gave rise to the great Judaeo-Christian and Islamic traditions.

Sigmund Freud even suggested that Akhenaten and Moses were one and the same; scholars dispute this but remain open to the possibility that they could have known each other.

Such notions, peering through vast tracts of time to where myth and history combine, remain controversial. But the synchronicity of events and ideas in the second millennium BC offers tantalising food for thought. If there is any connection at all between Akhenaten and the emergence of monotheism in human history, that image of Queen Nefertiti belongs to all the world.

Where she resides doesn’t matter as much as that she continues to exist unharmed, untouched, and unmoved for all eternity, bestowing her transcendent beauty upon all humanity as long as the sun, moon and stars traverse the skies above us all.

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Four fingers point back at very Pointman OPINION | TUESDAY | 8 MAY 2007

“Pointman” for the government during crises — now there’s a job I’d like to have.

(They probably wouldn’t take me, though. They wouldn’t entirely trust me.

No one does, perhaps because, like Groucho Marx, I wouldn’t join any club that would have me as a member.)

The government’s Pointman would be expected to deliver accurate, timely and relevant information in a way that illuminates, educates and informs the public on the government’s actions and intentions. This would also mean choosing the right words and phraseology with which to impart such information succinctly, clearly and confidently. (Disqualifying me right there.)

Singapore, once again, is exemplary in this regard. Their government has always had exceedingly sharp Pointmen minutely scanning the media for any dubious or inaccurate information on their nation-state, whereupon they would respond, often within the working day, with incisive corrections and comprehensive rebuttals in language of surgical precision.

This is not necessarily a matter of public relations per se. Good PR can be immensely valuable, of course, and the best PR makes good use of accurate, timely and relevant information. (Bad PR, on the other hand, thinks its role is to hide, cover up or obfuscate. No one gets away with that anymore. It simply doesn’t work. From having to deal with angry people, bad PR ends up having to deal with ignorant angry people; the worst kind.)

For better or worse, however, PR cannot help but be the first two letters of “propaganda”. The government’s Pointman will therefore have to be more than a smooth-talking, well-groomed, suavely smiling silver-tongued shyster.

Glib charmers can be usefully telegenic, but that’s not enough to compensate for lacking credibility. A respectable record of integrity would help, but in this job competence is judged not on past performance but presence of mind amid clear and present danger in the here and now.

If this seems to describe a Special Forces commando in a well-cut suit, that may not be far off the mark. Lee Atwater of the Reagan administration and George Stephanopoulos of Bill Clinton’s were past masters of the Pointman’s trade. Karl Rove leaves something to be desired, but Barack Obama could be among the greatest if he hadn’t decided to run for president himself. (Maybe a mistake, that: Genuinely clever men tend not to do too well in the Oval Office.

True, neither do genuinely dumb ones, but they don’t mind as much.)

Singapore’s James Chin wrote the book (or more precisely, the Letter to the Editor) on how to deal with the print media — though he was more of a point-and-shoot man. Here at home we have Plus’ Khalilah Talha, the Shangri REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

La Hotel’s Rosemarie Wee and the Health Ministry’s Tan Sri Dr Ismail Merican.

Millicent Danker’s gone to Zambia, but the redoubtable Datuk Dr Paddy Bowie’s still on song.

The government’s Pointman (or woman) will be an individual (or a team of individuals, like MCA’s Datuk Michael Chong and the Chongettes) who will have to forestall the fearful rumours, wicked gossip and paralysing innuendoes, misinformation and disinformation that inundates the speculative landscape every time something alarming happens in this country.

In announcing the search for such a Pointman last week, Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak said the need was to “prevent confusion among the people”.

“It’s not our intention to cover things up,” Najib assured his audience at an international conference on information management in Kuala Lumpur. “We’ll disclose information in full to prevent rumours from spreading.”

The DPM was referring specifically to health scares such as bird flu, SARS, hand-foot-and-mouth disease and other such outbreaks and epidemics, but it would be wonderful if the Pointman’s office could also be tapped as a one-stop shop for similarly forthright transparency on everything else the government has to face.

For instance, it might be useful to have someone explain to the public that the Information Minister’s criticism of foreign media for reporting on ousted local politicians was actually to get them to see where these people stand in this country at present.

Or perhaps the Science Minister’s alleged remarks on Indian complexions to a group of Malaysians in California could be attributed to a momentary lapse of reason due to overwork and jet lag, when he was only informally contrasting Dravidian and Indo-Aryan culturo-genetics.

There could be instant and reassuring explanations of aircraft, yachts or mansions here and abroad, or on whether or not Datuk Siti Nurhaliza’s in the family way. There could be quick and ready reference to corporate structures and shareholdings, and the developmental economics of fishermen owning racehorses. Above all, there could be the assurance that someone knows the answers, and that’s the Pointman.

Of course, this doesn’t mean he’ll tell you everything. As a government servant, he too will be bound by General Orders to observe the constitutional privileges of his elected masters. But he will be in a position to advise them on how to make sure the people get the right stuff in the right way at the right time (as immediately as possible, that is, or prudent) so that they will know the government’s true intentions and not be troubled by doubtful outcomes.

That’s why I for one would love the Pointman’s job. It may not mean I’d tell you the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but at least, at last, I’d know.

Otherwise, what’s the point of being a Pointman? There’d only be four fingers pointing back.

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The great unspoken national contract OPINION | FRIDAY | 4 MAY 2007

So is it true that the Chinese electorate in the past two by-elections showed they were unhappy with the government? Well, take a number and get in line.

In yet another heartening indication of this nation’s steady evolution beyond racialism, it seems everybody’s teed off about something or other these days. Peevishness has become a nationwide equal-opportunity affliction.

Road-raging helmet bullies, hot-headed parliamentarians and bellicose electioneers are but the upwellings of a surging underground river of malcontent. In the free-wheeling domain of the w-w-websites, the odium heaped on the government reaches doctoral levels, as they say: Perasaan hasad dengki, piled high and deep.

The point is, though: Race has almost nothing to do with it. If it is true that the Chinese remain upset with, for instance, Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein’s infamous keris-waving at the last Umno general assembly, surely it cannot be for anything worse than a breach of protocol. It was an act perceived as not so much belligerent or threatening as ill-mannered.

(Admittedly, such rudeness could be the most offensive of all to a community acculturated on Confucian correctness, so in no way diminishes the gravity of these ostensible protest votes against Barisan Nasional).

For all their drama, such spectacles are essentially transgressions of protocol, and our protocol in this country is a precious thing indeed, understood, valued and practised by all Malaysians, whether they know it or not.

Much of this concord is written — the federal constitution of 1957; the Rukun Negara of 1970; Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s “The Way Forward” speech of 1991; Raja Muda Perak Raja Dr Nazrin Shah’s speech to the Young Malaysians’ Roundtable on National Unity and Development of a month ago. But the over-arching national contract, which both rises from and encompasses these statements, is not.

The Great Unspoken Malaysian Contract resides in the way we live with and among each other; in how we greet and speak with one another. This is by no means formal (though it does operate very well with a certain degree of formality).

It is mostly expressed in the language and gestures of our daily interactions, and after many decades’ development, it has attained universal familiarity in this country.

It is the Force, Luke, it surrounds us and penetrates us, it binds us together — or at least keeps us from leaping for each other’s throats in a murderous REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

frenzy, or ending it all in one great leap from a sufficiently lofty balcony.

Which, admittedly, happens.

By and large, however, we suffer through and get by. With strength and discipline. Gritted teeth. Clenched fists. Red in the face from holding our breath and counting to 10 a hundred times a day. With enormous acts of will and faith, and ever-deepening trust and hope in the Almighty, we bite down, dig deep, suck it up, and get on with it.

Labourer and peasant ancestries offer good genetics for this. At the bottom of it all lies the innate mutual understanding that everyone with something to wear and somewhere to sleep is on the same quest: Cari makan.

Such hunger is common to all — though it’s surprising how the more you eat, the hungrier you get. (Or maybe not, in the certified fattest nation in Asia.) But this is something known and understood by everyone from the emaciated slave to the sleek billionaire: Enough is never enough. In this country, a former chief executive once told a foreign news-magazine, everyone must be a little unhappy. “If anyone is too happy, someone else will be very unhappy.”

And thus it has come to pass. Sure enough, everyone’s a little unhappy: The government with the opposition, the opposition with the voters, the voters with the government, and everyone with everyone else. Grumpily we roll along, and woe betide anyone inattentive enough to graze us in the fast lane.

If we live, they’re dead, dead, d’you hear me?! Apa, lu cari pasal ka? You talkin’ to me? Go ahead, make my day.

The pursuit of happiness is over-rated. Most of us would be happy enough with survival, the basic criteria of which seem to be getting what we want and keeping what we have. The hard-headed pragmatism that has seen us through 50 years of theoretically impossible nationhood has matured (albeit in the sense of cheese, a form of decomposition) into a thick mucilage of cynicism and apathy.

As a consequence, the Great Unspoken Malaysian Contract may smell a little rancid these days, but it still makes an effective poultice for these old scars that still ache from time to time, especially when there’s thunder and lightning and it rains mineral water.

It would be constructive, therefore, to recognise that the Chinese voters who swung away from BN in these last two by-elections were not disgruntled because they’re Chinese but because they’re Malaysian.

We’ve all learned to manipulate the system this way. In a straight fight between two of the three main groups, the third calls the shots and sends the message at the finish, on behalf of everyone else.

It works, more or less. A government is returned, salient messages nailed to its shirt-tails. Things get done, somehow, someday. Everyone has their say, somehow, some way. Food is found, the world turns round, and everyone lives to fight another day.

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The personal passions of party politics OPINION | TUESday | 24 APRIL 2007

People take politics so personally, don’t they?

Well, maybe not everyone — it’s common knowledge that only a minority are at all involved. They’re known as “voters”, and there are fewer than 10 million of them registered in this country. With the population of Malaysia topping 27 million this week, that’s not even a major minority.

Cut out the ones who don’t, can’t or won’t vote, and you’re down to a mere seven million or so. (There could be nearly five million more, but most of them are quite content with their lots in life and don’t see the point of voting. Ironic, huh? Use it or lose it, people.)

The active electorate, aware of its relatively meagre numbers, punches way above its weight. Umno alone claims some 2.5 million members; the MCA a million or so; the MIC about 500,000. Pas also claims half-a-million.

(These numbers are notoriously unreliable, of course; we’re talking politics here. The DAP and PKR don’t even reveal theirs; critics say it’s because they’re not sure themselves.)

Add up the guesstimated memberships of the country’s 30-odd political parties (some of them odder than others), and it would seem only about a million Malaysian voters aren’t card-carrying politicos of some description.

Which is why it can get pretty intense down at the hustings. By the time the party-political machinery grinds down to by-election level, those of the electorate prepared to parade party flags and hoot derision at their opponents are, by definition, committed.

They are driven. Their goals are clear. Even when they don’t know what they’re doing, they know why they’re doing it.

Down on the election stump, people support their political parties with the zeal of soccer hooligans. There’s no compromise in sport. One doesn’t negotiate victory and defeat on a football field. It’s a war zone; all’s fair in love and war; anything goes.

It would be civilised to do battle with ideas, intellect and oratory; surgically flensing opponents with the cut and thrust of argument. In fact, there was a time when we were renowned for that. It’s a well-known historical truism that we talked, argued and speechified our way to independence, unlike those incoherent marauding tribes elsewhere.

But those were the days when people could sit and listen to a great speaker for hours. They still might, with Fidel Castro or Datuk Seri S. Samy Vellu. But such filibustering flamboyance has been shouted down by the coming-of-age of a generation raised on instant gratification. The campaign points being made today are not as complex or subtle, and made well enough REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

with a flying bottle of mineral water.

(The handy 500ml ones, of course. Anything larger runs the risk of being friendly fire. But those little half-litre ones sit in the hand just right, and when thrown they tumble end over end like half-kilo stick grenades, usefully delivering clean water to irrigate any wounds on arrival.)

The physics is simple; the psychology simpler still. The hard question is: Why? Why get so angry with each other over a by-election for a minor state seat, in a constituency that was just as well off or otherwise as every other placid rural backwater?

The answer seems to be that it’s never really about Ijok, Machap, Batu Talam, Lunas, Sanggang or any other of the 576 such places in the country.

It’s about the personalities involved. And that’s how it gets ugly.

With the concentration of the nation’s political process into such a narrow sector of society, elections are virtually family feuds. Witness the hurt feelings of passed-over candidates; the fits of temper and sulking, then the pacifications and reconciliations, until unconditional love is re-affirmed and peace returns once more to Cold Comfort Farm.

Every prime minister has been “Bapak” something; every party leader assumes a stern paternalism in asserting the right to dispense fear or favour, lay down the law and have the last word over their households and their wives’ and children’s wings.

Leadership becomes as much a matter of personality as policy, and leaders are judged as much on their personal lives as their politics.

Political evolution in this country has been driven not by ideology but by generational rebellion and sibling rivalry. Mentors raise proteges who grow up to compete with the old man for control of the family assets, or leave home to join another firm or set up their own shops. Party-political jargon calls them “factions”, “splinters” or “rumps”, but they’re still blood of the same blood, flesh of the same flesh, cousin-brothers all the same.

Race is family, after all, and when the leaders of Parti Keadilan Rakyat or Pas face off against those of Umno, or DAP against MCA (or MIC against, well, MIC) we witness the breakdown of the nuclear family imagined with such wistful futility by our founding fathers and their Kaum Ibu. When the time comes for a showdown at the ballot box between Cain and Abel, Tuah and Jebat or the Pandavas and Kauravas, in our first-pastthe-post, winner-take-all system, skeletons in the cupboard are hauled out, shrouded in dirty linen, and anything goes.

Swung in the same cradle, raised at the same table — it doesn’t get more personal than that.

Thankfully, the general public remains generally unmoved when things turn ugly on the election trail. To the 20 million or so Malaysians completely uninvolved in elections except as detached observers, this isn’t politics, it’s domestic violence.

A distressing spectacle, no doubt, but affecting only a small minority.

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‘How I wonder what you are’ OPINION | Wednesday | 18 APRIL 2007

That happy ending was just too good to be true.

The incredulous father scarcely daring to believe the child on the phone could be his 5-year-old son, by then lost for 14 days and nights, testing the boy with a nursery rhyme, “twinkle twinkle little star…”.

What a fabulous way for Yin to be found, after a fortnight during which he went from being every parent’s worst nightmare to a household name and a cause celebre holding a nation in thrall.

In mosques, temples and churches across the land, special observances were held for Muhammad Nazrin Shamsul Ghani. Within the first week of his disappearance, newspapers, radio and TV were calling out his name in all languages; the Malay Mail distributed 10,000 posters of his picture and the numbers to call, then reprinted it as a full page in the paper every day for a week.

By email, SMS and the Internet, the word went out to look for Yin. People offered money. Cabinet ministers lent their weight; political parties and NGOs their personnel. This wasn’t just the work of a few key individuals and Good Samaritans. Yin’s disappearance gave the nation a visceral clutch of fear and anger.

It was, first of all, so terribly ordinary. This happens all the time, in crowded public places everywhere. During Yin’s disappearance, many people relived their own experience of losing a child like this — or of being the child lost. What Yin’s parents Shamsul Ghazali Shamsuddin and Nor Amizah Ahmad were going through evoked heartfelt empathy among all parents.

Then there was the pathos of it: The CCTV footage of a small boy toddling off alone out of a busy shopping complex and vanishing into a milling throng of pedestrians and traffic. That last glimpse of the little boy grew ever more haunting as the days stretched into weeks with no further sight of him.

Had Yin been a decade older, it would have been different. Teenagers too young to drive are still old enough to decide whether to stay with their families or run away. A 5-year-old doesn’t make such choices.

So where was he? By the second week of his disappearance, the unthinkable was being thought. Was he the victim of a child-smuggling ring; drugged, crippled, begging on the streets of a neighbouring country or selling chewing gum in this one? A head of steam was building, REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

envisaging the direst consequences for any adult involved in Yin’s continuing absence.

But there was no ransom demand to show that some kind of human intelligence, however wicked, was involved in this. Denied a proper target, public anger seethed at the lowlife scum who turned telephones into the devil’s own devices, sending the boy’s parents on one wild goose chase after another, or worse, abusing and mocking them.

The creeps and crawlers will always be there (and how technology has empowered them), but no word came from the creeps who’d crawled away with Yin. Not all the false leads were malicious. Genuinely concerned people were making genuinely mistaken sightings of Yin from Kedah to Johor.

But there was no sign of him at the border crossings, ports or airports.

Had he been anaesthetised and smuggled out in a suitcase? The story was growing wild with implausibilities.

Then, two weeks to the day after Yin vanished, came that implausibly happy ending. A matronly woman emerges with the boy, his head shaven, she says, as a consequence of some health care. He had been looked after by a family of Rohingya refugees from Myanmar, living with them in their hovel in Sentul Pasar.

They had no inkling of the consternation over the lost boy, they said, because they had no TV or telephone.

As the curtain drew closed on the joyous tableau of Yin’s return to his home and family, there came a glimpse of the blisters on the soles of his feet, and a cold, hard glare turned on the couple who had brought him back.

They are now under investigation, to determine if it is at all possible that they simply did not know a nationwide hunt was on for Yin, or that they should deliver him to the authorities.

Could there exist in the city of Kuala Lumpur entire communities of people who do not see newspapers or posters or billboards, listen to radio or watch TV? Are there people who know no one and do not mingle with others, even on the most crowded thoroughfares in the busiest parts of town?

Could it be that Yin’s fortnight down the rabbit-hole was due entirely to an innocent and forlorn act of kindness — a lost family recognising one of their own and doing the only decent thing they knew by a lost child?

Perhaps, unlike Yin’s safe return, that is too much to hope or pray for. If it’s true that wickedness was not a part of this story, it would be a modern fairy tale for the ages. Otherwise, there’s due process.

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Open apology to the sadly sub-literate OPINION | TUESday | 17 APRIL 2007

The vituperation this writer has received in the past few weeks (nay, years, decades) has lately prompted some maudlin introspection on what some disparagingly call my “lexical choices”. (And they call me pompous.)

Simply put, the verdict seems to be that I am guilty of using big words in order to impress people. This could not be more wrong. I use big words not to impress people but because I like them. (Words, that is. People I can take or leave.)

I’ve always liked words, ever since “hieroglyphics” offended my teacher in Standard Four, and “supercilious” delighted me in being used to describe the facial expression of a bullfrog.

It seemed to me that words existed to express thoughts and feelings, and could be used like paint to make things visible. The English language, granted to me by accident of birth to book-loving, erudite, argumentative and presciently globalised parents, abounded in words allowing precision of expression.

It is with deep regret, therefore, that I admit the folly of my lifelong ways: Delivering the right words in the wrong way to an inappropriate audience, far from conducing to comprehension, can have worse than the opposite effect. Not only is one not understood, no one knows how funny one is.

There was a time when people encountering unknown words in their reading would keep quiet about their deficient vocabulary. If they were moved to improve, they might carefully underscore the mystery where it appeared and look it up in a dictionary. (Of which there are at present more than 20 million in the country; nobody has to be more than a few paces away from one.)

Among my generation when we were kids, there remained those who enjoyed stumbling on new words in their reading: The more exotic and obscure the better. With their meanings tantalisingly hinted at in their contexts, it meant a dive for the dictionary and the instant gratification of knowledge, understanding, and a guide to pronunciation.

Once affirmed in the dictionary and successfully used in a sentence, these words became companions for life; faithful servants and soldiers ready to be summoned forth to name the objects of the universe and perform in the service of our own ideations. Even among my generation, however, this particularly educational and empowering aspect of the pleasure of reading was dying out. Today, there’s virtually none left 4 ne1 2 c.

With the general dumbing-down of the world over the past couple REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

of generations, largely due to the burgeoning of information technology, the linguistically challenged have come to realise they are, in fact, in the overwhelming majority.

Suddenly, a revolutionary revelation! As my colleague-in-letters Datuk Johan Jaaffar dourly observed in a recent column: Literacy is over-rated.

Becoming rich, famous and successful does not necessarily require reading and writing. (Arithmetic, maybe.)

With delusions of grandeur bulldozed flat in the great national effort to level the playing field, literacy beyond the ability to read road signs and fill in forms has become regarded as elitist, exclusionary and arrogant.

In such a market, the hitherto invaluable advice to KISS or MEGO (“Keep It Short & Simple or My Eyes Glaze Over”) is rendered irrelevant by the reduction of communication to a sequence of verbal tics (poetically enough in the digital age, a succession of ones and zeroes).

But I’m less than four years away from statutory retirement age, so beg pardon, but I shall ignore all this criticism of my “lexical choices”. I will always prefer one obscure or difficult word that precisely captures my meaning to a string of muffled muttering monosyllabic munchkins beating about the bush.

If I have an equal choice between words familiar and obscure, I will continue to select the one that best fits the sentence, not the vocabulary of whoever might be attempting to read it.

For I love and respect words. I love their precision and subtlety. And I love the sound of them; the way they form in the mind to trip off the fingertips or tongue; their rhythm, cadence and melody. I would be lost without them to flow across the contours of my feelings, giving them form and meaning, rendering them recognisable, palpable, and sometimes manageable.

I am grateful for the companionship words provide and the understanding they allow me of the world and everything in it, myself included.

It’s just the way I am, I guess. After all, the one obvious truth about anyone who doesn’t know the words I use is that they wouldn’t know what I’m blathering on about. In which case, what relevance could their opinions have to me? All their criticism does is make of me a grumpy, embittered, irascible ogre, which I deeply regret and for which I humbly apologise. * Portions of this piece previously appeared, to deleterious effect, in a posting on Sharon Bakar’s estimable Bibliobibuli weblog: thebookaholic. blogspot.com. This column is also fondly dedicated to Atikah Kamarudin of Mara Junior Science College, Langkawi, whose teacher assigned her the task of searching the newspapers for a dozen words new to her, and who found just one of my articles sufficient unto the challenge.

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Love means not having to say sorry OPINION | TUESDAY | 3 April 2007

The cheesiest line from the cheesiest movie of 1970, spelling lasting damage to the careers of both Ali MacGraw (who?) and Ryan O’Neal (see?) was, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry”.

This vapid statement summed up Love Story, which nonetheless sold five million copies in book form and made over US$100 million as a movie in the United States and as much again worldwide.

Perhaps this was understandable in the year of the My Lai massacre, the emergence of the Khmer Rouge, the Kent State killings, the breakup of the Beatles, the deaths of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, Apollo 13, and the Irish songstress Dana winning the Eurovision song contest with All Kinds of Everything.

It ushered in arguably the most vacuous decade in history until the present one, but I have a particular loathing for the Seventies because that was when I had the great ill-fortune to be growing up. (If that can seriously be said for what happened back then, given the wardrobes, literature and popular culture of those times. Tony Orlando and Dawn, anyone?)

However, the tagline of 1970’s most successful film has retained a certain currency into present times. It’s become an important element of international diplomacy. Without a little bit of love, you cads, you’d better learn to say sorry.

The latest distraught party on the international stage is Iran, which would be at least a little mollified if Britain would only apologise for its brazen violation of their maritime boundary on March 23.

A decent apology, Iran’s acting ambassador to Turkey said there last week, would help ease the outrage and hasten the release of those 15 British sailors — or at least the lone female one of them, whom Iran was going to release anyway, until Britain compounded its transgression by arrogantly denying it had transgressed in the first place.

Such a shame Tony Blair’s government couldn’t have followed the example of the captive servicemen themselves. One of them, Royal Marine rifleman Nathan Summers, was shown on Iranian TV over the weekend with no visible signs of torture or pistols pointed at his head, uttering the magic words: “I deeply apologise for entering your waters.”

Then again, Summers probably wanted badly to go home, where Blair already was. He had something to gain from his apology. This is something to be borne in mind when seeking or receiving apologies.

It certainly has been borne in mind by successive Japanese prime REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

ministers Junichiro Koizumi and Shinzo Abe, neither of whom has proffered the apologies demanded for the honouring of war criminals after World War Two and the dishonouring of women during it, respectively.

Wait. That’s not true. They have apologised. Well, sort of. Unfolding the origami of Koizumi’s careful utterances on his visits to Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine during his term in office, and Abe’s elliptical evasions on the “comfort women” despatched to console Japanese soldiers conquering Southeast Asia 65 years ago, any cryptologist might winkle out that slippery little mollusc, the False Apology.

Simply put, this involves issuing a loud and clear “I am sorry…”, followed by a sotto voce, “... you’re upset.”

We Asians are quite expert at this. “I’m sorry... you feel that way.” “I’m sorry… you’re an idiot.” “I’m sorry… I even have to speak to you, you festering lump of dung.” “I’m sorry… for myself.”

Needless to say, this sort of spurious contrition has zero effect in smoothing ruffled feathers. Indeed, it raises hackles even more, in that the False Apologiser can (and in the above cases, did) protest that an apology was in fact issued, much to the aggrieved parties’ disgust.

At the core of all this mealy-mouthed doublespeak, and why this can be a matter of considerable finesse in diplomacy, is what an apology truly is: An admission of guilt, error or incompetence. Hence, Datuk Seri Najib Razak’s bristling denial of an Indonesian newspaper report last week claiming that he had apologised to Indonesia for the presence of our warships in their territorial waters a month ago.

No such thing, Najib clarified; he had merely addressed the allegation with his Indonesian counterpart Juwono Sudarsono, the two defence ministers agreeing that such things should not be allowed to escalate into “untoward incidents”.

It must have galled Najib all the more that this was a carbon-copy of a similar exchange just two years ago, in April 2005, when the Indonesian newspaper Kompas reported that he had apologised to Jakarta over another close encounter of the blurred kind between Malaysian and Indonesian navy vessels in the contentious Ambalat maritime area off Sabah.

In that episode, Malaysia was angered enough to consider suing the naughty journal. Perhaps a little inured by now to the mischievous goadings of our neighbour’s famously free and courageous media, no such high dudgeon was expressed this time.

Instead, this little lovers’ spat ended as the last one did, with a restatement that there’s no need for anyone to apologise if no one did anyone wrong with malicious intent; both countries know how to negotiate disputes amicably, and would continue to do so in the interest of our continuing good relations.

If sorry seems to be the hardest word, well, all you need is love.

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Yes Tuan, no Tuan, three bags full Tuan OPINION | TUESDAY | 27 MARCH 2007

What a strange anachronism has revealed itself in the way we speak to policemen. We still call them Tuan, it seems.

We’re not supposed to. There is no government directive saying we should. Yet, we do. And only policemen receive this genuflection. Soldiers don’t. Nor do other uniformed enforcers — army, Customs, Immigration or Road Transport Department officers, for instance. The very thought of similarly honoring Rela personnel is ludicrous.

So how come the beat cop gets to be called Tuan — “Master” — while any other government servant below the rank of director-general is lucky to get more than an “Oi!”?

The roots of this are buried in our colonial past, when Tuans and “Mem”s still ruled the roost hereabouts, but for some reason they continue to sprout tendrils that reach for the sky — especially when having to deal with policemen from a position of perceived vulnerability, such as the side of the road with a breathalyser or summons ticket in the offing.

No doubt, the police force is a venerable old institution in this country.

Celebrating its 200th anniversary last weekend, it may have surprised many that we had cops in our country 150 years before we had a country. It’s a natural tendency for new nations to cherish evidence of deeper histories, though, so the 1807 decision of the administrators of Prince of Wales Island (now Pulau Pinang) to set up a squad of bobbies has come to be regarded as the birth of what is today the Royal Malaysian Police.

It wasn’t until after the Second World War, however, that the motley police crews of the various states and former Straits Settlements were aggregated into the semblance of a national organisation.

The pre-eminent security challenge of those times was internal, as a consequence of the communist insurrection that followed the Japanese occupation, and against which the police force served with such distinction and sacrificed so many of its own. (Remember Bukit Kepong.)

But this was why the original vernacular term for the police was matamata — “eyes”. Whatever effect decades of repositioning, repackaging, rebranding and local TV dramas have had, the original role of the police, as seen through the eyes of the public, was to be the eyes of the authorities.

Then as now, the police may have preferred to see themselves as protectors and defenders of the people, but when the enemy is in the REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

blanket, there’s no way for people to turn a blind eye to who’s being watched.

As a result, the police force in this country never came close to attaining the friendly, reassuring presence it still wishes it had, with such initiatives as Rakan Cop, their Mesra, Cepat dan Betul slogan and “handshake” badging, or assigning policemen to physically live among the people, as is being tried in ?Seberang Prai. They may have had a discernible effect in reducing petty crime among their immediate neighbours, but that’s probably due to their ability to spread fear as much as win confidence.

The Tuan syndrome is only understandable in the harsh light of such a history and such a role. After 150 years of being the enforcers of magisterial foreign powers, followed by 50 ferreting out internal subversives, the Royal Malaysian Police will likely never be able to erase their aura of fearsome power and implacable authority over those they are in fact pledged to care for, protect and defend.

Calling a cop Tuan proves it, and being referred to as such should be an embarrassment to any decent policeman.

So what do we call them? What any decent person would call any decent government clerk: “Encik”. Better still, make some effort to get familiar with their rank insignia or the usual duties thereof, and call them “Konstabel”, “Koporal”, “Sarjan”, “Inspektor” and such. (Don’t worry — the other colonial hangover in this matter is that the ranks all still carry their English names, only in pidgin form: “Deputi Inspektor Jeneral” for example.)

This is not to say that there’s no longer any use for Tuan. Domestic servants might still be expected to address their employers as such, or perhaps the lowliest labourer with respect to the loftiest estate manager.

Those among the landed gentry who demand their employees call them Tuan instead of simply “mister” or “sir” might do well to examine their own over-inflated senses of self, but I suppose it’s their right to get the bowing and scraping they’re paying for, unless and until their underlings go berserk and murder them in their beds.

It may have been in keeping with their relationship that Darth Vader should address the Galactic Emperor Palpatine as such, but “Yesss, Massterr’ would seem somewhat creepy in most other contexts, whether or not delivered in a breathy bass-baritone.

The term “Tuan” and its continued use carry an odious burden, inappropriate to modern times. Its cap-doffing, forelock-tugging, footshuffling, grovelling overtones imply acceptance of mastery and ownership.

And whatever else the police are to us, they are not our masters, and they do not own us.

No, sir, not even those above the rank of Inspector.

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Road safety is a mental health issue OPINION | TUesday | 20 MARCH 2007

On road safety (or, more precisely, the lack of it) we may be barking up the wrong tree and at the wrong officials.

This is not entirely a problem for the Ministry of Works. Our roads are good. Nor is it to be laid at the door of the Ministry of International Trade & Industry, no matter how many foreign cars are brought in to annoy the national car company. The Transport Ministry and the police, stewards of enforcement, are doing as much as they can short of fascism to regulate vehicles and control drivers.

Because there’s no way to cure the dead, however, the emphasis in road safety should be on prevention. It’s time to think out of the yellow box and call Datuk Chua Soi Lek. This is a matter of mental health.

The fatal deficiency here is not that we have some 65,000km of roads and more than 10 million vehicles in this country, but fewer than a thousand psychiatrists. That’s not enough to rectify the neuroses of the Mat Rempit of Kedah alone, leave alone their mortal enemies on four or more wheels nationwide.

American researchers last week announced in the journal Neuroscience that the hormone tetrahydropregnanalone, or THP for short, may be responsible for the wild mood swings associated with that time of life.

The paradox is that THP has the opposite effect on adults and younger children, on whom it acts as a relaxant. Combined with the witches’ brew of all the other hormones kicking in at adolescence, however, THP seems to galvanise quite the opposite.

This would imply that the crazed-teen syndrome is treatable by means other than straitjackets and jail. This possibility surely merits all due consideration by the Health Ministry, as the Internal Security Ministry does not have enough restrictive clothing or prisons to contain all the young Malaysians intent on distressing Datuk Fu Ah Kiow by posting their daredevil kap-cai stunts on YouTube.

Old-school child-rearers may be a little disgruntled by yet more scientific research indicating a neurological basis for bad behaviour, having themselves been raised on the merits of a good thrashing when stepping out of line. If clinical psychotherapy can do the trick, however, it ought to be preferable to the kind of old-fashioned belting that today risks charges of child abuse.

Finding a way to cure adolescent angst through manipulating brain REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

chemistry is one thing, but THP cannot reasonably be blamed for the other 380,000 or so road accidents per year in this country. Bikers may be 17 times more likely to die in traffic crashes, but this is no indication of better mental health among other road users. Alienation, depression and sociopathic behaviour clearly know no barriers of age, race, gender or socio-economic status.

With conservative estimates maintaining that more than 2 million Malaysians have some form of psychiatric problem, there’s all the more reason for road users to pay the closest attention to everyone else out there with them — no matter kind of vehicle they’re in. These people may look normal but there’s no telling what electro-chemical shortcircuits are fizzing in their brains, just waiting for the right stimulus to come ripping out in the murderous syndrome universally known as “road rage”.

However, even the most placid and even-tempered road-user can still be a deadly hazard. Another peculiarly Malaysian trait might be termed “fatal inattentiveness”. God knows, there’s enough about living here that has made a virtue of not paying too much attention to what’s going on around us. Malaysians, by and large, have learned not to mind other peoples’ business; to live and let live; to shy away from too intrusive a concern with other people’s behaviour.

Alas, such benign tolerance can have the direst consequences when extended to what’s going on in other people’s vehicles. Yes, be concerned, be very concerned, with motorcyclists at traffic lights (or anywhere else), or when passing T-junctions or roundabouts, or entering or exiting parking bays. The vehicle operator about to broadside or rearend you may have no psychological dysfunction worse than indifference, but neither of you might know exactly what hit you or why.

Judging by the records of Ops Sikap I through XII, watchtowers, roadblocks, highway patrols, on-the-spot fines and the strenuous pleading of elected representatives have had about as much effect on improving road safety as the newly proposed “star-ratings” of roads is likely to.

What can be done, when the keyboard-happy operators of those variable-message electronic signboards themselves seem unaware of the carnage that can arise from their well-meaning efforts to inform roadusers that the highway’s jammed and it’s raining cats and dogs? Perhaps pharmacology might offer better mileage.

Or perhaps not. Tranquillisers, sedatives, anti-depressants and other psychotropic medication may have proven useful in helping people with mental-health problems, but most are prescribed with warnings not to drive or operate machinery while under their influence. It’s enough to drive anyone mad.

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Not going gentle into that good night PRIME NEWS | FRIDAY | 9 JUNE 2006

Why, Tun? That’s what we — the products, inhabitants, stewards and legatees of the country you designed and built — need to know. Why have you become so harsh a critic of your successor’s administration?

You made them, too. They have cleaved to your vision of what this country needs to be, and they are moving forward — or at least attempting to, as best they can, given the way forward as they see it.

It wasn’t necessarily their way forward; it was yours. No one has argued with the road map you drafted for this country, nor the direction you determined, nor even with the pace you set to get where you wanted us to go.

Nothing of your legacy as prime minister has been dismantled.

Such restructuring as is happening in the corporate Malaysia Inc you established — Proton and MAS in particular — is for companies in desperate trouble, needing to be re-engineered to new and more businesslike specifications. Whether this will turn them around remains to be seen, but it needed to be done.

On the fuel price hike, your suggestion that fuel subsidies could have been maintained by allowing the exchange rate to float was, well, radical.

Certainly, so was your decision to peg the ringgit to the US dollar during the Asian financial meltdown in 1998. By that time the claws of the crisis had sunk deep, and there was no lack of popular and political support for your soon-to-be famously successful move.

But the present administration, in reducing fuel subsidies, was responding to imperatives of long-term prudence, and that too has been by-and-large accepted and supported by the people. Times have changed, Tun. You should know: You changed them.

In the case of the Tebrau bridge, you seemed beside yourself with irritation. But it was precisely with respect to national sovereignty that the idea was scrapped; it’s hard to understand how you could have implied otherwise.

We know it’s a gamble, but for this term at least, the electorate have fallen behind the present administration with a greater mandate than you received even at the record-breaking height of your popularity.

But that was in 1982. For the ensuing 21 years, you charged forward with stupendous resolve, damning the torpedoes, brooking scant REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

dissent, building this city on rock and roll.

Your successor is more graceful at the waltz, it seems — and so far the people have responded fondly enough to that, too.

How has Malaysia changed in the first half-term of Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi’s administration? It’s quieter. More circumspect. There’s more introspection at the top; a need, as much as a willingness, to listen, perhaps even more than to speak.

There’s greater inclusion, more accommodation. Necessarily in these circumstances, and yet so easily depicted as indecisiveness, there’s less unilateralism. And certainly, less of a hell-for-leather, gung-ho, we’ll-doit-our-way charge at the future.

Yes, there’s less money sloshing around the system; there are fewer big buckets to draw from. This Government has turned away from top-down economic development through megaprojects towards those grassroots sectors where but a fistful of ringgit might mean as much as thousands in other palms.

It’s a necessary attention, somewhat sidelined in your time, and quite cost-effective in terms of improving the lives of those Malaysians who could most do with it (and being recognised for it at the ballot box).

The present administration is not to be criticised for this. Which is by no means to say it is not to be criticised at all — even in the most strident, sneering or contemptuous terms, if that helps get a valid point across.

Just, please Tun, not by you. Our nation’s history should not have to deal again with the bitter irony of a revered leader leaving office honourably — indeed, covered in glory — only to henceforth speak for the far fringes of the Opposition.

It’s time to let us go, Tun. For better or worse, we owe our character as a modern nation to you. This is what we are now. This is the way we’re going. God knows, we may stumble or fall, stray offtrack or derail entirely. We may reveal ourselves to be not as you had hoped but as you feared: effete, incompetent, mediocre; a polity of petty concerns, narrow minds and limited abilities.

But we’ll struggle along as best we can, for better or worse, as who and what we are. We have to. You taught us that.

It’s your choice, of course; you still have the keys to the kingdom granted you by a grateful populace for having carried them from the past to the future in a single generation. The respect accorded you will last forever; there would be no way to discredit what you did for Malaysia without virtually negating Malaysia itself.

But you of all men should know there are only three choices for the rare few: Lead, follow, or step aside.

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The story continues…

SOUVENIR EDITION 1845 - 2005 | SATURDAY | 16 APRIL 2005

“He who has seen everything, I will make known He who experienced all things He went on a distant journey He brought information He carved on a stone stele all of his toils Take out and read from the tablet How Gilgamesh underwent every hardship.”

Tablet I, the Epic of Gilgamesh; c.3,200BC JOURNALISM is a lot older than most people think. Recording the events of the time was the principal catalyst for the development of writing itself.

The excerpt cited comes from the opening lines of the oldest written story in existence. Yet, prefix the Epic of Gilgamesh with a dateline (“Uruk, Fri. - “) and literary style is all that distinguishes the contents of these 5,000-year-old Mesopotamian clay tablets from what you read in newspapers today.

The five Ws of reportage - Who, What, Where, When and Why - are all properly addressed by Gilgamesh’s anonymous biographer. As, indeed, they are in the Books of Moses & Co.; the Iliad and Odyssey; the Vedas, the Ramayana and Mahabharata; the Dhammapada of Buddha and the Analects of Confucius; the Quran and Hadith... but you catch my drift.

Reporting on the events of the time and the personalities shaping them has been central to the genesis of Myth & Man and the development of civilisation as we know it. Homer and Valmiki were early pseudonyms; Plato and Herodotus, early bylines. Regardless, they were all reporters.

Basically, the only change in this business in 5,000 years has been in the means and the media; the hardware.

(Even sitting here composing this screed on a computer, I am reminded of the ancient Egyptian scribe Khety, who 4,000 years ago raised a stele bearing the exhortation: “Apply yourself to writing! Observe how it frees you from labour!” One relates more to the sweating labourer taking dictation with a hammer and chisel.)

For millennia, hardly anything changed in the way news was exchanged among the peoples of the world. Hand-written official announcements were distributed or posted in public places. Beyond that, news was spread handto-hand and by word-of-mouth.

Then, around 1450, Johann Gutenberg invented the printing press and gave this business the name it would bear forevermore.

Although it took another 200 years or so for the first newspapers to appear, for another 100 years after that Gutenberg would have had no REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

trouble recognising and operating the machines used to print them: each sheet of paper laid on an inked bed of type and literally pressed into print.

At a maximum rate of 200 sheets an hour, and requiring some 50 kilos of brute force per page, the Press was broad-shouldered and brawny at birth.

Amazingly, printing technology then went into stasis again for another 300 years. In 1796 came a tremendous leap forward. A Scotsman named Adam Ramage improved the spindle-screw that pressed the paper to the typebed, reducing the muscle required and raising the production rate to a blistering 250 sheets an hour.

But the Ramage press was also smaller, lighter and more portable than Gutenberg’s, which allowed the machinery of journalism to be hauled across mountains and oceans on the pioneering journeys of those times.

Meanwhile, at the bleeding edge of the business, newspapers continued to draw their content the time-honoured way: from travellers, sea captains, and other newspapers. Very early on, newspaper publishers were getting journeymen overseas to send them letters on faraway goings-on; hence, the venerable journalistic institution of the “foreign correspondent”.

One peculiarity of the early history of newspapers was that they did not generally report local affairs, preferring to print news from abroad. The advance of empires in the 17th and 18th centuries made word from farflung places ever more available, but publishers from the outset also had to contend with fears of subversion among the ruling classes at home.

The founding fathers of the United States, Thomas Jefferson in particular, tried to overturn this convention, too. “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government,” Jefferson declared in 1787, “I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

Benjamin Franklin wouldn’t have minded either way: he had been a newspaper publisher for 60 years by then, and had done much to establish the Press in America as a political force. As early as 1798, however, Jefferson’s presidential predecessor John Adams was moved to sign into legislation the Sedition Act, criminalising “any false, scandalous and malicious writing... against the Government of the United States”.

Finding the right balance between representing the rulers and the ruled has remained ever since a constant test of the profession’s conscience.

Come the 19th century, technology was champing at the bit of journalism.

Faster and better printing processes were invented in time to cope with the sudden leaps in information exchange wrought by the telegraph in 1837, the telephone in 1876, and the radio in 1900. The Linotype machine was invented in 1886, ready for its print run all the way to the mid-1970s.

In such a time of ferment was the ancestor of this newspaper born. The eight-page folio-sized The Straits Times and Singapore Journal of Commerce was 91

launched on Tuesday, July 15, 1845, edited and hand-pressed in 200 copies by publisher and sole proprietor Robert Carr Woods in a godown near what is now Raffles Square in Singapore.

Then as now, The Straits Times sought to be “an instrument providing commercial information” useful to its readers and “to exert influence” in governance.

For 160 years, The Straits Times and its Malaysian legatee, the New Straits Times, retained the original “broadsheet” format; about 75cm by 60cm.

Newspapers this size began appearing after 1712 in England, when a tax was imposed on newspapers according to the number of their pages.

Broadsheets were twice the size of the “tabloid” sheets already common in the early 18th century. The term “tabloid” acquired disreputable overtones in the century or so since this handy format was used to disseminate lurid news to the salacious masses, but it originally alluded to the innovation of pharmaceutical companies of the time, which had begun compressing their powders into pills, or “tablets”.

In newspaper parlance, “tabloid” at first applied to news items themselves, shortened and condensed to fit smaller spaces, but soon came to refer to the whole paper. (While making for another neat lexical link with the clay tablets into which the Epic of Gilgamesh was pressed with sharpened reeds.)

Broadsheets - indeed, print journalism in general - reached a zenith in the first half of the 20th century, when their utility and time-frames meshed perfectly with the demands of their markets, the technology available for their production, and their historical role and context. In particular, war reporting and the new craft of photo-journalism combined to change the tone of professional journalism and bind it more intimately with the history it reported.

Over the preceding 200 years, information exchange had accelerated from the pace of sailing ships to the monthly periodical, then the weekly news journal, then the daily newspaper.

With the advent of radio-telephony and broadcast television in the 1920s and 30s, the turnover time of news was reduced to the hourly bulletin.

Today’s live satellite TV coverage has eliminated the time constraint completely: The news consumer can now see and hear what happens as it happens, when and where it happens.

When the Internet took off with the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s, the global information network became seamless, all-encompassing, and interactive in real-time.

Interestingly, every advance in information and communications technology in the past hundred years, from radio to the Internet, has renewed predictions of the demise of newspapers, and it still hasn’t happened. Perhaps this is because, as the axiom goes: “If it isn’t written down, it didn’t happen.”

REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

No doubt, fewer papers are sold today than 50 years ago, and even back then the number had shrunk to about onesixth what it had been 50 years earlier. But, from reed-and-clay to ink-on-paper, print journalism has remained what publisher Philip Graham called “the first draft of history”.

(Shortly before killing himself in 1963 and leaving his widow Katharine to take The Washington Post to its greatest heights.)

Perversely, the shrinking pool of newspaper readers conduced to the industry becoming the last redoubt of that icon of the Industrial Revolution, the monopolist magnate. From Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst at the dawn of the 20th century to Robert Maxwell and Rupert Murdoch at its wane, they justified the journalist A.J. Liebling’s wry post-war observation: “Freedom of the Press is for those who own one.”

The era of the media barons has also passed, but the dinosaurs made way for Godzilla: The multinational media conglomerate, commanding every means of delivery and incorporating the entire information supply chain from the frontlines of reporting to speed-of-light delivery to a now truly global media market.

The downsides of this are deep and divisive, and beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to note that amid the present barrage of digitised information, the good old daily newspaper has not yet vanished from the world’s doorsteps and driveways. Instead, it has altered its role to complement the now-constant flow of real-time data by providing context, analysis and perspective.

The daily newspaper has also adapted to the changing lifestyles of its readers. Mass transit and personal mobility, more than anything else, made the broadsheet less convenient. In rapid succession over the past decade, grand British broadsheets such as the London Times, The Independent and The Scotsman have produced downsized, “compact” editions.

Some have since done better than others, but the NST’s decision to follow suit last September has been fairly well received by Malaysian newspaper readers. Certainly, the “tabloid taint” these “serious” newspapers were wary of hasn’t been as much of a factor as feared.

A newspaper’s heart and soul, its mission and role, are independent of its physical dimensions, and the newsconsuming public knows this. Readers decide for themselves which journals they trust and will turn to for the news of the day and the information, education and entertainment they have come to expect from a newspaper.

With this edition, the NST ceases production in broadsheet, completing this newspaper’s transition to the compact version that you, the Reader, have indicated you prefer.

But history doesn’t skip a beat; the story continues, renewed every day; and this newspaper remains, as ever, yours faithfully, the New Straits Times.

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Waiting to take the highway to Terengganu mid week | Wednesday | 16 June 2004

Do not mess with Datuk Seri S. Samy Vellu. He has been Works Minister for a cumulative 20 years now, and has forgotten more than anyone else will ever know about ministering works in this country.

As Works Minister, Samy Vellu presides over the country’s 60,000 kilometres of roads, and he should have been consulted before anyone said anything about the next 169km to be opened. People shouldn’t simply go around announcing road openings without consulting the Works Minister.

Some ill-informed folk had put it about that the Karak-Kuantan stretch of the new East Coast Highway would be opened this month.

But no: The road’s ready but won’t be open till August. So my fond anticipation of another getaway to Terengganu - in my opinion the loveliest place in Peninsular Malaysia - must be prolonged more than a month.

This is all the more galling for the growing urgency of the need to visit the reefs of Redang, Perhentian and Lang Tengah again. It’s been nearly two years since I last did so, and those years have been spent mired down here in the viscid congestion of the Klang Valley.

For reasons anyone would appreciate, living here leaves a lot to be desired. (Indeed, it may require a lot to be desired.) I miss the small town in the hills where I used to live; I long for the sighing of waves on a seashore at sunset. But it’s a job, and I need the EPF. From the window of my office cubicle, through which I have the rare and inestimable urban-corporate privilege of a wide view of the sky, I have watched a vintage year unfold, weather-wise.

During the ferocious heatwave several weeks ago, I worried that this might be another El Nino year. During the last bad one, seven or eight years ago, when the Asian financial meltdown was spookily presaged by the highest sea temperatures ever recorded hereabouts, the coral bleached and died.

I’d never seen anything like it, although the phenomenon had occurred and been studied elsewhere in the tropics. The coral reefs in shallow waters looked as though someone had just set off a gigantic flash photograph.

Where the sun’s marauding rays settled, the living tissue had been broiled to bleached-white death. Shadow-lines were sharply etched REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

boundaries between the living and the dead.

(This implied that the greater damage was done by radiation and not heat, and it occurred to me that the reefs might be protected by floating mesh nets above them, to provide shade. We could wrap our islands, Christo-style, in floating parasols.)

But the planet spun on, the seasons changed, the weather corrected, and the reefs healed. This year, the inter-monsoon rains were also unusually heavy, maintaining the weird weather patterns that made the disaster flick The Day After Tomorrow so curiously compelling, but at least reducing the prospect of parboiled coral reefs.

Such musings bespeak a mindset that made the Barisan Nasional general election victory in Terengganu a most excellent development.

I had nothing personal against the Pas State Government. Indeed, I had even seen potential environmental benefits in the decimation of the State’s tourism industry, especially with respect to Terengganu’s turtle beaches and offshore islands.

Unfortunately, the Pas repulsion also affected me. As a Muslim, I was disturbed by the signboards going up at the boat jetties specifying the new penalties for assorted offences against my religion. As a Malaysian, I was dismayed by how a state administration could make a virtue of infrastructural disrepair, actively spurning development in a State that had suffered not so much poverty as uneven wealth distribution.

Neither did I like the undercurrents of resentment among the young people there who were hoping for more economic opportunities, not fewer. It bothered some of the younger local dive-guides that they had qualified for the tourist business just in time to watch the tourists go elsewhere.

Life is a clashing gauntlet of double-edged swords, and there’s no telling if the ouster of Pas and the re-establishment of the BN in Terengganu won’t lead to other discomforts, such as wanton naked foreigners on the beaches of Perhentian and moonlight raves in Marang. But for now, at least, we might enjoy a quicker, safer and more comfortable drive to a less dour and derelict, more hopeful place.

Well, not quite now, but in August. Waiting another month won’t be too bad, after waiting two years to go diving and five years for the BN to get Terengganu back. Besides, August is turtle egg-laying season, and we’ll get to see if there are any left.

It would even be worth the tolls, which Samy Vellu says will be “reasonable”. Going by present tolls elsewhere, that would mean about RM60 for the entire length of the projected 438km East Coast Highway. This is about what it would cost to take the ERL to KLIA for an AirAsia hop to KT. I believe I can fly.

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Reagan’s enduring legacy of ignorance mid week | Wednesday | 9 June 2004

Ronald Reagan was a charming fellow. He had an ingratiating manner, ruddy cheeks, a pompadour, and a husky, earnest voice he never needed to raise because his audiences hung onto every word for the sheer mellifluous melody of their delivery.

Reagan had that great Presidential Look; so widely since emulated and never matched, not even by Hollywood, much less the White House: the sharply cut dark suits; the ramrod spine and barrel-chested stride. He had the physical stature to make of the presidential podium a platform over which to tower, not a shield behind which to cower.

It was clear why they called Reagan “The Great Communicator”. He was so appealing, it didn’t matter what he said. He could paint the world as black-and-white, inside-out and upside-down as he pleased, as long as he kept radiating an optimism born of the good and simple convictions of a good and simple man.

It was astonishing how powerful such superficialities were in the dominance Reagan wielded over his country and the world in the 1980s.

On a global scale, of course, Reagan was not alone. Margaret Thatcher and Dr Mahathir Mohamad also came online at about the same time; you could tell the capitalist Free World was in a mood to spin on its heels toward some serious neo-conservative wealth creation after its acrimonious and inconclusive 30-year quarrel with the Left.

In this they had a fatefully kindred spirit in the newly risen, dapperly groomed and historically doomed General Secretary of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev.

Reagan’s down-home simplicity allowed him to see that the best way to defeat Communism was three-fold: 1. Have enough weapons to vaporise the Soviet Union; 2. Have a “Strategic Defence Initiative” to prevent the Soviet Union vaporising the United States in return; and, 3. Conspicuously spend an awesome amount of money in the process.

The last part was easy. Ideology be damned: The proof of the pudding was in the eating, and boy could America eat. Reagan gave his richest citizens such tax breaks as to have them spend his first term living large and lavish, ushering in the era of “Reaganomics”.

It was graced by what was known as “The Trickle-Down Effect”: Make your fat cats happy, and they’ll be generous and benevolent with the rodents beneath their tables.

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Reagan trimmed government and cut taxes. Japan entered the richest phase of its history as American consumers did what they do better than anyone else: Consume. The stock markets reigned supreme. And the US plunged headlong into the red to the tune of US$200 billion a year to pay for Parts 1 & 2 of the Reagan Art of War. Reagan took America on a rich, smug, self-confident strut, sending Moscow the message that whatever the Soviet Union had ever wanted or could ever want, from bread to blue jeans to global dominance, America already had, and in such abundance as Communism could never hope to deliver.

The Soviet Union, on the other hand, was an “Evil Empire”, and the Reagan Doctrine’s support of anti-Communist movements around the world was underscored by the browbeating of Leftist or otherwise unacceptable regimes in Latin America, Asia and Africa.

Grenada was invaded; El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras and Bolivia destabilised; Libya and Lebanon shelled, Iran harassed, Iraq supported, and right-wing rebels everywhere funded and armed by the spoils of other wars.

It wasn’t Ronald Reagan who ended the Cold War. No one knows exactly what he said to Gorbachev as they strolled through Red Square in Moscow in the late spring of 1988, but it must have been as persuasive as everything else about him, because the General Secretary of the Soviet Union ended up throwing in the Communist towel, ending the Cold War. Perhaps the world was right to celebrate the ensuing collapse of the Berlin Wall as per Ronald Reagan’s famous instructions at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin on June 12, 1987: “General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalisation: Come here to this gate! Mister Gorbachev, open this gate!

Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

This has since brought a world of change to Europe, the Russian mafia and the English Premier League.

Reaganism’s lasting damage, however, was done by the terribly mistaken notion that it was an applicable “doctrine” and not an individual man. Reagan’s foreign policy, which instituted the pre-emptive and unilateral exercise of overwhelming might to advance American interests around the world, succeeded on his personal charm. As critics 20 years ago were charging, there was no inherent value in his policies’ specious ideological underpinnings, and considerable danger.

Ignored at the time, those critics have been proved right. The world now knows the consequences of Reaganism when essayed by such lesser mortals as those now occupying the White House. From Ronald W. Reagan’s success with the “Evil Empire” to George W. Bush’s failure with the “Axis of Evil” is a great and shameful decline.

In the giant’s wake, only midgets remained.

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Human nature, red in tooth and claw mid week | Wednesday | 26 MAY 2004

Animals seem to have been getting a bad Press lately. They have been likened to a repugnant variety of deeply flawed and badly behaved human beings, from American soldiers in Iraq to housewives in Kuala Lumpur.

This would seem unfair, as animals are not generally thought to kill or maim other animals out of hate, in revenge, or for the fun of it. Animals don’t torture, or take pleasure in inflicting pain. Savage they are, but they aren’t supposed to be actively cruel.

Unfortunately, in the fearsomely amoral natural world, some data suggest otherwise. True, most animals tend not to kill unless they have to. But if they have to, some of them aren’t averse to having fun with it.

Cats and killer whales in particular seem to like playing with their food, which can mean awful, lingering deaths for mice and seals, respectively.

Most of the time, of course, animals kill other animals to eat them, or to save themselves from being eaten. Sometimes, it is to defend their territory. (This can be a problem with oceanic sharks, which regard their territory as wherever they happen to be at the time, which is perfectly reasonable to the shark but fatal for many other life-forms.)

Animals don’t kill for hate. But they do kill their young. They don’t kill for fun, but there is the bird called the shrike, a.k.a. “butcherbird”, which catches and impales small mammals and reptiles on thorn bushes, apparently just because it can.

Animals don’t kill for revenge, but they do commit murder. Among the higher primates, such as the chimpanzees famously studied by Jane Goodall in Tanzania for 35 years, the killing of relatives is common enough.

Animals all the way up to 98 per cent of our own DNA know warfare, murder, infanticide and cannibalism. All the way down to anchovies and insects, upholding the primal impulse to avoid extinction means assembling hierarchies of power. The meaning of life is to keep REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

lesser mortals out of the gene pool and organise the rest according to who dares, wins.

Human civilisation may well have arisen from attempts to ennoble the social structures of Gelada baboons. What are “hierarchies of power” if not politics?

And so we contain our savagery by institutionalising it. We drape upon it the precious tissue of our civilisation and culture, allowing it expression strictly through the laws, conventions and procedures by which countries are invaded, foreign lands laid waste and innocents annihilated. (Or, indeed, protected from same.)

And so we howl when the very substance of our civilisations - our people - treat each other like, well, animals. An individual human being’s brutal insanity signifies for human society a civilisational collapse. None of us is safe. It’s a jungle out there, filled with monsters and beasts, and we’re all savages at heart.

And so we shore up and shelter in the institutions we established to protect us from our own worst selves: the Law, and its shepherd, the Legislature. We have systems and processes to deal with the uncivilised beastliness among us. The American soldier who tortured Iraqi prisoners gets a year in jail; the KL housewife who tortured her Indonesian maid faces 67.

Regardless of what such variations mean in the measure of different human civilisations, these institutions and procedures are all that stand between us and the wilderness, because animals don’t have them. In fact, they are just about the only things we have that they don’t.

We may need to remind ourselves of this critical distinction, because we persist in describing the worst-behaved humans as “animals”, when animals at their worst behave like humans.

Jane Goodall felt that “the main difference between cruelty among animals and among humans is that we have the mental ability to know better”. She may have been right about them and wrong about us.

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READY FOR PROOFER The brains we gain fall mainly down the drain mid week | Wednesday | 19 May 2004

Now just wait one cherry-pickin’ minute. What’s all this beseeching brilliant Malaysians overseas to come home and run governmentlinked companies, eh? What about the brilliant Malaysians already here, beseeching decent work?

Some of my contemporaries are grumbling quietly in my ear these days, muttering animated oaths against the Fates that have forgotten them.

They are today’s 40- and 50-somethings who didn’t cut and run to cushy little billets in California, Sydney, Vancouver, London or Las Vegas when the going was good, there to develop foreign accents in pursuit of world- classiness while taking the occasional smug long-distance potshot at the bumpkins back home.

Instead, they chose to stay right here through the tooth-and-nail, hell- for-leather, corporatising, privatising, liberalising and re-engineering 1980s and 90s, building and losing fortunes and enduring untold travails in the name of national aspirations. They spent their youth and genius being first used, then abused, and thereafter ignored.

The corporate executives who came online 20 years ago (at least, those who have survived) wish it to be noted that they have critical experience and knowledge of the way today’s national economy was assembled. They also know how things fell apart.

They know how the peculiar economic challenges of nation-building in the 80s and 90s led to a credo of swift completion at all costs.

Absolute efficiency in project delivery was the order of those days, and whoever delivered best, first and most could be assured of even more opportunities to do so.

Which turned out to be a treasure best left at the bottom of the sea, as it spawned huge conglomerates sprawled over unwieldy hosts of industries. In the 80s and 90s, Malaysia’s corporate managers had to perform like circus jugglers, keeping a dozen things in the air at once.

In retrospect, that they were able to manage anything at all is a wonder in itself. That they had no way of weathering unexpected squalls, such as the regional financial crisis of 1997-8, became manifestly obvious.

“Everyone took care of their own turf and assumed someone else was watching the big picture,” recalls one. “So when everything REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

collapsed across the board, no one knew enough about anything.”

It didn’t matter if a tree was healthy when the forest was on fire.

But while the eyes of the nation stayed glued on the fates of a woebegone handful of ex-billionaire CEOs, the legions of the country’s best brains who had assembled their corporations and businesses were left to scratch like rats through the wreckage for what meagre pickings they could glean.

It wasn’t their fault. They’d been trained as accountants, engineers, lawyers, academics, economists and managers. They were businessmen, technocrats and executives.

They were the first generation of the New Economic Policy, schooled from childhood to be the new professionals the country needed so many more of, not the politicians of whom there seemed quite enough already.

They had no choice. It was their destiny, decreed by national policy.

They got with the programme or were left behind; it was as simple as that. Enough of them took the stated mission objectives seriously.

But in the end, the better they performed, the more they had to deliver. If someone said something couldn’t be done, someone else would say it could be — and, what was worse, attempt to do it, hang the cost.

In the end, people were trying to do frankly impossible things — like serve the nation and simultaneously have a life - and the many-roomed mansion of cigar smoke and gilt-edged mirrors came tumbling down.

Let it not be forgotten, therefore, that the brilliant Malaysians behind the tripling of the country’s gross national product from less than RM4,000 per capita in 1980 to more than RM11,000 in 1996 remain at the nation’s service, still have 20 to 30 productive years ahead of them, and might yet have a thing or two to tell the new crop of brilliant Malaysians vaulting so adroitly into the corner suites of Malaysia, Incorporated.

Having paid so singularly high a price for their 20-year apprenticeship, it would be a shame if the country now dispenses with the hard-won maturity of the Mahathir Generation in favour of a whole new batch of apprentices.

Immolation in the furnace of national ambition is a terrible thing to do to the flower of the nation’s youth. At least let’s salvage what tempered steel is to be found amid the ashes and slag.

Without sharing the load with those responsible for it — their immediate predecessors — today’s bright young geniuses are just as likely to crumple under the many burdens of inordinately great expectations.

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Staying alive in the year music died mid week | Wednesday | 12 MAY 2004

I had intended to go to Istana Budaya to watch the Saturday Night Fever stage show, but my family locked me in my bedroom until the spasms subsided.

Fortunately, I was already clad in a white polyester three piece suit over a black nylon shirt with five-inch collars and matching bikini briefs.

Suitably attired in mercifully solitary confinement, I was able to reflect on what had made 1977 such a year as to make pointing at the ceiling special.

I suppose being 22, as both John Travolta and I more-or-less were at the time, might have had something to do with it. I don’t know about him, but I recall very little of my life at 22. Records indicate I was at university in South Wales reading Marine Biology.

That was probably all I was doing with it, for there is no record of my ever attending lectures or, indeed, having anything else to do with why I was at university. At registration, I met coursemates who wouldn’t see me again until graduation.

Anti-socialism was cool in the 1970s. It was a time between times; conducive to melancholy individualism. The 60s were well and truly fried out, and the yuppie accountants of the impending 80s had only recently been delivered of their ex-hippie mothers’ wombs.

The music was so bad, anyone could sit alone in a room with REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

an acoustic guitar and make it — and far too many did. In the 70s, musicians suffered for their music, and enjoyed making others suffer too. It was a lousy time to be both young and alive.

Then along came two iconic American heroes to save the day, the year, and now it seems the century. They had much in common. Both were poor urban Italians dreaming of escaping dead-end lives. One was Rocky Balboa, whose eponymous movie transformed the career of alter-ego Sylvester Stallone by winning that year’s Best Picture Oscar.

The other was Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever. Whether you were a mother or a brother (and you could tell by the way you used your walk) Tony had a particularly agile way of staying alive. Style and self- confidence, no matter how over-wrought, could mitigate miserable circumstances. You could carry paint cans to a hip soundtrack.

Saturday Night Fever never reaches the epic moral heights of West Side Story — but neither does it rip off Shakespeare. The fever breaks on Sunday morning as it should for all good Catholics and especially bad ones; Tony’s in love, insofar as that’s possible; he’s got a four-dollar raise at the hardware store; see ya in seven, Tone.

The story redeemed nothing — SNF is as disdainful of women as Rocky was hard on men, for instance — but it seized the day, in that carpe diem thing reprised for the following generation by Robin Williams 103

and his coven of adolescents in 1989’s Dead Poets’ Society.

Saturday Night Fever briefly heated a cold hiatus in history, and was a tonic for those feckless times.

It was better than Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which always seemed to me a presumptuous attempt by Steven Spielberg singlehandedly to redeem the human race. It was better than Annie Hall, which was so teeth-gnashingly clever that you just knew Woody Allen would come to a sticky end.

Rocky Balboa was a comic-book fairytale superhero, y’unnerstan’?

Tony Manero brought the dream a strut closer to the streets where people lived. But you had to look and move like John Travolta to make it.

That was asking too much even of John Travolta, who quickly fell from grace and the screen in a brief sequence of dull thuds, not to resurface until 1994, when Quentin Tarantino cast him in Pulp Fiction and masterfully resurrected the Marquis de Sade from a dead Adonis.

If the shining star of Saturday Night Fever paid for his success with 17 years of his life, can you imagine what it did for the rest of us there at the time?

It made bloody fools of us, that’s what. The hair. The lapels. The heels. The napkin-sized ties. The strange, extreme width of it all. Those “best brown baggies and their platform soles”, as Mark Knopfler mumbled in “Sultans of Swing”, observing with a poet’s baleful gaze the life he had been denied by premature baldness. (“Would ya just watch the hair?! Ya know, I spend a long time on my REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

hair and he hit it. He hit my hair!” — Tony Manero.)

But Knopfler and Dire Sraits, Sting and the Police, Jonathan Richman, Elvis Costello, Joe Jackson and all the other new intellectuals of pop came after the holocaust. They were the survivors re-populating territory laid waste by the Love Machine of Disco, in its battle to the death with its mortal nemesis, Punk Rock.

Synchronised line-dancing to Franki Valli and the Four Seasons could only be countered by anarchy unleashed. For a truly hideous three years in contemporary music, the Charybdis of Disco smashed upon the Scylla of Punk, eventually leaving Barries White and Manilow to pick up the pieces shattered by the falsetto of the greatest Barry of all, Barry Gibb.

Even today, there are neighbourhoods around the world where the public performance of the Bee Gees’ soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever is considered criminal incitement.

So yes, I was worried when flared trousers came back. The return of platform shoes was frankly alarming, but the recent craze was thankfully short-lived, as it quickly proved how little human anatomy had evolved since the last global wave of fashionably torn ligaments, 30 years ago.

As Charlie’s Angels, Austin Powers and the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” should have proved, anyone that nostalgic for the 70s doesn’t deserve to have stayed alive this long. But now Ben Stiller & Owen Wilson are playing Paul Michael Glaser & David Soul playing Starsky & Hutch, and Tony Manero’s pointing at the ceiling of Istana Budaya in KL. Oh, those j-j-j-jive talkin’ Bee Gees. What a thing to have done to the year Elvis Presley died.

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The best-laid plans of mice and ministers mid week | Wednesday | 5 May 2004

What was meant to happen was: Malaysia’s North-South Expressway would be met at the border by its Thai equivalent, running seamlessly north through Yala and Songkhla provinces to Phuket and Bangkok.

It would be paralleled on the ground, underground and overhead by the railway, oil and gas pipelines, telecommunication cables and electricity lines.

At the principal border crossings, Malaysia and Thailand would each develop its side into market centres and industrial hubs, to facilitate tourism and integrate commerce. Neither side would rule out the possibility of these areas expanding into free-trade zones in the future.

Meanwhile, a “cross-sectoral” approach would be taken towards human resource development in the southern Thai provinces and the northern States of the Malaysian peninsula. While each country would remain in charge of its own education systems, specific training would enable the people of the trans-border region both to serve and benefit from the new industries to be established there.

These initiatives, to be spearheaded by the private sector, would be a seed crystal for the Asean Free Trade Area.

In the process, they would bring development and prosperity to the 30 million people dwelling within the “Indonesia-Malaysia-Thailand Growth Triangle” (IMT-GT), encompassing Indonesia’s Aceh, Medan and Dumai; Malaysia’s Penang, Kedah, Perlis and Langkawi; and Thailand’s Yala and Songkhla.

But this was all conceived more than a decade ago, when the momentum of Malaysian economic growth and infrastructural development was soaring to its zenith. The completion of the NSE and the high-tech industrialisation of Kedah and Perlis exemplified what could be done with territory once indistinguishable from the lush rustic dereliction just north of the border.

Then came the regional financial meltdown. By the time the IMT-GT’s Joint Business Council met for the 12th time, in Kangar a year ago, the participants were able to claim some modest progress in pushing for the group to include most of east Sumatra in Indonesia, plus Selangor and Kelantan in Malaysia, and consequently Narathiwat and Pattani in Thailand.

Otherwise, there had been some improvement in transport links. Six airlines now served the IMT-GT area, where there had been only one 10 years before.

Between Malaysia and Thailand, there had been some action on reducing congestion in the container yard at the Padang Besar crossing. Short-term REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

visas were being considered for easing trans-border employment. Border hours were being extended from 6pm to midnight.

In human-resource development, some Thais in the border provinces were receiving language training in Malaysia.

The council considered private sector proposals in road construction and education, but decided to ask for government funding for itself.

Obviously, the brave vision of the IMT-GT has been clouded by many things in the past 10 years. Paramount among them has been the disdain of southern Thais themselves. In a 1999 survey, the College of Islamic Studies at the Prince of Songkhla University found that the people of Narathiwat, Pattani and Yala did not want the IMT-GT. Sampling 300-500 respondents in each province, researchers learned that the people thought the IMT-GT’s plans would lead to pollution and corruption, and benefit a small middle-class but not the majority rural poor.

They thought the mobilisation of labour would result in more sociocultural problems than economic benefits, bringing crime, drug trafficking, prostitution, gambling and cross-cultural conflict.

They thought industrialisation would lead to the dominance of industrialists, who would be northern Thais or foreigners from Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia, and that their new industries would “make more Muslim women to work in the factory ignoring the religious practices and abandoning the Islamic duties”.

Some respondents in Yala thought Malaysia’s Islamic banking system would be good to emulate, but otherwise they seemed to want none of what the IMT-GT offered.

Perhaps that was where the developmental bedazzlements of the early 90s worked their worst delusions. Master planners from on high drew bold strokes and circles on maps, drawing up long-term schemes, commissioning artist’s impressions and envisioning best-case scenarios from bird’s-eye views.

But Malaysia may well have been unique, in having had the remarkable historical consonance of resolute political leadership and disciplined public acquiescence enabling the fast-track, turnkey, top-down development of the past generation.

Today, the region’s least-developed areas resist such a set-piece approach to development. If they want economic growth at all, they want it to grow from within; “from below, like jungle,” as the writer Clive James had it, “not from above, like defoliant”.

They want to be consulted and involved. They want to have their say, and to be heard by those who would determine their destinies.

Unfortunately, in southern Thailand now as in north Sumatra and southern Mindanao, they’ve let their chances be shot to shreds and blown to hell by militant lunatics.

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Lessons in midlife-crisis management mid week | Wednesday | 28 APRIL 2004

My father, who died at 39, did not live long enough to prepare me for a mid-life crisis. (Instead, I seem to have lived a whole-life crisis since 12.)

Having also, thankfully I think, inherited some of my mother’s longevity genes, I am now at 49 fated to contemplate the awful possibility that the male mid-life crisis may indeed be a reality, and not just the predictable going-to-pieces of my friends and contemporaries.

Most of them have admonishingly grown-up children, after all, and incipient grandfatherhood must help focus the 50-something mind on the sports car loved and desired since eight.

But even without progeny, I’ve tried the Porsche, and it doesn’t work. It’s a nasty, noisy little car that sounds like a Volkswagen and has less legroom than a Kancil, with nowhere near the street cred when parked outside a Bangsar nightclub with a screwdriver sticking out of its sexily flared nearside rear wheel-arch.

People develop attitudes to Porsches that do not help mid-life crises.

Scuba diving is also a good tool in personal-crisis management. It gets even better with advancing years, as creaky knees are relieved by weightlessness.

But then there’s the problem of the sort of people one has to dive with these days. So young, so fit, so virile. Surfacing from a 60-metre drop to the dark blue lip of the abyss where the hammerheads prowl, it’s deflating to be called “Uncle”.

It’s also expensive. But the trouble with a mid-life crisis is that it comes along when money isn’t the problem it was way back when a man’s dreams began to form. It is therefore feasible to end up bestriding a 15-thousand-ringgit 20-speed titanium racing bicycle surrounded by slack-jawed schoolboys awestruck by how long it must take to earn the money to buy one of these babies.

REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

Cycling is very good, though. It’s also light on the knees, and even Old Guys can do well enough on a bicycle to ride up to the Fraser’s Hill Gap, for instance, where there is undeniable cachet in taking off the helmet to reveal hair either grey or gone for good. Just don’t fall off on the way back down, because the older you get the easier you break and the longer it takes to get back up again.

There are undeniable benefits in attempting to charge through a midlife crisis on physical fitness alone. Just beware the razor’s edge between being all you can be, and butchered meat in a wire basket attended by paramedics.

In my own such mishap, suffered at the relatively tender age of 43, the ensuing surgery cost four times more than the mountain bike I’d sent flying off the mountain with me in flailing pursuit.

So there’s also a good argument for mellowing out in middle age. A mid- life crisis — that ghastly moment when you realise that you at 50 are you forever — is perhaps best cruised with the grace and elegance of a classic sailboat. Especially if it’s not going to include the sailboat.

This could be a time of self-knowledge and satisfaction rather than angst and misery. A time to begin enjoying the fruits of 30 years’ struggle, hardship, deprivation and suffering, not to bemoan the utter futility of it all.

Think of the millions who didn’t make it even this far, like James Dean, Tupac Shakur and my dad.

Comes a time when a man’s just gotta sit back, relax, get comfortable and... ah, the heck with it — floor the accelerator on the Ferrari.

If we haven’t lived fast, died young and made beautiful corpses by now, perhaps we haven’t lived fast enough. If there’s one thing better than a misspent youth, it has to be a misspent dotage.

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READY FOR PROOFER Nose-to-nose with the Oxford English Dictionary OPINION | Wednesday | 12 February 2003

Everyone has one, right under their noses. It’s that little dimple or vertical groove between your nose and upper lip. It’s called a “philtrum”. A pleasantsounding word, with pleasant connotations, as we shall see. What we shall not see is this word listed in the Oxford English Dictionary.

To a lifelong OED snob and disdainer of all imitations, which all other dictionaries by definition had to be, this was literally dumbfounding. The OED is the biggest dictionary in the world. It consists of 20 volumes totalling 21,730 pages, citing 2.5 million quotations in 291,500 entries defining more than 500,000 words, excluding “philtrum”.

Retailing locally for RM10,890 and weighing 62.7kg, the OED lists 430 definitions of “set” and not one for “philtrum”.

If a word is not in the OED, then a word it is not. Yet a philtrum is about as clear as the nose on your face. Unable to countenance such a loss of face, I sent them an email.

“Imagine my horror,” I gasped, “at not finding a known word in the OED! That word is `philtrum’, which is the groove on one’s upper lip beneath the septum of the nose. Why ain’t it there, O Great Word Gods of the Oxford English Dictionary? (Especially when `septum’ is?)”

Within 24 hours I received a reply from a Ms Margot Charlton. “First of all,” she said, with appropriate lexicographical precision, “we need to be clear which of our dictionaries we are talking about. To us, the OED has only one meaning; it is the Big One, the 20volume Oxford English Dictionary.”

She mentioned in passing the two-volume “Shorter” Oxford English Dictionary, which is shorter only in the length of the entries, not their number.

“I hardly suppose that you are using these monsters for everyday purposes,” she blithely ventured, “since they are historical dictionaries containing much information which is unlikely to be relevant for your newspaper.”

She shouldn’t have said that. (Strictly, she shouldn’t have said “which”, either, which, in the above sentence, should be “that”. Never mind.)

“This newspaper,” I gravely informed her, “was founded 12 years before the OED was even a gleam in the eye of the London Philological Society, and by grand and ancient tradition enshrines the entire monumental thing on two honoured shelves to its esteemed self in our inestimable Library.”

(In fact, the NST owns one of 20 or so full sets of the OED in Malaysia, which happens to be among the most avid dictionary markets in the world. About a million dictionaries a year are sold in this country; one for every 20 people, reassuringly.) “And,” I could not resist adding, “we have the Shorter too.”

Declaring herself pleasantly surprised, if not exactly warming to this volutuously voluble inquirer from the East Indies, Ms Charlton assured me that REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

the word I sought was indeed in the OED. “Its entry is at philtre, philter, she pointed out, “of which it regards philtrum as a variant.”

And so it does — that’s how we know the word is L. f. Gk. — but it doesn’t say what a philtrum is or what the word means, which is what dictionaries are supposed to do.

Ms Charlton deigned to explain: “Our smaller dictionaries of current English, in particular the New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998) and the Concise Oxford Dictionary (10th ed., 2001), are based on a thorough examination of large text databases, which enables the editors to include words shown to be in reasonably frequent use. It is evident that `philtrum’ did not pass this test.”

Once I’d worked out that she’d missed the point entirely (the word hadn’t even “passed the test” for the Big One), I was shocked. “Have mercy,” I begged her, “I beg you! Let the poor little useless groove on our upper lips live! How can you so cruelly turn up your nose at what’s right under it?

“How,” I pleaded, “can we forsake this lovely old Latinate derivative from Greek for what I am told is otherwise known as a `snot channel’?”

A gross indignity indeed. Philtrum and its OED-recognised “variants” philtre or philter hark back to the Greek philtron, for “love potion”.

Once upon a time, that little groove on your top lip was considered a natural receptacle for a dab of perfume or other such pheromonal mood- enhancer.

(It still functions admirably for this purpose, or for a smear of Vicks to clear a stuffed nose, as well as to drain the exudate of a runny one.)

We know this because — in the ultimate indignity to the dictionary that rightly regards itself as “the accepted authority on the evolution of the English language over the last millennium” — philtrum is listed in other dictionaries.

Among them, such handymen of the hoi polloi as Collins and MerriamWebster, which Ms Charlton regards as, ahem, “a different approach to dictionary-making”.

“Chambers’ dictionaries,” she observed as though describing chamberpots, “have always been popular with crossword fans because they include so much exotic vocabulary.”

I may share her sentiments on cross-word fans (if obviously not on exotic vocabulary) but Chambers doesn’t have “philtrum” either. And finding it in Merriam-Webster was no comfort. I have been virulently anti- MerriWeb, that Curse of the Americas, since finding that they even permit kudo — presumably for faint praise not amounting to full kudos (from the Greek for “glory, renown”).

No kudos to them for that; nay, not a single kudo shall we toss those shameless panderers to common abusage.

For me, the glory and renown of the OED has also dimmed, just a little. But hopefully not for long. For the past 10 years, more than 300 lexicographers, scholars and specialists have been at work on a RM200- million revision of the greatest dictionary on Earth. “When we reach `P’, later this year,” Ms Charlton assures me, “we will doubtless deal with this oddity.”

Doubtless, with a stiff upper lip.

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Telling the honest truth about sunscreen mid week | Wednesday | 22 January 2003

Recently honoured with an invitation to deliver a commencement address to a class of graduating high-school students, I completely blew it with a long and boring speech that had seemed to make sense while I was writing it down the night before.

That was a fatal mistake. Sir Lawrence Bragg once said: “When a man writes out his lecture he inevitably writes it as if it were to be read, not heard. The ideas follow each other too fast.” (So that’s what they were doing.) The irony is that in spite of this, such speeches seem to take forever for the speaker, too. All I should have told them was: “Wear sunscreen”.

Well, perhaps not in so many words. But I should still have stuck with the tried-and-true. In a world of lies, damned lies, and matters of opinion, it’s the least they deserved: • Some things make sense at night but not by day.

• What goes around comes around.

• The more things change, the more they stay the same.

• Faint heart never won fair lady, which is something to be said for faint heart.

• Cats do not have nine lives, but curiosity does kill them.

• You can’t take it with you when you go. You can barely hang on to it here.

• A man needs a mirror only to shave.

• Real Men don’t shave.

• Time speeds up because every year you live is a smaller proportion of your life. This is a blessing because everything improves with age, due to failing eyesight and fading memory.

• Memories don’t fade, they are edited. By the end of a man’s life, REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

they have often been whittled down to the single category of “Breasts I Have Adored”.

Nature is inimical to a dust-free environment.

Women and men are not from different planets, but are living on them. (The wisest sages in the history of mankind have nothing constructive to contribute on women. Give it up, gentlemen.)

Patience is a virtue only insofar as youth is folly.

Intelligence is not learned but activated.

Education activates intelligence but can’t create it.

“Standard of living” and “quality of life” are two entirely different things. Because the latter cannot be quantified, Heaven on Earth is inconceivable.

Everyone you meet can teach you part of what you need to know.

You need to know some incredibly unpleasant things.

Everyone is the centre of the universe, which renders the statement meaningless.

No negotiation takes longer than two hours.

No heartbreak lasts longer than three years. (After that, see above note on “memories”.)

Key to a happy marriage is one bed and two bathrooms.

Children are miniature adults and must be dealt with accordingly.

Everyone grows up to be their parents, but this is no excuse for not growing up.

Many fat ladies sing. Fat ladies are singing everywhere. I see them all the time.

Water quenches thirst.

Some need sunscreen more than others.

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READY FOR PROOFER The perils of polygamous promiscuity in Perlis mid week | Wednesday | 15 January 2003

The wonder was not that Perlis was considering a 10pm-to-dawn public curfew on teenagers, but that teenagers in Perlis had anything to do after 10pm. (To be fair, some suggestions were offered: silat practice, teh tarik, movies, birthday parties and... what was the other one?)

Admittedly, having spent my own teen years locked up in a Borstal where they didn’t call it “curfew” but “lights out”, I can have no idea what effect Perlis’s proposed restriction might have had on today’s free-range teenagers.

(No doubt, this newspaper’s YouthQuake section this Friday will tell us.)

I now have an idea, though, of the Perlis State Government’s opinion of the state of Perlis parents.

To forestall this discourse being lost in irrelevance, let me declare at the outset that I am among those who think that by 10pm teenagers should be reading in bed with a view to falling asleep.

However, this isn’t about whether they have a right to be wandering around town instead, nor even whether governments are obliged to have a say in the matter. It’s about whether the State has a right to do anything about it.

Constitutionally in this country, it does not.

Parents are entitled to impose curfews — or even to choose whether or not to. Presumably, parents make these decisions based on whether they think their teenage children are going out after dark for silat practice and a snack, or sin and subversion.

Regardless, such measures are best left to parents. These issues of human rights and basic liberties are preferably resolved at the domestic level, where universal Confucian precepts of paternal privilege and filial piety can be brought to bear, if necessary, against youth’s natural opposition to tyranny, oppression and injustice.

Outside the home, such issues are addressed first and foremost by the police and thereafter by the judicial process, insofar as it applies to juvenile delinquents.

If all four street corners in Arau are becoming infested by feral teens, the State Government should empower the police and their statutory agents, such as grown-ups, to advise young people out late at night to go home. Making criminals of them would only shove the law into ethical territory it is not meant to enter.

But the Perlis State Government should rest assured. Although people are fond of sneering at “all talk no action”, there are times when to talk the talk is to walk the walk. The authority of an administration is wielded as much in its REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

stated principles as in its power to legislate.

The elders of Perlis have strongly indicated their deep concern over teenagers wasting time out and about late at night.

Parents, when it’s 10pm, do you know where your children are?

Juvenile delinquency is as much of a problem in Perlis as anywhere else.

Although just 10 per cent of last year’s nearly 3,000 cases of teen crime nationwide were committed in Perlis, per capita population it’s still around the national average. In Perlis last year, however, that meant a grand total of 28 teenagers.

Against this scourge, the State Government might do better to mobilise its social-welfare, educational and community-relations resources than to pursue contentious new legislation.

Counselling and supervision can work together to identify the problem and, in so doing, address it. The recent introduction of teacher-counsellors in schools was expressly in aid of such teen welfare, as a back-up to parental control. Give them, and the kids, a chance.

Failing which, heck, go ahead, curfew the malingering dossers.

Sequester them indoors with their families every long and ghastly night.

Let them confront each other with just how tedious and unstimulating home life can be; how they have no one to talk to, nothing to do and nowhere to practise the electric guitar. Let them resolve their dysfunctions as a family.

(This may involve State paramedical and psychiatric services as well.)

If all else fails, we now have National Service. Of which, having been raised in prison, I am again honour-bound to express the highest approval — but with a caution nonetheless: Beware the curfewed teen regiments upon their eventual release into the adult population.

After a pent-up adolescence, their sudden explosion into adulthood can have far-reaching consequences. There can be as much long-term damage in the leisurely repentance of hasty marriages, as in daringly libertine notions on their first visit to a voting booth.

Perlis’s concern over rebellious teens is therefore all the more ironic for Kangar’s bid to become the polygamy capital of the country.

Perlis’s polygamy plan, beaten about the head by the disapproval of some of the nation’s loudest and most important women, is now also impaled on a logical inconsistency. It defies reason to encourage polygamy while also having to deal with the results of broken marriages, deserted mothers and derelict fathers.

Both initiatives may have arisen from the moral sensibilities of a State administration rising to its party-political challenges, but they were at crosspurposes. You can’t accommodate men’s marital desires while swatting at the kids they leave to slouch unmentored through adolescence.

In pursuing religiously defensible domestic policies, the Perlis State Government can choose to advocate either polygamy, or functional families.

One or the other but, logically, not both.

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Remembrances of teachers past and present mid week | Wednesday | 8 JANUARY 2003

For nearly 40 years, Mrs B (not her real initial) has stood frozen before the blackboard of Standard 4B while I stood on my chair, and now I take my revenge. You shouldn’t have done that, Mrs Bee. Not to a nine-year-old, and especially not for using the word “hieroglyphics” in a Composition. You called me a liar, ma’am. You said it was impossible for a nine-year-old to know such a word, let alone spell it.

Therefore I had obviously copied my essay on Ancient Egypt from a book, and you made me stand on my chair.

I’ve had four decades to mull it over. As I recall, the tumult of dislocations roiling through that nine-year-old psyche curled into a clenched fist of realisations, viz.: 1 I had not copied my essay, which, therefore, 2 Must’ve been pretty good.

3 Teacher is wrong.

4 Interesting view from up here, and, 5 Teacher is wrong!?

The stares from the corridor, the pointing fingers in the playground, the studiously bent and embarrassed heads of my classmates, including that of the beautiful Rubita Razak who might never speak to me again... and Mrs B, omnipotent authority absolute, calling us “goats” and not knowing nuts about nothing.

She was a stupid and cruel teacher, and all others remotely like her currently commanding the nation’s classrooms should take fully to heart that they will be held in the deepest contempt for the rest of their pupils’ lives.

After the horrible Mrs B, all teachers became to me as windmills to Don Quixote. They were not to be learned from, but overcome. They were not facilitators but obstacles.

This lasted all the way to Form Four, by which time the damage was done — I seemed doomed to be uneducable in any traditional sense, having received too much schooling from artificially elevated vantage points. Until along came Miss Mah Swee Aun. Miss Mah was our Maths teacher. Observing my bemusement at the arcane symbols of some especially incomprehensible concept, she shook her head in a pity so genuine it was almost tender. “You don’t even know what you don’t know,” she said. “Now that is a problem.”

Not often in life do such transformative lines float by. You know an epiphany when you hear one, though. And good teachers are good at that.

REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

They have a way of breaking the cement box containing your head, without breaking your head in the process. They can show you how to be smart — or what’s stopping you.

It’s more about being instructive than inspirational (for which example is all and the rest is mostly buffoonery). Great teachers don’t just tell; they show.

They have to have a talent for it, I think, which is why there aren’t that many great, or even good, teachers.

What made a teacher good, I see now, began with knowing their subject.

You didn’t get the feeling they’d had to learn what they were teaching, but that they simply knew it.

At the Malay College in the `60s and `70s, we had teachers — Mr Peter Chen, Mr Goh Cheng Leong, Mr D. J. Tate and Mr Tan Gim Hoe — who literally wrote the books on the subjects they taught. (Biology, Geography, History and Mathematics, respectively. Cikgu Tan is still there, in his 31st year with the school.)

But even that wasn’t the whole of it. They also kept learning more themselves, about all sorts of things, and passing it on. Knowledge, they showed, was not an end but a means; not a product but a process. And the mind was a muscle, and needed to be exercised.

Good teachers knew the score, and the drill. They could show us how things worked, what was what, and why things were. The best of them taught us nothing so much as how to learn. (“It doesn’t matter if you don’t know, as long as you know how to find out.”)

They treated education as exploration. (“Go from the known to the unknown.”)

They knew that teachers are meant to empower, not wield power; to open doors and windows, not be the view.

And they’re always outnumbered by the bigoted, childhating, knownothing bullies like Mrs B, who believe humiliation has a role in education, or tortured souls like the teacher of that girl who wrote to the NST’s Letters Page last week, who had threatened to pray to God for her pupil’s failure if the girl persisted in dressing indecorously.

