Look for what we can offer the world
MUSINGS
Sunday, 29 Sep 2019
By Marina Mahathir
While Malaysians look inwards and find new non-issues to hyperventilate over, other Asian countries are looking at the rest of the world and finding ways to export their cultures.
THESE are the things that make me weary:
A university professor inventing a so-called anti-hysteria kit that retails at RM8,000 and which he hoped to sell to, of course, the government because hysteria seems to happen a lot in government girls’ schools. And how else can you get rich but by selling things to the government at overinflated prices?
People getting hysterical (it’s getting to be a habit) over alleged porcine DNA in chocolate. Which begs the questions: How much chocolate do they eat that they need to worry about it, and aren’t there better things to get hysterical about? Or better still, let’s just not get hysterical but do something worthwhile, like protest the climate crisis.
And now once again, we are exhorted to beat our chests and tear our hair out because apparently there’s pig-based tallow in our bank notes. Mind you, this was not based on actual research into the composition of our money but on “information from an industry player”. Firstly, we really ought to question an academic who spouts alarmist stuff based on unclear information from an unnamed industry player. What does “industry player” even mean? And which industry was he from? The hocus-pocus industry?
I decided to do some research on the matter and came across an article from 2017 about the Bank of England stating that they will keep using animal fat or tallow in their bank notes despite protests from various groups.
There had been a petition protesting that the use of animal fat in bank notes was offensive to vegans, vegetarians, Hindus, Sikhs, Jains and “others in the UK”. Some Hindu temples had even banned the £5 note because of this animal pollutant.
The Bank of England, however, said it would not change to the other possible product because it was too expensive and not “environmentally sustainable”. And what was that product? Palm oil.
So basically, that so-called Malaysian academic could have teamed up with all the vegans, vegetarians, Hindus, Sikhs and Jains and in one shot, eliminated animal fat in our bank notes and at the same time lobbied for our palm oil industry. Which all gives new meaning to the phrase “greasing palms”, no?
But that’s the opportunity lost when people try to be clever and wind up showing how clueless they are.
On a more serious note, I get completely brain-weary when our newspapers get filled with nonsense like this. Is this truly the only way to sell news, by publishing sensationalist rubbish? Why do we prolong the dumbing down of our people by continually giving space to rumourmongers and gossip vendors when there are truly more important things to think and write about?
Lately, we have been worrying ourselves about the haze. Which is something we do every year. What we really need is a Greta Thunberg who would really call out the politicians, plantation owners, and other complacent people who yearly allow their voters and consumers to fill their lungs with smoke and ash.
I wonder if at the next elections, voters will remember this and make the haze and climate change an issue? When thousands of schools have to close and our children’s education is disrupted, isn’t this a political and economic issue?
It’s not as if our children are getting a holiday because they can’t go outside and play, and parents are going crazy trying to figure out how to deal with children at home all day.
As it is, there are issues about how our children are being educated, but when they lose days because of the haze, will these thousands and thousands of children ever catch up? Are there plans by the Education Ministry for how schools should manage these disruptions?
While we are getting our knickers in a twist about whether we’ll go to hell for handling money, eating chocolate or using the same supermarket trolleys as unknown persons, while we wind ourselves into paranoia about anything and everything, other people in the world are looking outwards and figuring out how to conquer the world. Not by military means, that’s so old hat. But instead by, horror of horrors, entertainment.
There’s a new book that everyone should read, just to see how far behind we are. The Pakistani author Fatima Bhutto has just published a book called New Kings Of The World: Dispatches From Bollywood, Dizi And K-Pop. In it she chronicles the global rise of the new soft power from India, Turkey and South Korea.
As we already know, Bollywood is huge. But do we know how huge it really is? Hindi movies have reached so many places where they don’t speak the language at all, including Russia, Eastern Europe and Latin America, not to mention many parts of Asia.
Shah Rukh Khan is a much bigger star than anyone in Hollywood and has devoted fans in places as varied as Peru and Germany. There’s a group of middle-aged German aunties who follow him around the world because they adore the fact that his movies allow them to cry. And his fans in Latin America are invariably poor and indigenous people who see themselves in him.
Turkish “dizi” television serials, each episode some two hours long, have also conquered the Arab world and Latin America. They feature stories from the Ottoman past and also modern-day issues. One series features a woman who fights for justice after being gang raped. Fighting for justice has universal appeal, much more than worrying about porcine elements in food and banknotes.
And finally, we all know this phenomenon called K-pop. An entirely manufactured, strategically planned industry so successful that a group of pretty boys like BTS gets to speak at the United Nations. Not a bad gig by any measure. It’s allowing young women in hijabs everywhere to learn to speak, sing and dance in Korean, want to travel to Korea and wear cosmetics just like Korean girls. Now that’s total domination.
So while we look inwards to keep finding “innovative” ways to up our points on our way to heaven, other people, some of them even Muslim, are looking at the rest of the world and finding ways to push back against Western cultural hegemony by inventing new forms of entertainment.
It’s not all perfect, of course. We should question these new hegemonies as much as we did the old ones. But they’re interesting because they’re so effective.
Maybe we can devise a global strategy to export our own “cultural technology”, as the Koreans call it. But to do that, we have to first decide what our cultural products actually are. Now there’s the rub, isn’t it?
