The Malaysian Insider

SEPT 2 — This week was an anniversary week, a week of remembrances and of forgetting. It was a rainy week, one in which Malaysians should have been proudly united in their Malaysianess, but, instead, sidestepped back into divisiveness and racial disharmony.

It was a week, when Malaysians recalled, with heartfelt pride, the hour when Malaysia’s first Prime Minister, Tunku Abul Rahman shouted, in sheer joy — Merdeka, Merdeka, Merdeka, Merdeka, Merdeka, Merdeka, Merdeka after the country finally gaining its independence from British colonial rule.

This anniversary was to be a proud day, a day when, this week, the nation celebrated 52 years of ‘freedom’ from those dastardly British, yet seemingly are unperturbed by the increasing, covert colonisation by American popular culture .

AUG 22 — This week saw welcome rain in the desert I call home. Every day now, for the past few afternoons, there has been rain, cooling, wonderful rain, plant watering rain, but along with the rain came the scary flashing lightning, tumultuous thunder and,  occasionally, lack of internet.

It is the same with all matters; you take the good with the bad, the yin accompanying the yang, the black and the white, and, even when applying this dictum to the vagaries of our children’s education — the highs and the lows. Along with a zenith of studiousness, learning, winning of accolades enters the nadir of oppression, poor standards and careless callousness.

These are the obverse and the reverse of the spinning educational coin, supposedly there to give our children a start in life and edge them gently into society, if only we, the sensible ones, the grown-ups, could finally decide how exactly this is to be done without the dangerous and disheartening flip-flopping of seemingly irrational educational policy.

AUG 15 — Hello . . . hello . . . er . . . hello.

Is there anyone out there – does my small, almost inconsequential, voice echo in sundering emptiness like the (summan khawãlida) mute immortals.  Am I left shouting hoarsely into a post soft machine (Kevin Ayers) bucket of abject nothingness – this dratted smog is getting so thick I can’t even see you.

Ah, there you are, well what a forest blazing, aggravating peat sort of week that was, an almost diabolically smoky week – smoky week, you notice, not smoking week as a once be-masked Jim Carrey might have exclaimed.

AUG 8 — And what a carry on it has been over the past week.

It has been a salacious week, a downright dirty, rumbustious, saucy, libidinous week worthy of the great Rabelais, Peter Rogers or Benny Hill. It was a protesting week, a week of revelations and apologies, an up and down week, an in and out week all in the name of fornication and not so discrete gender politics, and other, more obscene, Acts.

AUG 1 – Everybody’s looking for that something

One thing that makes it all complete

You’ll find it in the strangest places

Places you never knew it could be – Westlife

Occurrences over the last week or so have brought to mind the fragility of life, the frailty of the human condition and in particular the human body which, for most of us, is softer and more vulnerable than the ground it comes to rest on – when it hits, that is.

In the midst of life, and investigations, we are, indeed, in death.