How they become teachers (or what turns teachers into tyrants) is for educationists, sociologists and clinical psychologists to ponder. That they are a menace is manifest — not just for the damage they may do their charges, who might be saved from an unholy host of bad teachers by even a few good ones, but for the contempt into which they bring education itself.

The new school year began this week, and it is another Year Zero for a radically overhauled national education system.

Fielding the 526,219 new heads on the block is an army of some 11,000 teachers, excluding reservists, retirees and volunteers, armed with advanced technology and backed by the will of the Government, in a full- court press to get these young Malaysians fit for seriously effective lives.

Good luck to them all, but remember — when students fail, teachers fail them first.

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Should old acquaintance be forgot...

Happy New Year! mid week | Wednesday | 1 January 2003

Good morning and Happy New Year. Today, as you may have noticed, is the first of 2003. This column feels almost as much significance in that as in being a year old this week (i.e., not a lot).

For, if I may, this is also the 20th anniversary of my debut as a weekly columnist with this newspaper — notwithstanding the 13-year break I took in that time to do as Robert Burns counselled in Auld Lang Syne, and run about the braes, paddle in the burns, and cross the broad roaring seas.

Having returned, I feel like Wip Van Rinkle — or Rip Van Winkle in reverse. Washington Irving had his feckless Dutchman fall asleep for 20 years, wake up and find himself the same while everything else had changed. This Malaysian did the same and found himself middle-aged and grey, while nothing else had changed.

It is quite immiserating, not to say tiresome, to be faced with the same issues after 20 years. Racial polarisation, we were dealing with in 1983 (obviously with as much effectiveness then as now). Arresting the decline of the English language in education, same-same. Schisms in the MCA, oh boy. Corporate opacity — well, that was almost new and trendy back then, although we see through it more clearly now.

On the world stage, Israel and Palestine’s principal players were then, as now, Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat. Back then, Sharon owed his fame to his performance against Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in southern Lebanon; now he’s playing the West Bank. Arafat’s role, costume and script have not changed.

Then, 302 American and French soldiers were blown up by just one suicide bomber in Beirut. Since then, enthusiasm for the technique has risen in inverse proportion to its efficiency.

Twenty years ago, Benigno Aquino was shot dead on arrival at Manila’s international airport. Now, someone’s blown up Ferdinand Marcos’s mountainous concrete likeness in the Philippines’ Benguet province.

Twenty years ago, North Korean agents blew up the South Korean Cabinet on a diplomatic visit to Yangon, killing four ministers and barely missing then-President Chun Doo Hwan. Today, they’re trying again with their own nuclear facilities, and Chun Doo Hwan is still barely missed.

Then, the Soviet Union shot down a Korean jetliner over Sakhalin REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

Island. Now there is no Soviet Union, but civilian aircraft are still wilfully blown out of the sky, and the United States continues to find Evil Axes to grind.

Here, too, it’s not easy to ring out the Old and ring in the New, because the Old seems to enjoy sneaking back around the front to gag the baby and steal its diapers. Twenty years ago there was Dayabumi; now, the Petronas Towers. Then, it was Kenyir; now, Bakun. Then BMF; now Perwaja.

Back then, Federal Territory Minister Shahrir Samad announced plans for an “aerobus” system for Kuala Lumpur — and drew gasps by suggesting the project might be offered to the private sector. Today, Shahrir has a website and the KL Monorail is in final trials. (Not counting that of whoever sabotaged its earlier trials, if they’re ever found.)

Twenty years ago, the authorities seized 33,000 pornographic videotapes in a nationwide crackdown. Now, they seize about 10 million illicit VCDs a year, a testament to both the advance of ICT and how much effect all these seizures have on either supply or demand.

Violent crime was a west coast problem then and still is, while the east coast was just as flooded 20 years ago this week as it is this week.

Twenty years after Datuk Seri S. Samy Vellu was among the 54 people hurt when the stage he was standing on collapsed at the Thaipusam ceremonies in Batu Caves, he remains Works Minister and President of the MIC, but there have been no such mishaps at Thaipusam ever since.

So usher in the New by all means and with all due revelry, but don’t be too hard on the Old as you show it the exit - a respectful salute is more in order than an unceremonious boot — lest we meet again, some sunny day.

Newness is what we live for and our economy demands, no doubt, and we’ve acquired a lot of it over the 20 New Years past. New cars, houses, roads, railways, ports and airports; new homes, buildings, deputy prime ministers, Cabinet members, party presidents, and parties.

Bit players have come and gone, fortunes have risen and fallen, but to quote the Canadian poet Leonard Cohen, much of it has been “new skin for the old ceremony”. Much has not changed, perhaps cannot, maybe should not, nor ever will in any case. Perhaps 20 years makes the difference between seeking the Utopian dream of conflict resolution, and settling for the Machiavellian advantages of conflict management.

Which hypothesis shall doubtless be tested again this year, as it was back then and has been every blessed year since. Still, 2003 will offer a particular novelty. Twenty years ago, Datuk Seri Dr Mahathir Mohamad was in but his third year as Prime Minister. This year, his last.

Perhaps it’s for such transitions, and the changes they portend, that Robert Burns so sweetly reminded us to raise that cup o’ kindness for Auld Lang Syne.

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Santa Claus doesn’t live at the North Pole mid week | Wednesday | 25 December 2002

Attempts to locate Santa Claus at the North Pole have failed because he lived in Turkey. (This isn’t punny. No doubt, Santa Claus goes with turkey at Christmastime, but not as stuffing. We refer here to Turkey, the country, which gave its name to turkeys only because those tasty African birds were imported to Europe by Turk traders.)

Turkeys did not come from Turkey, but Santa Claus did. He was born Nicholas, son of Theophanes and Nonna, and in the fourth century he was Bishop of Myra in Lycia, which is now the town of Demre in the province of Antalya on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast.

Having had little reason to leave such a salubrious place, least of all for the Arctic, Nicholas died in Myra in 342, famed as a miracle-worker and revered for his genuine personal generosity. His bones were moved to Bari on Italy’s Adriatic coast in the 11th century, where he has since been dearly venerated.

From St Nicholas of Myra to the costumed clowns in cotton-wool beards infesting the world’s shopping malls at this time of year is quite a leap.

It took 1,500 years and eight flying reindeer for St Nicholas to morph from the tall and slender figure depicted in art, wearing chain-mail and bishop’s robes, into the fat and jolly, red-suited Nordic fellow known and loved all over the world today.

St Nicholas bequeathed to Santa Claus the colours of his robes and facial hair — though Bishop Nick’s neat grey goatee has since bushed out into a luxuriance worthy of a Santa Singh.

In Europe, the old St Nicholas endured. Finding in his life and works a focus for all things good, kind and giving, the Dutch, Swiss, Italians, Greeks, Austrians, Germans, Belgians and Russians in particular have kept him close to their hearts for 16 centuries.

Somewhat as beloved in Old Europe as Shree Ganesha is in Asia, St Nicholas is the patron of seamen, travellers, merchants, bakers, and children.

With his feast celebrated on Dec 6, it was inevitable that so benevolent a figure would be conflated with the Christkindlein, the Christ child, among Europeans.

This amalgam of venerable traditions, combining the saintly virtues of kindliness and generosity with the religious observance of Christmas, crossed the Atlantic in the 17th and 18th centuries, to be repackaged, marketed and distributed as only Americans know how.

St Nicholas became Santa Claus (from the Dutch Sinterklaas by way of Nieuw Amsterdam, a.k.a. New York City), while the Christkindlein became “Kriss Kringle”, Santa’s civilian name.

REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

Washington Irving gave Santa Claus a flying sleigh in 1814, but neglected to mention its propulsion system. This oversight was rectified in 1823, when Henry Livingston of Poughkeepsie, New York, published the poem that begins, “’Twas the night before Christmas...”, in which he revealed that Santa’s sleigh was powered by eight flying reindeer. (All of which bore names, none of which was Rudolph — that red-nosed parvenu turned up more than a century later in 1939, in the Christmas promotion of a Chicago department store.)

Santa was already a full-bearded and portly bearer of gifts by then, but he was an elf. He expanded to his present Falstaffian dimensions in 1841, when a Philadelphia shopkeeper hired a worker to dress up as Kriss Kringle and climb his chimney as a promotional stunt.

By the 20th century, Santa’s “look” was well established. The Coca-Cola Company globalised it in the 1930s, with a long-running series of Christmas ads that drove the image home all over the world.

Contrary to popular belief, Coke didn’t design Santa’s red-and-white livery to match its corporate colours, any more than Singapore’s national colours are protecting what’s left of the modesty of those comely “Santarinas” strolling around Raffles Place this week. But it certainly helped the soft-drink maker’s rise to world domination, and may even do something for Singapore.

Even without the stocking-fillers, furry costumes and false beards, the real story of Santa Claus remains a touching parable of Western civilisation’s efforts to honour the saving graces of compassion and generosity that, throughout Europe in the era otherwise known as the Dark Ages, came to be embodied in St Nicholas of Myra.

Why, then, does the revisionism persist which misdirects Santa’s letters to the North Pole? (In fact, a postbox in Finland.) Perhaps it’s a Western plot to monopolise global toy distribution by concealing knowledge of Santa’s true address. (While giving Nokia a head start on all those nice kids wanting handphones for Christmas.)

Perhaps those sniffy recalcitrants trying to keep Turkey out of the European Union also want people to remain unaware that they’re dissing the birthplace of the best-loved saint in Christendom.

This is yet more reason for Europe to free itself of the North Atlantic axis and align more closely with Asia, of which continent it is but the westernmost extremity. Turkey belongs with Europe as much as Europe belongs with Asia.

There’s no space left in today’s commingled world for the age-old and eternally fatuous debate on where Europe ends and Asia begins.

Turkey reminds us that Europe and Asia begin and end in the same place, stem from the same root, respect the same ancestors — and yes, Virginia, one of them is Santa Claus.

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Bless the beasts and children, for they speak not mid week | Wednesday | 18 December 2002

This newspaper’s current online opinion poll on the death-penalty proposal for child rape tells as chilling a tale of human nature as the crime itself. Gentle Reader, perpend (but finish your breakfast first): “Kill all rapists AS SOON AS POSSIBLE! Eliminate (them) without any hesitation. No need to castrate them for that would be too kind, just decapitate them”.

“These people are beasts and do not deserve any pity... they should be removed from the face of the earth.”

“Tie the rapist to the back of a motorcycle and drag him on the road and don’t stop until all the roads are covered or there’s nothing left to drag.”

“CANE THEM! LOCK THEM UP! Leave the cane marks on their behind for the rest of their life.”

“These rapists are BEASTS! If I am given the chance to mandate the law, it will be cutting off the private part before sentencing them to death!” “I believe there are two options, either castration or the death sentence. And it would be good to let the rapist choose which sentence he wants.”

“The earlier they rot in hell the better!!”

“The rapist should be tortured to death.”

Well, thank you kindly, friends and neighbours. There’s clearly a major need to eliminate the predations of the sick and twisted men who commit unspeakable crimes against children — not least because they provide an ostensibly legitimate focus for the vilest thoughts of all the other sick and twisted minds in our society.

The horror of it is that these people sincerely think of themselves as noble and righteous; that the Caring Society they uphold has cause not just to kill but to mutilate and torture people to death, dragging them around town behind motorcycles. Where do these good citizens get such vivid and awful ideas? Why, from the ways of the world, of course.

None of the foregoing barbarism is novel — there’s no imaginable wickedness that hasn’t been committed in the brief and bloody history of civilisation. However monstrous the means of wilfully ending another human life, it’s been done.

This is not an easy subject to broach — as I write, my mind is reeling from a rapid-fire replay of man’s inhumanity to man through the ages.

I shall do us both the favour of not reviewing here in any detail the pogroms and revolutions, the occupations and liberations, the interminable REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

tribal massacres and atrocities that collectively inform our sorry legacy as a species.

It would be a tour of damnation, taking in the paintings of Heironymus Bosch and ending up in Singapore at Haw Par Villa.

Surely it goes too far, for a random sampling of honest Malaysian opinion to evoke the Huns, the Mongols, the Inquisitions, the Gestapo, Kempeitai, Ku Klux Klan, Khmer Rouge, Hutus, Tutsis, Taliban and the Ten Courts of Hell.

Yet, it is such a definitive horror. All living things suffer, but only humans exult in it. This inhuman capacity of human beings to destroy each other in the most terrible ways has resurfaced so often in the course of history as to indicate a well of darkness within us that defies every civilising impulse.

The rapists of children are not “animals” or “beasts”, which do not do such things. They are insane. Something inside their brains has snapped; their higher consciousness has shattered. They are undoubtedly dangers to society, and must be treated as such.

This is the ethos of the current proposal to intensify vigilance against, and stiffen penalties for, child rape — an act so atrocious as to constitute literally a crime against humanity.

The death sentence is being considered as a deterrent. Opposition to it — including that of senior government figures, social activists and womens’ NGOs — stems from the apprehension that it would only deter the willingness of victims to come forth.

Even more perversely, say some child psychologists, the death sentence could actually intensify the predators’ ability to emotionally blackmail their victims into silence. They advocate social control, awareness and vigilance, more than capital punishment.

Yet, society needs to express its disgust over this affront to all decency, as well as to protect the innocent and ensure that the wicked and the mad are stopped — dead, if need be; if that is the most merciful way out for a tortured and irretrievable soul. Very well: the vexed populi are giving vox.

In considering their options, however, the powers-that-be are tasked with protecting us from the basest evils among us — certainly not with invoking them. To know the horrors that lurk in men’s (and, by all means, women’s) hearts is to hope fervently that our civil institutions fulfil their highest purpose of saving people from their own lust for flesh, blood and vengeance.

No matter how many ever packed the Colosseum, or thronged their village squares for the hangings and burnings, or knitted by the guillotine, or crowded into football stadiums for the floggings and executions, or cast the first, or last, stone.

The enemy here is madness, and madness can inflict ghastly pain. The torturer, however, is — indeed, can only be — a rational human being, and the executioner a person of conscience and principle.

Such as, presumably, any of the 76 per cent of respondents to our online survey who want the death penalty for child rape.

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Asean’s prospective 11th member needs our help mid week | Wednesday | 11 December 2002

There are things we should know about East Timor, and there are things they should know about us, because we both know things about Indonesia and Australia.

First, it is now “Timor Lorosae”, its homeland name, or “Timor Leste”, its name in the United Nations. Next, the President’s name is spelled Xanana Gusmao but pronounced Sha-NA-na GOOSE-mung.

We know this because he took his name from the retro American rock band Sha Na Na. (Who took their name from the backing vocals of the 1958 hit by the Silhouettes, Get A Job, which Jose Alexandre Xanana Gusmao finally did.)

If this doesn’t render the 56-year-old former freedom fighter and political prisoner, like, totally cool, he sustained himself through six years imprisonment in Jakarta with painting, poetry, and Mariah Carey’s 1993 hit song, Hero.

Freed from house arrest after the people of East Timor voted for independence from Indonesia in August 1999, Gusmao reluctantly stood as an independent candidate for president last April. (He told the BBC he would rather grow pumpkins.)

Overwhelmingly elected, Gusmao now presides over an 88-member Constituent Assembly comprising mostly members of Fretilin, the party REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

that expended a generation fighting for East Timor’s independence from first Portuguese and then Indonesian rule.

The head of Timor Leste’s Government is Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri, 52, a Muslim of Yemeni descent. The country’s five per cent Muslim minority is pleased that Alkatiri is PM, but he and Gusmao differ on some basic things.

Gusmao, seeking national unity, would grant an amnesty to those who sided with Indonesia in their independence struggle. Alkatiri is wary of enemies in the blanket. Gusmao wants his country to be happy, free and easy, and a little socialist. Alkatiri is more conservative.

In a best-case scenario, they would seem to make a good double-act, possibly finding for East Timor a negotiable middle path to development.

Last week’s rampage of youths in Dili, however, veered closer to the worst-case scenario, which has Gusmao growing pumpkins after all. The riots boost the contention that the occupation-addled, poverty-stricken and politically naive people of East Timor need security, to enable economic development to begin.

Alkatiri may be forgiven for taking recent events personally. Among the targets of the rioters’ wrath were a mosque, which was vandalised, a supermarket patronised by foreigners, which was looted — and 125

Alkatiri’s house, which was burned to the ground.

Attempts to suppress minorities and expel foreigners are classic early spasms of nationalism, of course, but what happened in East Timor last week was the notable alternative to Malaysian-style co-optation. Having been there and done that, Malaysia could show East Timor something about the politics of consociation.

Gusmao blamed last week’s riots on poverty. He and Alkatiri at least agree that, once independence is attained, the only freedom left worth fighting for is the freedom to prosper. Gusmao would like to alleviate poverty through micro-credit, as in Bangladesh and a few other lessdeveloped countries.

Alkatiri prefers to think oil and gas, which is something else on which Malaysia might advise. Just as it once was for us, East Timor has oil wealth offshore and someone else is getting it.

Last May, Australia and East Timor agreed that East Timor will receive 90 per cent of the revenues from the oil and gas Australia produces from East Timor’s 75,000-sq-km share of the Timor Sea between the archipelago and Australia. This should mean an income of some RM400 million a year for the next 20 years — about a 30 per cent increase in per capita GDP for East Timor’s 800,000 people.

The 105,000 people of Darwin, Australia, however, will receive RM26 billion in government spending on onshore facilities to receive Timorese oil and gas — along with the rest of the Timor Sea resources.

Australia can afford to be this generous because East Timor’s piece of the seabed was determined by a maritime boundary agreed between Indonesia and Australia 30 years ago, along the line of the continental shelf. Australia’s fulsome support of Timor Leste does not extend to reconsidering this boundary, which gives Australia 80 per cent of the seabed between Darwin and Dili.

The UN Convention on Rights of the Sea asks that countries separated by less than 400km of ocean accept a boundary midway between them (as Malaysia and Indonesia do with the Straits of REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

Malacca). Earlier this year, Australia declared it would not recognise the International Court of Justice on maritime border disputes (as Malaysia and Indonesia do with Sipadan and Ligitan).

East Timor now owns less than 30 per cent of the Timor Sea oil and gas fields, with the rest taken by Australia and a dozen oil multinationals.

If the midway convention were applied, East Timor would own upwards of 90 per cent of those resources — and earn about 10 times more in revenue under the terms of the present deal with Australia.

Some 30 years ago, Malaysia’s Petronas made Third World history as a national oil company by turning oil concessionaires into contractors, and itself into a full-service petro-conglomerate and not just a rent collector. Petronas has since helped a host of other developing countries gain control of their hydrocarbon resources. We should do the same for East Timor.

When Mari Alkatiri visited Malaysia last August, Datuk Seri Dr Mahathir Mohamad was enthusiastic about Malaysian involvement in East Timor, including having Petronas “plan and establish the structure of their own national oil company”.

That offer should be remembered and followed through. If there is a decent future for East Timor, it will most certainly be as a member of Asean. Gusmao and Alkatiri are also united in hoping for Asean membership and assistance.

We should redouble that assistance — which surely we owe East Timor after so long having had to sit on our hands in obeisance to Asean’s ironclad principle of non-interference while it was part of Suharto’s Indonesia.

The Republic of Timor Leste is no longer Indonesia’s 27th province, but the 191st member of the United Nations and the 184th member of the IMF and World Bank. It must also be the 11th member of Asean.

Or we could leave it to the tender mercies of Australian resource management, which has worked such wonders for Papua New Guinea and Bougainville.

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The mysterious invisible wall of forgotten things mid week | Wednesday | 4 December 2002

Goldfish have memory spans of about 10 seconds. This means if a goldfish takes longer than 10 seconds to swim from one end of an aquarium to the other, it thinks it’s in the ocean. An endlessly exciting ocean, moreover, as every 10 seconds it bumps into a mysterious invisible wall it can never remember bumping into before.

The late Douglas Adams, author of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, observed how sheep are startled by the sunrise. After a few panicked moments milling around trying to hide under each other, sheep forget they were frightened and settle back into sheepish placidity. By the next sunrise, they’ve completely forgotten there’d ever been one before and are startled all over again.

The advantage of short memories is that things remain forever fresh, new and thrilling. Life and the world are apprehended in an eternal child-like innocence. Learning through experience breeds familiarity, which breeds contempt, which breeds ideology. For that reason alone, it would seem better to leave the important stuff to instinct and the rest to apathy.

It is more economical for brain cells to be devoted entirely to the business of eating and breeding. Leaving some over for memory is not only wasteful but potentially disastrous.

Accordingly, the living planet requires vanishingly short memories of the great majority of its inhabitants. A tiny aquatic creature called a “gastrotrich”, for instance, hatches, matures, reproduces and dies in three days. If it had a memory, it would have asked itself 500 million years ago what the point of that was, and not bothered.

If the Universal Evolutionary Impulse requires you to plunge off cliffs to your death for 50 million years just so that some distant descendant will be a bird, it’s a mercy being unable to remember so much as where you were an hour ago.

Life as we know it is only practicable because so very few creatures are endowed with memory. Were it otherwise, sheep would be wild-ranging feral herbivores and goldfish would leap out of their tanks attempting to kill their owners.

As it is, the living planet rolls along in a fog of more-or-less amiable blankness, with the Earth’s creatures by-and-large having lived in a Now five billion years long.

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Only human beings have the mental capacity to remember. (Oh all right, and possibly whales and elephants but they can’t count, so don’t.) Only we can apprehend the passage of time and events, perceive causative sequences, discern chains of equivalences, and use them to construct elaborate schema of existence within which to eat and breed.

To put it more pertinently, only we can choose whether or not to remember. That we so often choose not to is partly homage to our remote ancestors, salamanders. We, too, instinctively know that there are some things in life upon which it is best not to dwell too long nor ponder too deeply.

Human beings cannot remember physical pain, for example, for that would make life intolerable from birth itself. The trade-off for this mercy is that each time a bone is broken, a wound sustained or a child is born, the pain is as excruciatingly novel as it ever was.

As on the surface, so in the depths. We can also blank out emotional pain; burying it deep and silencing it. Modern psychology suggests this is profoundly inimical to mental health, but most of us seem prepared to live in denial of that, too.

Otherwise, what would we do but replay over and over again in our minds the slide of an apartment block downhill, the crushing of lives in a landslide, the loss of a loved one, aircraft falling from the sky?

George Santayana, the Spanish philosopher who famously wrote “those of us who forget the past are condemned to repeat it”, may have fallen a little short. Those who remember seem equally condemned — for them, the past never departs.

But it is well worth recalling Santayana’s oft-quoted line in its context, from his five-volume 1905 work, The Life of Reason: “Not to be aware of the past is to be forever a child, but those of us who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. Mankind is the sum of his ancestors.”

To be aware of that rich truth, alas, risks unleashing a hellishly Hellerian Catch-22: As we don’t remember, so we never learn. As we never learn, we never know. And what we never know, we can’t very well remember, can we?

Twenty-five years ago today, a MAS 737 with 100 people on board was hijacked on a flight from Penang to Kuala Lumpur and diverted towards Singapore. Someone shot the pilots over Tanjong Kupang in southwestern Johor; the aircraft plunged into a swamp and disintegrated. No one survived.

No one would ever know what really happened to MH653 that Sunday evening on Dec 4, 1977. It took three weeks to locate the flight recorders and nearly a year to have their contents made known, to inconclusive effect.

The airline erected a memorial at the site, bearing the names of those who perished. A quarter-century later, it too has been abandoned, overgrown, and forgotten, leaving nothing but another of those mysterious invisible walls we occasionally bump into.

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There’s a monster in a corner of every kitchen mid week | Wednesday | 27 November 2002

My garbage never used to intimidate me this much. Not that I was ever exactly fond of it. This was stuff by definition to be thrown away. Discards, refuse, rubbish; the unwanted leftovers, residue and debris of daily life.

Developing an emotional response to garbage seems alarmingly psychotic.

Like everyone else, I simply want it removed from my immediate vicinity. I am prepared to co-operate in this. Treating my rubbish with due respect to the ejecta of things consumed for my sustenance, survival and the occasional pursuit of happiness, I fastidiously seal it in plastic bags to be deposited in streetside receptacles designed expressly for this purpose, from which they regularly and gratifyingly vanish.

For me, just as cabbages come from supermarkets, garbage goes into dump trucks, presumably to be trucked and dumped somewhere far, far away.

All this has changed because, amazingly, it’s the same for all 23 million of us. Every week, we throw away 100,000 tonnes of rubbish. I don’t know what that means, because I can’t bring myself to envision a thousand municipal swimming pools filled with rubbish. Every week.

On the other hand, like the rest of us, I don’t have to imagine what a landfill is. You can smell them as far away as you can see them. And you can see them from great distances, signposted by wheeling flocks of carrion birds and rising columns of yellow smoke from spontaneous combustion.

And you’re never far from one. There are 180 big landfills in this country — each getting bigger by a swimming pool of rubbish every day — and 80 per cent of them are stuffed to overflowing and need to be closed within the next two years.

This has made me deeply uneasy with that deceptively innocent, if malodorous, pail in the cupboard under my kitchen sink. For years the uncomplaining repository of my discards, it now seems to emanate a wicked smugness.

Who would have thought our rubbish bins were the advance guard of global dominion? The meek may inherit the Earth, but this is ridiculous.

My dustbin’s destiny needs to be denied. I could recycle most of the aluminium, paper and cardboard. It shouldn’t be too difficult to locate some of the Housing Ministry’s 3,950 recycling bins at 700 collection centres REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

nationwide. Although this will increase the time and effort needed to get my garbage beyond the point of no concern, it would be a righteous act.

In extremis, I suppose I could also compost the fruit peels, coffee grounds, teabags, eggshells and cigarette butts. (Or at least take comfort in their inevitable rot; the great consolation of all living things.) But then, the real threat isn’t in the most evil-smelling bits. Decomposing, bacterialaden organic matter is not too much worse than the lower bowels we lug around with us everywhere we go anyway, even to the most significant romantic dinners.

Those wriggly little worm-like things aren’t the problem either. They are merely the juveniles of a legitimate life-form with arguably as much of a right to exist as we have.

The true menace isn’t even alive and therefore can’t decay — and that’s the problem. This isn’t about organic creatures, but organic chemistry.

We’re talking chlorinated hydrocarbons, a.k.a. PVC, as in the very bags in which we put our rubbish.

These molecules are safe enough when chained together in a gang, whereupon they serve us well as general-purpose labour, but woe betide us whenever they get sufficiently hot under the collar to break free.

That’s when they run amok as dioxins, escaping in the acrid smoke of burning plastic to defoliate trees and cause cancer in lab rats, pimples on people and extreme anxiety for veterans of the Vietnam War. But who knows? Perhaps today’s ubiquity of dead trees, cancer, zits and misery can be blamed on the dioxins already in the air, water and food chain from 60 years’ use of pesticides and chemical fertilisers, as well as all those festering, fulminating landfills.

Fearing for the future may be a tad precious if we’re already up to our bronchioles in it.

So if it comes down to a choice of living in, on and under garbage (as indeed, so many of the world’s people do), or nuking it in a RM1.3-billion fluidised bed furnace gasification ash-melting incinerator utilising the latest technology developed by Japanese engineers who are the world’s most experienced in toxic waste, well, burn baby burn.

I’d trust them on the plastic, cadmium, lead, mercury, arsenic, phenyls, phenols and furans.

But then, I don’t live in Broga, Semenyih, Selangor, whose residents are glumly girding their collective loins for their turn in this not-in-my-backyard game of musical chairs with the mega-incinerator project.

Notwithstanding the relief of the people of Puchong, who campaigned so successfully to have the trash-burner relocated, the tragedy is that there’s really only one backyard, we all share it, and there’s a monster under my kitchen sink that thinks it’s the kingdom come.

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Feeding the need to speed without bleeding mid week | Wednesday | 20 NOVEMber 2002

Malacca Chief Minister Datuk Seri Mohd Ali Rustam has been hard done by. His recent request for higher speed limits on Malaysian highways has seen him pilloried as “elitist”, among other less complimentary things.

This is most unjust. The Chief Minister may have somewhat clumsily mentioned the standard brands of iconic luxury automobile by name, but the context of his statement made it clear he was referring not to the cost of these vehicles but their capabilities.

He did not mean that cream should float to the top, but that water should find its own level. If a car is designed to function at its best at 160kph, it should be allowed to. Even if it’s a souped-up Kancil on nitro. As should be expected of any politician worth anyone else’s salt, Ali was talking not about wealth but power.

And he may be right about those speed limits. There’s probably no point noting yet again that the wizened old 50kph speed limit on town roads was established the better part of a century ago in respect of the Model T Ford, and was based on the speed of a horseman galloping ahead to warn the citizenry.

It has long been futile to note that automobiles have evolved considerably since then while horses haven’t, because traffic-management authorities everywhere are the spiritual descendants of those horsemen.

The notion that lower speed limits help save fuel is also worn out, as today’s top-end high-performance automobile engines consume less than the mid-range family sedans of 20 or 30 years ago. (And discharge about a tenth as much in emissions.)

Besides, everyone knows that greatest fuel efficiency is achieved at optimum cruising speeds. Enforcing speed limits below this optimum defeats the purpose of fuel economy by limiting drivers’ usage of their cars’ performance to jack-rabbit accelerations from standing starts and slalom overtaking manoeuvres.

It might still be useful to recall, though, that the present 110kph speed limit on our expressways is based neither on the mechanical efficiency of automobiles nor the conservation of fossil-fuel resources, but on average human reaction times measured against distance.

Studies have shown that the time it takes the average Joe to get his foot off the accelerator and onto the brake pedal with sufficient force to initiate emergency deceleration can be as much as two seconds. This is a distance of more than 30 metres at 110kph, which is ample space for an articulated REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

lorry.

This “Screaming Zone”, as it were, is greatly expanded by rain, night, fatigue, poor eyesight, dull reflexes, panic, or cellphone call.

Nevertheless, in good visibility and dry conditions, with a wide, clear, well-engineered road ahead of your 12-cylinder fuel-injected turbo-charged 300bhp leather-upholstered industrial plant, it seems almost a crime against economic development not to spin that baby up where it belongs and blast all that curb-crawling city crud out of the tubes and into the atmosphere where it belongs.

Especially if it means you can schedule even more appointments for even greater productivity in your working days, which was surely the whole point of having these highways in the first place.

Be this as it may, and notwithstanding what we know happens when a Kancil inadvertently meets an express bus at a combined velocity of 200kph, the real issue with speed limits is clearly psychological.

The national psyche wants to be given some rein. There’s a need to speed up a bit. Overly cautious restraint is counter-productive. It makes people irritable, impatient, and bored. They fall asleep at the wheel. They get grouchy with their spouses and kids, and seriously annoyed with the authorities, who they feel are getting too much buck for not enough bang.

To be in such a state while driving hot new cars on cool new highways diminishes the achievement. It denies the consummation anticipated in the smell of these vehicles’ interiors and the eager hum of their engines. One need not drive a Mercedes to empathise with how it must feel to long for the speedometer needle to explore, just once, the remaining two-thirds of the dial. To sit in a Porsche Carrera 911 on Jalan Ampang at 6pm on a weekday is to experience only wretched torment where smug selfsatisfaction was expected.

Perhaps the Cabinet should indeed reconsider speed limits. The experience of other countries has shown that raising or lowering them within a 20 per cent range has no statistically significant effect.

Nothing experienced by other countries necessarily applies to Malaysia, as we know, so perhaps there could be a trial period of one calendar year in which the limits are raised by 10kph across the board.

The incidence of traffic accidents could then be monitored for comparison with the present levels of about a quarter-million a year, with 6,000 or so fatalities.

Should there be no significant change, the inevitable recurrence of this issue can be preempted by raising limits again at regular intervals, until either productivity rises to the point where everyone can afford the best automobiles in the world, or the number of people killed reaches a level deemed optimal by their survivors.

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Mrs Mobutu has a business proposition for you mid week | Wednesday | 13 NOVEMber 2002

Dear Mrs Mobutu Sese Seko, Thank you for your e-mail. We are distressed to hear of the difficulties you’re facing as a consequence of your late husband Joseph Desire Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Waza Banga’s misfortunes in the former Zaire.

For “The All-Powerful and Iron-Willed Warrior Who Conquers All Leaving Fire in his Wake” to have succumbed to prostate cancer while exiled in Morocco was surely tragic enough. It is outrageous that his next-of-kin cannot access the billions of dollars of his hard-earned savings now frozen by the heartless Governments of Switzerland and the present Democratic Republic of Congo.

Rest assured, Madame, we should be glad to help you redress this injustice and salvage as much as we can of your rightful inheritance.

Indeed, we are already extending such assistance to the wife of the late General Ansumane Mane of Guinea-Bissau; the younger brother of Captain Foday Sankoh of Sierra Leone; the cousin of the late General Sani Abacha of Nigeria; the elder brother of the late Liberian President Samuel Doe; and Mrs Cedia D. Estrada, wife of Mr Joseph Ejercito Estrada and former First Lady of the Philippines.

Our client list comprises but a fraction of the applications we receive from the bereft relatives of deposed despots, corrupt politicians and crooked corporate executives. We render our services to only a select few, based upon meticulous cost-benefit analysis.

One cannot be too careful, as you know, for there are many unscrupulous trick-sters in this evil world.

We are therefore pleased to note that you have managed to prise US$18 million (RM68.4 million) in banknotes from the clutches of your late husband’s executors, and are willing to let us have a small percentage of that sum for our assistance in laundering the rest of it.

We understand you mean this quite literally, moreover, as the currency notes in question have been “security coded” with a special indelible black ink, rendering them unusable until the ink is removed.

Never fear, Mrs Mobutu; we have in our possession the secret formula of the black coating, which is Vaseline and iodine, as well as ample quantities of the special solvent to remove it, which is Sunlight washing-up liquid. Rest assured, your money will be safe, clean and lemony-fresh with REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

us.

But we must exercise caution, Madame. As you may be aware, successive Governments of Nigeria over the past 20 years have spread scandalous rumours of your illegitimacy. They have alerted lawenforcement authorities worldwide to what they call the “419 Advance Fee Fraud”, numbered after the section of their Criminal Code they have reserved especially for you.

They have unstintingly subverted your very own medium of the Internet to discredit you, at websites such as http://home.rica.net/alphae/419coal/.

Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo claims the 419 Fraud has done “incalculable damage” to his country, although he cannot speak for your own erstwhile Zaire, nor Ghana, Togo, Liberia, Sierra Leone and the Ivory Coast, whose beleaguered leading families are among those pleading most piteously for our assistance.

Those bent on jailing the lot of you for “Advance Fee Fraud” clearly do not appreciate the problems you face in trying to open bank accounts of your own, given today’s networked police databases, etc. Obviously, your helpers must advance you some funds to arrange transactions of this magnitude in such hostile environments.

Unfortunately, some negative publicity has been generated over the US$10 (RM38) billion or so you and other needy sub-Saharan relatives are believed to have so far received in these “advance fees” from kind-hearted people all over the world.

Nigeria, the US, Canada, Britain and Australia are collating the stories of these poor dupes and trying to trace their money to you through the international banking system, despite the obvious futility of tracing systems where there are none.

You and we know that their pathetic efforts will have no effect on the number of fools born every minute and manifestly destined to grow up and be parted from their money at every opportunity. None of them will ever have much of it, for obvious reasons, but in sum their sheer numbers will always guarantee magnificent economies of scale.

Naked greed is inherent to the tragedy of the human condition, is it not?

There but for our superior intelligence, Mrs Mobutu, go you and we.

Allow us, therefore, to recommend that you place your US$18 million in soiled greenbacks in a plain brown suitcase and FedEx it to us at an address we will provide upon your acceptance of this proposal.

As a token of our good faith, there will be no charge for the detergent.

(Disclaimer: This article in no way refers to Mrs Marie Antoinette `Mama’ Mobutu, Mrs Bobi Ladawa Mobutu, either of the twin-sister Mrs Mobutus who were with the late Mr Mobutu at his death in 1997, nor any of the legions of other Mrs Mobutus rumoured to exist. Unless, of course, this really is one of them.)

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A Sunday drive in the country with Peter Carey mid week | Wednesday | 6 NOVEMber 2002

Mark Twain said he would never read a book if he had to sit with its author for half-an-hour beforehand. Until last Sunday, I had had no reason to disagree.

Sir V.S. Naipaul, for one, had sat in dour silence at a grubby plywood table by a reeking ditch in Brickfields, refusing even to touch the sticky tumbler of teh tarik in front of him. All I remember him saying, grimly, was: “You must force yourself to write.”

What Kurt Vonnegut said of creative-writing courses — that their greatest value lay in ensuring that 90 per cent of aspiring writers would not survive to disgrace a bookshelf with their names — surely deserves inscription on the Curmudgeons’ Wall of Fame.

Jack Kerouac vomited in people’s houses; Salman Rushdie called Naipaul “sad”; Paul Theroux went an entire book further; and Norman Mailer’s cartoonish machismo once irritated the Australian novelist and Booker Prize winner Peter Carey.

As people, writers can be boorish, uncouth and glum. It seems almost intrinsic to the impulse, as much as a consequence of it.

So when I heard from the Australian High Commission that Peter Carey was visiting Malaysia and wanted me to join him on a road trip down the peninsula, I was in equal measure elated and dismayed.

This man is a seriously gifted, highly accomplished and justly REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

celebrated novelist. But so were those other sociopaths.

This was also hot on the heels of the castigation I’d received for my comment in this column on the Bali bombings three weeks ago, which had outraged Australians in particular with its “Puritan sentiments” and lack of sympathy for the victims.

I couldn’t help but be on guard, not so much to defend myself — which I really couldn’t — as to withstand attack.

I first read Peter Carey some 20 years ago — a collection of sharp, surreal short stories titled Exotic Pleasures. He didn’t win my loyalty — fiction never has, alas — but I was aware of his scintillating progress.

He’s trotted out a novel every three years since, among them the acclaimed Illy-whacker, Jack Maggs and Oscar and Lucinda, for which he won the Booker in 1988, which he collected again last year with the terrific True History of the Kelly Gang, thus joining South Africa’s J.M. Coetzee as the only writer to win the Booker twice.

Now Peter Carey was in Malaysia to complete research for his latest novel, part of which is set here in 1946. He had read my book and wanted to visit some of the places I’d written about: Taiping, Kuala Kangsar.

And so last Sunday morning we rendezvoused for breakfast in Penang, at the fabulously restored Cheong Fatt Tze Mansion on Leith 137

Street. The place looked like the set of Raise the Red Lantern.

Mr Carey (“Peter!”) Peter was tall and tousle-haired, with a prominent nose poised between a receding chin and lively eyes behind rimless glasses.

He was classically novelist-rumpled in canvas shoes, khaki trousers and a shirt that might once have been blue but had long ceased caring what colour it was.

Other than that, Peter Carey was nothing like I’d feared. We both had our notebooks and pens out, but neither of us used them much.

Conversing with this amiable 59-year-old college professor and father of two, who happened to be Australia’s most celebrated living novelist and one of the great writers of his time, taking notes seemed a little illmannered.

Peter was no stranger to Malaysia. After failing at university, where he’d studied chemistry to no discernible effect, he went into advertising (“full of damaged people, but they were all reading and writing”) and worked here briefly in 1971.

Liking Malaysia, he’s dropped by at irregular intervals ever since, most recently last year to begin researching his next book.

Like his good friend Salman Rushdie, Peter’s made his home in New York. He visits Australia often, and all his novels are rooted there, but we both agreed that it is easier to write of one’s homeland from somewhere else.

It was a bright, sunny day, so ferociously hot it promised a vengeance of rain. We paused in Taiping, where the old schools and shophouses looked especially grand in the shimmering light.

We joined the parade of Sunday vehicles ambulating through the Botanical Gardens, which seemed none the worse for it.

REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

By the time we reached Kuala Kangsar for a late lunch, the sun was even more flatteringly past its zenith, and moderated by the first assembly of clouds.

The Ubudiah Mosque looked fantastic as ever, and the old Istana Hulu had not in a hundred years been so dazzling, with the finishing touches being applied to its restoration as the Royal Museum of Perak.

This will not come a day too soon for the present museum — the lovely old Istana Kenangan nestled beside the majestic Iskandariah Palace itself — which in its eighth decade is frighteningly fragile for tourist traffic.

Here Peter took most of his notes, tracing the lineage of the Perak Sultanate; inquiring into the meanings of titles; examining the attendance list of the first Durbar of the Federated Malay States in 1897.

Gliding past the immaculate grounds and buildings of the Malay College, we drove across the Iskandar Bridge and on to Ipoh, where we paused again for refreshments at the old FMS Bar by the town padang.

We rejoined the North-South Expressway for the rest of the drive back to KL, which we reached in a solid grey curtain of vintage Malaysian monsoonal rain. But the Holden Statesman is an excellent automobile, and Australian High Commission Political Counsellor Simon Merrifield was, among other things, an expert driver. (Although a right rump with a digital camera.)

He was also, like Peter Carey, a decent bloke. The experience in sum reminded me of how personally fond I am of Australia and Australians, and how deeply involved we are with each other.

Not until we sighted the Twin Towers through the veil of rain did Simon even mention the Bali bombings - and even then only to tell me that Karim Raslan had written a good piece on the subject.

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So it’s not about the language after all mid week | Wednesday | 30 October 2002

Is it about respect? Is that the driving force behind these objections to using English to teach Science and Mathematics in Chinese schools?

The spirit behind these closed doors, secret meetings and hasty escapes from the crush of the Press — is it about maintaining superior standards?

There seemed an inescapable metaphor in last week’s Keystone-Cops caper of reporters chasing the leaders and associates of the Malaysian Chinese Association across town. Chinese education wants to be left alone. It doesn’t ask for interference, and wishes not to interfere with others.

It seeks leave to receive with due formality the Government’s education proposal, somewhat as a flyer to be prominently posted on notice-boards in all Chinese schools: “English bears certain advantages that all students are encouraged to consider”. Beyond that, the Barisan Nasional’s Chinese representatives want no part of this initiative.

There can be only two ways for the MCA and its partners to justify such separatism for Chinese education, neither of them particularly palatable. They are either: I. The Argument from Vulnerability: Chinese education has to be preserved in its present form because it is the community’s last defence against cultural eclipse; or: REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

II. The Argument from Venerability: Chinese education is the best there is, and any attempt at “modification” by those who have not done better can only diminish it.

A fine dilemma. What’s it going to be, Gentlemen? Would you remind us that traditional education is to the Chinese in this country as the earth and waters are to the Malays: their point of reference; wellspring of their being and identity? Would you contend that if the tether of its education system is cut, the great kite of Malaysian Chinese culture will be blown away like litter on the wind?

But that would be self-demeaning. The Malaysian Chinese community is not fragile but durable, proud and proven. It is robust, rooted, respected and, reportedly, relatively rich.

No Overseas-Chinese minority community in the world has ever helped found a national government, nor played so instrumental a role in maintaining their nation’s political stability and sustaining its prosperity, as Malaysians have.

The Argument from Vulnerability would also be, simply, wrong. The value of Chinese education to this nation is such that not only should it endure as long as Malaysia does, any notion otherwise runs headlong into the big toe of the Federal Constitution.

It would be unseemly for the MCA to adopt a cowed, sullen and 141

defensive posture on this issue. In upholding the priorities of Chinese educationists, as it apparently needs to do, it would be better for the MCA to stand tall and speak seriously of the qualities and values of Chinese education, and what they have wrought for this country in the past century.

This would have to be the even more fraught Argument from Venerability, however, and sneaking out the back doors of hotels hardly advances it beyond these stage-whispers in the wings, imparting to the argument a distastefully hissy tone: Chinese schools are better than the rest.

Especially in Science and Maths. Even before the National Language policy was implemented in education a generation ago, Chinese primary schools were out-performing English-medium schools in these two subjects. Since then, they have averaged pass rates of 80-90 per cent in Maths and Science at the UPSR. The assertion that thousands of Malaysian Chinese send their children to Singapore for an English-language education is held as mistaken. The attraction of Singaporean schools is the overall quality of education there, not necessarily the medium of instruction.

Rather than compromise with the laggardly national education system, say the proposal’s most adamant critics, Malaysia’s Chinese school system should be seen as setting a benchmark of quality in education.

They should be informing national education policy, not conforming to it.

REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

All they ask, however, is the acceptance that Chinese education is not broken and does not need fixing. The general dumbing-down of Malaysian schoolchildren was not the fault of the Chinese schools. (The closing of the Malaysian mind obviously being another matter.)

The trouble with this argument is that no one’s arguing. The above points are understood and accepted.

It is entirely possible to support the Government’s proposal while not just defending but depending on the history and achievements of Chinese education in Malaysia.

Indeed, it is in light of that tradition of excellence that the Chinese educationists’ objections are so baffling, and the position taken by the BN’s Chinese partners so disconcerting.

It seemed reasonable to assume that the transition to English would trouble least and benefit most the brightest students, who abound in Chinese schools.

This proposal was not meant to alter the ethos, structure and function of Chinese schools, but to inoculate their curricula with English and literally count on them to help cultivate this powerful, pancultural intellectual resource for Malaysia.

In this regard, the country’s best schools — irrespective of medium — were seen not as part of the problem, but of the solution. They were expected not to follow, but to lead.

Therefore, Sirs, if in this matter the argument of language is irrelevant, and that of education inadequate, may the case for the Proposition humbly venture the Argument from National Unity?

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To the winners, as always, go the spoils of war mid week | Wednesday | 23 October 2002

Winston Spencer Churchill was stark naked and soaking wet in the White House when Franklin Delano Roosevelt barged his wheelchair through the bathroom door and said: “United Nations!”

It was the morning of New Year’s Day, 1942. Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, China and a motley crew of 22 other countries were at war with Germany, Italy and Japan. Churchill and Roosevelt had considered formally declaring themselves an “Alliance”, but the term was legally complicated. They had also mulled “Associated Powers”, which left them both cold.

Immersed contemplatively in his bathtub, Churchill liked FDR’s “United Nations” coinage at once. It reminded him of lines from Byron: Their children’s lips shall echo them, and say Here, where the sword united nations drew, Our countrymen were warring on that day!

And this is much, and all which will not pass away.

(Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage; Canto III, v.35) Churchill and Roosevelt took it to their 24 brothers-in-war later that day, and the “Declaration by United Nations” was signed.

The title did not, however, supplant that of the “Inter-Allied Declaration” signed in London six months earlier, before America had entered the war. Throughout the ensuing conflagration, the “United REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

Nations” were known as the “Allies”, against the “Axis” of fascism in Europe and Japanese imperialism in Asia.

During the war, the four founding powers of the UN — the US, Britain, the Soviet Union and the Republic of China — pursued together the parallel objective of commanding the post-war era to come. By the autumn of 1944 — about the time of General George S. Patton’s finest hour in France and Douglas MacArthur’s famous pledge to return to the Philippines — the Four had agreed on what to do with the United Nations after the war.

At the Yalta Conference on the Black Sea later that winter, Churchill and an increasingly frail Roosevelt gave Outer Mongolia, Sakhalin Island, the Kuriles north of Japan, and Eastern Europe to Joseph Stalin. There and then began the “Cold War”. (The phrase was coined by no less than George Orwell, in a newspaper essay on the meeting’s outcome.)

The Yalta conference therefore agreed that their post-war redistribution of the world would need to involve “a general international organisation to maintain peace and security”, thus ensuring the realisation of the United Nations as we know it today. (“I didn’t say the result was good,” said FDR afterwards. “I said it was the best I could do.”)

Roosevelt lived just long enough to see the United Nations convene 145

its charter conference in San Francisco barely two months after Yalta, in April 1945. He died in May, and the UN’s founding charter was signed by 50 nations that June.

Atop the charter’s 111 articles was the creation of an all-powerful Security Council. (So powerful, indeed, that its first act was to ensure that the UN itself would not be formally ratified until it said so, which it finally did four months later on Oct 24, 1945 — after the nuclear bombing of Japan authorised by Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman.)

At the UN’s first general assembly the following January, the Security Council determined that it would decide the UN’s membership, nominate its secretaries-general, administer its peacekeeping troops and enforce action against “recalcitrant States or other parties”.

The council would comprise 15 members, with 10 to be elected by the general assembly on two-year terms, and permanent seats for the Founding Four plus France.

(Why France? They still won’t say. Partly because of French resistance during the war and assistance to the Allies in the North Africa campaign; partly because all other countries in Europe had been neutral, turned-over or wrecked in the war. But mostly, they enigmatically shrug, because of Charles De Gaulle.)

On China’s part, permanent membership of the Security Council is eternal testament to the Pyrrhic victory of the nationalists who overthrew the last emperor in 1911. As they set to waging civil war against the Communists and absorbing the brutal Japanese invasion of Manchuria, the Republic of China relentlessly pushed its international legitimacy through the League of Nations, the Allied war effort, and REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

thereafter.

Taiwan grimly held on to China’s seat on the UN Security Council for 22 years after the country fell to the Communists in 1949, but had to give up the ghost in 1971 and hand over to Beijing its precious key to the most important prize in the world: the UN’s “Rule of Great Power Unanimity”, better known as the Security Council Veto.

Only the Security Council has the power to issue edicts binding on all UN members. General Assembly resolutions go nowhere if the Security Council disagrees.

The council needs nine-of-15 majorities for lesser resolutions to be accepted, and unanimity for anything “substantive”, but any of the Permanent Five can halt any resolution by exercising its single veto.

To date, they have done so 250 times. The USSR/Russia accounts for nearly half that total, while the US’ 74 vetoes outnumber the 55 of Britain, France and China combined.

But the veto power is not a numbers game. There is much irony but no coincidence in the five permanent members of the UN Security Council having become the world’s first five nuclear powers.

The first resolution ever passed by the UN, in January 1946, called for “peaceful uses of atomic energy and the elimination of atomic and other weapons of mass destruction”. To which the only ones who said “no” were the only ones who could.

Thus has it remained ever since. Tomorrow — United Nations Day — we commemorate the 57th anniversary of this grandest of all the world’s international institutions, still faithfully preserving, protecting and defending the rights and privileges of the winners of World War II. 147

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Why did the bombers pick on the Sari Club? mid week | Wednesday | 16 October 2002

Yes, I knew the Sari Club. Filthy place. Reeking of beer and sweat; the air thick with smoke and jagged with Strine; packed out and heaving into the night at the scummy end of the Legian-Kuta strip, down past the Gado- Gado, Hard Rock and Peanut.

Everybody knew the Sari Club. It had been there about 15 years, sopping up the dregs of the Kuta night, where the carousing begins in the early evenings at the chi-chi Legian end of the strip, then cascades down the drag in seven waterfalls of deepening drunkenness to debouch onto Kuta Beach and sprawl snoring at the dawn, or sink into the strip’s last sump, the Sari Club.

It was well known. If you couldn’t score anywhere else, you could score at the Sari Club. To that rickety firetrap would lurch the last of the night’s purblind drunken foreigners.

Almost entirely white foreigners, at that, because the Sari Club did not welcome locals, and charged them Rp50,000 for entry while foreigners got in free.

The Sari Club and Paddy’s Irish Pub on Poppies Lane, where the other Kuta bomb went off, were the only clubs on the strip to do that.

Even foreigners with local girlfriends had to pay for them. It wasn’t race discrimination; black, brown or yellow foreigners were allowed in.

Unless they looked like Indonesians.

REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

It was so unnecessary an insult. The nightspots of Legian and Kuta are all jam-packed with a uniform crowd of foreigners and a spattering of their local associates. It did not sit well with those locals that the Sari Club — the slimiest, scuzziest, sleaziest dive of them all - practised such discrimination.

Among the reasons Bali was enjoyed even by people who enjoy being hideously drunk is that it was a somehow safe and protected place.

No matter what happened anywhere and everywhere else in Indonesia, Bali was fine. The island seems always to have dwelt within a force-field. Indonesia’s murderous crazes did not cross Bali’s waters, just as its choking hazes never reached her skies.

Bali’s principal involvement with recent political history was in roundly endorsing Megawati Sukarnoputri’s candidacy for president last year, thereby being no more trouble to her than to anyone else.

This was Bali, the last Hindu outpost in the Malay world. Having for centuries had to appease the outlander or die, Bali’s survival strategy was to open up like a lotus by clinging to its roots while letting the foreign lotus-eaters shape her beauty to their taste.

In exchange, the foreigner would protect Bali with love and currency.

Bali feels ancient, almost primal, but modern Balinese art was schooled by early 20th-century European romantics such as Walter 149

Spies and Rudolf Bonnet. The Kecak trance dance — a tourist favourite — was adapted and choreographed in 1931 by Spies and one Baron Victor von Plessen, to add excitement to a film they made entitled, Island of the Demons. (That later became the more widely known Gods.)

Generations of court musicians and Balinese dancers have grown up with the nightly performances for tourists at the Puri Saren in Ubud, where forthcoming temple ceremonies, weddings and funerals are advertised by flyer.

Bali offered these charms and wonders to the West in a manner the West itself was able to specify. It was all here; all the exotic sensuality of the Malay archipelago, its oldest myths and legends and most graceful arts, in settings of near-miraculous natural beauty, plus all the nightlife you could drink.

There is even a hint of mystery; a certain darkness. Most of Bali is offlimits to casual tourism.

A foreigner wandering into the places where Bali’s people live is often gently but efficiently guided back to the nearest tourist quarter, while those in groups often recall the stillness and silence of the places they hiked through in Bali’s interior.

Light and dark are literally woven into the fabric of the saput poleng, the ubiquitous chequered cloth of Balinese ritual. Bali can be a forbidding place for the disrespectful.

This is not to say that those who planted the Kuta bombs were Balinese. They might have been outsiders who neither knew nor cared that they parked their Kijang outside the worst place in town.

It wasn’t even a very big bomb. None of the three that exploded in Bali last Saturday night — the two in Kuta and a third outside the US REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

consulate in Denpasar — was a large or sophisticated device. Nor was the fourth bomb that exploded 1,400km away outside the Philippine Consulate in Manado, northern Sulawesi.

The Sari Club bomb was the biggest of them, but it didn’t have to be much more than a large grenade: it exploded outside a flimsy twostorey wooden firetrap stocked with cylinders of cooking gas and wadded with human beings soaked in flammable liquids.

It could have been sheer bad luck for the 500 people in and around the Sari Club in Kuta last Saturday night. If that particular place was specifically targeted, however, there may have been something personal in the choice.

Which would mean this may not have been the work of a global terrorist network, conspiracy or alliance, but a smaller, meaner act; an act of local vengeance. No doubt tapping the corrosive new resources of the global “War on Terrorism” for the material and gumption for mischief, but basically assailing local grievances.

The Bali bombings may be linked to global affairs only in that America’s blunderous new war is giving every garden-variety thug, hoodlum, malcontent and troublemaker in the world an excuse to make trouble and blame it on the Americans, the Muslims, the Elders of Zion, Osama Bin Laden, corrupt politicians, capitalism, globalisation, drunken Caucasians in general or the bossa nova, for all they care.

It’s called anarchy, and it is the antithesis of the global conspiracy of organised evil the American axis needs so badly to seek and destroy.

While the Western alliance tilts at shadows, the real beast is abroad and feeding on the remains of governments.

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‘On this earth, no feast lasts forever’ mid week | Wednesday | 9 October 2002

Last week in this column, I recounted a haunting incident involving an old photograph of a young woman in an old mansion in East Java. What made it worth racking up a hundred-ringgit phone bill in fact-checking calls to Indonesia was an e-mail I received the next day from Faezah Ashref, who told me what became of the girl in the portrait, the millionaire’s daughter, Oei Hui Lan. Wrote Faezah: “Referring to your article `There are no such things as ghosts’ (NST, 2 Oct), it may interest you to know that Oei Hui Lan was married to the famed Chinese diplomat Wellington Khoo (1888-1985) who represented China at the end of World War I in 1919.

“Khoo also served as the head of the public service in the new China for seven terms, two terms as premier, even briefly acting as head of state. Eventually Khoo served as vice-president of the International Court of Justice.

“Throughout his distinguished career as a diplomat in their poor China, Wellington Khoo was generously supported by Oei Hui Lan. They both eventually resided in Washington but unfortunately divorced in 1956.

“Wellington Khoo died in New York in 1985 at the age of 98 and Oei Hui Lan died in 1983 at the age of 100.”

In Faezah’s three paragraphs was full vindication of my careerlong insistence that we who write in newspapers should never, ever, underestimate our readers.

No matter how abstruse and arcane the subject, someone out there knows cartloads more about it than we do.

I am grateful to Puan Faezah for being an NST reader, and somewhat amazed by this quite unexpected postscript to the story. Given Oei Hui Lan’s married name, I was able (though no less astonished) to find this photograph (at left) of her in the treasure trove of the NST Library’s photo archive. This was Hui Lan in 1932, bound for Europe aboard a ship in the Straits of Malacca.

(Two more formal portraits of her are in the collection of the Lafayette Gallery of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. If you’re reading this online you won’t see our picture, but you may click to http://www. lafayette.-150m.com/koo8711.html to view theirs. The V&A, incidentally, contradicts Faezah by holding that Hui Lan was born in 1899 and died in 1992, which would have made her 93 years old at her death, not 100.)

REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

If the V&A is correct, Hui Lan in this picture would have been 33, the mother of two young sons, the daughter of one of the world’s richest Chinese — the Indonesian sugar baron Oei Tiong Ham — and the wife of one of its most internationally eminent.

She had met Wellington Khoo Wei Chun, who would be nationalist China’s first plenipotentiary to the West, while they were students at Columbia University in America during China’s revolutionary upheavals against the Manchu Dynasty.

Khoo collected his PhD in international relations in 1912 and became secretary to the illfated General Yan Shih Kai, who usurped the presidency of the new Republic of China from Sun Yat Sen in 1912 and died four years later, having failed to establish himself as China’s Napoleon.

Khoo continued to serve the new China under Sun Yat Sen, representing China at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference and on the council of the League of Nations. Under Sun’s successor Chiang Kai Shek, Khoo was China’s ambassador to France from 1936 until 1941, Great Britain during the War, and the United States after it.

In 1945, Khoo led China’s delegation to the San Francisco conference founding the United Nations. Four years later, with Mao Zedong’s Communist triumph in China, his life’s work was undone.

Oei Hui Lan’s life spanned the greatest century in history, from the fall of the Qing Dynasty to the fall of the Soviet Union, and she had a ringside seat for all of it.

Her father’s fortune gave her limitless wealth and family interests across much of Southeast Asia, while her husband’s role in China’s postimperial emergence into the world of nations would have filled Hui Lan’s early life with vast political promise as well as the belle epoque luxury that had been her birthright.

But she and her husband would both live long enough to watch history spin awry, fortunes fade, and empires tumble and fall. Oei Tiong Ham’s family businesses in Indonesia were nationalised on the former Dutch East Indies’ independence as a republic, and today’s Taiwan is a paltry memorial to Khoo Wei Chun’s brilliant life’s work for Chiang Kai Shek’s Nationalist China.

In 1975, Hui Lan published her memoirs. I was unable to obtain a copy in time for this article, but Faezah Ashref tells me the book paints her life in a poignant and melancholy light; it is a tale of loss.

In a final eerie resonance with how this story began for me, observing the public display of a lost private fortune in the misty hills of East Java, Oei Hui Lan, a.k.a. Madame Wellington Ku Vi-Kyuin, titled her book after the old Chinese proverb, No Feast Lasts Forever.

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READY FOR PROOFER There are no such things as ghosts and goblins mid week | Wednesday | 2 October 2002

There is, however, a certain lovely old mansion in the cool and misty central highlands of East Java, in an old Dutch colonial town named (unfortunately) Malang.

A hundred years ago, the building was owned by Oei Tiong Ham, the “Sugar Baron” of the Dutch East Indies and one of the richest Chinese in the world. Born in Semarang, Central Java, in 1866, Oei started farming opium at 24, invested his profits in sugar mills, and by the age of 38 in 1904 was worth 20 million guilders.

Oei bought this mansion from a bankrupt businessman named Ho, whose daughter Lucy he also took as his eighth wife. By her and his other wives, Oei had 26 children, evenly divided into 13 daughters and 13 sons.

The photograph of one of those daughters, his favourite, Hui Lan, hangs on a wall of the dining room on the ground floor.

Oei Tiong Ham died in Singapore in 1924, relatively young at 57. Two of his sons carried on the family business, which continued to flourish, surviving the Second World War and Indonesia’s wars of independence, to be nationalised in 1961.

By then, Oei’s descendants had moved most of their assets and operations out of Indonesia to Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore, where Oei Tiong Ham has left his name on a housing project. The eldest son of Oei and Lucy Ho was Oei Tjiong Iee, the founding chairman of what is today Malayan Banking Bhd. In 1989, the Oei Mansion in Malang was acquired by entrepreneur and antiquary Anhar Setjadibrata, who wanted somewhere suitable to store and display his collection of Indonesian art and artefacts.

Setjadibrata opened his private museum as a luxury boutique hotel in 1990, and there are few superlatives in the hospitality trade that have not been lavished on Malang’s Tugu Park Hotel, where guests can freely and leisurely admire one of the largest private collections of Javanese, Chinese and Dutch colonial antiques in Indonesia.

Of Oei Tiong Ham’s home, Setjadibrata has preserved only the groundfloor dining room, whose massive teak table can seat 20, as it did when Oei was alive and his clan filled the house.

Tugu Park guests today may choose to dine in that room, where the doors open outward to a verdant, flower-filled courtyard and inward to a lounge filled with objets d’art and bric-a-brac from Oei’s own life and times, including that arresting portrait of his daughter on the wall by the courtyard doors.

It is a large monochrome photograph, heavily framed and mounted such that we are almost eye-level with a near-life-size, full-length portrait of an REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

exquisite young Chinese woman in her teens or early 20s, standing in a formal but flattering gown, with an arm resting on an ornate sideboard. Her expression is subtlety personified: her gaze is wide and direct, but there seems the faintest hint of a smile on her lips.

Long after dinner the night I stayed at the Tugu Park, after lingering over coffee with a friend, we took advantage of the quiet, late hour to examine the mansion’s many treasures unhindered by the bustle of the hotel by day, and in more subdued and evocative lighting.

I paused for a long moment before the young Miss Oei’s portrait. Her enchanting beauty only sharpened the blade of irony. “And this is what it all came down to,” I remarked to my companion, who was across the room, peering into an antique showcase of snuff bottles like minuscule Faberge eggs.

“All that wealth, power and glory, a century, four generations, and in the end tourists are poking around in your family’s things and gawking at your daughter.”

And then something strange happened. A gust of wind blew in out of the darkened garden and through the open French doors. It was strong enough to rustle the foliage, ruffle the table-runner and tinkle the chandelier, and bore a fragrance so incomparably sweet I reflexively inhaled deeply.

The breeze caught at the door-leaf nearest the portrait, and the antique glass paned in teak swung gently on its hinges, slowly folding over to shield from view the picture behind it.

“Woah,” I said as the breeze died completely away, leaving a fading trace of its heady perfume. “Did you see that?”

But answer came there none, for my friend across the room was white as a sheet and staring in wide-eyed wonder at a spot somewhere above my head.

In the three seconds it took for both of us to regain composure, she was at my side and pointing out what she’d seen.

From her vantage point, as the door had blown inward, the glass pane had caught a reflection of the girl in the photo, and a peculiarity of the old, warped glass and the uneven lighting had made the image of Oei Hui Lan seem to tremble, move, and float free to swiftly swoop outward, upward and disappear into thin air above my head.

“Do you think,” I asked her, my forearms goose-pimpled, “it was something I said?”

The Tugu Park Hotel is not haunted, there are no such things as ghosts, and what happened in those 10 seconds that night was so perfectly normal that even as it happened, neither of us for so much as a heartbeat thought something supernatural was going on.

Well, maybe for a heartbeat. But no more. There are no such things as ghosts, but there can be extraordinary juxtapositions of natural phenomena.

What was seen recently in the car park of a certain block of flats in the Klang Valley and in the brisk sales of that doctored photograph of a youth and a spectre, however, were juxtapositions of extraordinarily gullible people.

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Calling long-distance from the West Bank mid week | Wednesday | 25 September 2002

Mahmud, do you have his handphone number? Okay, try the office number. It’s ringing? Give me that phone. Hello? Hello? Let me speak with your Prime Minister, please.

Yes of course it’s an emergency. I’m calling from Ramallah, what do you think it is? Yes, I’ll hold.

Ah, hello Mr Prime Minister, sir! It’s me, Yas. Look, I’m in a spot of bother. I could really do with your help. I’m sorry, sir, what was that?

Could you speak up, please? It’s really noisy here right now. I said, IT’S REALLY ... excuse me a moment.

(Oi! You down there! Yes, you in the bulldozer! Could you take five, please? I’m on an important phone call here! Thank you!)

Bloody foreign workers. Ah, Mr Prime Minister, sorry about that.

The renovators are getting a little ahead of themselves.

Are you watching this live on CNN? Well, somewhere in that rubble is me. No, up a bit. Second floor. Yes, the only remaining floor. Here I am! I’m waving! Yoo-hoo! Can you see me? The old guy in the kaffiyeh!

Excuse me a moment. (Oi, Tawfiq, get out of the way, give me a little elbow room, I’m still your Chairman, you know.)

Sorry, Mr Prime Minister. It’s a bit crowded in here. Oh, about 200 of us. Yes, four remaining rooms. It’s a good thing we’re all one big family. But they’re calling us terrorists! We! The legitimate leader of the Palestinian Authority, elected with 90 per cent of the popular vote!

Thousands of our people are protesting. I can hear them from here. We will hoist the flag of Palestine above the walls, churches and minarets of Jerusalem!

Hey, can you see if it’s true they’ve hoisted their flag on our roof? I mean, really. What is their point?

It’s a wonder this phone’s working. Isn’t satellite technology amazing.

But where are my manners. How are you, sir? And the wife? Kids okay?

Good, good. Say, could you perhaps do something to stop these people trying to kill me?

Well, I don’t know, I’ve tried everything I can think of. No one west of the Bosphorus is returning my calls. I’d really appreciate anything you can do for me. They listen to you.

Well, all right, everyone else listens to you, then. Aw c’mon, Mr REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

Prime Minister, you’re the only Muslim head of government in the world whose country isn’t a war-zone. While you’re looking at 6.5 per cent GDP growth next year, do you realise I’m now phoning you from the tallest building in Ramallah?

Listen, if I had a civil service, I’d give them a month’s bonus too. But my entire Cabinet resigned a fortnight ago and all I’m left with is 20,000 policemen and they’re not in the mood for retail therapy.

You heard what Peres said? He said the Israelis aren’t out to kill me.

They don’t want to hurt me or harm me. Oh sure. But if the roof falls on my head, how? Collateral damage, is it?

Look, Mr Prime Minister, you can put in a good word for me with the other world leaders. Tell them it’s not my fault. I’m as teed off with those suicide bombers as anyone.

I keep telling them, don’t do it, it makes a terrible mess, but they’re seriously wired, those people. They have this wild and crazy look in their eyes. You try reasoning with them, it’s not possible I tell you.

What am I supposed to tell them, better stay alive and be treated like murderous lunatics and thieving scum than die and go to heaven?

Well, I don’t know, hey, I’m thinking on my feet here... tell the Europeans they have to take some responsibility for this European society of European exiles with European values they planted here in Palestine.

Tell the rest of the world Iraq’s a diversion.

Tell Bush if he lets Sharon kill me the suicide bombers will all go off at once and there’ll be a pillar of flame over Jerusalem, but if he doesn’t we could spin all this as urban renewal.

Look, there might be something in this for you too. Last time I was in KL, I figured you guys were pretty good with that infrastructure thing.

Come on over and build us a highway or two, a power plant, a couple of shopping malls. We’re talking root causes here. Terrorism is commerce by other means. I’m figuring about US$15 billion, but for you, 10. We can work something out.

So, okay, Mr Prime Minister? Islamic solidarity, brotherhood of the oppressed, social justice, civil order and all that? I know I can count on you, sir. Okay, I better let you go now, thanks for the chat. The uplink’s breaking down.

Oh, one more thing. They’ve demolished the kitchen and the pantry.

All we have left is mineral water and a bucket of halva. Do you think you can get us some pizza delivery?

Oh man, there goes the power. Hello? Hello?

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Restoring our mansion of many rooms mid week | Wednesday | 18 September 2002

The present push for English in Malaysia is not so much to gain a new edge, skill or facility, as to regain a facility once owned, then lost.

We had this facility, this global force, the English language, for generations; centuries. Those arriving fresh off the boat knew they had but two ways to survive in this country: dive into their own communities and never emerge, or use English.

But in a necessary — or at least predictable — rite of passage to nationalism, Independence and Identity, we tore out the tongue and dashed it down. Language — a tool, a mechanism, a means — was regarded as a symbol of subjugation and treated with the disdain usually reserved for traitors and collaborators.

That was unfair, because we had usurped the conquerors’ language, turned it against them and talked them out of town with it. (“No to Malayan Union!” read the banners and placards; “Abolish the MacMichael Treaties!”)

And then we went one better than our erstwhile masters by producing a written Constitution for ourselves, by the end of which process we had the beginnings of what would swiftly become one of the most erudite Judiciaries in the Commonwealth.Having been a part of the education and enlightenment of all our greatest nationalists and the crafters of our Independence, there would have seemed no reason not to hold on to our English; the English of Abdul Razak Hussein, Tengku Abdul Rahman, Onn Jaafar and C.H.E. Det. Turning the pre-eminence of Bahasa Melayu into a pretext for abandoning English was, perhaps, the most regrettable act of nationalism. A generation later, oops! It seems those who most heroically rejected English turned out not to have been nationalists and patriots after all, but easy riders.

Meanwhile, those who would continue to victory on the battlefield of life did not even pause to think of giving up any of the tools and weapons they had available, especially one as useful as English. (Although most took the opportunity to hone their Malay as well, gaining even larger personal benefit.)

So now here we are, scrabbling around our Great Midden of Abandoned Things for the shards and fragments of that once cast off and despised old family heirloom, the English language, now that its value seems to have gone up so much.

REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

Very well: let us acknowledge that English is as not nearly as universal as English-speakers would like to think it is. On an international writers’ programme a year ago, only five of the 30 of us from 25 countries worked in English: the Brit, the Kiwi, the Irishwoman, one of the Indians and the Malaysian.

I could not see that the lives of any of our fellow writers, journalists, poets, playwrights and novelists had been in the least diminished by their not using English. English-speakers are everywhere, true, but 75 per cent of the planet’s population does not speak, need or want English any more than is necessary to sell them something.

That majority, sharing the other 6,808 of the world’s living languages, regards aspiring to English literacy as somewhat like wanting to join a country club. Not an unworthy pursuit in itself, and with some benefit in promoting foreign relations, trade and tourism, but an indulgence no less, if not a conceit.

To varying degrees, every culture in the world empathises with the extreme once expressed by the far right in Japan, who maintained that to speak a word of a foreign language was to be less Japanese. But it is a shallow fallacy, as though the brain’s import of a word in a different language “overwrites” a mother-tongue word already there, or takes up “disk space” the mother tongue needs.

The mind doesn’t work that way, as Malaysia has also proved. The cultural imperative here is a durable and highly self-defensive force, and it too has earned respect. Those who remained deep within their communities, never to emerge or interact with others, contributed no less to the foundation of our nation.

The fear of cultural ablation may never completely abate — progress kicks up quite a slipstream — but truly there is no need for such a whiteknuckled grip on the brake.

Because, for us here in Malaysia, the push for English is not about chasing after another alien importation, but regaining what was ours in the first place. Is ours. English served us well, and serves us still. It was part of our ancestral mansion, not the colonial powers’. We built it, with our materials and labour, in our homeland, and for 200 years we lived in it. We should never have abandoned it.

If the effort to restore and refurbish our mansion of many rooms clears away the overgrown undergrowth that has come to obscure what we could do with all 139 of Malaysia’s languages (full list available on request), so very much the better for the generations to come.

For the world doesn’t belong to any one language but all of them, and with our uncommon heritage of ethno-linguistic resources, we could own the planet.

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‘O pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth’ mid week | Wednesday | 11 September 2002

There was a commotion in the corridor, through which the young Bulgarian novelist Nikolay Grozdinski was sprinting and banging on doors.

Mine was already open, as I enjoyed the cool morning breeze blowing in off the Iowa River, sweeping the fug of the night out the open window.

Nikolay appeared in my door frame, his green eyes blazing. “New York’s been attacked,” he said.

Next door to my quarters at Iowa House, in the university, city and US State of the same name, the Common Room TV was on. Staring in wideeyed silence at it were Marius Burokas, a Lithuanian poet, Khin Lay Nyo, a Myanmar novelist, and Shashi Warrier, an author from India. We were visiting writers on a fall programme at Iowa University last year.

I had arrived just two weeks earlier, and had been wistfully entertaining thoughts of writing a small novel.

I looked at the TV and saw what everyone saw. I slumped into an armchair. Strangely, tears prickled behind my eyes. I felt an amalgam of emotions never felt before. Horror and anguish I recognised, but... elation?

It took me months to work out that first tangled knot. It was, I came to see, a draining relief.

At last, this bleeding wound between worlds would be stanched. The final denouement. Showdown at the KO Corral. This bitter quarrel had been festering for centuries - let there now be a resolution to it, one way or another.

Much later that long and dreadful day, a year ago today, as night fell, I sat in my room (with the door firmly shut), hammering out analysis amid a terrible sense of personal desolation.

Those smouldering pyres in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania would mean that either the world would change, or it would not. And I could not determine which of those two prospects was the worse.

SEVERAL weeks later I was able to visit New York and, on a perfect November day, see “Ground Zero” for myself. Jottings from my notebook: It would have been a day like today, with the sky high and clear and blue, but today the wind sweeps through the empty space at the end of Greenwich Street where the towers stood. Now six floors remain of the 110; six floors above the ragged black wreckage.

Today Joe’s Gourmet Foods and Bari Pizza Pies are open, and Thunder Lingerie and the Pussycat Lounge. Business hustles about the crowds REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

circumambulating on plank catwalks this gaunt and awful shrine. They stand silent and still, they light candles, place stuffed toys by a chainlink fence, inscribe their names and messages on freedom walls.

They wear flags, badges and ribbons. They aim cameras. They stand in muted clusters. A woman weeps; her tears course down her cheeks and glisten in the golden autumnal light.

These are images best caught by photographers. Words make too much noise.

A haze hangs over the wreckage. Pigeons flutter in the spaces between the buildings. Beyond a fence of tributes and wreaths, an entire building stands shrouded in black netting that ripples in the wind.

Smoke seeps up from fires smouldering in the shattered subterranean bowels and curls wraithlike to leap on the wind and be carried away into the canyons of downtown Manhattan, carrying with it this strange thick smell, cloying and gritty, an inorganic smell. Not like a funeral pyre or charnel house; a sulphurous smell, like seabed ooze.

I wonder, though: What does it smell like after a B-52 bombing run in Afghanistan?

High overhead an aircraft banks, climbing steeply from La Guardia. Its starboard passengers are dazzled by the sun; across the aisle they see the hole in New York City.

Vendors sell souvenirs: baseball caps emblazoned NYPD, FDNY. Photographs. Books. A Chinese couple sells calligraphy next to a prayer station manned by earnest young Christians with pleading eyes. But prayers have bedecked this spectacle since it began, with assassins’ daggers plunging.

The street signs and St. Paul’s Chapel are still rimed with grey ash, caked and congealed now into a cracked crust of grime; a shroud of death worn as a cloak of valour.

Snatches of Cantonese on Canal Street. A smiling Laotian woman sells enamel badges of the American flag. An Italian man calls out: “Only three dollars for a flag today!”

The Romanian taxidriver asks me where I’m from. Malaysia, I tell him.

His eyes meet mine in the rearview mirror. “What is it with you guys?” he asks.

“And Caesar’s spirit, ranging for revenge, With Ate by his side come hot from hell, Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice Cry Havoc! and let slip the dogs of war; That this foul deed shall smell above the earth With carrion men, groaning for burial.”

— William Shakespeare; Julius Caesar 161

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Woe is me, shame and scandal in the family mid week | Wednesday | 4 September 2002

An editorial last week in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, headlined “Nazis Next Door”, declared there was “no reason for Malaysia to be nervous over the large Filipino presence in Sabah or to emulate the Nazis’ methods of dealing with unwanted people”.

Oh I say, steady on old boy.

The editorial drew its dudgeon from Philippine consular reports that Filipino “refugees” were being “inhumanly treated” in Sabah. “The deportees were crammed in congested holding centres awaiting deportation. They had inadequate food. Some slept on cold cement floors. And at least 13 children have died in the camps or while in transit to southern Philippines.”

Truly tragic, if true. The two infant deaths we know of were sobering and regrettable enough, even if the health authorities concerned say these infants were dying anyway; many children of immigrants die like this, of asthma and bronchitis, exposure and malnutrition. Still, there were never meant to be any such casualties in this exercise, which was one of the reasons it took so long to implement. (See “Wake-up call” by Sarban Singh, NST Aug 29).

“But the Malaysians have never been noted for having a humanitarian streak,” sniffs the Inquirer. Likening the deportation exercise to the treatment of the Vietnamese boat people in the 1970s, their writer seems to recall that “Malaysian authorities pushed back the refugees to the sea”.

The present exercise, however, reminds him more of “the herding by the Nazis of Jews in their ghettoes prior to their being transported to concentration camps”, and makes the Vietnamese refugees’ travails “look like a picnic”.

One of the saving graces of Philippine journalism is its penchant for raising hyperbole to heights of such absurdity as to be almost charming. Fortunately, the editorial then notes that recent events have “raised questions about what has prompted Kuala Lumpur to stage this new round of expulsions”.

Kuala Lumpur is glad you asked. We don’t want any more infants dying because their parents are tottering one rung of the ladder above the bottomless pit of poverty.

We don’t like seeing the poorest people of any society or nation having to live as bereft of dignity, status, legitimacy, rights and recourses as they are of decent food, clothing, shelter and basic amenities.

We were there ourselves, but a rung or two ago, and we know how it takes the best of the human condition to meet the most basic of human needs.

For years, Malaysia pleaded with the Governments of Indonesia and the Philippines to co-operate with us in the management of transnational human resources. Two things were needed: documentation of economic migrants, and control of the channels of passage.

REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

For the usual plethora of reasons beleaguering our sprawling, overcrowded, endemically corrupt and poverty-addled neighbours, agreements in principle could not be translated to fact. It just took too much organisation, funds and hardware.

In the meantime, the churning Malaysian economic machine was growing ever more addicted to the cheap-and-nasty fix of illegal immigrant labour. The fear that repatriating illegal foreign workers would devastate our economy suggests that the crime had become the norm.

If so, we had come to depend on a furtive floating world of rightless, faceless, stateless people, hoarding makeshift weapons under their shanty shacks as their only defence against everything.

The illegals were more dangerous to each other than they were to those whose houses they burgled and handbags they snatched, or whom they may have sickened with disease. Their world in this country was a brutal and lawless place.

Dismembered illegals routinely turned up in gullies on the edge of town, newborn babies were abandoned in awful places, and bedded karaoke parlours were cropping up in suburbia.

Once an Indonesian with no identifying documents, i.e. a name, cried “Merdeka!” three times and jumped to his death in the Klang River where it flows between Central Market and Dayabumi.

It was chastening, humiliating, and humbling. There but for the Grace of God go we. Yes, as the Inquirer leader says, the measures Malaysia implemented after Aug 1 were “Draconian ...including a six-month imprisonment and six strokes of the cane”.

And such sentences have been handed down by the dozen to Indonesians, Chinese, Myanmars, Bangladeshis and Thai — and their employers, snakeheads and pimps — since the new regulations came into force.

Where there’s a case for sparing the rod, it’s spared, but the message being sent to the people-traffickers — and the crooked dupes who pay them RM1,400 for illicit passage when a genuine Indonesian passport costs just RM46 — is that this is for real and it hurts.

None of which would remotely excuse inhumane treatment of the sort alleged by the Inquirer. The repatriation exercise of Filipinos from Sabah has been halted pending the completion of investigations, which have so far revealed plausible deniability.

In any case, matters are hardly helped by inciting flag-burnings and violent demonstrations that only reveal the true face of the mob whose right to earn a ringgit is so stridently upheld by the likes of the Philippine Daily Inquirer and firebrand Indonesian politician Amien Rais.

For Malaysia’s actions against illegal immigrants arise not from our being different, as the Inquirer indecently implies, but the same. And we would like our neighbours — at heart and soul our kith and kin — to get at least this much of their act together too. If we can do it, so can they, and we can help each other up the ladder out of the mire.

“Prosper Thy Neighbour” in fact and deed, or drag each other under.

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Prepare to beam us all aboard, Dr Ping mid week | Wednesday | 21 August 2002

Scientific progress is getting seriously strange. I could handle the Dick Tracy videophone-watch becoming a reality. Or even the advent of the handheld tricorder device.

These are mere techno-gizmos, and if you drop them they will reassuringly fall to the ground and break to pieces.

Anti-gravity, however, is a destabilising prospect. And teleportation is going too far. Somebody stop these people before they turn the world into a comicbook fantasy filled with weirdos in jumpsuits and designer foreheads.

Oh, piffle and pshaw, of course that will never happen (except in certain American cities where it happens all the time).

The recent teleportation event in Australia claims only to have deconstructed a stream of photons and instantly replicated it a metre away.

(The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle was reportedly involved, which as usual either says a lot or absolutely nothing.)

The Australian National University scientists who achieved this feat modestly play it down, no doubt in accordance with their secret vows to the Intergalactic High Command.

They say all they’ve done is replicate photons, which have no mass. Their next great task, they say demurely, will be to teleport just one measly little atom.

(Can’t you just see these people on their days off, eating pizza, watching David Cronenburg movies on DVD and giggling dementedly? I can.) We shall REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

have to watch them carefully. The burning question: Which atom will they choose for that fateful experiment, and will it then attempt to escape and impregnate a human?

And another burning question: Why is the Boeing Corporation’s mysterious “Phantom Works” funding the research of Russian scientist Evgeny Podkletnov, who is rumoured to have developed “an anti-gravity beam 10cm wide, successfully repelling objects more than 1km away with negligible power loss”?

I know people who can do that simply by not bathing, but Dr Podkletnov, using “a rapidly spinning disc of superconducting material”, also claims to have “modified” gravity enough to reduce the weight of objects by up to two per cent.

“These devices,” said a Boeing spokesman possibly under the control of aliens, “do not actually break the laws of physics.”

If there were such laws, that might mean something. But now even Albert Einstein’s looking shaky.

Another bunch of Australian boffins, at Macquarie University, is suggesting that the speed of light - hitherto the only measurable constant in the universe has changed.

Specifically, it has slowed down. (Intoned CNN in a classic of science reporting: “The implications of the discovery are not necessarily clear.”) While they ponder the implications, however, grand old Al’s proving the Law of Circular Motion instead, a.k.a. “what goes around, comes around”.

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He did it to Isaac Newton, supplanting two centuries of Newtonian celestial mechanics with his Special and General Theories of Relativity, and now these Mad Maxes are doing it to him.

The vaunted Laws of Physics are in truth but the Best Guesses and Current Consensi of Physics. When we celebrate the great scientific minds of this or any other time, we should laud and admire the way they thought, not so much the things they thought up. For they were so often wrong.

Newton wrote his monumental Principia Mathematica in 1687 at the age of 45, then spent the next 40 years writing 600,000 words on the Mind of God and, by history’s cruel judgment, losing his.

Einstein, desperately needing a “cosmological constant” that would allow E to equal m.c-squared, made one up.

Later, when the astronomer Edwin Hubble proved the universe was in fact not static but expanding, Einstein himself repudiated his Constant as “my greatest blunder”.

Even so, having done his greatest work and won the Nobel Prize by the age of 42, Einstein, like Newton before him, spent the rest of his life searching for the Mind of God in the form of the Unified Field Theory (the “Theory of Everything”) and not finding it.

If even our greatest geniuses can be self-deluded, error-ridden fools, what Laws pertain?

It’s all mysteries, uncertainties and probabilities, and anything goes. Cloning.

Cryogenics. Cold fusion. Anti-gravity. Teleportation. Photon drives. Warp REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

drives. Midichlorian symbionts. (Almost quoth Hamlet: “There are more things in heaven and earth, George Lucas, than are dreamt of at Industrial Light & Magic.”)

Because we can never know what these ideas will grow into, however, it’s important not to forget how they were born. Newton had an apple fall on his head, and realised he’d got between two celestial masses bent on collision.

Einstein strolled along a canal watching the wakes of barges, and noticed how they seemed to slow down and stop as he matched their pace.

Today’s breakthrough scientists watched Star Trek, read Marvel Comics and played video games. What do we do if these guys screw up and turn into Willem Dafoe in a green monkey suit?

Call Spider Man? So be it, then. Hang the split infinitive and logical impossibility, it is our increasingly manifest destiny to boldly go to infinity ...and beyond!

We have no choice. Some of us are already there. The leader of the team of Australian physicists who became the first in the world to achieve quantum teleportation is Penang-born Dr Ping Koy Lam, 34. (His most recent publication is titled “Polarization squeezing of continuous variable Stokes parameters”. So it’s true you don’t need English for Science and Mathematics.)

We cheer Dr Ping and his team’s success all the more for raising the fond hope that among the first atoms successfully teleported will be those constituting a bowl of Hokkien mee from Tanjong Tokong.

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Just one of those sweet old Malaysian things mid week | Wednesday | 14 August 2002

Every Merdeka Day in Hong Kong, the Malaysian Association gathers to celebrate the event. The last night of August is in the middle of typhoon season: muggy, blustery and wet. Not the best of times for elegant soirees on the Hong Kong waterfront.

But the cheerful bellmen of the Peninsula Hotel in Kowloon are dextrous with large umbrellas, and adept at discreetly brushing the stray spatter of raindrops off a tuxedoed shoulder or pashmina shawl.

You wouldn’t know to look at them, but these are not just your average, ordinary Hong Kong millionaire Chinese. These are what you call MalaysiansFirst, and you’d have to be one to realise the difference this makes in Hong Kong. What they have in common with the locals is principally weighed in carats.

About 800 of the 15,000 or so Malaysian expatriates in Hong Kong attend the Malaysia National Day Dinner & Dance. A fine time is had by all, entertained usually by a name act from KL. At some point in the evening, of course, usually at or around midnight, comes the singing of the National Anthem. So everyone dutifully stands up and sings: Negaraku, tanah tumpahnya darahku...

No problem there. How difficult could it be? It’s only a half-dozen lines, after all. Suppressing self-conscious giggles, they continue: Rakyat hidup bersatu dan maju...

Hokay, what comes next? You can hear it as the line trails away on “maju” that’s as far as many of them have gone in a long time. They’re lumbered. The shame of it! How could anyone forget their own national anthem?

But then something extraordinary happens. In those five beats between the end of the second line and the beginning of the third, each would-be chorister is suddenly transported on a magic carpet of self-conscious embarrassment back to a primary-school assembly somewhere in a childhood Malaysia of long ago.

Under a blue and white sky in a blue and white uniform, starched stiff and standing to attention just like this, singing this grand old song with these lovely old words as the HM and head prefect or some such annoyingly capable kid solemnly raise the flag up the pole... ...Rahmat bahagia Tuhan kurniakan...

On “rahmat” it all comes flooding back, pouring out of long-neglected memory to sweep to a rousing crescendo on the final syllable - “kurniakaaaaaaaaann!” (And sure enough, someone with adequate breath control will do that little two-note drop at the end: “...aaaa-a- aan!”) Then inhale, and...

REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

...Raja kita selamat bertakhta...

Everyone’s made it triumphantly to the endzone. One more time, let’s do it again for Ah So’s iceballs: Rahmat bahagia Tuhan kurniakan Raja kita selamat bertakhtaaaaaaaa!

TOUCHDOWN! And finish in whoops, whistles and applause, cheering and merriment.

It’s just one of those Malaysian things. The thing that brings together Malaysians abroad in a way that doesn’t, or possibly can’t, really happen here.

Some ineffable something we all recognise in each other out there; the thing that makes us what-you-call Malaysians-First, which somehow disappears into the riddling fissures dividing us back here.

We dance around those cracks. We try to patch them up. We try to engineer our way around our divisions, as we always have and probably always will in one way or another.

What keeps us at it is this imprint of a very particular home; a collage of cultures colluding to be unique and irreplaceable, and not remotely reproducible anywhere else, as expatriate Malaysian communities remind themselves every Merdeka Day all over the world. (“What is patriotism but the love of good things we ate in our childhood?” - Lin Yutang.)

