Disturbed in heart and mind

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IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ALL
The articles are captured from the original writer, MsMarina (with her permission). SambalBelacan is just compiling articles to make easier to find. Any comments received will remain un-respond because it's not mine.Reach her at her very own blog at http://rantingsbymm.blogspot.com/ Please.
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Wednesday September 1, 2010
Disturbed in heart and mind
Musings
By Marina Mahathir


The Shah Rukh Khan hit movie ‘My Name is Khan’ holds a pertinent message for us: there are only good and bad people in this world; there are no other differences.

IT’S very strange, but as we enter our 54th year of independence, what I least feel is independent. It so happened that I had to travel far recently, to a land where the air was a lot cleaner.

I felt that I breathed a lot easier but I don’t think it was just the air. Once you get away, the air just feels so much less toxic.

Indeed, in the month of Ramadan – the month of reflection and restraint – we find instead more toxicity than ever.

From school principals who spout racist nastiness to politicians and media who insist on poisoning what is already a poisoned well.

Instead of the serenity one hopes to feel at this time, in order to feel closer to God, all I can feel is the disturbance in the heart and mind that comes from living in an environment of hate.

It’s not that I’m lacking in loving friends, family or neighbours.

I live in a lovely street where we know one another and help each other out.

My friends are the kindest in the world. I feel blessed to know all of them.

But I open the newspaper or switch on the TV and there is nothing but anger and sadness.

How can we call ourselves independent when we are so caught up by hate, none of which seems to have any real foundation at all?

A few thousand kilometres away, the rhetoric of hate has become mainstream.

In the United States, Islamophobia is reaching fever pitch, fuelled as always by politics.

No American politician worth his salt, especially if he’s standing for election this November, will avoid talking about religion, affirming his own and besmirching others.

A rally by the most rabid right-wingers to supposedly “reclaim honour” drew 87,000 people.

The direct result of all this hate-mongering was the stabbing of a New York cabbie after he told his passenger he was Muslim and the burning of a mosque in Tennessee.

When we look in horror at these events on the other side of the world and feel indignant and self-righteous about them, do we think how we might ourselves contribute to the same treatment to others?

We see how badly minorities are treated in those countries and see no irony in treating our minorities the same way.

Is our empathy only meant for those of the same faith as us?

In Surah 21, verse 92 of the Quran, God speaks: “Verily, [O you who believe in Me,] this community of yours is one single community, since I am the Sustainer of you all: worship, then, Me [alone]!”

And again in Surah 33, verse 35: “Verily, for all men and women who have surrendered themselves unto God, and all believing men and believing women, and all truly devout men and truly devout women, and all men and women who are true to their word, and all men and women who are patient in adversity, and all men and women who humble themselves [before God], and all men and women who give in charity, and all self-denying men and self-denying women, and all men and women who are mindful of their chastity, and all men and women who remember God unceasingly: for [all of] them has God readied forgiveness of sins and a mighty reward.”

In both these verses, and in fact in the entire Quran, God does not speak of particular races but simply to all humankind. We are all equal before God.

How is it that we missed this simple message?

If we knew it, would we be spreading toxins instead of love and respect for one another?

Do we have the independence of mind to believe, rather than to follow those who claim to know what’s good for us but in fact are poisoning us bit by bit?

I just watched the Shah Rukh Khan hit movie My Name is Khan for the second time.

In Malaysia, someone saw fit to censor a lot of it, particularly whenever it showed a Muslim being bad.

Everyone, regardless of race or religion, has a chance to be good and bad in the movie.

Censoring it, in fact, was a great disservice to Muslims and missed its central message.

When the Shah Rukh Khan character was a child, his mother told him a truth that he held onto all his life: there are only good and bad people in this world.

There are no other differences between human beings.

Perhaps we should make all our politicians watch it.

They might learn something not very new. They might learn that most of us can tell who’s good and who’s bad.

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Let’s stop tip-toeing around

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IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ALL

The articles are captured from the original writer, MsMarina (with her permission). SambalBelacan is just compiling articles to make easier to find. Any comments received will remain un-respond because it's not mine.Reach her at her very own blog at http://rantingsbymm.blogspot.com/ Please.

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Wednesday August 18, 2010
Let’s stop tip-toeing around
MUSINGS BY MARINA MAHATHIR


Pregnancy for a young girl is a lonely, frightening and confusing experience and help is hard to come by. We need comprehensive solutions to this problem, not criminalise it.

I ALWAYS get a little worried when people start talking about death penalties. It often spells a poverty of ideas, which of course, comes from not really understanding what the problem is all about.