MUSINGS
Sunday, 29 Sep 2019
By Marina Mahathir
While Malaysians look inwards and find new non-issues to hyperventilate over, other Asian countries are looking at the rest of the world and finding ways to export their cultures.
THESE are the things that make me weary:
A university professor inventing a so-called anti-hysteria kit that retails at RM8,000 and which he hoped to sell to, of course, the government because hysteria seems to happen a lot in government girls’ schools. And how else can you get rich but by selling things to the government at overinflated prices?
People getting hysterical (it’s getting to be a habit) over alleged porcine DNA in chocolate. Which begs the questions: How much chocolate do they eat that they need to worry about it, and aren’t there better things to get hysterical about? Or better still, let’s just not get hysterical but do something worthwhile, like protest the climate crisis.
And now once again, we are exhorted to beat our chests and tear our hair out because apparently there’s pig-based tallow in our bank notes. Mind you, this was not based on actual research into the composition of our money but on “information from an industry player”. Firstly, we really ought to question an academic who spouts alarmist stuff based on unclear information from an unnamed industry player. What does “industry player” even mean? And which industry was he from? The hocus-pocus industry?
I decided to do some research on the matter and came across an article from 2017 about the Bank of England stating that they will keep using animal fat or tallow in their bank notes despite protests from various groups.
There had been a petition protesting that the use of animal fat in bank notes was offensive to vegans, vegetarians, Hindus, Sikhs, Jains and “others in the UK”. Some Hindu temples had even banned the £5 note because of this animal pollutant.
The Bank of England, however, said it would not change to the other possible product because it was too expensive and not “environmentally sustainable”. And what was that product? Palm oil.
So basically, that so-called Malaysian academic could have teamed up with all the vegans, vegetarians, Hindus, Sikhs and Jains and in one shot, eliminated animal fat in our bank notes and at the same time lobbied for our palm oil industry. Which all gives new meaning to the phrase “greasing palms”, no?
But that’s the opportunity lost when people try to be clever and wind up showing how clueless they are.
On a more serious note, I get completely brain-weary when our newspapers get filled with nonsense like this. Is this truly the only way to sell news, by publishing sensationalist rubbish? Why do we prolong the dumbing down of our people by continually giving space to rumourmongers and gossip vendors when there are truly more important things to think and write about?
Lately, we have been worrying ourselves about the haze. Which is something we do every year. What we really need is a Greta Thunberg who would really call out the politicians, plantation owners, and other complacent people who yearly allow their voters and consumers to fill their lungs with smoke and ash.
I wonder if at the next elections, voters will remember this and make the haze and climate change an issue? When thousands of schools have to close and our children’s education is disrupted, isn’t this a political and economic issue?
It’s not as if our children are getting a holiday because they can’t go outside and play, and parents are going crazy trying to figure out how to deal with children at home all day.
As it is, there are issues about how our children are being educated, but when they lose days because of the haze, will these thousands and thousands of children ever catch up? Are there plans by the Education Ministry for how schools should manage these disruptions?
While we are getting our knickers in a twist about whether we’ll go to hell for handling money, eating chocolate or using the same supermarket trolleys as unknown persons, while we wind ourselves into paranoia about anything and everything, other people in the world are looking outwards and figuring out how to conquer the world. Not by military means, that’s so old hat. But instead by, horror of horrors, entertainment.
There’s a new book that everyone should read, just to see how far behind we are. The Pakistani author Fatima Bhutto has just published a book called New Kings Of The World: Dispatches From Bollywood, Dizi And K-Pop. In it she chronicles the global rise of the new soft power from India, Turkey and South Korea.
As we already know, Bollywood is huge. But do we know how huge it really is? Hindi movies have reached so many places where they don’t speak the language at all, including Russia, Eastern Europe and Latin America, not to mention many parts of Asia.
Shah Rukh Khan is a much bigger star than anyone in Hollywood and has devoted fans in places as varied as Peru and Germany. There’s a group of middle-aged German aunties who follow him around the world because they adore the fact that his movies allow them to cry. And his fans in Latin America are invariably poor and indigenous people who see themselves in him.
Turkish “dizi” television serials, each episode some two hours long, have also conquered the Arab world and Latin America. They feature stories from the Ottoman past and also modern-day issues. One series features a woman who fights for justice after being gang raped. Fighting for justice has universal appeal, much more than worrying about porcine elements in food and banknotes.
And finally, we all know this phenomenon called K-pop. An entirely manufactured, strategically planned industry so successful that a group of pretty boys like BTS gets to speak at the United Nations. Not a bad gig by any measure. It’s allowing young women in hijabs everywhere to learn to speak, sing and dance in Korean, want to travel to Korea and wear cosmetics just like Korean girls. Now that’s total domination.
So while we look inwards to keep finding “innovative” ways to up our points on our way to heaven, other people, some of them even Muslim, are looking at the rest of the world and finding ways to push back against Western cultural hegemony by inventing new forms of entertainment.
It’s not all perfect, of course. We should question these new hegemonies as much as we did the old ones. But they’re interesting because they’re so effective.
Maybe we can devise a global strategy to export our own “cultural technology”, as the Koreans call it. But to do that, we have to first decide what our cultural products actually are. Now there’s the rub, isn’t it?