This good Malaysian thing imbibed since birth seems simultaneously to stare us in the face and elude our every glance, but it wholly accounts for the jus soli of our Constitution.

“Negaraku, tanah tumpahnya darahku.” Bukan darah yang disanjung, malah tanah yang ditumpahnya. It is not the blood, but the land that receives it.

My Uncle Tony, a captain in the merchant navy, once told me the story of this wiry little old Chinaman from Yong Peng or Paloh or somewhere, who’d been plying the world’s sealanes on cargo ships for 30 years. Their LNG tanker was moored in the Persian Gulf one evening, and they were taking in the air off the taffrail as the sunset deepened into night over the distant desert.

Wafting across the water on the evening breeze came the sound of the call to maghrib prayer. Ah Chye listened quietly for a time, then told my uncle it always reminded him of home.

“Negaraku, tanah tumpahnya darahku.” Bukan darah yang disanjung, malah tanah yang ditumpahnya. It is not the blood, but the land that receives it.

My Uncle Tony, a captain in the merchant navy, once told me the story of this wiry little old Chinaman from Yong Peng or Paloh or somewhere, who’d been plying the world’s sealanes on cargo ships for 30 years. Their LNG tanker was moored in the Persian Gulf one evening, and they were taking in the air off the taffrail as the sunset deepened into night over the distant desert.

Wafting across the water on the evening breeze came the sound of the call to maghrib prayer. Ah Chye listened quietly for a time, then told my uncle it always reminded him of home.

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The more things change, the more they stay the same mid week | Wednesday | 7 August 2002

It was October 1985, and this country was having another of its vintage years. The Mahathir Administration had entered its fifth year. The Penang Bridge was newly completed, as was the Putra World Trade Centre.

The Proton Saga had purred onto Malaysian roads. Meanwhile in the global commodity markets, prices had begun to slide towards what would be the following year’s recession.

All business as unusual for the newly Incorporated Malaysia, Looking East, Buying British Last and generally working itself into a lather of new prospects both good and ill.

Then, out of local academia came this startling assertion: “Only five to 10 per cent of the population really need to know English. Politicians, community leaders, government officers and undergraduates. Why should the remaining 90 per cent be made to master English when it is not necessary?” From where this writer was sitting at the time (in the leader writers’ room of the NST’s old building) that was a red flag to a bull. I tore into the subject and the issuer of that statement, a local university professor.

Was she suggesting, I asked in my column, that our future as a nation was independent of the world? Did we no longer need Malaysians who could communicate with other nations through the media, diplomacy or face-to- face?

If it were true that only five to 10 per cent of the population needed English, I ventured, it would be the five to 10 per cent that actually ran the country.

Acknowledging that this elite did indeed include politicians and government officers, I went further to mention teachers, businessmen, bankers, doctors, scientists, bureaucrats, technocrats and, oh yes, journalists.

This was not about neo-colonialism, nationalism or culture, I railed. This was about education, “which,” I wrote, “ranks far above all three as a determinant of this nation’s future.”

That riled the professor even more, as you might imagine. She sent me a note saying she’d been misquoted, decrying my bias and warning of the neglect afflicting the national language, Malay. That, of course, was so much more grist for another column. Malay was suffering from abuse, I observed, and English from disuse. “Don’t simply shoot from the lip and expect people to roll over and play dead,” I wrote.

And there we left it, as another sprinkling of broken glass along the rumbustious road of Malaysian life and letters.

The years passed. Life went on. Issues rose and fell. Elections came and went. I left the NST to travel the world. More years passed. I came home and REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

wrote a book. Even more years passed. I rejoined the NST. And here she is again! Nearly 17 years after our briefly spectacular dingdong in these pages, the very same academic popped up again at another university seminar a couple of weeks ago to condemn the Government’s move to promote English in schools, and to restate her old assertion - with one significant amendment. Now, she says, less than five per cent of Malaysians need to possess a good command of English.

She has also modified her exclusion list. In an interesting shift of emphasis, the only Malaysians who need to speak English are no longer “politicians, community leaders, government servants and undergraduates” but “diplomats, businessmen and paper presenters.” (By which I’m not sure she means us.)

The Government’s current initiative to restore English in education seems to be generating a rare and paradoxical unity of parochialists, as Chinese and Indian educationists join their Malay counterparts in attempting to forestall this latest effort to give everyone’s kids a leg up into the real world. But no, it seems there are some who fear that our bases of identity are so threatened and fragile that educating people risks cultural collapse.

In a horrid historical irony, this is pretty much what Frank Swettenham feared a century ago, when he opposed educating the Malays. Swettenham did not believe any good would come of giving the natives ideas above their station, as had happened to such disastrous effect in India. Far better to keep them as ignorant, tractable and happy as they were, with perhaps the rudiments of literacy and numeracy to help the smarter of them be of some household use.

Who knows? He might have been right. For better or worse, however, nobody important at the time agreed with him. The rest is history.

A history, incidentally, that led to Independence, social development, economic dynamism, political stability, geopolitical relevance, regional leadership and the sort of academic expansion that has provided long and rewarding careers for some obviously disadvantaged people.

This is the saddest and most pernicious failing of preferential policies: the cosseting of the limited, ignorant and uncompetitive as they rise to positions of authority and influence, which they then use to disengage and alienate those not as limited, ignorant and uncompetitive as themselves.

The better part of a generation has passed since the decline of English usage in this country was first noted with alarm. Perhaps this academic and those who share her feelings might be credited with having stymied the effort to arrest that decline 17 years ago. Perhaps they deserve some kind of acknowledgement for the standards of language — all languages, for language is about mind, not tongue — being even lower now than they were then.

Back then, I closed out my riposte to the professor’s ideas by averring: “What you have said in maintaining that only five to 10 per cent of this nation needs English is that 90-95 per cent of this nation does not need to be so educated. You call that progress?”

Seventeen years and eight million more Malaysians later, the answer stares us in the face. Again.

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The long and short of text messaging mid week | Wednesday | 24 July 2002

The objective of human evolution is now clear. If what separated us from the apes five million years ago was the development of the opposable thumb, we are reaching the culmination of a very grand design indeed. We’re calling it SMS. For this did God give human beings and no other creature the ability to touch all four fingertips of each hand with the tip of the thumb of the same hand.

It wasn’t about stripping leaves from branches — pandas do that with a bony stump on their wrists and like it better than sex. Neither was it about hammering lumps of stone into tools, which sea-otters do just as effectively.

For a while in the Sixties, the opposable thumb was about hitch-hiking. That seemed about the extent of it.

All along, however, it was really about cellular telephony. The humble thumb, in all the aeons since it enabled the development of the human species, has never wielded such socio-political clout as it does today.

Eighteen months ago in the Philippines, a government was toppled by thumbs as decisively as gladiators were once despatched at the Colosseum.

From Manila’s ritzy hotel lounges down through the bars and the bodegas and out to the foetid streets, cellphones beeped, buzzed, chirped and trilled their summonses to “EDSA !!”.

The gathering crowds waved their handphones like torches at a rock concert or clipped to their belts like phaser pistols. The revolting peasants had exchanged pitchforks for Nokias.

Text messaging enabled everyone in the uprising to perform as a single fish in a shoal or a bird in a flock: a constituent unit of an organic whole.

The conveniently compressed Mrs Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo was given a resounding thumbs-up and packet-switched into office.

On Japan’s teeming city streets by then, cellular telephones had long ceased being telephones, having turned into writhing tentacles. Dreamy young people walked around sensorily connected to and interacting with everything they liked in life and each other.

They lived and moved in a digitised matrix of expanded reality, incorporating elements they could select, edit and assemble for themselves.

Their mobile phones had become whole-being interactive Walkmans, semipermanently grafted to their hands and ears.

The chilling thing about the phenomenon was the impossibility of accessing the digiterati without the technology that enabled them to operate intimately REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

across space. (Or even right next to each other, with handphone infrared ports almost-touching, the way fingers used to, before thumbs took over.)

The interaction of the Real and the Virtual thus extended beyond the Tamagotchis, DoCoMites and other cellular entities to affect their surroundings as well, rendering a stroll through the e-bazaars of Shinjuku even more e-bizarre for the un-enitiated.

Note how the technology can mean very different things in equally wireless-wild societies. Japan’s lush multimedia cell-scape is a virtual world away from the Philippines’ street politics, and both are incomprehensible in the West — even to the inventors of this technology.

It seems the world’s most successful new communications technologies are those that enable the common person to be seen and heard, as much as the earlier ICTs of radio and television enabled them to see and hear.

(Another indication that globalisation really means everyone on the planet having an equal chance to be themselves, and not necessarily Finnish.)

Thankfully, our own Maxistentialists, Celcomets and TMnauts seem more interested in arranging parties, whether political or all-night. The vacuity of most SMS communication in this country is its saving disgrace. Textmessaging here seems to be about little more than giving thumbs something to do other than twiddle. You’re never alone with a cellular phone.

As a result, we who attempt to communicate using all eight fingers and both thumbs to write thousand-word documents by the ream are swept aside like so much styrofoam on a tsunami of gr8ly abvtd txt msgs by the 100s of m.

So much for the carefully crafted sentence; the punctilious arrangement of paragraphs; the precisely expressed thought. Yo! w r u? :) A moment’s silence, please, for the untimely death of the vowel.

I don’t know how you do it; I cannot do it myself, nor even contend with the philosophical paradox of taking 10 minutes to thumb out an “instant” message. (I’m told there’s a function called “predictive text” but it takes too long to spell.)

The only way I might come to terms with the SMS revolution is to think of the Sumerian scribes who 5,000 years ago incised the Epic of Gilgamesh into clay tablets. Or of the Ancient Egyptian scribe Khety a thousand years later, who painstakingly carved into a stela the exhortation: “Apply yourselves to Writing! Observe how it rescues from Labour!”

Copping out through diligent tedium may have been key to the ascent of civilisation.

What’s depressing is the heights to which we’ve ascended. Bangsar Heights, in my case, where last Saturday night a beautiful woman beamed her number into my SIM card through my infrared port. I felt positively goosed.

But now I don’t know where it is nor how to find it.

I looked, but that SIM card is really, really small and I’m all thumbs.

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READY FOR PROOFER On the vital importance of selective amnesia mid week | Wednesday | 17 July 2002

The thing is, I never write my own speeches. When commencing a two-hour talk to my favourite audience — pre-university students — my preferred intro is: “Any questions?”

It’s the most efficient way I’ve found to instantly figure the house. If I’m going to be addressing a paddock of tree stumps, I would wish to know right at the outset. That happened in America distressingly often, but I’m happy to report it hasn’t yet happened here.

Here, the smart ones ask me to talk about myself, thus displaying a precocious knowledge of the universal truth that everyone’s favourite subject is themselves. The brilliant ones, though, ask me what’s going on outside.

Then it’s mush the huskies and off we go on a discursive, not to say rambling, dialogue (or monologue-with-interjections, anyway) on writing, journalism, politics, history and national identity, with the latest Tom Cruise movie thrown in for effect.

But, even immediately afterwards, I can’t recall a thing I said. I suspect there’s something sub-consciously wilful about this amnesia. I can pass polygraph tests denying everything if necessary. The trouble is, sometimes they remember.

Worse, sometimes they even write it down.

Umno Youth’s up-and-coming (or going, not quite sure which) Khairy Jamaluddin, now special assistant to the Deputy Prime Minister, attended and wrote up a talk I gave to Malaysians at the London School of Economics in 1996 as “The Rashid Integration Model”. (It may still be out there on the Internet somewhere.)

In so doing, he did me the inestimable favour of providing not just the funky title but the only written evidence of an idea I laboured at for years in the hope of beating it down into a book, but no, the vain thing kept insisting on an audiovisual presentation.

Talking, as we all know, is the undoing of thinking. It’s impossible to do both at the same time. And what is unthought, obviously, no matter how glibly uttered, can’t be remembered.

At the last Umno general assembly, a reporter from another newspaper approached me and asked if I remembered the talk I’d given their cubs nine or 10 years before. On anxious dredging I un-earthed a murky image of a dozen or so unsmiling people with folded arms and crossed ankles in a windowless room in the rank premises her newspaper occupied back then.

She asked me if I remembered what I said, and the only thought I could discern in the dead blank of my mind was: “Oh s**t, here it comes.”

“You said,” she said, “you’re too young to be cynical.”

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She asked if I still thought so, and I said I supposed so, but now that we weren’t so young anymore it might be okay to enjoy the occasional cynic; heck, life oughtn’t be without some hard-earned indulgences.

At least, that’s what I meant to say. What I actually said, of course, I have no way of recalling, so I hope she doesn’t hold it against me in another nine or 10 years.

When it came to the students of Taylor’s College’s American Degree Program earlier this month, all I can remember is them. Good-looking, bright, fit, healthy, well-fed, brought-up and turned-out young men and women; young enough to be my children, had I not known at their age what I’ve since forgotten.

Young enough, at any rate, to have been born under the Mahathir Administration and for this to be the only Malaysia they’ve ever known. It doesn’t seem to have crippled them. They were attentive and alert, brighteyed, bushy-tailed and curious. They’re going to clean up in America, which will hold far fewer surprises for them than they hold in store for America, as well as for themselves. What the US offers them will be all the space in the world to unfold.

Because they did seem kind of crumpled up, a little, some of them. A certain hunching of the shoulders and constriction of the voice; a restraint of expression. They needed to reveal something. They were not really oppressed, prevented or intimidated from doing so, and they had the language; it was more that they seemed to lack the mechanisms for it; the templates, the techniques.

They wanted to contend with words like “censorship”, for example; big bad brutes of words the generation before had learned to shy away from.

(Hush, child, lest the Kraken wake!) They had been born and raised programmed to a default-setting of sensitive issues and no-fly zones established in their grandparents’ time, and although their parents might have held the key to it, the children had hardly even a notion of the lock.

Raised on the Discovery and National Geographic channels, they seemed irritated by parents and families who scoffed at dreams and counselled traditional common sense. No, they saw ample common sense in doing oceanography or theatre, making music or swimming with whales or writing, and generally following their bliss. (I encouraged them mightily, of course, subversive that I am.)

What did it mean to be Malaysian, or a Malaysian, they asked. Who were they, really? One young woman passionately asked: “What if I find out I’m not what I am?” — a question that might give a Zen Master years of pause. I strongly suspect they weren’t asking to be told, however, but to be enabled to tell.

I obviously had a good time. I was particularly moved by the e-mail one of them sent me the next day, reminding me that she had asked what it took to be a journalist, and I had replied: “Compassion and curiosity.”

Now she wants to be one too, oh dear, what have I done.

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READY FOR PROOFER Of newspapers, champagne glasses and pyramids mid week | Wednesday | 10 July 2002

I’m breaking a promise today, and this is my attempt at atonement. To the group of teachers I was scheduled to address at the NST’s Newspaper-inEducation workshop today on “Newspaper Writing Styles”, I have this to say: I know what an “inverted pyramid” is, but I’m blowed if I knowed what a “champagne glass” shaped story would be.

(Not that there have been no stories shaped in champagne glasses. Quite the contrary, one imagines, whether or not they were played with flutes. But that, I could have sworn, was as far as it went. Apparently not.)

This, however, is what I’ve been able to gather on the subject. Journalistic writing comes in three basic forms: Reportage, Analysis and Commentary. Each form is determined by its function. Together they constitute a three-tier pyramid (right-side-up), with Reportage as the foundation and Analysis in the middle supporting Commentary at the top.

Reportage answers to the Husband and his Five Wives: Who, What, Where, When and - the most demanding of the lot - Why? (The Husband, as usual, is left to figure out the all-important How?) It’s a family of facts whose objective is to inform.

Analysis takes the facts of reportage and sets them in context. Background, foreground, a narrative line of reasoning. The objective is to explain.

Commentary draws from both reportage and analysis and sets itself spinning with a jerk on the line of opinion. The objective is to influence. (lt follows, therefore, that to write commentary uninformed by analysis and reportage is to build, however elaborately, castles in the air.)

Put them all together, and you have what it takes to tell a story No doubt, this has declined in the past generation or two. It declined with written language, which declined with the advance of the visual media as much as of national policies gone awry; and with the telling of stories, which declined with the advent of the Age of Self-Reference (a.k.a.Aquarius).

But because the written media remain the only permanent record of our civilisation, this is where the tales of our times have to end up, if they are ever to have been told at all. (Tom Clancy put it better, of course, damn his macho sunglasses. “If it isn’t written down,” he had Jack Ryan’s wife say in one of those novels, “it didn’t happen.”)

So you see, writing styles in journalism are absolutely determined by the objective sought. Seeking to inform, a news report distils a story down to one concentrated paragraph of less than 50 words - if not a single sentence of under 10 - with the rest of the story arranged in subsequent paragraphs of steadily decreasing consequence. (The legendary “inverted pyramid”.) Reportage is pure craft, and its practitioners are the backbone and life-blood of this business.

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Analysis, however, has the more slippery task of sustaining interest. The 10th, 20th and 30th paragraphs have to carry as much weight as the first and last. There is a certain art to it - or at least an artful contrivance of devices picked from the novelist’s pocket. Quotes can turn into dialogue, for instance.

Colour and tone might be manipulated for drama and tension or comedic effect; whatever helps turn raw information into a wider sensibility; education, in a word.

Commentary, for all its airs and graces, is showbiz. That is, all the above plus the entertainment value necessary to get anyone to be bothered with or by your personal opinions.

Dear Teachers, that is all I have to tell you. However, I believe there’s something else you may want to know, which is how to write. lf you’re more than 12 years old, I’m sorry you asked that question, because the only answer I know is: you read.

(If you haven’t known this since the age of 12, you see, you’re unlikely ever to know it at all. But don’t feel bad, life can be just as wonderful and possibly even more so in some ways, not least because you’d be at the comics and horoscopes by now.)

There’s no two ways about it. In order to write, you must read. The language doesn’t matter - whatever you’re most comfortable with is fine. You read.

Everything. Books, Newspapers. Ads Comics, Road signs, Toothpaste tubes.

Your literacy becomes as natural as sight.

And if you’re reading in, say, English, when something like J.D. Salinger’s Catcher ln the Rye or Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea drifts into view, read them too. If they can’t snow you how to write, I’m not sure anyone can.

Fortunately, there’s a tremendous list of others you might care to try (available on request). A fantastic variety, in fact. A constellation, a galaxy, nay, a veritable Universe of writing, collectively amounting to the sum total of recorded human history, all with only one thing in common: they want to tell you a story.

So what’s your story?

Mine: I can’t be with you today because I’m on my way to Pulau Redang with a bunch of total strangers at the expense of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation and the forebearance of the Fisheries Department to attempt the wilful extermination of an entire species of marine life. (Eat that, Ace Ventura.)

We will be hunting Acanthaster planci, the dreaded coral-eating Crown-ofThorns starfish. We will haul them out of the sea in sacks to be buried inland, somewhere barren because these suckers are so poisonous they kill everything growing on the ground where they’re buried. The team that bags the most will be celebrated by howling rituals around the campfire, I suppose.

I’m almost glad it’s not a very effective way to control the populations of these predatory beasts. Still, hunting and killing beats writing for a living, for there’s bound to be a story in it.’(For instance, consider the dynamic tension inherent in extermination for the sake of conservation...)

Dear Teachers, fill your champagne glasses,and keep your students’ topped up.

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Did you really think Dr Mahathir was joking? mid week | Wednesday | 26 JUNE 2002

Did you think he was joking? Did you think Datuk Seri Dr Mahathir Mohamad resigned last Saturday in a fit of pique or, conversely, that he had deliberately planned his dramatic resignation expressly to enjoy that outpouring of love and protest from his party members?

If you did, perhaps by now you have at last stopped judging him by yourself. If there’s one thing Dr Mahathir has proved in his 56 years as a politician, the past 21 of them as president of Umno, chairman of the Barisan Nasional and Prime Minister of Malaysia, it’s that he’s not you or me.

You or I might have been that cynical and irresponsible, orchestrating the whole thing for our self-aggrandisement. You or I might actually have enjoyed that paroxysm of adoration from our devoted loyalists and fans. You or I might have wept crocodile tears while inwardly exulting, “they love me, they really love me!”

That’s why you and I are not the PM. So why did he do it the way he did? I don’t know; I’m not him. Like you, I’m just another hapless goon out here trying to hold onto this papyrus raft tossing on the weltering turbulence of the pond into which Dr Mahathir chucked this giant boulder last weekend.

All we have to go on is everything he said prior to the last words we actually heard him say, which were: “No, no, I’ve made my decision, it’s REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

been long enough.”

Since then, all we have known of Dr Mahathir’s feelings has been what we’ve heard from Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi. From the moment he took the stage at Dewan Merdeka, minutes after Dr Mahathir had left the hall, we have seen Pak Lah as never before. Did you think he was “weak”? Were you among those who injected the hint of a sneer into his being called “Mr Clean”, implying he lacked even the gumption for corruption? If so, you were wrong.

Abdullah Ahmad Badawi is and always has been a man of conscience, integrity, honour and self-discipline. At the time of the Umno split in 1987, Pak Lah paid for his conscience with three-and-a-half years in the political wilderness. What saw him through that trial-by-oblivion was his self-discipline, which by then had been honed into tempered steel by the fiery first few years of the Mahathir Administration.

Were you among those who thought Abdullah was “weak” because of his acquiescence to the upward mobility of Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim, brought in from the boondocks of religion-political activism and promoted above Pak Lah’s head?

Abdullah, born into Umno, had to watch the younger man’s rocketing rise from the launchpad of his very own Penang. He didn’t protest or sulk. He accepted Anwar, for the sake of the party.

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When the party was declared illegal in early 1988, Pak Lah found it too much to be made to choose between the two presumptive inheritors of Umno’s mantle, Dr Mahathir’s “Umno Baru” and Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah’s “Umno Malaysia”. It was not until Umno had regrouped under Dr Mahathir, while Ku Li went for broke with Semangat 46, that Abdullah returned to the entity that was closest to the Umno he had known.

If you were around at the time to remember how he was accused of capitulation, you might also recall Abdullah’s public declaration that his return was for the sake of the party, for his beloved Umno, and not the party president. And still some called him “weak”.

After Anwar was fired from Umno in September 1998, the party remained without a deputy president for four months. This was when Dr Mahathir was quoted as saying that his deputy had to be “exactly like me”. Some were like him in some ways, said the party president, others in other ways, but no one fully fit the bill. Abdullah said nothing. Some called that “weak”, too. I saw such strength as to put me in mind of a Rudyard Kipling rhyme remembered from childhood: “To stand and be still to the Birken-head drill is a damn tough bullet to chew.”

Abdullah was duly appointed deputy president of Umno (and, by extension, Deputy Prime Minister) four months later, and confirmed unopposed in the post at Umno’s electoral general assembly in May 2000. Commentators at the time (this one included) looked askance at Abdullah’s protected status, especially when that assembly delivered resounding votes of return for vice-presidents Datuk Seri Najib Razak, Tan Sri Muhammad Muhammad Taib and Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin.

Abdullah ignored our comments, and continued doing his job.

Within a month of that assembly, Dr Mahathir went on leave and Abdullah had his first stint as Acting Prime Minister. Knowing that two REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

previous DPMs had sealed their fates by their actions in this particularly hot seat, we watched to see what Pak Lah would do.

He simply did his job, which was to act on behalf of the PM and not, as his predecessors had misjudged, to act as though he were the PM. Abdullah knew this in a way Tan Sri (then Datuk) Musa Hitam had not known in 1985, when as acting PM Musa recognised an Opposition victory in Sabah, nor Anwar Ibrahim in 1997, when he did a whole bunch of things that Dr Mahathir might not have done.

Even in this, some called Abdullah “weak”. When he acted with pre- emptive force against the Reformasi rallies of 2000, they expressed surprise that such a “weak” man could act with such purpose and resolve.

Had such detractors been watching the live broadcast of last Saturday’s events in the Merdeka Hall of the Putra World Trade Centre, they would have seen a Pak Lah they might scarcely have recognised.

The way he took the stage within minutes of Dr Mahathir’s departure to calm the traumatised delegates and declare the assembly’s rejection of the president’s resignation, with such commanding power in a voice usually so faint as to have reporters straining to hear him at Press conferences, was nothing short of exemplary.

The Captain may have left the bridge, but that did not mean there was no one at the helm.

Since a few minutes after six that now-historic evening of June 22, 2002, Umno and this nation have been held calm and steady by the hand, voice and stature of Abdullah Ahmad Badawi.

May he continue doing his job as he has done, being the man he is. As Churchill once said, essentially of himself: “Some chicken! Some neck!”

Selamat berkhidmat, Pak Lah, and good luck to you, sir.

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Bearing the unspeakable burdens of duty mid week | Wednesday | 12 June 2002

Yesterday was the 39th anniversary of the Burning Monk of Saigon.

We may not even need to reproduce that image here for you to recall it — such was the impact of the photograph taken by Associated Press photographer Malcolm Browne in Saigon on the morning of June 11, 1963, that even those then unborn would likely have a visual memory of the fiery suicide of Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc, seated impassively in the lotus position on the street, his body engulfed in flames.

“He didn’t even twitch,” recalled one awed witness, decades later.

“He burned like wood.”

New York Times reporter David Halberstam had also been impressed by the monk’s unfathomable discipline. “As he burned he never moved a muscle, never uttered a sound,” Halberstam wrote at the time. (“Human beings burn,” he added, “surprisingly quickly.”)

In the pre-dawn darkness that fateful morning, 66-year-old Thich Quang Duc left his monastery at the Thien Mu Pagoda in Hue and, in the company of four other monks, climbed into a car for his final journey to Saigon. He had lived a monastic life since the age of seven, and had been ordained a monk at 20.

Thich Quang Duc had long declared his intentions to his superiors and the Buddhist community. He wanted to bring attention to the harsh treatment of Buddhists under the US-backed regime of Ngo Dinh Diem, to which he had written asking for an end to the repression of Buddhism. When his letters were ignored, Thich Quang Duc began weeks of deep meditation preparatory to his final act.

Arriving at the chosen site of his death, a busy crossroads in downtown Saigon, Thich Quang Duc sat down in the lotus position.

Two of his fellow monks doused him with kerosene. Thich Quang Duc struck a match... and his destiny instantly intertwined with that of a 30-year-old photographer from New York City.

Malcolm W. Browne was one of those “accidental journalists”, in his own words “stumbling into the profession” after spending his 20s as a chemist. He had arrived in Vietnam a couple of years earlier. By the time Fate led him to that intersection in Saigon, he had already begun seeing through the John F. Kennedy Administration’s “bright shining lie” of a purely “advisory” role in its support of the South Vietnamese government against Ho Chi Minh’s North.

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The night before Thich Quang Duc’s suicide, Browne received a call telling him to be at this place in Saigon at this time, as something “really important” was going to happen. He was there to see the car pull up and the monks emerge. He raised his camera and began taking pictures as they arranged their colleague’s immolation.

“I was stunned,” Browne recalled. “A cold sweat had broken out on my head... it was only with the greatest difficulty that I kept my attention focused on the mechanics of picture-taking.”

Browne later related how at any point in the entire ghastly sequence, he could have stopped it. It would have been a matter of four quick paces for him to have stepped up and kicked away the jerrycans of fuel or grabbed the box of matches from Thich Quang Duc’s hands. He didn’t, and his decision not to interfere would haunt Browne for years thereafter.

In the moment, however, both the monk and the photographer transcended their most basic and powerful instincts as human beings.

The monk transgressed the most incontrovertible rule of his Buddhism, and killed himself. The photographer subjugated his own humanity, and took the picture.

Although Halberstam’s New York Times refused to use the photo for fear of spoiling its readers’ breakfasts, John F. Kennedy saw it the next day and told his ambassador to Vietnam: “Diem must go.”

In Vietnam, Thich Quang Duc’s suicide prompted seven other monks and nuns to follow his example in the ensuing months. By that December, the Diem regime was overthrown, Kennedy was dead, and American public opinion had swung to the anti-war stance that was so profoundly to change America’s sense of self, not just in Vietnam but the world.

The Vietnam War would become the most photographed and reported war in history, after which no armed conflict would ever again receive such critical, free and total media coverage.

His photo of the burning monk won Malcolm Browne a Pulitzer Prize in 1964, and remains one of the most iconic war images of all time.

Thich Quang Duc’s heart, they say, did not burn, even after his charred remains had been ritually cremated to ashes. Considered a holy relic, it is kept at the Reserve Bank of Vietnam.

Even though what both men did, or did not do, on that awful morning 39 years and a day ago went against the grain of everything to which they had dedicated their hearts and souls, they fulfilled their duties as they saw them — and changed the world.

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On the long-term prospects of short sight mid week | Wednesday | 5 June 2002

Work is progressing on the great new dam being built on the Sungai Selangor just seven km up the road from a hamlet ominously named Ampang Pecah (“Broken Dam”).

Moves are afoot, I’m told, to have that place-name changed to something less evocative of the 1889 damburst that swept away everything of old Kuala Kubu that wasn’t perched on the knoll now displaying the pretty little township of Kuala Kubu Baru.

Of course, the RM2.5 billion Sg Selangor Dam will be light-years beyond the earthen dike that collapsed in the 19th century, but it might as well be made of spit and sand for the ire it raised among our conservationists and nature-lovers.

Concerted and impassioned protests were mounted against the project. The residents of Kuala Kubu Baru attended the presentations of NGOs and other concerned parties, dutifully perusing the official environmental impact assessment and its several rebuttals.

But they did not whole-heartedly lend their own voices to the protests. This recalcitrance was not entirely rooted in “fear of reprisals”, as the more supercilious activists suggested.

To be sure, the old families of KKB, more than most, have long experience of security regulations. Theirs was among the last “black areas” in the country to be declared “white” after the Communist REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

insurgency, which began in earnest with the 1951 assassination of British High Commissioner Henry Gurney just 29km up the road from KKB to Fraser’s Hill.

Partly as a consequence of the Emergency, Kuala Kubu Baru has long been home to the Royal Malaysian Police Academy and the Army’s 21st Commando Regiment. The town has grown into a disciplined, orderly and safe place, populated by multi-generational families with an historic understanding of the sacrifices necessary for peace and security.

This was not, however, the principal reason for the residents’ unprotesting acceptance of the new dam.

The truth was, many of KKB’s old families now have descendants living and working in the Klang Valley, and they were moved and distressed by the water shortages suffered by their descendants in that conurbation in recent years.

Their children and grandchildren had done well, they thought, building lives, careers and families in the big city, owning nice cars and living in modern condominiums with swimming pools. It grieved the old folk to see their upwardly mobile offspring lining up at those swimming pools to fill buckets of water for their household needs.

So the people of KKB accepted the dam as a solution to that problem.

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They also acknowledged that the dam site — a deep and narrow gorge — would result in a relatively small area of inundation. The 100m-deep lake formed by the Sg Selangor dam would have a surface area of less than seven square kilometres, making it about one-fortieth as vast as, say, Kenyir Lake in Terengganu.

Moreover, such dam-made lakes as Kenyir and Kedah’s Pedu became tourist attractions in their own right, with holiday resorts and watersports facilities bringing financial benefits and entrepreneurial opportunities to their districts. With Hulu Selangor well-known for adventure sports such as jungle trekking, rock-climbing, mountain biking and river rafting, many KKB locals eagerly anticipated such prospects.

There was also the immediate boost to the local economy from feeding, sheltering and supplying the dam’s hundreds of workers for the five years of construction. This has already enhanced the prosperity of that little town with rising land values, new businesses and refurbished shop-houses.

Then there was the matter of the relocation of two Orang Asli villages, Gerachi and Pertak, comprising some 100 Temuan families.

They now live in nice new houses perched on hilltops with what will be splendid lake views.

Visiting urbanites express envy at the Temuans’ new homes, wishing they could live in such salubrious surroundings. They might yet be able to. Precedents have been set in Pahang granting the Orang Asli title to their property, which if extended to the Temuan of Hulu Selangor may mean they can eventually sell their houses if they wish.

The Temuan’s standard of living has also been raised by the monetary compensation they received for their old rubber and fruit trees, which were sold for timber or left to be drowned by the rising waters of the dam.

Alas, such positivism has not ended there. The newly denuded slopes sweeping down from Kampung Gerachi Jaya to what will be the future REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

lakeshore have been planted with oil palm.

At this point, this writer finds it a little less easy being an apologist for this project. The Temuan cannot eat oil palm fruit, nor sell it by the roadside.

They have no experience in oil palm cultivation, nor the inclination to develop it. Unlike with pomelos, durian or petai, oil palm demands extensive experience in agro-industrial management and intensive use of fertilisers, pesticides and weedicides.

Oil palm fruit bunches are the very devil to harvest. They are huge and heavy; they shake the ground when they fall, even from those short, big- bunched “Dolly Parton” varieties. Moreover, steep hill slopes are the least suitable terrain for oil palm, as anyone would know who’s ever seen a 40kg fruit bunch hit the ground and barrel downhill with harvesters frantically leaping out of its way.

Finally, productive oil palm cultivation in Malaysia requires fourtimes more fertiliser than rubber, six times more than rice and eight times more than cocoa. Without advanced and expensive techniques of terrain contouring and soil preparation, much of those fertilisers, weedicides and pesticides may run off down those steep slopes — in this case, directly into the drinking water to be supplied to the Klang Valley.

The Orang Asli’s new land could have been given over to the cultivation of fruit trees, flowers, herbs and medicinal plants, which is almost certainly how the Temuan themselves would have chosen to use their new land, had they been given the choice.

Compelling them into oil palm cultivation may be the most wrongheaded and short-sighted development in this entire saga.

There is no consolation in knowing that those who conceived and implemented this scheme may also eventually be drinking the chemicalladen water seeping off their grand ambitions.

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Tis an ill wind that blows no one any good mid week | Wednesday | 29 MAY 2002

Having at last secured gainful employment back in the Klang Valley, I sought to close out a decade of drift by making the metaphor literal with a fortnight’s diving off the Peninsular east coast.

As I floated at the interface of ocean and atmosphere off Pulau Lang Tengah, midway between the Perhentians and Redang, breathing the champagne-like air found only in the first half-metre above the sea’s surface, the coral gardens beneath me and their riotous assemblage of residents appeared like an ancestral kampung of my own.

Here a flotilla of Blacktip Sharks; there a pair of Green Turtles; in the blue distance, a swooping squadron of Eagle Rays. On a single twokilometre snorkel-swim I counted a dozen species of coral and 25 species of fish; each a familiar face and a welcome sight after years in which I had feared I’d never see them again, as the wilderness of our coastal waters retreated beneath the rapid development of tourism.

Tourism was and always will be a double-edged sword, as I learned in the case of the Pulau Redang group of islands in the late 1970s. Marine scientists had found, to their astonishment, that Peninsular Malaysia’s coral reefs, though limited to necklaces encircling our islands in the South China Sea, were among the most diverse in the world. There were as many coral species off Terengganu as there were in the entire length of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

Of that enchanting skein of islands off the peninsula’s east coast, Pulau Redang and her handmaidens were the loveliest of all. They had to be gazetted as a marine reserve, not just for the benefit of our country but the world.Tak kenal maka tak cinta, however. In order to protect and preserve this fabulous environment, we believed, people had first to be made aware of it.

Big-name naturalists and film-makers were invited, and we made documentaries and wrote articles on this very special place. As a consequence that we should have anticipated but didn’t, to our unbounded horror, boatloads of weekend divers, anglers and picnickers began flocking to Redang.

By the time the Redang Marine Reserve attained statutory reality some 20 years ago, it had become not a showcase of the best of the marine environment but a laboratory for the restoration of a brutalised ecosystem.

Our good intentions had backfired, turning us from well-meaning benefactors into accomplices in a terrible rape. I can’t say I’ve recovered REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

from that awakening - till my dying day my attitude towards conservation will be to keep human society well away from any fragile natural environment - but I’m relieved now to report that the peninsula’s reefs seem to have proven themselves more resilient than this writer.

The tragically unregulated tourism of the 1980s has been replaced by a level of awareness that’s a credit to everyone who ever advocated environmental protection. Spearfishing is now illegal and unheard of.

Shell collectors are booed by their own families. Boats now moor, not anchor.

Although virtually every island with a source of fresh water now boasts holiday resorts, every one of them with their own dive centre, even the most casual divers have learned how to hold neutral buoyancy above the reef like puffer fish, and not plough across it like bulldozers.

Today, however, a question mark hangs over the prospects for tourism in Terengganu, no thanks to the doubts and fears raised by the present State Government’s threats to segregate beaches and regulate visitors’ attire. Kuala Terengganu has visibly changed since the ascent of a Pas administration. Once sparkling, the State capital has grown shabbier and unkempt.

Part of this deterioration may be cynically deliberate and political, in sending the message that Terengganu is now poorer due to the diminution of Federal funds. I did not receive the impression, however, that the people of Terengganu were wholly delighted with their straitened circumstances.

To be sure, the Pas administration is applauded by those who now find it easier to operate burger stalls or other roadside enterprises, which no longer require licences. The poor have also found relief in the abolition of housing assessments. At many other levels, though, I was reminded that Terengganu is historically a stranger to deprivation - and bristles at the suggestion that the objective of those who elected Pas was to redeem themselves as Muslims.

Thus, the attitude of an administration more concerned with establishing new punishments than imparting a greater measure of religious grace to life may yet consign Pas to history in Terengganu. We shall see at the next general election.

But there’s a silver lining to Pas’ dark cloud. If Pas continues to equate tourism with degeneracy, and if that leads to the decimation of that industry in Terengganu, islands such as Lang Tengah, Redang and the Perhentians may be freed from their current overburden of garbage, sewage and karaoke machines. Artificial lighting will wink out and generators fall silent.

The stars will once again shine in undimmed splendour over the winedark seas, and the coral reefs regain their full, magnificent, undisturbed glory.

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Writing the script for a new Armageddon mid week | Wednesday | 3 April 2002

There was something I learned in America last autumn that I haven’t yet told you. I didn’t want to, preferring instead to watch what happened, in case this story turned out to be a crock. It might still, if there’s a grain of compassion left in the world, but it hasn’t yet.

So let me now take you back to an early November evening in Fairfield County, Connecticut; a verdant gated enclave of millionaires’ mansions a 90-minute drive from New York City, and one of the richest places in America.

In the expansive lounge of one of these sumptuous homes, your correspondent is sitting in front of 20 very wealthy Americans, earnestly making the best case he can for a suspension of the US offensive in Afghanistan for the impending Muslim fasting month, and going down like a corpse on the carpet.

This was a tough crowd. Unlike the students and academics I’d grown accustomed to addressing, there was no one here from Peoria. These were the Real Deal: rich east coast Republican backers of the George W. Bush administration.

Not a face of colour among them, but that wasn’t as surprising as how young they were. I’d expected grey eminences, landed gentry, old money, but these were stockbrokers, lawyers and investment bankers in their 30s, 40s and 50s.

They were top-of-the-heap, cream-of-the-crop, A-number-one, powerbroking American over-achievers. In their stonily impassive company, I was but two degrees of separation from the Oval Office.

It was far enough. When I was done talking, some left without a word, the rest adjourned to dinner, and one of them took me aside for a private education.

“Listen,” he said, as though I had a choice. “There’s not a chance we’ll stop bombing for Rammerdan. We can’t be expected to observe other peoples’ holidays.”

Casually dressed and with an easy-going, ingratiating manner, he looked to be in his early 40s; a market maven of some kind, or so I was later told. And now, leaning forward and dropping his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, he was going to tell me what was really going to happen.

“First, we’ll destroy the Taliban and restructure Afghanistan,” he said.

“That means we get the Central Asian Republics as well. We work with Russia, they’ll come along. Then we’ll get Iraq, and after that the North REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

African countries, Libya, Algeria. Then we go back and get the other Arab countries, Somalia, Yemen, and finish off with Iran.” He might have been describing a much-anticipated meal.

“Destroy and restructure,” I summarised.

“Mm-hmm,” he murmured, smiling. “And we’ll keep an eye on countries like yours, Indonesia and the Philippines, to see that they take care of their own extremists.”

“But millions may die.”

“No they won’t,” he said, dismissively. “Only if they resist. Why should they? Our way is the better way. They won’t resist. They want what we offer.”

“Resistance is Futile,” I quoted, lamely. He nodded, grinning ingenuously.

“Have you,” I asked, “ever visited any of the countries you mention?”

“No,” he said, the smile never leaving his face. Civilised behaviour being what it has to be, we shook hands and wished each other good luck and goodbye.

Was this gentleman revealing the Bush Administration’s true intentions towards the Arab and Muslim world? I didn’t really think so.

Being in America as a guest of the US State Department, I had no illusions: the object of the exercise was to familiarise me with American thinking. What he said, I thought, was not so much Truth as Dare - what he wanted me to know and be impressed by, to take home to my WatchListed country and let people know and be duly warned.

It was your basic tough talk, ventured more to intimidate than inform.

Worrisomely, however, events in the ensuing five months have cleaved closely to his script. Afghanistan’s been remade, the Central Asian Republics are enfolded in a cosy Russo-American embrace and, yes, farcically, Somalia and Iraq are back in the crosshairs. So now I feel I ought to dutifully pass on his message: Be Warned, Everyone.

Because even the US could not have scripted the vengeance with which its “war on terrorism” would be hijacked by Israel, for one, to launch a final assault on its own problems. Wreathed in the volatile vapours of this global American campaign, the Middle East’s worst civil conflict has escalated to near-apocalyptic levels.

With the awful “infra-terrorism” of teenage Palestinian suicide bombers immolating innocents by the day, and the implacable Israeli assault & battery of the Palestinian Authority, theirs is a conflict no longer seeking resolution, but outright elimination.

If in some American minds the events of last Sept 11 seemed an opportunity to remake the world, perhaps the current cataclysm in the Middle East might remind them of what’s at stake in all those places they’ve never seen.

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Dragons of destiny REHMAN RASHID ON FRIDAY | 19 February1988

Nine celestial Dragons awaited their cue to enter the affairs of the world, and eight of them were well worth welcoming in a fusillade of firecrackers.

The ninth, however, may cause problems. According to some mediums (so called, perhaps, because they’re neither rare nor well done), this one is a disgrun-tled Dragon, bent on causing mischief and woe.

The mediums who detected the prowling presence of this maverick miscreant Dragon assure us, however, that there are ways and means of ensuring he doesn’t ensconce himself in our homes to mess up our lives. What’s more, they will gladly reveal to us those ways and means, upon receipt of a suitable fee.

We might do well to heed the warning. It seems this misbegotten Dragon has made its appearance before. In fact, it seems to have turned up without fail every 12 years.

But whether he’s a harbinger of hope or a courier of calamity, his-tory would indicate that the advent of the Dragon has hardly ever been less than auspicious in its portents.

The last time the Year of the Dragon made its appearance, Tun Razak passed away, Datuk Hussein Onn became Prime Minister, Dr Mahathir became his Deputy and the Campbell shopping complex caught fire.

Although 1976 may have seemed a good year for Jimmy Carter, who got elected President of the United States, it was not a good year for Mao Tse-tung, who died.

Nearer the home front, it started out as a great year for a new Sabahan party named Berjaya and a bad one for Usno. Then it became a very bad year indeed for the family of Berjaya founder Tun Fuad Stephens, whilst remaining pretty bleak for Tun Mustapha.

Indeed, the last time the Year of the Dragon made an appearance, the mythological beast did not seem particularly well-disposed towards politicians; of whom the year’s most noteworthy was Field-Marshal General Sir KnightCommander and Saalour-of-the-British-Empire Idi Amin of Uganda.

The time before that, 1964, the Dragon was a little more benevolent. Lyndon Johnson had the best year of his life, although Vietnam could’ve done better.

Cassius Clay saw some kind of light and became some kind of Muslim, with still years to go before he was to start seeing all kinds of stars.

Next-door to a fledgling Malaysia and a skittish Singapore, Bung Karno had a grand time Confronting British Imperialism by sending motley bands of erstwhile guerillas to have a miserable time in the mangrove swamps of south Johore.

All-in-all, however, Dragon Year 1964 was a wonderful year for optimism, because that was when the entire world first heard of a global development that REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

rendered politics almost irrelevant: it was called the Beatles.