The hysteria surrounding the issue of abandoned babies seems to have made people lose their minds. Instead of asking why people, especially young people, get pregnant and then abandon their babies, all sorts of ideas come floating by.

First was to marry them off regardless of their age. Never mind that we have just triumphantly announced the lifting of our reservation to the clause on the minimum age of marriage being 18 in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, now we were officially promoting sex among children by simply making it legal.

Who cares if under-aged sex and pregnancy have long-term consequences for the unfortunate girls? Has anyone noticed that the parents who abuse their kids are almost always very young and clearly unable to cope with the responsibilities of parenthood?

Long have we called for comprehensive sex education in our schools but to no avail, despite the rise in teen pregnancies and in sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV.

What do we get instead? Abstinence education! But haven’t we had this all along? Again, the central message is abstain until you get married. Or, in other words, if you want to have sex, get married. Even if you’re 14.

Since most people don’t think young kids should be having sex (unless they are married) and therefore should not be given any advice on contraception, no wonder then that teen pregnancies abound.

Hormones don’t wait for marriage certificates. And since our society stigmatises out-of-wedlock pregnancies, what choice do young girls have but to get rid of their unwanted babies?

For this, we want them killed? What sort of stone age society are we? What if the girls got pregnant because they were raped, perhaps by their own fathers or brothers?

Marrying them off is no solution for any number of reasons.

Nobody seems to have noticed that, in most states, Muslim babies are not recognised as legitimate if they are born less than six months after their mother got married, even if they married the baby’s biological father.

Given that many young girls are not likely to realise that they are pregnant until they are well along, or may wait a long time before they inform anyone, the chances are that even if they are forced to get married they would be past the three-month mark. Therefore, their babies would be considered illegitimate anyway. Bit of a waste of nasi minyak, if you ask me.

If only our dear leaders would take a deep breath and go talk to the only people who matter, the young pregnant girls themselves, they might actually learn that these girls did not have sex just because they are little sex bombs nor did they purposely get pregnant.

Pregnancy for a young girl is a lonely, frightening and confusing experience, and help is hard to come by. What more when the papers are full of young unmarried mothers being whipped for having illicit sex.

To tackle this problem, we need comprehensive solutions. Let’s stop tip-toeing around the fact that our kids are woefully ignorant about sex and the reproductive system and the consequences of having unprotected sex.

So grit our teeth and immediately put in place sex education, with a gender perspective and emphasising boys learning to respect girls.

In the meantime, yes let’s have baby hatches and let’s publicise them so that pregnant girls know where to send their babies to. Better yet, let’s have homes for girls to have their babies safely, where they can keep up with schoolwork and where they can learn mothering skills should they want to keep the babies.

Otherwise, talk to them about adoption and set up safe procedures for the babies to be adopted. Then set up a system where the girls can continue school afterwards.

Finally, adults themselves must set good examples. Every day we see adults trivialising marriage as if its only purpose is to have legal sex.

What happened to responsibility, care and, gosh, love? What happened to planning for the future, for your kids’ education and all that? When we see lawmakers breaking laws just to get another wife, how does this set an example for our young?

If we want to encourage good parenting, let’s start with ourselves, shall we?

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Policies must be well thought out

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IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ALL
The articles are captured from the original writer, MsMarina (with her permission). SambalBelacan is just compiling articles to make easier to find. Any comments received will remain un-respond because it's not mine.Reach her at her very own blog at http://rantingsbymm.blogspot.com/ Please.
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Wednesday August 4, 2010
Policies must be well thought out
MUSINGS By MARINA MAHATHIR
newsdesk@thestar.com.my


While bullet points may pick out the salient benefits, to explain a new policy one needs to know the research and thinking that goes behind them.

WHEN I was in Sixth Form, I had a wonderful history teacher who taught us not only about history but how to think and write about it. Every week we had to submit an essay on one subject and a plan on another.

The plan was her magic formula. Essentially, she taught us how to organise our facts and thoughts, and logically come to our conclusions. Her students have been known to pass their exams just by writing out their plans because those so clearly laid out what they knew and how they meant to answer the question.

Her training has stood me in good stead until today. I still try to write a plan when I need to prepare a major paper because it helps me to take an argument logically from start to finish. I wish everybody had studied under my teacher. If they had, we may not be constantly subjected to the sort of fuzzy, half-formed and illogical thinking that we are assailed with today.

When I read pronouncements by our leaders today, more and more I start to wonder what the process of thinking is behind them. And, increasingly, I start to believe that our leaders practise what I call “bullet-point policymaking”.

My theory is this. A politician says to his or her staffers that he or she needs some exciting thing to announce. They go off to research what would be new and innovative to address any particular situation, for example, the deplorable state of our schools or teen pregnancies.