Twelve years earlier, however, politics didn’t yet exist; at least not in the guise we have all since come to know and love. High Commissioner General Sir Gerald Templer KCB GCMG KBE DSO, who arrived in Malaya in Dragon Year 1952, could hardly have been called a politician.

The Dragon was very good to Sir Gerald and thoroughly rotten to the little town of Tanjong Malim, which he punished for not doing enough to help exterminate Communism.

But Tanjong Malim learned its lesson well, as did more than a few Malayan Communists. By the end of that year, Templer was able to declare: “The shooting war is under control”. The Com-munists greeted the Year of the Snake most aptly, by disappearing belly-wise into the belukar for the next 30 years.

The Dragon was distinctly re-gal in 1952: not only did Gerald Templer reign, King George VI died and his daughter Elizabeth became, to all intents and purposes, Queen. The Duchess of Kent visited Malaya — the new-spapers of the time seemed to consider this the undisputed high point of the year, almost casting into insignificance the Umno/MCA alliance sweep of the “guinea-pig” elections in December.

And so here we are now in 1988, the third visit of the Dragon since the Malayan Citizenship Bill granted 72 per cent of the Malayan population, and their descendants in perpetuity, the right to call this country home. What shall the Dragon do with us this time?

Clearly, it seems somewhat silly to think of there being Good Dragons and Bad Dragons, when the truth is that something which results in great good fortune for one person might very well turn out to be unparalleled disaster for another.

Instead of being “Good” or “Bad”, Dragons are more properly respected for simply being “Awesome”.

This year, however, the balance of mystical power might be swayed in everyone’s favour by this being a Double-8 year as well. Maybe this unique and happy conjunction, this twice-blessed, Double-Prosperity Dragon, will move more people to expect the best and therefore decide that this is by far the most auspicious time to buy a new house or car or embark on some new investments and mobilise those savings; and thus will the economy pick up and good things happen and a better time be had by all.

From the look of things, it would seem that the auguries must indeed be good; especially considering the unusually large number of expectant Malaysian mothers now happily waddling around in advanced stages of pregnancy.

At the very least, there’s got to be a lot of hope embodied in all those Dragon babies.

So Gong Xi Fa Cai to celebrants of all races; and Kong Hee Fatt Choy to all non-Mandarin-speaking Chinese-school teachers; and Keong Hee Huat Chye to everyone living north of Ipoh.

Beat the drums and bang the gongs! The Dragon has arrived, and we’d all do well to make him welcome. Especially since he may have horns.

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‘THE LAW IS CLEAR’ REHMAN RASHID ON FRIDAY | 12 February1988

At 6:15pm on Thursday, February 4,1988, Justice Harun Hashim of the Kuala Lumpur High Court ruled that Umno was an unlawful party.

His judgment was based upon a strict reading of Section 12 of the Societies Act 1986, under which any political party found to have allowed the participation of unregistered branches would itself be guilty of transgressing the law.

(As some lawyers have pointed out, this is a peculiar provision; analogous to saying that the parents of an illegitimate child are themselves illegitimate. But that is the law as it stands today.)

Justice Harun’s ruling effectively closed the case that had been brought before the High Court by 11 Umno members who were seeking primarily to have last April’s Umno elections declared null and void. The plaintiffs have, in effect, succeeded; but only through the unexpected happenstance of Umno as a whole being declared unlawful.

In hindsight, it would seem that as soon as both the plaintiffs and the defendants accepted in their Statement of Agreed Facts that the branches in question were indeed unregistered “at all material times”, the court’s decision was set.

Counsel for the defence seemed quite unconcerned about those branches being unregistered, because much of the defence rested on the premise that this was an internal Umno matter; and that it had been brought forth by those with political expedience aforethought, and whose membership of Umno was automatically invalidated by the very act of initiating that suit.

In short, this was not a matter for the judiciary; it was none of the court’s business.

(Besides, the plain and simple fact was: those branches were unregistered.)

So: ever since last April 24, when the unregistered branches participated in the Umno General Assembly and elections, Umno has been unlawful in the eyes of the courts.

Since last Thursday’s shock decision, what has transpired has been an outpouring of support for Prime Minister Datuk Seri Dr Mahathir Mohamad. The reason for this is not mere sentiment. According to Article 43 of the Federal Constitution, Dr Mahathir’s continued tenure as Prime Minister of Malaysia depends on his continuing “to command the support of the majority of the members of the House of Representatives”. *** Technically, the Prime Minister of Malaysia need not belong to a political party — all he needs is that majority support of the nation’s elected representatives. It is in observance of that stipulation that we have witnessed this avalanche of declared loyalty to the Prime Minister.

It has been quite a spectacle; this resounding affirmation of the esteem in which Dr Mahathir is held by his Parliamentary colleagues and the Barisan Nasional as a whole.

REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

If indeed this was the necessary first step towards restoring Umno’s legitimacy, then fair enough: the first step has been taken.

Now, please will Umno get itself legal again?

We have had a week of mostly emotion when we should have been seeing much more in the way of motion; towards a redressal of the transgressions which have led to this “unlawfulness” in the first place.

Those contentious branches have either to be properly registered with the Registrar of Societies, or shed from Umno pending lawful reinsta-tement at a later date. Consequent upon this, Umno itself must be reregistered. This may be an involved process, commencing with the recent issuance of a “show-cause” letter from the Registrar of Societies and the initiation of set procedures upon Umno’s response; or it May be that the particular exigencies of this situation justify an accelerated solution, a circumvention of procedure, in view of the need to not let these so-called “technicalities” lead to the destruction of Umno — and the staggering implications such an eventuality would have on the governance of Malaysia.

Who is to say how the processes of law are to work when one of the most important components of the law-making process in this country falls foul of its own legislative creation?

But whatever the road from here, Umno must do whatever is necessary to be fully legalised again, and soon.

The personal authority and credibility of Dr Mahathir cannot be denied, but the wide-ranging support the Prime Minister enjoys cannot in itself ameliorate the decision of the courts — not unless the courts are to be denied any authority and credibility of their own.

This matter is too urgent to be allowed to remain mired in essentially political actions and reactions; for even as a majority of the na-tion’s elected, representatives rally around the Prime Minister, the gaping wound left in Umno’s legal validity by the High Court decision is proving a beacon of hope to those who see this as an opportunity to attempt the refashioning of Umno in their own image.

The gravity of the current bid to cleave Umno into Umno(I) and Umno(II) is undeniable. It even involves Bapa Malaysia Tunku Abdul Rahman, who at 85 years of age seems destined never to enjoy a peaceful and contented retirement.

What price, in truth, Umno’s unity?

A truism: Unity stems from a common cause, or a common adversary, or some shifting balance of both. The acrimonious divisions of recent history seem to have been rooted in conflicting perceptions of the essence of Umno’s cause. Now, however, there is a common adversary’ the like of which has never been faced before: Umno’s illegitimacy in law.

Over the past few days, some senior Umno leaders have voiced their belief that this unprecedented development may well prove to be the ultimate spur to drive Umno towards reestablishing the unity of purpose it needs. They must be proved right.

Crucially, however, that unity must have standing in, and there-fore the backing of, the law of the land.

Otherwise, all that we can rely on for even the semblance of unity will be emotion; and emotion is a most unreliable guardian, inimical to the sober conduct of government.

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Requiem for a Dead Cat REHMAN RASHID ON FRIDAY | 5 February 1988

One night some months ago, when I was out of town, my brothers Rafique and Seng Keat were on their way out for a little night music when they spotted a cat huddled under the car.

Getting down on their hands and knees, they managed to ease the creature out. They found that someone had tied the cat’s front legs together with wire, so tightly that both paws were grotesquely swollen.

They took the cat inside and cut away the wire, freeing its front legs, then set it out in the garden. Then they went off for their evening’s entertainment, hoping the cat still had at least one or two lives left. They thought no more of the cat until some days later, by which time they could smell it.

We have in our garden a shed, of sorts, in which we keep the various bits and pieces of useless detritus which people never quite get around to throwing away and so allow to pile up in their garden sheds. The cat had found its way in there, and died. *** It was in an advanced state of decomposition by the time they found it; bloated and putrefying. (“Death,” said Seng Keat later, “is ugly.”)

Rafique once again demonstrated the hidden depths to his being when he undertook the job of undertaking the cat, or what was left of it. He manoeuvred the carcass into a plastic bag, put that into another plastic bag, and then together they went off to dump it into the big rubbish skip behind the local wet market.

They told me about this incident when I got back, and since then my neighbourhood seems to have changed a little, at least to me.

With its legs lashed together like that, the ‘cat couldn’t have stumbled very far before looking for some meagre shelter in which to lie down and die.

Somewhere nearby, it seems, some very disturbed person is living.

What sort of person would do someth-ing like that? Maybe the cat crept into his house and stole some food or so-mething, and caused this person to fly into an uncontrollable rage. But no — I’ve seen enough broken and scalded cats and dogs in my life to know how fits of rage manifest themselves when directed against animals.

This was worse. This was the product of no wild fit of anger. This cat was deliberately, meticulously dealt with. There was such a fiendish levelheadedness about what was done to it; it was almost an intelligent way to kill a cat, if what you’re after is the slowest and most agonising death possible.

Grab it, lash its front legs together and fling it out onto the road... how does a human being think up such a thing? What kind of fever boils in such a REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

brain? And why?

It scares me that I don’t understand this. I don’t like having to believe in blind madness. I want to believe that all things human are linked to all other things human; that if you look hard enough you can always find some causative pattern that explains why people do the things they do, no matter how horrific or apparently insensate their behaviour.

But this? I live in an urban working-class, moderately multi-racial neighbourhood — hawkers, manual workers, wage-earners. Most, I would imagine, make honest livings. But somewhere nearby is someone who took serious pleasure in inflicting torture and death.

Ah, but so what, right? It was just a stray cat. Stray cats die all the time, and usually in unsavoury ways. It’s just their karma, I suppose. Stray cats are a very low form of life; if they were any lower they’d be cockroaches.

It was such an ordinary atrocity; such an insignificant sadism, a simple household brutality.

Sometimes you wondei about brutality, about inhumanity. When you do, you generally think about it in some macro, global, philosophical manner. The inhumanity of war, the brutality of genocide.

When trying to understand the existence of brutality, we tend to resort to one of two palliatives: either we enoble it in the name of sacrifice — terrible but also transcendent; or we ascribe to it the legitimacy of tragedy — terrible but also human.

In order not to see brutality as plain and simple madness, we have to elevate it to the status of divinity; someth-ing that changes worlds, something high above and far beyond our tiny lives down here below. * * * People, we say, are essentially good — it is ideologies, and the Governments behind them, that create all the problems and fight all the wars. People want nothing more than to live and let live, be happy, have fun, make babies, enjoy life. Ideologies, not people, move Governments to pledge devotion to armies and weapons and prisons.

Therefore, we reason, if Govern. ments could be less like extraordinary dreams and more like ordinary people, there’d be no nuclear weapons and wars and needless suffering.

This belief, as painfully naive as it is, nonetheless stands as the fount of all the hope we have. That is why we cherish it with all the irrationality of love.

That is also why it can be so disquieting to have brutality suddenly turn up living right next door to you, or maybe sitting next to you on the bus, or standing behind you in the post-office queue, or eating at the table next to yours at the all-night food-stalls... ...or, who knows, perhaps even sleep-ing in your own soul....

But, as I told Seng Keat, we’re still not so bad. There are places in the world where they do this sort of thing to other people.

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Money from the heart REHMAN RASHID ON FRIDAY | 29 January 1988

It will happen again very soon. In fact, it’s probably happening right now. Somewhere out there, a baby is being born with a defective heart.

More than 2,000 of them are born each year; an average of more than five a day.

If past experience is anything to go by, and it usually is, about one per cent of them will be born to parents who understand the recourses available to them in seeking help for their infants. They will go to the media and appeal to the Malaysian public for help — and they know they will be heard.

Their children will have their pic¬tures appear in the newspapers, dona¬tions will be invited, and a great many people will respond.

Who are these generous people, these merit-making Malaysians?

Some of them are public-spirited groups like Sakti, the Lions and Ro¬tary Clubs, the Jaycees. Others are companies like Sports Toto, handing out a couple of grand here and there, and getting their pictures taken doing it.

But for the most part these givers are completely unknown. You might have someone like six-year-old Clarence Ooi, leading his kid brother and sister in a $20.65 demolition of their piggy banks to help save the life of Baby Roger Slow.

Or you might have someone like the anonymous donor who gave REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

three-year-old Chan Yoke Chin the entire $10,000 she needed for surgery in Singapore. (“Who was that masked man?” “Why, that was the Loan Arranger!”)

And you have the taxi-driver turning over a day’s takings for the sake of one child; night-market stall-holders having a whip-round for another. A form is passed around an office, the loose change and dollarbills accumulate. You have schoolchildren and housewives, clerks and labourers, office-workers and executives, and who else? You? Me? Last year, 1987, in campaigns run by the New Straits Times Group alone, a faceless and unknown salvation army of Malaysians put together a total of almost half-a-million ringgit to help bring the hope of a normal life to 19 children between the ages of one month and six years; and also to car-diac patient Alison Beh, 26, who re-ceived a $20,000 share of that astounding and commonplace benevolence.

As far as I can tell, this sort of thing is unique to Malaysia. I know of no other country where, on average once every six weeks, money and caring materialise out of nowhere to rescue total strangers and their babes-inneed.

There are some things about us which will always make Malaysia an ace place.

But before we let ourselves get car-ried away again by the 199

compassionate love that abounds in this nation, let’s think about why all that money had to be raised.

The cost of heart surgery in Britain is $35,000. In Australia it is $25,000; in Singapore or the Philippines, $18,000. At the very least, four or five times more than similar surgery costs here.

Oh yes, we do have heart surgery in Malaysia. Here, valve replacements cost about $7,000, coronary bypasses cost $5,500, and hole-in-the-heart surgery costs just $4,500. And if you’re poor, you can qualify for waivers that mean you pay as little as $500 for some of these operations.

For the $500,000 donated by the pub-lic to enable 20 children to go overseas for surgery, over a hundred could have been treated here.

And the success-rate here for open-heart surgery is 98.25 per cent; for closed-heart, 99.74 per cent.

(Of course, there will be exceptional cases like Chin Mar Wick, whose con-catenation of cardio-thoracic problems was more than Malaysian facilities could handle. But as one senior cardiologist insisted: “Very few cases need to go abroad.”)

The cardinal problem is no longer one of expertise, in which we have made great progress, but of equipment. Machines, apparatus, buildings.

Last November, the Kuala Lumpur General Hospital received a $50 million grant from the Economic Planning Unit of the Prime Minister’s Department. Their first priority was the hospital roof, leaking so badly it needed $4 million-worth of repairs. (The cost of a brand-new cardiac unit and the personnel to maintain it spent on fixing gutters...)

Next on the fixit-list was the plumbing and air-conditioning — a deadly-serious problem. Last July, 10 of the KLGH’s main operating theatres had to be closed because of bacterial contamination due to faulty plumbing and sanitation. Only in November did the last five of them re-open.

The 30 per cent reduction in the KLGH’s surgical capacity for four months greatly worsened the hospital’s backlog of cases. Today, there is a two-year wait for the 700 KLGH heart patients still hoping to at least outlive the waiting list.

The situation is markedly better at the University Hospital, where $2.5 million-worth of renovations a year ago has helped reduce the wait to two or three months for the 50 patients scheduled for cardiothoracic surgery.

The KLGH and the UH are the only two public-sector cardiac centres in Malaysia. Dr J.S. Sambhi of the Ma-laysian Heart Foundation estimates that another 14 are needed to meet the needs of our population, each costing $3 million to set up. With the roofs leaking and REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

the plumbing shot, where is the money going to come from?

With all this basic infrastructure in such dire need of attention, what chance is there for a few more dialysis machines at $30,000 each to add to the five presently available for the 700 Malaysians who need them?

And what are the odds against get¬ting a few more ultrasound heartscanners and some hefty diagnostic computer mainframes anytime soon?

Who’s got the money?

The 1986-90 Fifth Malaysia Plan allocation for development expenditure in the public health services was $697.88 million. Bear that in mind as you consider the following: When Sports Toto was listed on the KLSE last August, it attracted almost as much — $666 million -- in public funds.

The Social Welfare Lottery has an annual turnover of $154 million.

(Slightly over half of that is paid out in prizes, however.)

And last year, the Grandfather of all those institutions which owe their ex-istence directly to public subscription, the Employees Provident Fund, made a net investment profit of $2.4 billion on total assets of $31 billion. ($2.4 billion would pay for 800 cardiac units or 80,000 dialysis machines or surgery for 100,000 hole-in-the-heart babies overseas or 500,000 locally. Alt, if wishes were horses...)

Nothing wrong with making money, of course, which the EPF seems more than passably good at; but when your pokok is the savings the common people, it would be appropriate to remember that the whole point of greater prosperity is a better “quality¬of-life” — and that there are a great many people whose quality of life would be immeasurably enhanced by knowing their children might have a fighting chance of growing up to lead normal lives.

The fragile lives of children like Chin Mar Wick, Punam Naidu and Eong Kerk Chek, touching hearts from here to France and Australia, provide a truly special gift to a great many people — the chance to show they care.

But surely there must be a way for that caring to achieve even more than it does at present. This is not to say that public donations are of minimal importance — on the contrary, they are a pulse that beats close to the great national heart that shall always be the salvation of Malaysia.

It’s just a question of getting value-for-money, that’s all.

(By-the-way, those of you who don-ated the $82,000 for Baby Mar Wick will be pleased to know he’s safely back from France, the operation was a success and he’s doing just fine. I hope he grows up to be a world-famous heart surgeon.)

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Read any good books lately?

REHMAN RASHID ON FRIDAY | 22 January 1988

It is very nice to see the Government attempting to persuade people to read books, as earnestly as it persuades us to be loyal, love Bahasa and drink coconut water.

The effectiveness of such campaigns is undeniable. Coconut smallholders are now. having a much better time, and with no ap-parent jeopardy to the Malaysian male libido. The development of the National Language seems to be progressing in quantum leaps and bounds — baku perhaps, beku never. And a veritable Top Ten of catchy new patriotic pop-songs is setting hearts a-stirring and feet a-tapping across the nation, demi negara yang tercinta....

With equivalent results in the Reading Campaign, we might even be assured of a significantly more literate nation by year’s end.

This will be a relief; especially to those senior administrators who have been shocked beyond belief by the realisation that it is still possible for Malaysians to complete 12 years of education without learning the value of being able to read.

Education Minister Encik Anwar Ibrahim was barely able to control his ire at having had to issue a directive henceforth requiring all candidates for teachertraihing to be able to prove that they have read at least three books by the time they present themselves as potential teachers.

“And we’re not talking about poor people, or children,” he said recently, “these are adults.”

This is not the sort of thing one wishes to talk about too loudly —what will the neighbours think? — but there could hardly be a more telling indication of the present status of reading in the Malaysian consciousness: somewhere slight. ly subordinate to taking out the rubbish.

I rather fear, however, that the three-book directive to trainee teachers is a valiant attempt to salvage a lost cause — people who aren’t into reading by then aren’t likely ever to be; except as a means to enhance career prospects and avoid being scolded.

The Year of the Reader, then, is a campaign which would be most productive if targeted primarily at children and their parents. Get Malaysian kids turned-on to books, and make sure their parents are made to feel guilty as hell if they’re not helping.

Activate their imaginations! Channel their curiosity! Show them that in books they can find adventure and excitement sufficient to make the Transformers look like a cartoon.

Show them how books can be even better than videos — you can fastforward, rewind, freeze-frame and pause whenever you please; only here the picture quality lasts forever and actually improves with continuous use. Show them how you can open a book and be instantly transported anywhere in the REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

world and everywhere beyond; go plunging into the past or shooting into the future; embark on endless travels and see wondrous things.

Be advised that for the price of a MASK Rhino Mobile Defence Unit with Two Action Figures ($59.90), you could get them the illustrated children’s edition of H.G.Wells’ Short History of the World, in which they would discover uncountable thousands of Action Figures in an astounding variety of Mobile Defence Units.

Remember, it may be possible to get bored even with the Thundercats Astral Moat Monster (Evil Guardian of the Mystical Prison; Poseable Arms, Feet and Wings). For the same price —$29.90 — you could get David Black’s Animal Wonders of the World, and assemble your own beast from the great variety available.

Why get kids things they’ll grow out of, when you can get them things they can grow into?

Let them understand how anything they could possibly want to know about everything that has ever been known or speculated upon is written down somewhere — all they have to do is know how and where to look for it, and how to recognise it when they find it.

Do this right, and we may yet reap the benefits of increasingly activated, inquisitive and literate generations of Malaysians; grow-ing up with not only the ability but the desire to acquire information and knowledge.

This in turn will lead naturally to a demand that information and knowledge be made more freely available, for nothing is as galling as an unsatiated appetite, once whetted.

In seriously promoting the reading habit among Malaysians, therefore, the Government has embarked upon a most noble effort; courageous, even, if we bear in mind that people who read are also people who question — as evidenced by the extensive personal libraries of many of our present crop of ISA detainees.

But to balance such a potential against the drawn-out depredations of illiteracy, and to conclude that the answer to our ills is the understanding born out of increased information and not the fearfulness of entrenched ignorance, is an act of foresight.

It’s just that people have always to remember that because the written word encompasses everything human, it also includes all humanity’s mistakes. Trying to tell tragedy from transcendence will always remain our most enduring — perhaps our only — quandary.

Today, at the Changkat Pavillion, the largest book fair ever to be held in this country opens itself to the public.

Let us flock there in droves, to sample the wealth of in-formation and reading material on display. Let us hope that it will be as stimulating and seductive as it ought to be, and that we will not be greeted by the usual fallow acres of text-books, SPM manuals, masters’ theses in designer covers, shabby religious paperbacks of dubious authority and, in some farflung corner, someone desperately trying to sell $3,000 encyclopaedias by touting their free mahogany display-cases.

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PIECES OF PALESTINE REHMAN RASHID ON FRIDAY | 15 January 1988

There has always been this majestic futility about the Middle East; a grand and tragic resignation to damnation.

There is the feeling that peace in Jerusalem is a laughable fantasy; that in the focussed heat of the three great monotheistic religions, the cedars of Lebanon must ever burn.

The Children of Abraham have al-ways been the most quarrelsome of siblings, each battling for the right of tenure of the one centre to which they can all lay claim; the one node which is common to all of them, which proves — but has never been able to provide — their kinship. Baitul Muqqadis.

Jerusalem. A divinely-ordained division, enduring as heaven and hell.

The world seems to have grown fatal-ly inured to this. Call it Israel, call it Palestine, call it what you will — there will always be violence and injustice there; the only thing that will bring peace and harmony to Jerusalem will be the Second Coming, assuming people won’t fight over whether to call Him Mandi or Messiah.

To the rest of the world, the land of the River Jordan is the Great Lesson To Us All. As the endless combat continues, all other nations choose their preferred positions around the arena and, from a safe distance, cheer on their chosen champion and jeer their chosen villain in the eternal feud.

So many armies have fought for the Lebanon that now they’ve all collapsed into wholesale chaos; sanctified crusades shattered into a myriad shards of soldiers, all in identical battle fatigues, aiming identical weaponry at everything they see.

This is not supposed to be in any way comparable to South Africa or South Korea; these are not matters of socio-political concern. This is beyond politics. Lebanon is charnel; Palestine perdition. It is ordained. Simple as that.

Which means we ought to be taking serious note of what’s been happening in the West Bank and Gaza Strip this past month. There have been riots. Angry youths on the streets, hurling stones at equally young conscripts firing tear-gas grenades and attempting to clout the civilian population back into a semblance of obedience.

Rubble in the streets; dozens dead, scores more hauled in and taken God knows where.

Just like in Johannesburg and Seoul. Why now? It’s been over 20 years since the Six-Day War captured these pieces of Egypt and Palestine for Israel, and almost 40 years since the establish. ment of modern-day Israel.

Why now, and what exactly is going on there? An uprising of Arab against Jew? A swelling tide of anger to finally sweep aside the hated interloper? After REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

20 years, are the vanquished finally ris-ing to confront the invader and avenge the desecration of sacred soil?

No such romance. Despite the instant international polarisations caused — or rather, renewed — by the current West Bank riots, ideology ought to be very sparingly invoked in contemplating these events. This is not a war; not a Holy War, not even a civil war. These are riots and demonstrations, of the sort that could happen anywhere and all too often do.

In order to have a riot, you don’t have to go so far as to challenge another’s religion or philosophy or heritage. All you have to do is rough him up a bit. Wield a heavy-handed authority against him, order him about, harass and intimidate him, slap him around a little.

You limit his mobility and constrain his opportunities. You make him live somewhere you wouldn’t. You make sure you take care of your own needs first before letting him try for some of the water, food and electricity that’s left over. You make him feel dirty, ignorant and inferior. And you give so little credit to his intelligence that you don’t even mind him knowing that this was once his land.

And you keep this up for 20 years.

The generation that lost these pieces of Palestine to Israel in 1967 is old and worn now. Their defeat in the Six-Day War was so summary, so complete, that they have been able to do nothing in the two decades since; beyond appealing to the nations of the world for succour and watching those nations earnestly work out their own interests fist.

Yasser Arafat continues to be the leader of that generation, and, as befits such a leader, this man who once embodied the PLO’s defiance and resolve now symptomises its fatigue and senescence.

But they had children, those beaten warriors, and their sons are young men now. A new generation is taking over; one formed of those who can have no memory of a life free of Israeli rule, whose idea of Palestine is more idealis-tic than ideological, but who have certainly had enough of being a despised and unwanted minority in their own homeland.

The Arabs of the Occupied Territories are getting dangerously tired of being made to feel they’re living in someone else’s country; tolerated under the peat sufferance of a regime that would rather they were somewhere else.

There’s no Holy War a-borning in Palestine. This is simply the final outpour-ing of the common anger against bad Government; another expression of the same phenomen that transformed the Philippines and South Korea Wand may yet be working towards transfor-mation in South Africa.

Certainly beyond politics and ideo-logy, beyond even religion, this is the most clearly human phenomenon to have emerged out of the West Bank and Gaza since their annexation by Israel. This may mean there’s hope yet for transformation in that sad and broken land.

Call it Palestine. Call it Israel. The ones who really matter are those who call it home.

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‘Permitted to remain for residence...’

REHMAN RASHID ON FRIDAY | 8 January 1988

Emigration... ...such a forlorn word. Ten letters that float like scum on the surface of a stagnant discontent; spelling out a final solution to resentment, frustration and despair.

The emigrant consoles himself with hope, as he flees from a perceived hopelessness. Bound for the Great Somewhere Else, he leaves behind the bitter existence he once called home and sets his sights on a fresh start, a new deal, another turn of the cards.

Truth be told, we all cradle the thought of such passage somewhere private in our minds. It is soothing to consider “options”; envisage outwardbound avenues we can follow if we had to. That’s natural. It’s basi-cally the same reason most people believe in God. But to actually get up and go? What must it take for such a decision?

It is one thing to leave when you’re alone; quite another to carry a family with you. Alone, the moving might simply be travel, a surrender to the tradewinds; a romantic, adventurous thing.

With a family, emigration is grittier; more determined and resolute.

There is so complete a finality about it. Those who leave Malaysia have come to know this especially well; many times have they been told their homeland has no need of those who choose to go. “Good riddance,” they hear; “Don’t come back.”

They hear the doors slammed shut be-hind them; their leaving carries with it the stain of betrayal, the stigma of disloyalty. So they console themselves: “It is better to be a second-class citizen in someone else’s country,” they say, “than to be one in your own.”

Perhaps they are right. I wouldn’t know. To me, people who deprecate themselves as “second-class citizens” in this country are hardly better than those who exalt themselves as “first-class”. They grasp the same tarnished coin; differing only in their perception of who owns it.

But I am not about to weigh judgment on those Malaysians who have, gone — I number friends among them, and I wish them well. I recognise the agonies they suf-fered in coming to their decisions. I remember the light of final resolve in their eyes; a particular admixture of old pain and new promise.

And I recall the strained humour with which we attempted to lighten the burden of farewell... “Well, as long as you don’t mind your kids growing up speaking Oz-zie...”; “Who you gonna be cheering at the Olympics?”

REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

And away they went, kids and kaboodle, fleeing one of the most prosperous nations in the East; fleeing no wars, no poverty, no civil disorder but fleeing still.

Such departure always weighs heaviest on those left behind; those who must contemplate the newly-vacant spaces once filled by a Malaysian family,

by Malaysian friends. There is perceived a loss, and so-metimes the sense of loss surfaces as new bitterness. WHY? Is it so bad here? Is there no hope here?

The anger feeds on itself, as anger always does, and soon the savage indictment is being whispered: It’s true! 30,000 Malaysians applying for emigration, you know! Maybe 80,000! True-lah!

Not quite.

In the past year, the Australian High Commission here received some 5,760 ap-plications for migration. Since 1985, a total of 6,065 Malaysians have obtained permanent residence in Australia.

New Zealand, since April 1985 to date, has granted 550 immigrant visas to Malaysians.

Britain, over the same period, has “admitted for settlement” 200 Malaysians.

Canada has received 2,091 applications for migration since January 1986.

And the United States issued 500 immigrant visas last year; 400 the year before — totals which include refugees from third countries passing through Malaysia.

Over the past two years, then, there have been about 10,000 cases of emigration out of Malaysia to the five main adoptive countries.

So pay no heed to the exaggeratiims you may hear. They are born of emotions too volatile to need the truth. They only serve to cloud an issue which is distressing enough as it is. There is no need to inflate the figures to make the point.

Surely there is enough for us to lament in the notion that, in the past two years alone, 10,000 Malaysians — many of them with fa-milies in tow — have decided that the uncertainties of emigration are preferable to the certainties they perceive at home.

Maybe you knew some of them. Perhaps you attempted to suggest to them that their perceptions may have been wrong or incomplete; that this country needs its people to stay and help it grow.

Or maybe you were one of those who congratulated them on their decision, commended their courage, said you wished you could go too, waved them goodbye, and then went around telling people there are tens of thousands just like them, so they must be right.

The keepers who slam the doors shut behind departing Malaysians are no worse than those who cheer them through.

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A choice of perceptions REHMAN RASHID ON FRIDAY | 1 January 1988

I write these words in the very first hours of the last day of 1987. The night is still, the crescent moon cloaked in a thin veil of cloud. Occasional cats wail in the darkness; occasional cars swish past. The last grains of sand trickle through the hourglass of the year.

Azmi’s all-night tea-stall in front of the 7-Eleven is doing smite desultory business. This time tomorrow, he’ll be worked off his feet.

Twenty-four hours from now, the New Year will have begun. Much revelry will be taking place; much laughter, much shouting. There will be much happy celebration. Eighty-eight will be here. 88. Great number.

Double Prosperity. Two infinity-signs standing to attention.

And, at long last, 87 will be gone.

Such a year this has been; a year to relinquish, a year to remember.

What becomes of us now will depend on what we choose to forget, and what we choose not to.

We will remember 1987 for the Umno General Assembly in April; for a challenge that might have torn Umno apart but didn’t. It is our choice whether we remember the challenge, or the unity.

We might remember 1987 as a concatenation of crises, a Year of Living Dangerously, when issue after inflammatory issue flayed their way through the Malaysian conscience, each one building on those preceding until our nerves were stretched taut with apprehension — a tension which a few too many of us seemed to find thrilling beyond reason.

We might remember how we let ourselves be seduced by the word “liberalism”; naively believing that it granted people the right to scream unconscionable accusations at one another with no thought of the consequences.

Or we might choose to remember the truths brought home to us in 1987: that it is better to speak softly than shout, better to negotiate than agitate; that there are important reasons why tolerance, discipline, restraint and simple civility are such highly-respected virtues.

In 1987, Malaysia underwent a serious testing of the limits. It was close, but we were not tested to destruction. We faced situations we had not faced before and were unprepared for, and we were able to measure our responses and reactions to them, keeping our wits about us. We are the wiser for this; a little more experienced, a little older. This means — and time will surely show this to be true — we are stronger now.

REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

And so with the world. There will be some effort to remember 1987 as the year of “Black Monday”, Oct 19, the global economic crash. But that effort of memory will be rewarded with the realisation that the worst stock market collapse in history did not destroy the world.

This was 1987, not 1929; the world runs on more than one economy now. A single nation might crumble, but the world as a whole is strong enough — the global economic network widespread enough — to roll with the blows and withstand the sledgehammer clout of plummeting investor confidence.

We might then want to remember 187 for the escalation of the Gulf War; we might want to retain the images of Arab tankers flying American flags, Iranian missiles homing in on American warships, American missiles immolating Iranian oil platforms.

But the image that will endure will be the one that emerged when the President of the United States and the General Secretary of the Soviet Union smiled, exchanged pens, shook hands and eliminated intermediate nuclear forces in Europe.

We may want to remember South Korea’s petrol bombs and tear gas, but we will truly remember the successful conclusion and hopeful aftermath of its presidential elections.

Closer to home, we may want to recall a soldier named Gregorio Honasan, but we shall reflect longer on the regional unity that was reborn out of an Asean summit hosted by the Philippines of Corazon Aquino.

And here at home, we may have cause to remember another soldier, named Adam Jaafar. In so doing, however, we will remember not the momentary madness of a single individual, but the enduring sanity of the nation he condemned in an angry scrawl on the wall of a rented room in Chow Kit. The value of experience is not to be measured in the price paid but in the lessons learned. We shall remember the things we learned about ourselves in 1987.

You are reading these words on the first day of 1988. I’m sure you join me in wishing this to be a happy and fulfilling year for all of us. And it will be, as long as we remember 1987 as the year which tested us with shadows and taught us the inesti-mable value of keeping our faces turned to the light... ...an important exercise of spiritual fortitude, otherwise known as looking on the bright side.

Chichaks chirp on the wall downstairs; outside a nightjar chuckles. It’s four in the morning of the last day of 1987, and it’s time to go and see Azmi for my teh tarik.

Happy New Year, folks!

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In pursuit of a Star REHMAN RASHID ON FRIDAY | 25 DECember 1987

After journeying through the de¬sert for many years, the three pil¬grims thought it might be pleasant to rest awhile.

At the next convenient oasis, they dismounted, tethered their camels and strolled through the dappled moonlight. The night was cool and fragrant. The First Man reached up and plucked some low-hanging fruit from a palm tree. He offered one to the Second Man. “Fancy a date?” he asked.

“I didn’t know you cared,” said the Second Man. The Third Man, bringing up the rear, darted in. “I believe I’m entitled to my 10 per cent,” he said.

“You also believe,” said the First Man, passing the bunch of fruit to him, “you’ll not live long enough to get it.”

The Three Men walked on, ruminantly masticating their dates, or otherwise thoughtfully chewing them, and presently they circumnavigated the oasis. Sighing gratefully, for weariness was upon them, they flopped into the sand next to their camels.

The First Man gazed heavenward. The Second Man busied himself with building a fire. The Third Man threw back his head and began singing. “This is my que-e-e-est, he bellowed at the night, “to follow that sta-a-a-a¬r....”

“Oh do shut up,” said the First Man, “You’re supposed to be carrying myrrh, not mirth.”

“I don’t even know what myrrh is,” grumbled the Third Man, who secretly thought rather highly of his singing voice and was therefore miffed that nobody else ever did, “and I only hope the fellow writing this knows how to spell it.

He’s certainly dredging the bottom of the barrel when it comes to puns.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” said the First Man, “They’ll probably come up with a new name for it in a millenium or two. We’re doing this for posterity, you know. It’s the principle that matters.”

The Second Man, on all fours blowing vigorously at his little pile of embers, had managed to get the fire going. Dusting his hands in satisfaction, he walked over to his camel and retrieved a handful of crushed resin from a saddlebag.

He returned to his companions and sprinkled the resin on the fire. Clouds of perfumed smoke roiled upward.

The Three Men inhaled deeply, savouring the heady fragrance. “Yes, very nice,” said the First Man, “just make sure you don’t use it all up before we get there. That frankincense is supposed to be a gift, you know.”

The Second Man was frankly incensed. “I have to make sure it’s not gone off,” he said petulantly; “Besides, how do we know we’ll ever get there’? We’ve been following you for 30 years, you know. How do we know you know where REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

we’re going? How do we know we’re not competely lost?”

“Yes, how?” whined the Third Man, pleased that the Second Man had broached the issue.

The First Man glared at them, taking the opportunity to practise his patented jeling. After a suitably dramatic moment, he let his features soften just a touch.

He raised his arm and pointed to the heavens. “The star is still there, isn’t it?”

His two companions turned and looked again at the familiar celestial object, hanging low in the sky over the distant horizon and rivalling the, moon in brilliance. “Yes,” they!”’ breathed in unison, failing to be unmoved by the numinous luminous beauty. “But,” groused the Second Man, “we never seem to get any closer.”

“That’s not the point!” shrieked the First Man. He struggled to regain his composure. “We are not,” he intoned ponderously, “supposed to reach that star. As you may have noticed, we are riding camels; which, it may surprise you to learn, cannot fly.

“That star,” he continued, adopting a suitably stentorian tone, “is merely a guiding light. It serves to illuminate our path and reveal to us the way to go. It is not our destination, but it will lead us to our destiny!”

The Second and Third Men ex-changed glances. Their companion was tripping out again. They resigned themselves to listen. The First Man, descendant of a long and honourable line of marauding poets, warmed to the sound of his own voice: “What matters,” he cried, “if the days do burn and the nights freeze? What matters if we trek alone through eternity and our bodies grow worn and enfeebled? The sight of that star, shining in the heavens before us, shall ever remind us of the true meaning of our journey! We are bound for greatness and glory, and there...” — he raised his arms in ecstacy — “...is the beacon we shall follow!”

He leapt to his feet and struck a heroic pose, manly jaw out-thrust, his profile etched against the first faint glow of a rosy-hued dawn, silently cursing the absence of a camera-crew. “Come my brothers!” he exulted, “Let us mount our steeds and resume our blessed journey onward, ever onward to the future that assuredly awaits us: “But remember! The desert sands are treacherous, so follow me closely, tread in my footsteps and stray not from the trail that I shall blaze for thee!”

Shouting “Hoopla!”, he vaulted up onto his camel; the beast swayed to its feet and undulated away.

The Second and Third Men got up, kicked sand over the little fire and prepared to follow. “Old Bossy-Boots,” grumbled the Third Man to the Second, “Why do we let him order us around all the time?”

“Because,” said the Second Man, “he’s the one carrying the gold.”

“Humph!” humphed the Third Man, “And we’re supposed to be Wise.”

“Oh do shut up,” said the Second Man. The sky began rapidly to lighten. It was going to be another blistering day, but in the heavens the star still shone, perfect and silent and pure.

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An outbreak of democracy REHMAN RASHID ON FRIDAY | 18 DECember 1987

How the world loves to see an eruption of democracy!

Such a grand spectacle it is to see an autocratic regime succumb to sheer public pressure and concede democratic elections. How exhilar¬ating it is to feel that the committed exercise of popular sentiment might still overturn the massed might of a military-backed administration.

In a little over two months’ time, President Chun Doo-hwan of South Korea will step down from his seven-year reign to allow the ascent of Roh Tae-woo the newly-elected leader of that nation.

What a triumph for democracy!, For the first time in nearly 17 years, South Korea has tasted the elixir of the popular will!

Of course, South Korea’s road to democracy wasn’t quite as pretty as the Philippines’. No bowers of flowers and nuns kneeling before tanks in Seoul; the images there had more to do with masked stu-dents hurling stones at armoured soldiers beneath coiling clouds of tear-gas.

But the vicious demonstrations and street-battles of earlier this year were ostensibly for the sake of democracy, and they’ve got it now. Or at least, something that looks like it.

Wire-service despatches report. ed a surging electricity of anticipation throughout South Korea these past weeks. TV coverage of that un-precedented presidential campaign showed unbelievably huge rallies; larger by far than Cory Aquino’s vivid People Power parades two years ago. Voter turnout at Korea’s first elections was a massive 83 per cent — almost 30 million people deciding between the three main contenders: Roh, Kim Young-sam and Kim Dae-Jung.

The people’s selection, by a two million majority and nearly 37 per cent of the vote, has been Roh Tae-woo. What a splendid victory!

South Korea has entered a new era of democracy and governmental validity!

Well... Kim Young-sam and Kim Dae-jung don’t exactly think so, but then what do you expect? They lost. (In Asian politics, the good loser is often a born loser.) The two Kims say it was all a set-up; the election was rigged. They say Roh Tae-woo had the backing of Chun Doo-hwan and was therefore a stooge of the ruling party, and was therefore given the support of governmental financial resources and access to media privilege.

REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

The two Kims are now somewhat ruefully contemplating the figures which show that they collectively marshalled 53 per cent of the vote (Young-sam: 27 per cent; Dae-jung: 26 per cent). They are trying to deal with the thought that if they’d united as an Opposition coalition they might have won quite handily.

Of course, there wasn’t much talk of such a coalition when the presidential campaign began because each of the three candidates saw himself with a chance to win outright, and who needs a coalition when you can have the whole she-bang to yourself?

So now it seems the two Kims are getting up steam to mount a concerted attack on President-elect Roh. First they’ll be trying to get the election nullified. If that doesn’t work, they’ll simply have to dedicate themselves to destroying Roh Tae-woo democratically, which means mobilising public senti-ment, which means tear-gas manufacturers need not contemplate a market decline just yet.

During the course of the cam paign, the candidates went for their people’s hearts and minds. Now and forevermore, they’ll be going for each other’s throats. That’s the democratic way.

Nevertheless, in the election of Roh Tae-woo, to the presidency, South Korea has just taken its first step towards democracy, whatever that means. The “free world” may exult in this, as it exulted over the Philippines. But, as Cory Aquino knows better than anyone, the road to democracy is a pretty rough track. The first step always feels good; it’s from the second onwards that you have to watch out for land-mines and incoming missiles.

South Korea has a long way to go yet, if it is to help disprove the conviction, held by many Third World leaders, that the exercise of demo-cracy basically means granting people the freedom to choose between dictatorship and chaos.

Still, it’s a start, of sorts. The campaign was run, the emotions kept in check, the people became an electorate, the electorate had its say and made its choice, and nobody died.

Somebody deserves congratulations, especially if this means the Olympics will go on as scheduled after all.

For the moment, then, we might as well take pause to savour Winston Churchill’s enduring homily: “Democracy is the worst form of Government known to mankind,” he is said to have once said, “but it’s better than the others.”

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Shafie of the shopping complex REHMAN RASHID ON FRIDAY | 11 DECember 1987

It’s not that people are afraid of Shafie bin Abdullah, it’s just that they’d rather he was somewhere else.

In his grubby ankle-length jubah and untidy turban, with his wispy goatee and his dirty feet in broken sandals, Shafie bin Abdullah is a major incongruity in the polished fluorescence of the Jaya shopping complex.

On the floor above, earnestly pretty shopgirls in designer uniforms spray promotional perfumes from crystal flagons into the air. Down below, between the glittering jewellery shop and the sickly-fragrant bakery, Shafie bin Abdullah stands stock-still and stares into space.

Around him the crowds ebb and flow; the currents break, divide and stream past him. Shafie looks like the frozen motion of a rock in a Zen garden.

At the end of each day, just before maghrib, Shafie dons a pair of blue-tinted swimmer’s goggles, clasps a handkerchief over his mouth and nose and walks out of the shopping complex, past McDonald’s and away into the great anonymous maze of Section 14.

Everything he leaves behind returns to normal. Everyone is relieved when Shafie leaves, although he never does anything to anyone.

I spoke to him the other day.

“Saudara,” I said in as elegant Malay as I could muster, “do you know that your picture is in an international magazine?”

It was true. A recent issue of Asiaweek had a nice colour photo of Shafie included in its pictorial essay on, the changing face of Islam in Malaysia.

There he was in a regional news-magazine in his rumpled robes, wearing his swimmer’s goggles and standing next to the McDonald’s signboard; providing the classic “West-meets-East, new-meets-old, bright-meets-dark” irony so beloved of photojournalism.

Shafie bin Abdullah, who only stood and stared and said nothing, had become an unknown celebrity; helping to define to the world what is becoming of Islam in this country. I was curious to know what he would make of knowing this. So I stopped and asked him if he’d seen his picture in the magazine.

He turned and looked at me, unb-linking, for a long moment. Then he asked me my name. I told him. An-other long pause. Then he said, in perfect, measured English: “My name is Shafie bin Abdullah. I have REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

glaucoma.”

Apparently misinterpreting my stunned silence, he helpfully ventured: “That is an eye disease.”

“Yes,” I said, “glaucoma.”

“I have been to an eye doctor,” he said, “but you cannot know if they’re good.”

“That’s true,” I said, beginning to feel light-headed, “you cannot. Why do you stand here like this?”

“Manusia dan jinn,” he said, “berada didunia untuk menjalankan tugas.”

“Yes,” I said, “but what is your duty?”

He lowered his gaze and stared solemnly at the floor. As he did so I caught sight of our reflection in the window of the electrical store, and went a little giddy with the complete unreality of this encounter. Shafie inclined his head toward the supermarket and, reverting to English, said: “I have to change this place.”

He turned once again to look straight at me. His eyes were like softly glazed brown marbles. Their opacity seemed a little deeper than could be explained by glaucoma. His face was utterly blank. “Perhaps,” he said, “you can help me.”

Another long pause. It seemed to take up to 30 seconds for his thoughts to arrange themselves into words in his head. When they finally did so, however, the words emerged from his mouth with total precision and perfectly formed: “But first we must change ourselves.”

I asked him where he came from; where his mother and father were.

“In Islam there are no fathers and mothers. luta mesti belajar. Itu diwajibkan. The only law is the law of Islam.”

I asked him how he kept himself fed; how he earned a living. No answer. I asked him how he came to be there, standing in that shopping complex amid the crowds and cameras and diamond bracelets and Famous Amos chocolate-chip cookies.

No answer.

I said I had to go, I had things to do, perhaps we would talk again. I turned to walk away. He called after me. “Can you give me a lift?” he said. “It’s not far. Five miles. Eight miles.”

I said no, perhaps another time. “Assalamualaikum,” I bade him.

“Mualaikumsalam,” he said, and a truly radiant smile transfigured his face.

I haven’t seen him for the past few days, but it’s entirely possible that someday I will give him that lift he asked for.

I would quite like to know where Shafie bin Abdullah thinks he lives.

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Broadcasting a narrow view REHMAN RASHID ON FRIDAY | 4 DECember 1987

Every Monday night at 9.30pm on RTM 1, the current-affairs pro-gramme “Isu” tries valiantly to say something about the things that happen in this country.

It is one of the least-watched shows on television, because noth¬ing is ever said that hasn’t already been said to death.

This week, they tried to say so-mething about the 70 million population policy. You will recall the 70 million population policy. Let’s call it the 70MPP for short. (Might as well abbreviate what we can, because everything else about the matter seems awfully long-drawn.)

The 70MPP first appeared in September 1982, in a mention at the Umno General Assembly. It was tidied-up and dressed for action in the Mid-Term Review of the Fourth Malaysia Plan, published a year later. It was granted Cabinet approval on April 7;1984.

Thereupon, it got extensively talked about by everyone. Eventually, it fell exhausted by the wayside of policy; unable to keep pace with the leading pack of domestic socioeconomic initiatives.

For some reason, “Isu” thought it prudent to attempt to breathe some life back into the old-model 70MPP, apparently unaware of the new im¬proved models already in the advanced-design stage. This earnest flogging of a moribund horse would suggest that there are people in current-affairs broadcasting who are having trouble keeping their affairs current.

So, sadly, it becomes necessary once again to give yet another shake-out to a woefully worn-out ar-gument. Deep breath. Here we go. (Again.): A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO THE 70MPP. • OBJECTIVE: A Malaysian population of 70 million.

• PRO: A wider population base, generating a sufficiently large labour pool and the consequent consumer demand to achieve a selfsustaining domestic economy.

• CON: Overpopulation i.e. population demands exceeding availability of living resources and space, thereby lowering quality-of -life.

• TIME FRAME: 115 years.

• SUB ISSUES: Marry-at-19, Go-For-Five.

• OVERALL SENTIMENT: Am-bivalent. The 70MPP as articulated in 1983 had both merits and demerits, but a century-long forward view embodies too many variables to enable a completely clear position on such a matter now.

Furthermore, babies have a tendency to decide for themselves when to appear, in what numbers and to whom.

REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

In other words, the development of population ultimately depends on people happily doing what comes naturally. Therefore, it might be best to let nature have a say in the matter. So: • FINAL VERDICT: None.

These matters were cleared al-most four years ago, after it had become apparent that the 70MPP was controversial for only one reason: People insisted on seeing it as a means, and not an end.

The true object of the exercise was to work towards generating an economy that can sustain a population of 70 million; not produce 70 million people in order to sustain the economy.

To clarify: A Malaysian population of 70 million is a dream, not a directive. It is a hope, not an edict.

It is a dream based on the hope that Malaysians will sense great promise in this country, and be eager to bring that hope literally to life by granting their homeland the gift of generations.

It is the hope that people will be happy to marry and have children here, because there is work to be had and money to b8 earned; and there are roads and houses and clinics and schools and shops nearby and a good life to be lived.

It is the hope that Malaysian children will be born in the knowledge that here their lives stand to mean something; here they will have the opportunities to grow up to be good and happy people, of relevance and comfort to each other.

For Malaysians to have hope in themselves; for Malaysia to have hope in itself — this is the dream that underlies the 70 million population policy.

In the four years since the 70MPP was first kicked around, this base¬line ideal has become much clearer than it was back then. It has since been seen that the whole point of the 70MPP was not to breed as if there was no tomorrow, but to build as if there most certainly was.

Build roads and houses. Build schools and industries. Build oppor-tunities.

Build confidence and optimism. Build pride. Build hope. In a word, build the economy.

It meant — and means — so much more than merely churning out ei¬ther profits or babies, but then Ma¬laysia’s greatest ill-fortune has always been in its almost unnatural abundance of narrow-minded people.

But no... we shall not be so harsh. For “narrow-minded”, read “ignorant”.

Narrow-mindedness is the result of ignorance, which at least allows the consolation that it need not be an incurable condition. Ignorance is cured through information and education.

This is what TV programmes like “Isu” try to do — to inform and edu¬cate — and it would be unreasonable to assume that they’re not doing the best they can.

The real problem, therefore, seems to be that the makers of such programmes, in common with the officials they interview, seem as badly in need of education and in¬formation as the rest of us.

And (if you will forgive my contin-uing excesses with the English language) how shall the teacherless teacher teach?

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Taxes, teas and trials REHMAN RASHID ON FRIDAY | 27 November 1987

When the time came to renew the road-tax on my beloved 4WD boneshaker, I couldn’t find its blue registration card.

From those I approached for advice, I received much con-tempt for my carelessness al-loyed with pity in view of the tri-bulations that assuredly lay in store for me. I adhered to a positive attitude. Seneca said: “In misfortune one must take a headlong course.” I consider Seneca a wise old man, even if he’d never heard of road tax.

I made a police report, explaining how I’d been able to lose such an important document without having anyone else to blame. I took the report and my insurance cover note to the Road Transport Depart. ment in Petaling Jaya. They said I had to bring my vehicle in for inspection.

I said how could I, its road-tax had expired. They said they would issue me a one-day per-mit. I said thank you, could I have a one-day permit please. They said no, they were closed for the Raya holidays, come back next week and go to Counter One. The following Monday I went back and stood in front of Counter One, where a lady wearing two-tone eyeshadow and a name-tag named Joan was writing numbers in three different exercise books. “I’ve lost my blue card,” I explained to her, “and now I have to bring my vehicle in for inspection.”

She asked to see my police re-port and insurance cover note. Then she wrote some numbers on a small piece of paper, handed it to me and told me to bring in my vehicle the next morning.

On the way out, I met a friend who asked me what I was doing there. I told him my story. He looked at me with contempt and pity. I showed him the small piece of paper Joan had given me. “That’s not a one-day permit,” he said.

I went back to see Joan. “This is not a one-day permit,” I said.’ She looked at me with contempt and a little pity, and told me to see the man at Counter Two. There was no one there.

“There is no one here,” I called to Joan over at Counter One. “He’s on his tea-break,” she called back.

“It’s only 9:30,” I said; “How come he takes a tea-break an hour-and-a-half after starting work?”

The man, whose name-tag said Anuar, returned 15 minutes later. Joan said to Anuar, smirkingly: “This man says you shouldn’t take a tea-break so early.”

Anuar reached through the iron grille for my papers, examined them with painstaking care and began writing letters and numbers on a form. He worked with great precision, meticulously forming the figures and misspelling my name in the predictable way. Then he stapled everything together and placed the REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

bundle in a tray.

Joan got up, collected the pile of papers from Anuar’s tray and took them away for somebody’s signature. The sun grew hotter. I watched grey-jacketed RTD inspectors inspecting the cars, lorries, motorbikes and buses that were parked in the inspection forecourt. Eventually Joan returned, and I got my oneday permit.

The next morning at 8:05, in the sort of sweet early morning rain that makes getting out of bed an act of supreme martyrdom, I was the first inspectee to arrive for inspection. An inspector named Hamdan asked to see my insurance cover note and my blue card. “I’m here because I lost my blue card,” I told him. He looked at me with contempt, but no pity whatsoever. He asked to see my one-day permit, my police report and Borang MV1. “Borang MV-what?” I said.

“You don’t have Borang MV1?”

“Nobody told me about Bor-ang MV1.”

“Go to the Borang Counter and get Borang MV1.”

I went to the Borang Counter. There was no one there. “Where is the attendant?” I asked a nearby officiil, resisting the urge to say Orang Borang.

“Perhaps he’s taking a tea-break,” said the official. “But it’s only 8:30...” I protested, before futility got the better of me.

Eventually the attendant re-turned and was able to give me an MV1. I filled it in, thankful for knowing where to look for my vehicle’s engine and chassis numbers. The last thing I had to fill in was the licence number for my car radio.

There was no time. Extracting a small span-ner from my toolkit, I smashed the radio. It had never really worked to my satisfaction anyway. It only played RTM programmes.

The inspector inspected my vehicle, told me to remove the foglamps, then gave me a piece of paper saying all was in order. “Thank you,” I said; “What do I do now?”

“Go to Shah Alam,” he said.

“Are there any other forms I have to fill in?”

“No...”

“Praise God.” “...not here, anyway.”

So I went to Shah Alam, where the Selangor RTD keeps its re-cords. I proffered my now-volu-minous pile of papers, filled in another form and was given in return another piece of paper saying come back on the second of June with $50.

I explained that on the second of June I would be in Peshawar, Pakistan, in the company of Afghan rebel leaders. They said fine, come back in two days’ time, whereupon I would be given a new registration card, whereupon I could go and pay my road tax.

The end of the ordeal was in sight. I strolled happily back to my one-daypermitted vehicle, and discovered that I’d locked my keys inside.

It was time for a tea-break.

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The ocean of the future REHMAN RASHID ON FRIDAY | 20 November 1987

Want to think about something else for a change? Good, think about the Pacific Ocean. It makes for some nice-ly diverting futurology.

“The Mediterranean,” quoted Ron-ald Reagan in one of his more lucid moments, “was the ocean of the past, the Atlantic is the ocean of the present and the Pacific is the ocean of the future. “ That’s right, of course. The Pacific is flanked by the world’s two most ad-vanced nations: Japan on this side and the United States on the other.

More than that, the dominant entity on the US Pacific coast is California, traditional domain of the most advanced Americans — a sizeable number of whom are so advanced they’re already beatifically floating around in the New Age. Japan, however, has been living in the New Age since late 1945 and is therefore considerably more efficient at it. Japan is now the world’s biggest creditor nation, with US$240 billion in foreign investments. Its foreign aid budget this year is US$10 billion, es-tablishing it above the US as the world’s leading donor country.

At the recent G-’7 Summit in Toronto, Time magazine reported that Japanese Prime Minister Noboru Take-shita (whose name, Malaysian newsreaders please note, is pronounced Tak-ESH-ta and not TakeSHIT-a) “emerged as a champion of the fast-growing countries of the REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

Pacific Rim.” So perhaps Japan does continue to regard the dominion of Asia as being its manifest destiny, but at least now it’s being more of a true leader and less of a presumptive Emperor.

Makes you less uneasy about its defence spending. At US$30 billion this year, Japan’s defence budget is now the third largest in the world, behind the US and the Soviet Union and ahead of Britain and France.

Of course, Japan and the United States are not the only entities bound by the Pacific Ocean. There’s also Australia on this side, and Canada on the other. Both are countries which haven’t meant much in the past, but which are about to assume greatly more significant roles in the world.

Australia’s emergence is turning out to be particularly spectacular.

There is justification for Prime Minister Robert Hawke’s recent assertion: “We are clearly the major player among the South Pacific Forum countries.”

Rather more pleasantly, that muscular sentiment is also manifested in the burgeoning developments in music, film, literature, art and sport that are firmly establishing Australia’s presence on the world stage; a process underlined by her rapid evolution into a rich and vibrant brew 221

of races and cultures, as Australia expands under a far more enlightened attitude towards immigration than in the past.

In almost every human respect, Australia has begun to resemble America as it was in the first third of this century. Australia may well turn out to be for the 21st Century what America was to the 20th.

“We are a country with a strong, developed economy,” says Mr Hawke, “...a force for the maintenance of democratic principles....”

(Yes, certainly: Australia, Land of Opportunity, Refuge of the Huddled Masses and Defender of the Free... where have we heard that before? ) But the way of the world is to reward symmetry, and the emergence of Aus-tralia will be mirrored on the other side of the Equator by that of China.

To talk about what China might be and do in the 21st Century will take more space than I’ll ever have here, but it looks highly likely that the Big Five powers of the 21st Century will be the US, the Soviet Union, Japan, China and Australia.

China and Australia will replace Britain and France, the oldest members of the present Big Five. In the 21st Century, you see, assuming a continuing trend towards geopolitical sensibility, power will not be measured in nuclear weaponry and military strength alone, but, far more appropriately, In influence — political, economic, cultural and human.

The US and Soviet Union will be watching their elder brethren Britain and France — their 19th Century an-cestors in world domination — reach retirement age, and they will have cause to reflect upon such intimations of mortality. By the middle of the 21st Century, the US and SU will have finally come to terms with not only their own symmetry but also their own senescence.

So the next Guardians of the Future, the three youngest superpowers of the 21st Century, will all be on this side of the Pacific.

Perfectly equipoised between them will be the scattering of islands and spits of land collectively known as Asean.

The present world has two principal superpower intertidal zones: Europe and the Middle East. Captain Power’s Soldiers of the Future will have a new one of their very own: South-East Asia; which will have to choose which of its two contrasting predecessors to emulate.

It is nice to think that Asean will find it much easier to perform the European function of meeting-place, rather than the Middle Eastern function of battleground, because we stand to be a far more intimate link between North and South than either Europe or the Middle East has been between East and West.

Rather than being trapped between two antagonistic adversaries, South-East Asia will span the divide and thus be a factor in their REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

harmony.

Hopefully, South-East Asia’s hefty partners to the north and south will assist that process by agreeing to hold all their important meetings in rotation amongst the Asean capitals, choosing whichever is nicest at that time of year.

The Asean nations will thus enjoy greater incentives to build ever nicer hotels, convention centres and holiday resorts, and will thereby come ever closer to matching their airlines’ advertising.

Fortunately, we are also likely to be dealing with emergent 21st Century powers that have had valuable lessons in how to handle their power. They’ve been able closely to observe and evaluate the performance of their 20th Century predecessors.

As the Soviet Union and the United States get misty-eyed at the prospect of seeing out the 20th Century arm-in-fra-ternal-arm, the powers of the future can see how antagonism need not be the es-sential truth of humanity, even if dualism is. All you need is a middle path.

Last week, Australian Premier Hawke told Time magazine: “With South-East Asia, we have developed a defence policy based on a perception that there is no threat to us from any country in that area.”

(Ah, the polite conceit of diplomacy! Couldn’t he have said something like: “We have good relations with the countries in that area; we understand each other...”? ) But Mr Hawke is right to consider it positive to regard your neighbours as friends, now that 200 years of history lessons have taught us the ultimate folly of trying to install your friends as neighbours. (You always end up having to evict too many people, as the Russians have learned — again — in Afghanistan.)

So, very soon, Asean will be in the posi-tion to be the friend the 21st Century will need most — the one who serves to keep the peace and provide places for everyone to meet and discuss their differences in pleasant surroundings.

As long as we can reassure our soon-to-be-awesome western Pacific partners on either side of the Equator that their own well-being would be greatly enhanced by ours, we should be able to count on their full co-operation.

Then, together, the nations of the wes-tern Pacific rim could have a whale of a time with our collective partners on the other side of the Ocean of the Future, represented as they will be by some splendid natural resources in the north, El Nino in the south and Hollywood California in the middle.

And if that isn’t a pacific thought, I give up.

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The end of the Padang REHMAN RASHID ON FRIDAY | 13 November 1987

The hoardings have gone up around the Se-langor Club Padang, and when they finally come down it won’t look the same.

No one seems quite sure exactly what it will look like — no artist’s impression with its neat perspectives and matchstick figures has been issued, and all anyone’s heard is that there is to be a car park and a shopping arcade underground and a piazza of some sort above; “like Trafalgar Square”, one pro-ponent of the Padang development once said.

(To be sure, there was one artist’s impres-sion released late last year, depicting the Pa-dang as it would look after completion of the car park. It looked very much as it does now, because the car park will be underground and therefore invisible. I respect the artist who got paid for that feat of creative imagination.)

Some lamentation has been heard, although not as loudly as one might have expected. There may be two reasons for this: either people are too stunned to say much, or they don’t much care one way or another.

I tend to believe it’s the former; recalling that moment in February 1985 when the Padang underground car park project was first announced as a possibility being looked into, at which time the general incredulity was tempered by the comforting notion that when someone says they’re “looking into” something, it means they’re not actually going to do anything about it for a while.

That was over three years ago, however — quite long enough for the thorough looking into of any possibility — and now the work is under way; targeted for completion in time for the Commonwealth Heads of Government summit here in mid-1989.

The underground car park plan has undergone quite a few modifications since it was first proposed; the number of planned levels decreasing in inverse proportion to the projected cost — from three levels to two to one; from $50 million to $70 million to $100 million.

Now that the venerable Padang sod is actually being broken, newspaper letters columns have begun resonating to the misgivings of those who cannot imagine how Kuala Lumpur’s most famous and enduring scene will change as a result.

Any radical and expensive new develop-ment in this country is bound to elicit doubts as to its viability or necessity. Such doubts are not necessarily counterproductive, but there is a new dimension to the REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

Padang project that has added a particular astringency to the impact it’s having in the public mind. And that is this “Merdeka Square” idea — the visible, topside manifestation of the subterranean development of carpark and shopping arcade.

Ostensibly, the Padang is to be converted into something of a monument to our Independence, mindful of the histdrical significance of that Veen expanse of turf between the Selangor Club and the Sultan Abdul Samad Building, seat of the Malaysian Judiciary.

Yet, the arguments against the project stem from precisely the same consideration: it is that selfsame historical significance that should protect the Padang from being paved over and landscaped and turned into whatever it is they’re planning to turn it into.

A curious controversy indeed. Argument for the proposal: history and national pride. Argument against the proposal: history and national pride.

To hear it described by those of its propon-ents sensible enough not to harp on the utility of a carpark or the need to lure more foreign tourists, Merdeka Square will serve as a testament to the spirit of Malaysian Independence; an honourable recognition of all the Merdeka rallies and parades to have been held there since the first, almost 31 years ago.

The project’s detractors, however, hold to the equally plausible opinion that the spirit of Independence is something intangible; the potency of which is hardly to be enhanced by the monuments money can buy.

If we could vault a few years into the future, however, we might be surprised by how immaterial this debate will turn out to be. Each National Day, pageantry will still take place along Jalan Raja; massed formations of schoolchildren will still cavort on the Padang, or Square, or whatever; the Clock Tower of the beautiful old Sultan Abdul Samad Building will continue to stand as the visual focus of national remembrance.

If it is true that the spirit of Merdeka is a vaporous, ineffable thing, then it really shouldn’t matter what fripperies are constructed upon it in the effort to give it a tangible visage. In other words: Merdeka Square will soon be a reality, and we might as well attune ourselves to the prospect of having something new and impressive to show off to the visiting dignitaries of the Commonwealth when they arrive for the CHOGM summit here next year.

Let’s just hope those responsible for building the underground part of the Padang development know better than those who have warned of soil instability and dangerous proximity to the flood-prone Kiang River, lest the whole kaboodle collapses beneath the weight of its own ambitions.

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It’s our problem REHMAN RASHID ON FRIDAY | 6 November 1987

Six years ago, one of my first major assignments for the NST took me to Ke-dah to do a feature on rural poverty there, and what was being done about it.

A child of the city with the privilege of opportunity and comfort, I was whol-ly unprepared for what I found. Sure, I knew poverty existed.

Of course there are poor people; there are always poor people — what else could focus the conscience of a nation and justify the NEP? But what I saw in Kedah left me pro-foundly shaken. I was able to see for myself that poverty meant something far worse than deprivation; it meant despair.

Poverty was a malignancy spread-ing hidden through the remote reaches of the Malaysian hinterland, where communities existed only in the demo-graphic sense of the census and the po-litical convenience of the constituency.

A diaspora of people living in scat-tered isolation; their homes little more than assemblages of weatherworn wood and rotting attap; scratching ta-pioca from an unyielding soil; sullen, silent and cynical beneath brazen and empty skies.

It was pathetic, and it was ugly.

I was guided on that tour by officials of the Kedah Regional Development Agency, Keda. They were mostly Keda-hans themselves, REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

and as we jounced along the rutted baked-mud tracks of the Sik and Baling districts, they spoke with energy and enthusiasm of their plans to bring development to those people. They would build houses and roads; plantations and industries.

They would organise these villages and teach the people to think as communities; impart a sense of social discipline and interde-pendence to people who had never known such things.

They had no illusions about the mag-nitude of the task before them, but neither had they any doubts over their ability to perform it.

I listened to their dreams, examined their charts and models, made my notes and eventually wrote the story. It was not my place, then, to voice my own opinions. But that was then, as they china!? Rashid ors say, and this is now.

I remember the novice journalist on that assignment, surrounded by that ghastly dereliction and thinking that the only answer to it was education.

For all the roads and houses and co-operative farming ventures, how else could these people’s horizons truly be expanded? Education.

Build the schools first. Stick these surly illiterate children in classrooms, teach them to read and write, transplant hunger from their bellies to their brains... that had to be the true seed of what we so glibly call 227

“development”.

Five years later, I made a return vi-sit to Kedah. Keda, and the plethora of other agencies involved in those early plans, had been spectacularly true to their ambitions. All their blueprints and models had materialised in reality. The houses had been built and the com-munities organised; crops were grow-ing in new fields and smart new roads webbed out across what had so recently been desolate land.

And new schools were everywhere. Standard JKR-design doublestorey blocks stood proudly where once only twisted trees had grown.

Children in uniform laughed and shouted in their playgrounds and thronged their class-rooms.

It had happened — my wistful thought of five years earlier had seen fruition; realised in concrete and steel by those men and women who had had the wherewithal and the determination to see it happen.

But, as is the way with such things, the attainment of an ambition meant ambitions magnified. As I sped along the new black-tarred roads linking those villages, marvelling at the sight of those schools, I wondered what was being taught in them.

Do they say the first step is the har-dest? I’m not so sure. When there were no schools, it was clear what had to be done. And it was done, and now there are schools. The tasks of the planner, designer and builder are complete; that of the educationist just beginning. Now, it would appear, comes the hard part.

It is perhaps cause for chagrin that Malaysia hardly ever has the time to rest on the laurels of its growth; that each new advance we make serves only to reveal a greater distance yet to go.

We desire expanded horizons, we work towards them, we get them; REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

but even as we enjoy the view, we see that they mean ever longer journeys.

For it seems there were grounds for the unease I felt over what was going on in those classrooms.

The now-infamous affairs of the Sekolah Menengah Teknik in Cheras have validated those fears. The revelations of those students’ delinquency shocked the nation. Insolence, disobe-dience, gangsterism and vandalism are one thing; intimations of murder quite another.

In response, we have heard calls for a return to corporal punishment, public caning; if a kid does wrong, beat him, humiliate him, show him who’s got the power; wreck one child as a lesson to the others. The savagery of rebellion answered with a savage authority.... Clearly, there Is also such a thing as a poverty of ideas.

All this ugliness will have served an important purpose, however, if it leads to the understanding that the impres-sive record of educational development in this country means very little if mea-sured only in enrolment and number of classrooms.

Today, that school in Cheras was gi-ven a reprieve after the Education Minister made a surprise visit. From w hat’s been reported, the students have been working hard at cleaning up their school premises. I’m glad they made the grade; even if it might have been based mainly on how neat and tidy their school looks and how quietly they sit within their classrooms.

As for what’s going on inside their heads, that’s not their problem alone. It’s also their parents’ and teachers’ and communities’.

Which means, it’s Malaysia’s.

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The caterpillar that could REHMAN RASHID ON FRIDAY | 30 October 1987

Last Sunday, I spent 45 minutes watching a ca-terpillar cross a road.

It was up on Fraser’s Hill, about 9.30 in the morning, beneath a sky of breathtaking blue, dot-ted with puffy little white clouds. The golden sunshine of the hills had just enough warmth in it to begin lifting the early-morning chill.

The perfect weather, of course, for caterpillar-watching.

He was a game little fellow. About an inch long, with a splendid coatof-arms — he was one of those hairy ones, and his fine livery of silver threads sparkled in the sun.

He was yalumphing across the road with fearless abandon, leaping along at about a yard a minute.

Hairy caterpillars enjoy a charmed life, unless they are squashed by an unkind fate into a yucky paste. They’re the last of their kind to be eaten by other creatures, because those hairs of theirs make them extremely unpleasant to chew and almost impossible to swallow. Which probably explains why they have a certain arrogance in their demeanour. This could be due to the fact, I am quite certain, that their spines serve merely to boast that they’re also poisonous.

So if you’ve ever wondered which creature of the forest is the boldest of all, wonder no longer. It’s the hairy caterpillar.

To that grand little caterpillar, the road must have seemed an REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

absolute trackless desert of black stone, extending forever into the cosmos. Yet onward he marched, grim and determined.

I wondered if caterpillars could access some form of species memory, and recall those of their ancestors whose brief lives included embarking upon similar foolish treks through the Blackstone Desert only to encounter great thundering machines rolling down across, the horizon and obliterating life, the universe and everything in an instant of total revelation.

Watching my Conan of a caterpillar on his journey, I guessed not.

Such valour could not go unrewarded. I became sheepishly godlike, and guided three motorcyclists safely past my caterpillar. Fortunately, they were going quite slowly anyway.

(Upon reflection, this was probably because they had rounded the corner and seen that they were approaching a rather large brown man on IZ hands and knees in the middle of the road, apparently praying.)

The caterpillar either knew nothing of what was going on in defence of his life, or couldn’t give a jot.

He just kept yalumphing ever onward. (I’m sorry about using that word again, but I’ve tried for days to find a word that accurately describes the manner of the creature’s locomotion, and the closest I can get is “yalumph”.

231

Technically speaking, it was a sort of bilaterally syncopated metachronal rhythm. See? He yalumphed.

Eventually, he reached the other side. I breathed a sigh of relief. He was in amongst the leaf-litter scattered by the gutter, and the safety of the forest was but yalumphs away. A question, trembling in its profundity, sprang to my mind: Why did the caterpillar cross the road?

Not, as it turned out, to get to the other side, because my friend paused at a blade of lallang, turned aside scornfully and began striking north, still on the road. He seemed to like it there.

The Faithful Servant, a bit disgruntled that the Little Master had not quite had enough adventur-ing for one morning, set off in protective pursuit.

On we went, the caterpillar and me; he barrell¬ing along with boundless confidence, me taking about one step per minute as I dutifully kept sta¬tion as Chief Bodyguard Against Great Thunder¬ing Machines.

A couple of them hissed past, their windows up; little round children’s faces pressed to the glass as they delighted in the unusual sight of a grown man crouched by the roadside, waving at them.

(I felt a little sorry for them, actually, and a bit peeved at their parents. Fancy driving your kids all the way up to Fraser’s Hill and then driving them around in the car with the windows up and the stereo on.

Kids could have great fun in Fraser’s. All that space to run around in and sweet soft air to breathe and caterpillars to watch.

Then again, too many kids up on Fraser’s Hill have a way of exasperating the life out of those of us who go up there for some badlyneeded peace and quiet. So as long as those cars steered well clear of my caterpillar and me, I wasn’t about to spend too much thought on the people in them.)

After half-an-hour and about 25 paces, I began wondering how the little fella could keep going at his rollicking pace for so long, having covered what for me would have been the equivalent of several miles at a full sprint. Surely even caterpillars run on biotic energy. Didn’t this fella need to eat occasionally? Or rest? Or even pause to catch his REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

breath, for heaven’s sake?

Nope.

I followed him for another 15 minutes, at cater-pillar-level and caterpillar-pace, seeing something of a caterpillar’s view of the world.

Forever. more, I’m sure, one of my all-time heroes, right up there with Indiana Jones, MacGyver and Optimus Prime the Transformer, will be the Little Hairy Caterpillar of Fraser’s Hill.

That guy wasn’t scared of anything. Leaves, stones, twigs — even the odd fallen pine-cone, a veritable Himalayas of wood — meant nothing to him. Can’t climb over it? No problem, crawl under it. Shinny along a twig and end up way above the road? So what? Jump!

Totally bold, that caterpillar was simply doing what it was his nature to do — which was to move through his world with consummate selfassurance.

Perils and dangers? Great thundering machines rolling down out of the sky? Well hey, that’s life, right? Can’t get rid of ‘em, so might as well just bowl on like they’re never going to happen, being whatever you have to be, and hope that somewhere up there is a benevolent God who’ll watch over us when we sally forth into the Great Blackstone Desert, look kindly on our folly and direct traffic around us.

Eventually, the little hairy caterpillar decided to go back into- the forest again, and I bade him farewell. (Oh alright — after looking left and right to make sure there was no traffic in sight, I saluted. So? ) He had to survive, my adventuresome friend, because the whole point of being a caterpillar is to become a butterfly someday, right? And when the little hairy caterpillar becomes a butterfly, he’ll be able to simply fly across the Great Black¬stone Desert; a privilege he had surely earned.

I walked on, happy. A great coughing roar sounded from around the bend, and there rattled into view a JKR lorry; waddling obesely down the road with a full load of clay from some road-widening works nearby.

As it lumbered growling past, belching out a plume of oily blue smoke, I said a silent prayer, fervently hoping my friend had finally decided to stop and have something to eat.

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Bodies in the belukar REHMAN RASHID ON FRIDAY | 23 October 1987

Rape is such a hideous brutality.

There are only two flaws in the human condition. One is desire, the other is weakness. These are the only two reasons for all crime, allhuman in justice, all inflicted suffering. Rape represents the furthest extreme of both these cardinal failings working in tandem.

It is desire swollen into lust and weakness rotted into collapse.

Rape is blind madness; brutal beyond bestiality in its mindless hunger.

It is far more than a mere injustice — it is an invasion, a subjugation, a wrenched submission.

Rape — that extremity of crimes — evokes emotions that are fully as extreme. Anger explodes into rage, revulsion descends into loathing, fear inflames into hatred; condensing into a seething brew of outrage that can erupt in demands for an expiation as brutal as the crime.

Execution. Castration.

This should not surprise us. Rape manifests the unleashing of all that is most reprehensible and shameful in the human condition, with the horror of the act itself being amplified beyond tolerance by its prevalence, its rising incidence, its utter lack of reason.

And, most of all, by its apparent resistance to definition. The courts continue having to debate the arcane: Is it rape when the woman wore make-up and attractive clothes? Is it rape when the woman was walking alone at night through a secluded area?

Is it rape when the woman is beautiful? Can a prostitute be raped?

Can a husband rape his wife?

The answer to all such surprisingly tenacious questions — an answer which seems to have much trouble being heard — is yes.

So much psychoanalytical effort has gone into rape (what it is, what it does, how it does it, its effects on rapist and rapee) that the basic truth about what rape means seems always to be swept aside. Listen: Rape occurs when one human being is forced to submit to the physical desires of another against her (or his) own will.

That is it, that is all, and it is enough. For a sexual act to fall’ under the definition of rape, this is the only requirement. Rape doesn’t have to REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

mean torn clothing or bruises and scars on the body, although these are common. It doesn’t have to mean scratches on the face and shreds of skin under the fingernails.

Rape doesn’t have to mean lifeless naked bodies discovered under bushes or in roadside ravines, although this happens.

Rape can also mean a very silent, very slow, very long humiliation.

It can mean a very private agony, unknown and unsuspected by the unknowing; a quiet and terribly personal torment.

Those social systems which cannot see or understand this must stand indicted of a savage male dominance. It is therefore the height of arrogance for them to attempt to diminish culpability by pleading male weakness.

Women, we hear, should share the blame for being raped if they can be thought to have behaved in a manner attractive to men. Men, it seems, cannot be expected to control their desires and should be forgiven — or at least understood — for behaving worse than animals.

Men are by nature raging, slavering satyrs and they should not be condemned for something they cannot help.

This attitude is every bit as insulting to men as it is to women; it deserves to be thoroughly rejected.

There are NO circumstances in which rape, once proven, is not the complete and total responsibility of the rapist — the man.

The law does not question this truth. The task of the courts is, simply to decide whether or not an accusation otrape is genuine. (The law is a man-made thing, and sometimes it sees reason to ask if women’s power over men might not be manipulated in devious ways. This may help explain why rapes are so seldom reported.)

If it is thus established that a rape has indeed been committed, it is wholly untenable to suggest that the rapist may not have been entirely to blame. This hold true for all rape. For the silently suffering housewife as for the psyche-scarred secret victim as for the mutilated body in the belukar.

And as for the seven-year-old child...

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The long road to Jakarta REHMAN RASHID ON FRIDAY | 11 SEPTEMBER 1987

I wasn’t much of an athlete in school — in fact I wasn’t anything of an athlete in school — and it took me years to get over the sense of failure I suffered as a result, because my alma mater was a real jock-type school.

It was the sort of place where peopl were familiar with terms like “alma mater”, and where quality sportsmen and athletes enjoyed a tangible cachet of superiority, carrying with it a certain right to swagger.

It didn’t even matter if they were duds in class — breaking records at MSSM meets was almost as good as maintaining decent records at exams.

But I was never an athlete of any kind. (I am what you might call a co-ordina-tion defective. It’s not that ‘my arms and legs don’t know what to do on the sports field, it’s just that they’ve always had trouble trying to do it as a team. This was not good for me, although I got the distinct impression that I was a lot of fun to watch.)

I only won one sports medal in all my schooldays — a bronze for the shot-putt, when the muscle-bound Sabahan ox who beat me by a metre-and-a-half fell flat on his face and fouled it. *** I’ve still got that stupid plastic statuette on its little plywood plinth somewhere. I even enjoyed being able to pretend to have once been physically adept at something.

Boy, I sure used to envy, those athletes. They were fine, strong guys. Those who represented the school at team-games like rugby and football seem to have remained firm friends all their lives, and thOse who were bigshots in track-and-field enjoyed quite a bit of personal glory.

Wan Katak, for example, is still known as such to this day as a result of a rather remarkable long-jump performed at the age of 13 in 1968, when we were all in Form One. Wan Katak was one of those track stars. Whenever we go back to Malay College for an Old Boys’ weekend, he’ll quietly go and check the record books to see if the “B” Division 400m record he set in 1971 still stands. The last time we were back there together was in ‘85, and it was still standing then.

Yup, Wan Katak could’ve been a national class athlete if he’d wanted. But he had an option, which was no option at all, if you consider the fact that he’s now a hotshot fund manager with some flash merchant bank in KL, making more money than is entirely good for him.

People with options like that tend to stop being active athletes when they leave school. Those who continue in active competition are usually those whose options are somewhat more limited.

Police constables like Rabuan Pit. NEB linemen like V. Subramaniam. Bank clerks like Mumtai Jaafar and Hanafiah Nasir. You could call them “career athletes”, but then athletics isn’t much of a career.

Not in. Malaysia, anyway.

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In India, P.T. Usha is respected almost to reverence by the athletics fraternity.

Indonesia’s badminton stars are teen idols. Thailand’s sprinters are pop-stars. And Lydia de Vega, as we all know, is a goddess.

Our neighbouring countries’ athletes seem to enjoy being athletes a little more than ours do here. They don’t get scolded quite so much.

They’re not so brusquely shepherded around and spoken down to; they’re not continually threatened and bullied and made to feel that representing their country is a privilege their country is granting them, and not the other way around.

There are exceptions, of course. Well, one, anyway. We are very grateful to Nurul Huda Abdullah for deigning to re-present this country, because we know she could very well have ended up representing Australia if she’d wanted to — although she’d probably not be quite so peerless Down Under.

But as for the others...

They’re punished or trying, punished for failing, punished for speaking, and — in Rabuan Pit’s case — punished for growing old.

Some of the most humiliating things have been said against Malaysia’s sprinters these past few days, and that’s not right. They do not deserve to be treat-ed as if they’d betrayed their country simply because it’s not easy to find the time to train when you’ve a living to make-and a family to feed.

I interviewed Rabuan Pit back in ‘81, when he was in his prime, and he was hurting even then. Now, at 32, he’s being castigated for being unable to return the times he was clocking at 26 — and by people who look as if they’d die if compelled to run the 400m in less than half-an-hour.

People who’ve never been athletes are always telling Malaysia’s athletes what to do; and they’ve always been happy to take the credit for victory but never the blame for defeat.

Well, Rabuan, Rahman Koyakutty, G. Sivalingam and Hassan Hussain, the Malaysian 4x100m sprint team, will’ not be going to Jakarta after all. We don’t want to see them lose and thereby embarrass Malaysia. If Malaysia can’t win, Malay-sia won’t go. Malaysia is that greatest of schoolyard bores, the sore loser. *** After all these years, you’d think we might have learned how to handle defeat with a certain panache, remaining true to the spirit of competition. We’ve had so much practice at losing; we ought to be quite good at it by now.

In a way, though, I suppose Rabuan might be relieved by what’s happened. At least he won’t have to worry about being banished home without his supper for not being as good as sprinters from countries where they show top athletes some respect.

And neither will he have to fret over the 10pm lights-out ruling for our ath-letes in Jakarta.

The Malaysian Chef-de-Mission has pledged that anyone caught breaking the lightsout rule will be sent home on the next available flight. (Does that also apply to those who’ve had to pay their own way to Jakarta? ) “The Government and people of Malaysia,” said the Chef, “didn’t spend their money on this contingent for them to have a good time in Jakarta.”

That’s strange. You can bet the countries having a really good time at the Jakarta SEA Games will be those winning the most medals.

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Penang’s sclerosis UNPUBLISHED

Three months is long enough to take stock of any new programme, policy or position. The three months since the radical restructuring of Penang island’s bus system have been utterly frustrating. It looked good on paper (as almost everything does) but the neat zoning of the island according to trunk routes served by shuttles never worked on the ground. This failure was not due to flaws in the design but in human nature. Quite simply, the new system was hated by those who operate it: the island’s bus companies and drivers. From Day One, the absence of co-operation from bus operators amounted virtually to industrial action. Many didn’t go where they were supposed to nor on the schedules they were assigned, some stayed off the roads entirely, and within the first month, eight summonses were issued to bus drivers and dozens were fired.

In the meantime, the ire of the island’s legions of bus commuters could only be imagined. Most agree that the quality of life on the erstwhile Pearl of the Orient has declined dramatically over the past generation — almost entirely due to the exponential increase in vehicular traffic and all its attendant demands since the historic linking of the island with the mainland via the Penang Bridge 20 years ago. Today, some 85,000 vehicles ply that bridge; 20 per cent more on those extraREHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

busy holiday weekends so vital to the State’s tourism revenues. Another 7,000 or more use the ferries — but they are still too few to help the Penang Port Commission, having lopped RM13 million off its balance sheet last year. Dreading the advent of the second Penang bridge, the PPC hopes to adopt the business model of Hong Kong’s Star Ferry service, and ferry people only.

The best of luck to them, for the ferries retain at least a vestige of what was so charming about the Penang of yore, and the island could do with some such solace, given what it has become and, more pertinently, the massive infrastructural intervention now needed to set things right.

With the second bridge, the outer ring road and the monorail projects slated to cost a collective RM6 billion between them, the RM50 million needed to effectively “nationalise” the island’s bus transport system seems small potatoes. Given the pugnacious recalcitrance of operators that led this to pass in the first place, there’s likely to be a political cost to this move as their businesses collapse. That would be offset, however, by the relief and well-being of the island’s bus passengers, for so long the haplessly stranded victims of free enterprise turned mean and venal.

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Of flippers, fins and fatal foolishness UNPUBLISHED

Terengganu’s decision to ban swim-fins from coral reefs, as announced by Menteri Besar Datuk Seri Idris Jusoh on Tuesday, is a really bad idea.In the open sea, these devices, worn on the feet and commonly and erroneously called “flippers”, are not optional accessories but vital equipment.

(Quick note on usage: They are not called “flippers” because “flippers” are what our closest aquatic relatives the dolphins and whales use to steer, whereas what they use to drive themselves through the water — their tails — are called “fins”. So, humans use artificial “fins” to propel themselves through water. However, what humans use to steer in water are not called “flippers” but “arms” and “legs”.)

To venture into an aquatic environment with any confidence of returning unaided to dry land some day, a human being requires three essential items: A face mask through which to see; a snorkel through which to breathe; and fins with which to move. It is, of course, possible to move through water without fins. Although people like Michael Thorpe were born with them, even people without abnormally large feet can be Olympic swimming champions.

But they do their thing in swimming pools, where swim-fins are inappropriate because they can hurt when they hit other people or create pressure waves in the water too near someone’s ears.

There are also open-sea swimmers who don’t use fins, such as triathletes, channel-challengers, and brave kids earning a place in the Malaysia Book of Records. But such athletes are rarely counted among the crowds of seaside holidaymakers and paddle-splashers at issue in this regard.

How this happens, it seems, goes roughly like this: The State’s marine parks and fisheries authorities rightly warn the State Government that too many people are trampling over the coral reefs and damaging them with their swim-fins. Reducing the number of people would curtail revenues and run counter to tourism-sector development. Therefore, ban fins.

It’s a bit like banning car tyres to curb road accidents.

No, it’s worse. Banning tyres would mean total immobilisation and therefore be quite safe. Banning fins would mean people going into the sea with a greatly diminished capacity to be safe in it.

Swim-fins are for power and manoeuvrability. They grant the wearer more control in waves and against currents. Used properly, they increase a swimmer’s range four-fold. Had stalwart siblings Zahra Ma’soumah and REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

Salman Ali Shariati Abdul Halim used fins in their epic swim from Pangkor to Lumut last February, they’d have done it in half the time. (But perhaps not earned as much for charity.)

Swim-fins are not the problem; people are. Visitors to the nation’s marine parks should be trained and contained. Instead of resort operators being directed to enforce unreasonable bans, they should be required to educate and control their boatloads of weekenders, imparting to their clients the rudiments of good snorkelling technique, showing them how to behave in the water, and generally serving as extension officers in marine park management.

But there is little new to be said in respect of the intelligent exploitation of natural environments for ecotourism. Successful management models can be found from the Caribbean to the Great Barrier Reef. What they have in common is an intimate co-operation of statutory authorities and environmental agencies with resort operators, to create a virtuous cycle of visitor education and awareness.

People are not necessarily stupid, but they can be uneducated, unaware and unregulated.

Truly, such blithe ignorance of the marine environment is a danger in itself — we rightly fret for the fragility of the reefs and their vulnerability to human onslaught, but to an individual lost amid sea swells even within shouting distance of shore, there’s no question who’s got the power.The reefs and their associated fauna can strike back in a variety of ways, most of them unpleasant and some potentially lethal, at incautious people with unprotected bodies and, especially, bare feet.

Without educating and controlling the tourists crowding our coral seas for the delights and wonders they offer, all the State Government will achieve with this ban would be to ensure that those who damage the environment are painfully damaged in return.Effective as that would be, in a gory kind of way, perhaps the State Government would do better to seek to regulate visitor numbers and behaviour directly, rather than leave the blunderous hordes to be thinned out by the natural action of wind, wave, current, tide and salt-water septicaemia.