They might actually write a whole paper on the subject along with recommendations on what to do and present this to their boss.

But he or she doesn’t have time to read it and orders the staffers to give him or her talking points in bullet form. These will be what he or she then announces at a press conference.

Now, this may seem an efficient way of doing things; but it is also deficient in many ways. For a start, while bullet points may pick out the salient benefits of whatever new policy, they cannot give you all the research and thinking that goes behind them.

And if you don’t know exactly what led anyone to arrive at this particular policy recommendation, then not only can’t you explain it properly, you also cannot truly “own” it.

What is more, “bullet-point policymaking” is not going to also give you an idea of the points that people are likely to make against the policy, and how you are supposed to respond to these.

Hence, if there is any criticism of any new policy, the standard response is to accuse the other side of politicising the issue. Or, equally poorly, backpedal immediately.

When was the last time we heard an Education Minister talk about education with true passion? Or anyone defend the position of women in the face of much male-dominated derision? How many leaders do we have who can say, “This is what I really believe in because …” and stand their ground on principle?

Instead they rely on what their staffers tell them to say. Now if you have professional and dedicated staffers who are keen to do the best by their bosses, you might actually get good papers backing up your bullet points.

If you don’t, then the points you get may not be worth much anyway. But unless you read yourself, or at least insist on a full briefing on the subject, including pros and cons, how would you know if the policy you are about to announce is sound at all?

This is why we get announcements that exams should be scrapped because we have become too exam-oriented, without the accompanying well-thought-out alternative.

Then, when everyone has not wholeheartedly praised the idea, there’s the belated attempt at consulting people on what exactly the policy should be. Shouldn’t they have done all the consulting and surveying before announcing it?

Is it any wonder then that, increasingly, people are starting to feel that their leaders don’t know what they are doing? That announcements are made because there is some public relations quota to be filled? Do their KPI report forms have a column for how many policies are announced each year? Better none at all rather than too many silly ones.

What is obvious to any intelligent person in the street, and maybe not to our leaders, is that problems often have multiple causes, and solutions cannot come only from one source.

Thus, an issue like teen pregnancies would involve several ministries and not just one. Would it not be fantastic if a major joint policy an­­nouncement on this were to come from the relevant ministers at the same time?

But then, why share the limelight?

Read More

Let women judges do their job

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IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ALL

The articles are captured from the original writer, MsMarina (with her permission). SambalBelacan is just compiling articles to make easier to find. Any comments received will remain un-respond because it's not mine.Reach her at her very own blog at http://rantingsbymm.blogspot.com/ Please.

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Wednesday July 21, 2010
Let women judges do their job
MUSINGS By MARINA MAHATHIR
newsdesk@thestar.com.my


We do need to look at justice with a gender perspective. It is always women who suffer, both from injustice and society’s blindness towards it.

IT SEEMS to be the unchanging lot of women in Malaysia. First we are elevated, and then we are brought down to earth with a thud.

When the first women syariah judges were appointed this month, Muslim women were elated. At last, not only are women recognised for their ability to sit on the syariah bench but also perhaps now we can expect better justice for women in the syariah courts.

The first uneasy twinge came, for me, when one of the new judges said that she wanted to show that just because she was female it didn’t mean she would be biased towards women.

While, yes, justice is supposed to be blind, this statement made it sound that she is determined to prove her credentials by bending over backwards not to favour women at all. Given that women have hardly found justice in the courts all this time, this is disappointing.

Then came the whammy. It seemed that only after appointing them, a syariah court panel, consisting only of men, was being set up to decide what the women judges could rule on.

How about that? Give someone a job and then decide what she can do. Was this just incompetency or an attempt at ensuring that they are kept “in their place”?

It is a fact that women have been getting short shrift in the syariah courts, whether in getting due compensation in divorce cases for themselves or their children, in inheritance cases and many others.

Even when courts have ruled in their favour, for instance in ruling that men have to pay maintenance for their children from their ex-wives, rarely have these been implemented.

As a result, many women and their children are left in dire poverty. Is that justice?

We do need to look at justice with a gender perspective. Otherwise “justice” will always be seen from a male perspective because it is generally men who make the laws. Or in the case of religious rulings, it is men who interpret them.

It would be nice to expect men to simply be gentlemanly and ensure that the mother of their children and their progeny are well cared for after divorce. But this rarely happens. Thus someone needs to stand up for women. Invariably this should be a woman who truly has justice in mind.

Not that this always involves only divorced women. The recent study on the impact of polygamy on families by SIS Forum Malaysia shows that generally polygamy does not lead to happy families.