(Caveat: The writer declares his deep personal interest in the foregoing, as he was greatly looking forward to his Terengganu snorkelling holiday this year, and without his fins would drift helplessly away to sea festooned with remoras and nibbled to death by shrimp.)

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The language of love UNPUBLISHED

When it comes to expressing love, the English language, fabulously garrulous in all other respects, is strangulated in a way few other languages are.

The Romance languages, for instance, aren’t called that for nothing.

Sensual, seductive and gender-obsessed, Italian, Spanish and French revel in phonemes designed to slide up to each other and goose themselves along in daisy-chains of relentless linguistic intercourse.

(Could you imagine a gallant Gallic la standing aloof from its designated amour? No, it has to get stuck right in there, sucking its lover’s face in ardent embrace: l’amour. No such salacious impulses in German, with its cirrhosis of du lieber.)

The Latinate languages are famous for being spoken with the entire body. English doesn’t even require an upper lip.

Then again, the Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Gothic tongues were shaped by the need to communicate while stalking mastodons. Love can’t have been prominent among the concerns of the reeking Northern European tribes whose dour gutturalisms eventually boiled down into the English we know today.

Those frozen, woad-daubed folk had more urgent matters to discuss, such as sabre-toothed tigers, Huns, Turks and Mongols. Therefore, their languages have come down to us as instruments of global commerce, international relations and war.

Contrasting the boiled-potato stolidity of English, Dutch and German with the luscious Dionysian tongues of the Mediterranean indicates the influence of climate.

This may also explain why the so-called Indo-Aryan languages, welling out of the warm, fertile, well-watered plains of the Rivers Tigris, Euphrates, Indus and Ganges, display an almost onomatopoeic approach to love.

Muhabhat is clearly made for earnest Urdu whispers under moonlight, as is the Farsi ishq.

Hindi, as befits the vernacular of the most syncretic culture the world has ever known, goes all the way from the workaday pyar to the breathless orgasmic gasp of luff. (Interesting consonance with the English word, but it’s all in the delivery.)

REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

The subtropical Tamil kadhal is, well, cuddly, while the temperate Chinese aiching is at the very least businesslike.

If the climate theory holds true for Eskimos, who have 200 words for “snow” and none for “papaya”, it might also explain why the Malay language, otherwise so woefully inexpressive as to require outright bastardisation simply to remain inofatif and fleksibel into the era moden, has three words for what English inarticulately tries to express with one.

In descending order of necessity to life, these are kasih, sayang, and cinta; closely analagous to the triumvirate of agape, amor and eros.

The first, kasih, is best represented in English by “compassion” (kasihan = kesian = sympathy): A sense of bonding and connectedness; of sharing. It’s the basis for all other expressions of love, none of which would mean a thing without kasih to underlie it all.

(This, indeed, is the closest approach to the English language’s universal “love”, which stems from the Old English lief, which meant “life” and proves they couldn’t spell.)

Sayang signifies a tender affection, as among families, or for children.

It represents what is cuddlesome and comforting in life.

Cinta is the headily perfumed word, representing sensual, erotic love and sexual passion.

With all three of these loves in your life, you’d be blessed; your emotional spectrum would be complete. Erotic passion is the spice in the blend, infusing life with its piquant delights. Without it, but with respect and affection, life remains good and fulfilling.

Without affection or tenderness, life would be sad; sayang sekali!

Without kasih, however-without compassion-it would be inconceivable.

These are useful distinctions in making some sense of the matter after it’s been sieved through the contortions of the human condition.

But they are even more useful in helping us see that there is nothing essentially human about any of these qualities in the first place. Birds, bees, performing fleas and Blue Whales all know what we mean by passion, tenderness and compassion. Love seems to be a frankly primordial concept; perhaps prefigured in the conjugally paired and twining vines of DNA itself.

Suddenly, the true universality of love seems obvious, unbounded and natural; manifest in the connectedness and interdependence of things, in the harmony of the spheres, in The Way Things Are. And if something is that fundamental, what’s to be gained from talking about it at all? Lief is for the liefing, friends and luffers.

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The sacrificial absolution of Umno Unpublished

Umno is not to be blamed for Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi stepping down as party president, chairman of the Barisan Nasional and prime minister of Malaysia.

Unlike with the retirements of Tunku Abdul Rahman and Tun Hussein Onn, this time the party itself was not the primary vehicle of those compelling its president to bow out.

To a significant extent, this was wrought by the 3,796,464 voters who chose opposition parties in the country’s 12th general election.

But even they cannot be held wholly responsible for this departure of a chief executive chosen by the other 4,082,411 Malaysians who voted on March 8.

Many of those who elected Pakatan Rakyat candidates may have sought a stronger parliamentary opposition, rather than the annihilation of the Barisan Nasional. Most would have wanted better governance — but 51.08 per cent, at least, did not want another government.

Nevertheless, the 48.92 per cent of the electorate who voted against the BN seven months ago empowered those who did finally compel the PM to step down. These are the ones who now crow loudest; those who vilified and insulted him and called him names; those who sneered and jeered and carped and railed against everything he did and said - or didn’t do or say, elegantly or otherwise.

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Mostly otherwise of late; witness his strained smiles at those who turned his Hari Raya open house into just another picket line.

The rabble in the galleries, barracking and booing; the rowdy applause in courtrooms and unseemly commotions outside: these have shown Abdullah the door.

People like Abdullah have no response to such behaviour. The hooting and hollering flusters and confounds them. The idiom eludes them: they lack the vocabulary; they have neither tongue nor heart for it.

So while his administration flaps feebly at the dissent buzzing about its ears, wielding the ISA like a fly-swatter in a swarm of hornets and only maddening them the more, Abdullah smiles.

He smiled when his predecessor appointed him deputy 10 years ago - even breaking into a chuckle as the older man declared his disappointment at having no better options — and he smiled last Wednesday afternoon, when announcing his decision not to stand for the party presidency at Umno’s 62nd general assembly next March.

Abdullah should be remembered for smiling in the face of the Furies, even when, at last, bowing to their will. He was weak, if kindliness, compassion and tolerance constitute weakness. He lacked strength, if intransigence, force and ruthlessness constitute strength.

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If it is weak to not strike back when slapped in the face, he was weak.

If it is weak to smilingly extend a hand to be spurned on Aidil Fitri, he was weak. If it is weak to endure humiliation with a frozen smile, he was weak.

Because he was not masterful, imposing, or capable of asserting the full authority of his office, he was weak.

Abdullah has been held to account not for anything he did, therefore, but what he permitted: the blooming of a hundred ironic flowers. He doubled the size of government, allowing the emergence of a host of new players and raising the ire of those who saw they needed leadership, not indulgence.

Most of all, he unshackled all that had been held in thrall to the national contract installed with the birth of this nation and maintained ever since by Umno & Co. Having drawn the short stick of history, it fell upon Abdullah to pay for the Sins of the Fathers. He might hope now to take them with him into history — virtually saying as much in his avuncular salute to Tun Razak Hussein’s firstborn son at their historic press conference last Wednesday.

Thus has this man been hounded from office not so much by his own party as the howling wolves of the open range; the laughing hyenas he set free when he loosened the leashes that had muzzled them for decades. Vox populi cried “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war, which ate him alive.

(Call this a “Kok caveat”: the canine reference in the preceding sentence is a quote from Shakespeare and not intended as a slight to any community.)

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Not that they’ll be sated with that. As spake their keeper Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim: “Najib is no better.” The carnivorous carnival continues; it is said that once certain creatures taste blood, nothing else quite hits the spot with that zesty metallic zing.

One would wish that, in this feeding frenzy on a moveable feast, they refrain from similarly devouring the institutions of state as well (Order in the Court! Respect the Speaker’s Chair!) but it may be too late. Drunk on intoxicant freedoms, the liberated predators know that nothing can stand against them now without also being immolated in the furnace of their righteous wrath.

For this reason, Umno should not look too unkindly on itself. The party has not led this charge to oust its president, but followed the will of the people as represented by His Majesty’s loyal opposition — as well as those using them as shields and spearheads for their own crusades.

For this reason, those in Umno tempted to join in the pillorying of their own leadership should strategise wisely. As long as they remain in Umno, they cannot consider as allies those who would dance on Umno’s grave, no matter how amicably they may break bread together in pious quest of common cause.

If they believe Abdullah’s departure is necessary for Umno’s resurrection, they should leave its destruction to the outside parties at present doing rather well at it. As Exodus and Disraeli counsel, it only seems like the enemy of your enemy is your friend, when in politics there are no permanent friends or permanent enemies - only permanent interests.

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Liar, liar, pants on fire Unpublished

Human beings can lie, researchers have found, by the age of six months.

This may seem startling, but not when you think about it. We’ve been in denial. We must have always known we couldn’t be trusted for the truth.

Lying is quite a complex act, involving an intricate gearing of perceptions and desires. It was assumed that the human brain needed about four years to develop the sophistication for it.

This now seems almost charmingly naïve. With self-reflective consciousness turning on at about three years — the age of most people’s earliest memory — it was somehow kind to believe it took just a little longer to learn how to lie.

That was a sad conceit, if a team of behavioural psychologists at Britain’s University of Portsmouth is to be believed. Six months from umbilical severance, people, that’s how long it took you to start pulling fast ones.

The UK’s Daily Telegraph last week quoted researcher Dr Vasudevi Reddy explaining how this was concluded by observing how babies wail for attention, then pause to see if such attention is forthcoming before deciding whether more wailing is called for. This indicates deliberate manipulation of what was always thought to be involuntary. The devious little cheats!

Infants eight months old lie to distract their parents or “conceal forbidden activities”, and by the age of 2 can perform the conceptual acrobatics involved in lying to avoid punishment.

Consider what this may mean. Learning to bluff before you even know you exist implies you don’t “learn to” at all — this is hardwired. It comes bundled with the programming. It’s instinctive. We are born with a capacity to mislead, exercised for desired outcomes.

Even from an evolutionary standpoint, there would seem to be clear advantages in instinctual lying. (“They went thataway!” “Food? What food?”)

Presuming that by the time our brains turned on to rational thought we’d been practised little liars for a couple of years, among the first thoughts we could coherently formulate must have been: “The goat ate my homework.”

The later questions — Who am I? Where am I? What is the meaning of all this? — would therefore have been open to definition from their very onset. Hence, after hundreds of thousands of years: Ethics.

It must have dawned upon mankind very early that the fluid nature of the human conscience made for unstable social structures. If “you are what REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

you pretend to be”, as the late great Kurt Vonnegut observed, we must, as he warned, “be careful what you pretend to be”.

Hence the great constructions of law and constitution; the exalted edifices of state; the architecture of civilisation within which we exist: The institutional scaffolding we entrust with containing our shape-shifting, manipulative, innately deceitful natures.

The more we learn about the ad-hoc nature of human consciousness, the less we should condemn politicians, activists, zealots, bloggers, lawyers and advertising executives. (Oh all right, and journalists.) They’re not all liars per se (or at least no more so than everyone else); they are designers of reality.

For if reality is a matter of perception, then it is prone to persuasion: the marketing of ideas; “that vision thing”. When assailed by the ideas of people who seem to be living on a totally different planet, bear in mind that they are. The world is entirely as you, and you alone, see it. Might as well be, if everyone else has also been lying since birth.

Speaking at a conference in Kuala Lumpur last week, anti-corruption crusader and NST columnist Tunku Abdul Aziz struck a chord with his audience when he deplored Malaysians’ [“lack of outrage”]. The usual reasons ventured for this are ignorance, cynicism and apathy. I suggest another: Empathy. Who among us, liars all since birth, might profess not to understand the impulse to corruption, treachery, betrayal and deceit?

We are distinguished only by our personal thresholds of moral repugnance. To understand is by no means to accept or, God forbid, admire. But not one of us wouldn’t understand. “Let he who is without sin,” therefore, “cast the first stone.”

This should be humbling. Those of us (and we are legion) who cling to our principles, ethics and moralities through the wildest tempests and challenges, or clutch them to ourselves like a child with a teddy bear in the deep dark night, do so because we know that without them there’s no saving us from the treacheries of our own nature.

For we were born liars. Dr Reddy observes that it’s like exploration, only not of the real world but the one the infant human is already crafting for itself: Babies want to test how much they can get away with, so they can learn the consequences. But when facing those consequences, the little devils also know how to fake tears.

If this is our nature, thank heaven for nurture. What dignity, nobility and honour there is in life must be entirely due to that quaintly antiquated notion, “character”: a consequence of upbringing, manners and education.

Without which, let’s retrieve William Golding’s Lord of the Flies from the bonfire of the vanities, get a DVD of Children of the Corn and revisit the concept of Original Sin. 249

READY TO GO Running up to dance the silver-medal boogie Unpublished

One feels so sorry for Fernando Alonso.

After battling for five years to claw his way out of the shadow of Michael Schumacher, he gets the merest glimpse of a break in the clouds — and is then drenched to the skin by Lewis Hamilton. After just two seasons as F1 champion to Schumacher’s seven, the Spaniard could be forgiven an occasional hissy fit.

Imagine it, O lesser mortals: To be at the peak of your powers in a career that makes you a global celebrity earning millions — and to forever be remembered as a runner-up; a podium finisher; an also-ran.

Britain’s 1984 Olympic decathlon champion Daley Thompson once wickedly teased women’s javelin-thrower Fatima Whitbread, describing her happy little jig on coming second as the “Silver-Medal Boogie”.

Bogey, more like. Cycling’s Jan Ullrich doesn’t even want to talk about the seven years he battled in the Tour de France, consistently outclassing everyone but a certain Lance Armstrong. Ullrich rode on for two years after Armstrong retired unbeaten, but was dogged by doping allegations and hung up his clips for good last February.

It’s gone, it’s over; the God-given talent and ancestrally bequeathed genetics that combined to make an individual capable of being the best in the world, wasted, lost, cast into oblivion because of just one other individual being better, for just long enough to keep you from your ultimate goal past your prime.

It’s like missing a three-foot putt.

Speaking of Tiger Woods, the past generation has been quite remarkable for this. In Woods, Armstrong, Michael Schumacher, Valentino Rossi and Sergei Bubka, sport and athletics found Phenoms: The miracle-worker; the phenomenal player; the unbeatable foe.

Their respective advents initially sparked a debate that has largely been settled now: On the whole, Phenoms are not good for their sports. They perform at a different level from all other contenders, drawing more awe than admiration. They become marvels, not models. They cause more despair than inspiration, for they are demonstrably superhuman. Behind them, in the pack, peloton or field, is everybody else.

Cut the breakaway sprinter out of the picture as he vanishes over the Alpe D’Huez, and the real sport begins. The game is played in the brutal REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

battle of the field, where Jan Ullrich lived, Graeme Obree attempted suicide and Marco Pantani coked himself to death, in a sport driven to drugs, desperation and despair by Lance’s Dance.

Purgatory is one bend behind the yellow jersey; one rung down on the leader board. Mickelson might rule and Vijay Singh be the Lion King, were it not time for a Tiger. Purgatory is second row on the grid, where for four seasons Fernando Alonso was spat in the visor by the Rainmeister’s spray.

One step down on the podium, next in line for the handshake, the eternal second, that’s where they hear that funky music of the SilverMedal Boogie while the fat lady sings.

They grow old as apprentices. Year after year, they wait for the phenom to grow old, to flag, falter, lose stamina, reflexes, or just the will to win. But as their own years pass sucking rear wheel, they realise Phenoms wouldn’t be Phenoms if they did. Phenoms first sap their challengers’ spirit by outclassing them, then break it by outlasting them.

What’s amazing is how many of them there’ve been in the past decade, crushing their sports into sorry shambles of second echelons presided over by an Immortal.

Tennis, at present, is the notable exception. Part of world number one Roger Federer’s popular appeal lies in his fallibility. He can lose. He is a more appealingly human champion than, say, Pete Sampras was — though even Pistol Pete did not come close to matching the dominance of today’s phenoms in other sports.

Still, the rest of Fedex’s appeal is that he remains good enough to keep Rafael Nadal from getting too smug. But so can Xavier Malisse. In tennis, the field is even and open. On any given day, any given Top 20 player can win. This, it is said, is good for sport. (Though it must surely suck for Spaniards.)

Frankly, it isn’t great for spectators either. One leggy Central European blonde after another wafts across the lawns of Wimbledon; young orientals chirp up the fairways of the LPGA tour; it’s all a bit of a blur.

It’s the phenoms who stand out in sharp focus: their flying vees as they cross the finish line; the air-punching fist on the victory lap; the thrown ball curling away into the crowd.

It’s the phenoms for whom the crowds gasp, as the ball falls out of the sky to the feet of a Ronaldinho, the head of a Zidane or any part of a Maradona, anticipating magic.

What’s mere world-beating skill and decades of dedication in comparison? Fernando Alonso might want to consider diversifying into designer apparel. It worked for Greg Norman.

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READY TO GO

Unfinished business Unpublished

Once Removed Andrew Leci Marshall Cavendish, Kuala Lumpur, 2008; 264pp; RM34.90rrp “AH, Bond! The famous wit about town. Or half of one, anyway.” — John Cleese as Q in …

This is precisely half a book.

Andrew Leci embarked on what might have been the definitive document of a devastating decade, got bored halfway through, dumped it and walked away. Typical.

Once Removed (the title must have its merits but they’re never explained) purports to be a diary of six months in the life of a youngish British expatriate in Kuala Lumpur; a quantity surveyor with a foreign firm foraging for business in the mega-projected Malaysia of the mid1990s.

The journal begins on January 1, 1997, enticingly portending a depiction of the annus horribilis of the local and regional economy — the benighted year of the Asian financial meltdown. Graham Wallace, our hero, is drinking and leching his way through the Irish bars and sarong party girls of KL in the louchest period of its history since, oh, 1952, perhaps.

It was the overblown zenith of the boom years, amply fuelled by the planeloads of youngish Western technocrats flown in to help Malaysia get to grips with all the new-fangled high-tech development coming online along with the monumental infrastructure of our brave new economy.

That was the hype, anyway. They also got to grips with beer mugs and bar babes. In this disarming novel, Leci confirms every stereotype of the rugby-jerseyed Hooray Henrys known regionally in those days by the acronym FILTH (“Failed In London, Try Hongkong”).

In return, they infused local glossaries with their own terminologies: SPG, LBSM (“little brown sex machines”), MLBB (“my little bit of brown”). Graham Wallace exhibits all the standard traits expected of the home-counties lager lout amid ornamental orientals on the hunt REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

for anything but a local mamat, ensuring his bawdy escapades are more pathetic than erotic — quite authentically, no doubt.

Leci was well-known in comedic theatre in KL — he was a founding staple of the Instant Café Theatre — before expanding his horizons as a Singapore-based TV sportscaster. His book is a tour-de-farce of broad comedy; a punny riot of double entendres and bon mots, often hilarious.

But Leci was also a present and thoughtful witness to a most febrile time in this country’s modern history, and it’s in these subtexts and undertows that his book most tantalises — and frustrates. There’s dynamite in the eye-widening glimpses of the work Graham Wallace was doing here as a quantity surveyor, with his up-close-and-personal experience of the backhanded, back-scratching, greasy-palmed and sticky-fingered venality and corruption of those times.

Our narrator’s tale introduces us to the era’s sleazy Datuks and fawning Mat-Sal consultants with their obsequious minions and crooked mandores, in caricatures all the more revealing for being drawn in the detached, self-absorbed mopings of a lost white boy oversexed and underloved in the steamy East.

It all builds up steadily to what any Malaysian reader would surely anticipate as the mother of all climaxes, as the diary winds on through the year 1997 towards the impending economic collapse, political crisis, and financial ruin of those who’d lived large and waxed fat as boom town rats.

But the diary ends on “Tuesday 31 June” — maddeningly, just before history got seriously interesting — with the entry: “There is no 31st of June.”

Oh, yes, very droll.

As a consequence of this shocking dereliction of a writer’s duty to either see a story through to its logical conclusion or not even begin, we’re left after 264 pages with a tale half-told, all plotlines flapping loose, the whole thing left hanging in mid-air with nothing settled, nothing resolved, no end in sight.

What might have been the most original and revealing expose yet written of the year “Malaysia Inc.” crashed and burned is reduced to but the feckless doodlings of a derelict expat, and really — who cares?

All moral suasion must be exerted on Marshall Cavendish and Andrew Leci to produce the second half of this diary and blow the lid completely off Wallace’s wicked world. Given his sozzled state on January 1, 1997, it’s intolerable not knowing how and where the lad ended up on December 31 in the year the music died.

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READY TO GO

The politics of hate Unpublished

Hatred, contempt and disdain have come to coil upon our landscape like snakes; hissing, rearing and spitting venom at whatever they don’t like, through the vaunted “alternative media”.

Base rumours and vile innuendoes, lies and half-truths are their currency. Forget about proof, even evidence is not required. Any allegation, however untenable or indeed ridiculous, gets its mileage when directed against the designated enemy — the “Establishment”, and those who support it.

If only these scurrilous defamations and character assassinations could be seen for what they were — the venting of frustrations long suppressed (and for clearly good reasons). But they cloak themselves in righteousness, if you please; in the need to pursue “free and fair elections” or “judicial reform” or, most cynically of all, “freedom of speech”.

Malaysia was recently downgraded a couple of notches on the ranking of nations for press freedom, ostensibly as a consequence of attempts to curb independent commentary. Some of the international reaction to this relegation has at least acknowledged that elements of Malaysia’s alternative media have attained startling heights of malice.

A gleeful wickedness is abroad, as anonymised keyboard cowboys crack their knuckles in the witching hours, illuminated in the darkness by the ghastly blue glow of their computer monitors, giving vent to the foul language and scandalous allegations that are their stock-in-trade, veritably daring their targets to act against them. (I get my fair share of it, of course, which explains this rant.)

They know they cannot be silenced. The mightiest of central authorities, such as those of China, Myanmar and Pakistan, have only proved the farcical futility of attempting to censor the Internet. It simply can’t be done. Societies the world over are resigned to the reality that untrammelled licence of opinion is here to stay, and must be accepted REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

as a clear and present fact of life.

All the more reason to banish the shadows of ignorance on which they feed, with the transparent light of straight facts and honest information.

As the alternative media mature (perhaps one should say “grows up”), they will prove to be their own regulators. No one likes being insulted, lied to or played for a fool. The time will come when those who reveal themselves as the would-be architects of chaos and destruction will receive their come-uppance through the very medium they abuse. They themselves will be attacked and vilified by their own kind or — worst of all for the worst of them — ignored by everyone else.

Until such self-regulation kicks in, we’ll just have to grit our teeth and bear it as they attempt to destroy reputations, topple democratically elected governments, overturn institutions of state and marshall their masses for rallies and demonstrations on the streets of our cities.

The Bersih coalition of NGOs, ostensibly dedicated to “free, transparent and fair elections” (which seems to mean elections that produce the results they would prefer) was hoping to gather 100,000 Malaysians at Dataran Merdeka. After their exciting rumble in Terengganu, some must have found it thrilling to anticipate a reprise of burning flags and petrol bombs in the heart of Kuala Lumpur.

The proposed rally has been denied a permit, but the Internet scuttlebutt is that our conscientious objectors might gather anyway. We wait to see how successful they will be.

The Malaysian Way has failed most egregiously in having enabled the usurpation of the most precious democratic ideals by law-breakers and troublemakers painting themselves as brave avenging heroes.

Lest it be forgotten: Legitimate ends are fatally befouled by illegitimate means.

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The last three minutes of brain death Unpublished

Research has shown that human beings, no matter how different their lives, die in remarkably similar ways. This isn’t as obvious as it may sound. Studies of “near-death experiences” have revealed the following symptoms, reportedly shared by everyone who’s ever been at death’s door but somehow not passed through: A bright white light, usually coming from “above”. The cessation of physical pain. A feeling of floating “upwards”, out of the body, often to the point where subjects can look down to see themselves below, apparently unconscious. The awareness of “presences”, often of deceased relatives; sometimes of religious figures. Life experiences are also often recapitulated (as in, “my life flashed before my eyes”).

Finally, there is the sensation of a choice to be made, either to continue floating upward toward the clear white light, or to descend again into the shadowy body below. Those who live to tell of such experiences often remember making a “conscious” decision to “return”, and are often tangibly changed for it.

These experiences know no distinction of age, gender, race, culture or locale, leading the religiously-inclined to see them as evidence for a common afterlife uniting all human beings.

Intriguingly, those who reject the idea of an afterlife see in the universality of near-death experiences evidence for a much more mechanistic human nature. Their reasoning goes something like this: The human brain lives on for about three minutes after the heart stops beating, during which time it begins to succumb to oxygen depletion.

Oxygen deprivation triggers a flood of chemical neurotransmitters in the brain, manifesting in the symptoms listed above. Although every dying brain goes through this sudden biochemical soaking, the experience is as unique to each as their personal memories.

Many precursor conditions of brain death can be replicated by oxygen deprivation, which is thought to account for the hallucinatory or transcendent, “out-of-body” experiences some people undergo at high altitudes, such as when climbing Himalayan peaks or circumambulating Mount Kailash in Tibet.

The brain also seems to respond in a similar fashion to electromagnetic fields. Experiments conducted at Canada’s Laurentian University in 1999 subjected volunteers to such fields, evoking within them sensations REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

of “presences”; these could be benign or sinister, depending on the psychology of the person undergoing the experiment.

This is taken as an indication of why some people claim to see ghosts, UFOs or supernatural things, and others don’t: It all depends on what they think and believe. In influential electromagnetic environments, those who believe in ghosts are more likely to see them than those who do not.

So too with all superstitions, religions and mythologies; indeed, the entire spectrum of articles of faith adopted by human beings. In the more esoteric areas of neurological research, science seems to be showing that we are indeed what we believe.

Does this, then, add to the atheist’s arsenal of arguments against religion and the religious experience? Not at all. On the contrary, it indicates that the human brain, that most awesome of organs, has literally undreamed-of depths and capacities — but that these capacities remain very much within the individual’s control to shape and form. As we think, so we are. We should be very mindful, therefore, of what we think; in the very act of thinking, we literally shape the reality of our world and our existence within it.

A lifelong sceptic myself, I am humbled by the wonder of these fairly recent findings. Having long dismissed superstition, voodoo and such as unbefitting the rational mind, I now concede the relativity of the real.

“The power of suggestion” is as real as anyone wants it to be. This may help us understand mass hysteria, for instance, or whatever efficacy may be claimed by bomohs, witch doctors and faith-healers, or the continuing fascination of much of the public with the mystical and magical — and why advanced religion frowns on this sort of thing.

Of course, shedding disbelief could leave many of us susceptible to tricksters, charlatans and freak-show frauds. But the antidote to such dumbo-mumbo-jumbo and out-of-focus hocus-pocus is education, knowledge and understanding. The danger here lies not in what is believed, but what is not known. Ignorance iblis.

Among those who underwent the Laurentian experiments mentioned above was a Carmelite nun known for her devout religious faith and exemplary aptitude for her order’s discipline of contemplative prayer. As the researchers manipulated her brainwaves through electromagnetism, she, like all the other test subjects, experienced an induced awareness of a phantom “omnipresence” with her in the laboratory.

Didn’t this, she was asked afterwards, undermine her belief in God? “No,” she said. “It affirms it.”

That God and all His angels, Heaven, Hell and everything in between could be prefigured in the chemistry of the brain: What more proof could be needed of the miracle of the mind?

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READY TO GO

In memory of the mad Scottish planter Unpublished

East of Kinabalu: Tales from the Borneo Jungle Leslie Davidson The Incorporated Society of Planters; Kuala Lumpur, 2007; 233pp; RM40 “It is not every day, I suppose, that a man might find himself floating, stark naked and alone, down a Borneo river, in pitch darkness.”

With the most arresting first sentence of any book published here this year, Datuk Leslie Davidson begins as he intends to continue. These pages are a rollicking feast of anecdotes drawn from the last frontiers of the pioneering planters who literally seeded these lands with the future we live in today.

Aberdeen-born Leslie Davidson, who would end his long and illustrious career with Unilever Plantations International as its chairman, began it as a cadet planter in Kluang, Johor, in 1951. It was the height of the Emergency; he admits he “was lucky to have survived”. In 1960, after a stint in Africa, he was sent to Tungud in Sabah, up the Labuk River from Sandakan, “East of Kinabalu”.

There he was to open up 1,000 acres of swampy forest for what would be the first oil palm plantation in Sabah. By fate and circumstance, then, Leslie Davidson was to be among the last of those redoubtable Scotsmen of yore, the colonial lone rangers of the East, with their entirely disproportionate effect on our histories.

From this distance, what men like Davidson were able to do is scarcely believable: plunking themselves down on a riverbank in the middle of a jungle straight out of Joseph Conrad and transforming it into vast swathes of neat plantations, growing the modern wealth of new nations.

The work was horrendous, the risks immense, yet they toiled with that peculiarly Scottish combination of stoic fortitude and grim good humour.

Davidson carved out of the jungle what quickly grew into an exceedingly diverse community of Timorese, Bugis, Suluks, Chinese, REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

Indians, Kadazandusuns, Banjars, Tidungs and Dayaks. There were even émigré Cocos Islanders and, for a time, a band of Balanini pirates, earning plantation wages during the stormy seasons.

Davidson marvels at the easygoing harmony that prevailed throughout most of his decade there, casting it among the benefits he was certain his efforts would bring to this country and its people.

Colonialism was an embarrassing anachronism and had to go, no doubt, but industrial agriculture could be just what this country needed.

Davidson did more than almost anyone to make palm oil the Golden Crop it remains to this day. He was instrumental in introducing, from Africa, the miracle bug Elaeidobius kamerunicus, the pollinating weevil that increased production by 40 per cent and assured palm oil’s future as a pillar of Malaysian agribusiness.

But, the triumph of his career is but a postcript in this volume, which sets out to be simply a ripping yarn — and succeeds admirably. His pages are festooned with colourful characters and events. Historical personages also waft through — Tun Mustapha Harun, Tun Fuad (then Donald) Stephens, Tun Musa Hitam and P.P. Narayanan all make cameo appearances in unlikely settings.

Recalled with a raconteur’s sparkle are cockfights, killings, and the monster flood that wiped out his first three years’ work. (Speaking of the Right Stuff, Scot-style: Davidson chose to see that disaster as a blessing because the flood deposited new alluvial soil that would save a tidy sum in fertiliser.)

As rough around the edges as its author and subject, East of Kinabalu would be a treat for anyone who wants to know how this country got its start in agribusiness — and one of the mad Scotsmen responsible.

(The book is available from the Incorporated Society of Planters, Wisma ISP, 29 Jalan Taman U Thant, 55000 Kuala Lumpur. Tel.: 0321425561.)

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Stepping back from beyond the bounds Unpublished

The Federal Court’s decision in the Lina Joy case has far more profound implications for Malaysian Muslims than non-Muslims, which makes it curious that non-Muslims seem more troubled by it than Muslims, many of whom profess positive jubilance over it.

But what is there to fear, and what to cheer? With this decision, the apex court divests itself of authority over determining who is or is not a Muslim, a matter the civil judiciary will now leave to Islamic jurisprudence. This does not mean a repeal of the Federal Constitution’s Article 11 provisions on freedom of worship, which continue to hold in full — for Malaysia’s nonMuslims.

Muslims, especially those most welcoming of the Lina Joy decision, personally abjure Article 11’s freedoms as a matter of faith in their religion.

But few would deny those freedoms to others, especially outside the Ummah, with regard to whom Islam famously sanctions no compulsion.

Within, however, is another matter, governed by a different canon of laws, administered by syariah courts.

Not until 1996 did there begin an attempt to consolidate the nation’s legions of syariah authorities, dealing in their various ways with questions of birth, death, marriage, divorce, inheritance and religious misdemeanours and infractions among Muslims.

The syariah legal system has developed remarkably (of necessity, no doubt, having had to grapple with so many uniquely Malaysian questions lately) but, entangled on the ground in a mesh of 14 state jurisdictions, it is still far short of a national syariah court with the heft and gravity of a Federal Court.

This deficiency must now be rectified, and fast. Some people’s legal identities, and therefore their marriages and families, are in limbo; other people are impeded from marrying and having families.

But juridical maturation takes lifetimes, generations, which is why for newly independent nations so much of it has to be inherited. Our Federal Constitution is such a document. Modelled on India’s but factoring in the Malay monarchies, it was assembled in 1956-57 by the Reid Commission, a panel of five eminent Commonwealth jurists, none of them Malayan.

The Constitution was bound to be reshaped after its launch three days before Merdeka Day, and it has been, with more than 40 major and 650 minor amendments since, along with countless interpretations of its 14 Parts, 13 Schedules and 181 Articles.

REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

Among them was a 1998 civil court judgment holding that Clause 1a of Article 121 limited the federal court’s authority to rule on points covered by syariah law. In the Lina Joy decision, on the singular point of who has authority to declare whether or not a person is Muslim, by a 2-1 majority the federal court abided by that interpetation.

The judgment holds that Islamic authorities must certify that Lina Joy is no longer a Muslim before she can have the word “Islam” erased from her identity card.

The dissenting opinion of Federal Court Judge Tan Sri Datuk Richard Malanjum, Chief Judge of Sabah & Sarawak, notes documentary proof that Lina Joy was baptised into Christianity on May 11, 1998, at the age of 34. As such, as a Christian, she should no longer be subject to Islamic law.

But the prevailing judgment of Chief Justice Tan Sri Ahmad Fairuz Sheikh Halim, seconded by Chief Judge of Peninsular Malaysia Datuk Alauddin Sheriff, held that because there is no similar certification of Azlina binti Jailani having left Islam, the validity of Lina Joy’s baptismal certificate is questionable.

The Federal Court has therefore decided to refer Lina Joy to the syariah authorities, from whom she must obtain proper certification that she has formally renounced Islam. “Only when Islamic authorities acknowledge her apostasy may the Appellant embrace the Christian religion,” wrote Ahmad Fairuz in his judgment (paragraph 14; translated).

In short, Lina Joy must apostasise by due process. But there isn’t one.

The Federal Court’s deliberations made as much as possible of precedents, but the judgment saw these as consequences of particular state policies and circumstances, and in any case decided prior to the re-interpretation of Clause 1a of Article 121 relinquishing the civil courts’ authority over Islamic affairs.

This means big work ahead for the syariah system, which must now codify procedures for circumstances practically inconceivable in Islamic jurisprudence; questions so far beyond belief that the Quran itself reserves for them but scant (though scathing) mention, and for which early Islamic jurists recommended execution.

The syariah court therefore has to rise, and rise quickly, to the authority of law the Federal Court has abrogated in respect of Muslims. That is one towering mountain to climb at a sprint. Having hardly set up base camp, the syariah system in Malaysia may now be called on to scale such summits as deciding the appropriate wording for a “certificate of apostasy”.

Still, the Constitution’s long-standing paradox of enshrining both “freedom of worship” and “Islam as the religion of the federation” is being, at last, untangled. Article 11, boosted on the stout legs of Malanjum’s dissenting opinion, will guard the former; the syariah, the latter.

It is therefore Malaysia’s 16 million Muslims for whom life truly changed last week. The change is theirs to prove workable, for it is they who must live with the consequences.

Ada misssing words in this para?

261

The dark art of the debater Unpublished

If there was one thing I was good at in school, it was debate. It was one of those rare pursuits at which one could do well by not taking it too seriously.

After all, in debate, truth doesn’t matter as much as argumentation.

True, a good debate helps explore an issue to the point where the truth might be seen through the dialectic. Socrates certainly made a meal of the technique. But that was not necessarily the debater’s objective, which was, rather, to win an argument. It didn’t matter which side was argued — you won not by proving anything, but by making the more persuasive argument.

It’s been said that the best debaters can argue one side of a question and win, then turn around and argue the other side and win that too. Bill Clinton was said to have done this in college. Tony Blair, too. And I managed it once, against RMC during a games week when the schedule was too tight to actually have our debate. So their team and ours met in an empty dorm while everyone was out watching the sports, and ran through our debate.

The topic was: “That democracy is alien to our society and therefore doomed to fail.” I remember that well, but I don’t recall which side we were on, maybe because we won both of them. It’s cheap trick, though, as people eventually found with both Clinton and Blair. It merely means that you’re the only one who sees the fatal flaw in your own argument. That’s why a debate can be won by a weaker argument, as long as the other side is just dense enough not to see through it.

A weak argument can also prevail because there’s more involved in winning a debate than even a smart argument and dumb opponents. There’s elocution and delivery; voice control; stage presence; the elements of theatre.

Humour is a very effective device — making them laugh is as irresistible for an audience as for a woman. In the end, the winner is usually the one who puts up the better show. It’s entertainment.

Therefore, I have always regarded fellow debaters with a little bit of suspicion. They know and I know how glib and convincing we can be — and therefore how slippery our slopes can be if ever we allowed ourselves to believe our own rhetoric when our objective is not to make a point but to win over an audience.

I am proud, nonetheless, to have been a top English debater during my time at Malay College Kuala Kangsar. On this one score, I consider that I rank among an illustrious roster. During our time, we had Salehuddin Hashim, Kamaruddin Jaafar, Anuar Othman and Azmi Khalid. Among those who’d left just before we got there were Sanusi Junid and Anwar Ibrahim, both of whom had left their marks on Badan Revolusi Ugama as well as the REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

Debating Society.

I am bemused by how each of these gifted orators utilised this particular talent as they made their ways through life. Politics drew several of them.

Many entered law. Some monetised their persuasive skills as boardroom negotiators. Many became rich; some famous; one or two, both. Me, I was faced with a moral dilemma.

I knew I could probably argue effectively any side of any question, the key to which was to see the strengths of any given situation and use those strengths to eliminate the weaknesses, render them irrelevant or, most winningly of all, turn them into strengths. It was potentially not a bad approach to life in general, I reasoned, for it lent itself naturally to seeing the best in everyone and the good in everything. I could find something redeeming in Attila the Hun and the Ebola virus if I had to.

Such an ability, I realised, could be useful in journalism, which at its best requires all sides of any question to be explored and expressed. It was not necessarily good in decision-making, although it could elucidate the parameters being decided. It was perverse in politics, where particular arguments are held as universal truths.

But I could understand the seductive lure of politics, where it might be possible for the silver-tongued to weave magic carpets of ideation so fine as to carry them to giddy heights of power over the fates of nations — but take me out and shoot me, boys, I couldn’t have done it.

It was intellectually impossible. Parlaying debating skills into a political career would entail genuinely believing what you say, when you’re really saying it in order to have people buy your spiel. Being barely capable of stretching my values to accommodate the sociopolitics of lying, I could never see how it would be possible to successfully lie to oneself. It seemed the kind of ability that automatically invalidated anyone who used it.

But the acclaim of an appreciative audience can be a heady intoxicant, bringing with it an irresistible temptation to press their cheer buttons; to “work the crowd”, hitting the lever like a lab rat for another morsel of applause. Once addicted to the adoration of the mob, the self-appointed “opinion leader” becomes instead led; tossed helplessly in whichever direction the fickle winds of popular opinion carry him. Such are the perils of popularity.

Because oratorical skills will always be useful for politicians, such potential at school level is better measured in elocution contests than debates, I think.

The silver-tongued might then be distinguished from the fork-tongued; the genuine intellect from the sly charlatan; the gifted orator from the two-faced Janus.

When I think of those great debaters of my schooldays, I cannot help feeling that there would be knowing looks among us if ever we meet now.

We know better than anyone what shysters we can be.

263

‘How I wonder where you are...’

Unpublished

On the sixth day of Muhammad Nazrin Shamsul Ghazali’s disappearance, Friday congregations in mosques across the nation offered special prayers for his safe return. So too at temples and churches that weekend.

By then, Yin’s disappearance had become a cause celebre. Newspapers, radio and TV were calling out his name in all languages; the Malay Mail distributed 10,000 posters of his picture and the numbers to call, then reprinted it as a full page in the paper every day for a week.

By email, SMS and the Internet, the word went out to look for Yin. People offered money. Cabinet ministers sent out their pleas; political parties and NGOs their personnel. This wasn’t just the work of a few key individuals and Good Samaritans. Yin’s disappearance gave the nation visceral clutch; a cold hard fist in the belly.

It was, first of all, so terribly ordinary. This happens all the time, in crowded public places everywhere. During the fortnight of Yin’s disappearance, many people relived their own experience of losing a child like this — or of being the child lost. This could happen to anyone. What Yin’s parents Shamsul Ghazali Shamsuddin and Nor Amizah Ahmad were going through evoked heartfelt empathy among all parents.

Then there was the pathos of it: The CCTV footage of a small boy toddling off alone out of a busy shopping complex and vanishing into a milling throng of pedestrians and traffic. That last glimpse of the little boy grew ever more haunting as the days stretched into weeks with no further sight of him.

For this was not a story that should have run more than a few days.

One way or another — joyful reunion, ransom demand, or a small corpse retrieved from river or roadside — this should have played out within days, not weeks.

Had Yin been a decade older, it would have been different. Teenagers too young to drive are still old enough to decide whether to stay with their families or run away. A 5-year-old doesn’t make such choices.

So where was he? By the second week of his disappearance, the unthinkable was being thought. Was he the victim of a child-smuggling ring; drugged, crippled, begging on the streets of a neighbouring country or selling chewing gum in this one? A head of steam was building, envisaging the direst consequences for any adult involved in Yin’s continuing absence.

But there was no ransom demand to show that some kind of wicked REHMAN RASHID | NST COLUMNS 2002 to 2010

human intelligence was involved in this. Denied a proper target, public anger seethed at the lowlife scum who turned telephones into the devil’s own devices, sending the boy’s parents on one wild goose chase after another, or worse, abusing them, mocking them, jeering at them.

The creeps and crawlers will always be there (and how technology has empowered them), but no word came from the creeps who’d crawled away with Yin. Not all the false leads were malicious. Genuinely concerned people were making genuinely mistaken sightings of Yin from Kedah to Johor. But there was no sign of him at the border crossings, ports or airports. Had he been anaesthetised and smuggled out in a suitcase? The story was growing wild with implausibilities.

How could there be a happy ending to this? Yin was either dead or alive. If alive, he had to be with someone. Why was this person not saying something to someone, even to demand a ransom?

The one possibility that never occured to anyone was that the people who had Yin simply did not know a nationwide hunt was on for him, that he had become a household name, or that they should deliver the boy to the authorities.

Yet, this was the frankly incredible truth. There exist in the city of Kuala Lumpur entire communities who do not see newspapers or posters or billboards; who do not listen to radio or watch TV. They know nobody and do not mingle with others, even on the most crowded thoroughfares in the busiest parts of town.

There are those who immediately relate to a lost child but only vaguely to the notion that there might be a brace of panic-stricken parents frantically searching for him somewhere logically nearby.

Who are these people who live here among everyone else who lives here, yet take no part in anything involving everyone else? Who are these inhabitants of a parallel dimension, a world unto themselves; deaf and blind to the rest of us, and by us unheard and unseen? Ghosts? Spooks? Jins?

No, Yin was abducted by aliens. Indian-Muslim refugees from Myanmar; you can’t get much more alienated than that. They didn’t even trust their stewards, the local office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, enough to take Yin there to see what to do with him.

They simply found a lost child and took him in to care for as one of their own.

That there was no evil or malice behind Yin’s fortnight down the rabbithole — indeed, that there was only a sad, forlorn kindness — should be all the more warning to parents with young children in crowded public places.

You really don’t know who’s out there these days, and they really don’t know you. But they’d love your kids all the same.

265

WRITINGS BY REHMAN RASHID DECEMBER 2018 EDITION ONE NEW STRAITS TIMES PRESS Abdul Jalil Hamid, Azizi Othman, Ungku Mimi Eliza Syed Yusof.

NSTP THINKING EYES Bazuki Muhammad.

NSTP RESOURCE CENTRE Azlin Ismail, Azlee Aziz, Isam Rasip, Shahrul Md Desa.

ISBN 978-983-012-345-6 DUMMY

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REHMAN RASHID

Rehman Rashid, with his Scorpion’s Tales, Midweek, and Rehman Rashid on Friday, inked the New Straits Times... I am hoping to get Kak Mimi to write this. Nihitatur mil modit porum ex et asped eiur re sit volupta dendigendae eat hit repudant pa cus, quibea nis dus inte num dis moluptatem et, consenisaut que des dolor aboribus. Verspid comnis necerfe rrorem volore etum hilluptias adissit acimus sed el minctur adasbm pkkk. As eosant a volorem.

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NST COLUMNS 2002 TO 2010

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