First wives and their children generally suffer most, both in terms of attention from their husband and father as well as in terms of standard of living — after their husbands had taken on another wife, 44% of first wives were forced to go out and work just to ensure the survival of their family.

Considering that men are only supposed to take on another wife if they can afford to support both, this evidence, culled from interviewing over 1,200 families, shows they are coming up short.

Not that second wives and families are faring better either. All families complained about the amount of time their shared husband and father had to spend with them.

Equal time and attention is simply not humanly possible. As a result, there was dissatisfaction all round when birthdays, anniversaries, school events are missed.

Men may think of polygamy as their “right” but it is a stressful one, if nothing else.

It is always women who suffer, both from injustice and society’s blindness towards it. Heaven knows what we need to do to make society take violence against women seriously enough.

We can rightly point to many countries to show how our women are so much better off than theirs. But the reality is, unless women are protected from violence and can seek justice in the courts, such “equality” that we enjoy can only be superficial.

So let those women judges get on with their jobs. After all, their counterparts in the civil courts have been doing so for a long time.

Read More

Online threat to reading culture

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IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ALL
The articles are captured from the original writer, MsMarina (with her permission). SambalBelacan is just compiling articles to make easier to find. Any comments received will remain un-respond because it's not mine.Reach her at her very own blog at http://rantingsbymm.blogspot.com/ Please.
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Wednesday July 7, 2010
Online threat to reading culture
Musings
By MARINA MAHATHIR


Web language has changed not only the way we communicate but also rewired our brains to only respond to things that are short and fast.

LET me make this clear: I love the Internet. As all my friends know, I’m online virtually all the time whether on my laptop or my PDA. I e-mail, Facebook, tweet, blog and chat nearly constantly. Someone once described my instant response to emails as “quite frightening”.

But recently there have been some articles in overseas publications talking about the effect of these new ways of communication on us, or more specifically, our brains.

As all these online ways of connecting are short and fast, our brains are literally being rewired to only respond to things that are also short and fast. In other words, our attention span has shrunk to, oh say, 140 characters. It has become harder for us to focus on anything that takes longer than a few minutes.

I have to admit that I’m as much a victim of this as any other Internet addict. I begin my days by reading the news online, mostly on Twitter. This wonderful invention delivers to me all the news stories in the world in one convenient form.

But it is edited already, first by me, because I choose which news websites I want, and then by the websites themselves.

As anyone who has clicked a headline to go to the website knows, there are always lots of other interesting stories which they don’t put up on Twitter.

But I do read. What Twitter, and sometimes Facebook, do is draw my attention to a story, and if my interest is piqued I follow the link and read the story in full.

In this way, I not only learn about the news fast but also in depth. The other day I read a fascinating story about the Bosnian war and how artists responded to it, which came to me via Twitter.

The Internet worries me for other reasons. I have always been a reader, so the Internet has enhanced my reading, not lessened it. But in a country where reading habits are already so poor, I have to wonder what it is doing to the young.

Recently, I posted a long article about gender equality on my blog. It was full of interesting information and insights and I thought it would provoke some interesting discussion. But most commentators only mentioned that the article was too long.

Interestingly enough, most of those who complained about its length were men, thereby fuelling my suspicion that men not only read very different things from women but they also refuse to read anything that has both length and depth.

Perhaps it is no surprise that there is a whole genre of books called “chick lit” and nothing called “dude lit”. Is there some un-macho stigma attached to men reading books? If reading is where we gain an insight into the world, then I’m afraid this dislike for reading alone will ensure that men and women will inhabit different worlds.

Indeed one young man proudly claimed that he had only ever read 10 books in his life, and in fact hates reading. Yet his English was excellent, a result, he said, of playing games online. This may be an exception.

My son, whose schooling was entirely in Indonesia, picked up most of his English from playing games on the Net. But one holiday he picked up a Harry Porter book and loved it so much, he read the entire four books available then in two weeks.

The point I’m trying to make is not just about reading. It’s about the ability to maintain focus for a decent length of time, enough to complete a job or to learn something new.

If our young people are doing everything in quick bursts, whether it is on SMS or chat, then are they acquiring the focus needed to really learn anything or to concentrate long enough on something in order to become an expert at it?

Today we see written language, already poor, being shortened in such a way that it can become incomprehensible. We may need to be concise on many things but we still have to be understood.

SMS language is really only appropriate on mobile phones and not anywhere else.

Perhaps the real danger to a native language is not so much another language but the abbreviated mobile phone form of itself.

There must be a way of marrying the immediacy of the Internet with a more leisurely reading habit. Better-written books and articles would help. Making reading books cool would increase interest.

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