Victims of food anxiety

Some of us have become rather obsessive about the religious pristineness of our food and are perpetually on the lookout for whoever may next cause offence.

ONE of the fascinating things about India is the food. While there is a wide variety of all sorts of cuisine from all over the large country, one thing that you will always see in every restaurant menu are two categories: vegetarian and non-vegetarian.

A large number of people in India are vegetarians, that is, they eat no meat at all. Then there is another lot of people who are non-vegetarians, that is, they do eat meat. Of the meat-eaters, there are those who don’t eat beef because of their religion, and those who don’t eat pork, also because of their religion.

There is then potentially all sorts of confusion to be caused by all these different food preferences. There is the possibility of non-veg people being offended by restaurants that only offer veg food, or the other way round. Meat-eaters are at great risk of being offended if they happen to walk into a restaurant that serves meat that they are forbidden to eat.

The odd thing is that rarely is there any confusion at all among Indians regarding which restaurants to go to. Virtually every restaurant serves the food that anyone can eat, whether they are vegetarian or non-vegetarian, non-beef or non-pork eaters. People sit side by side and order whatever they want. There is no need to practise culinary apartheid.

Recently there was a case where some villagers in India beat a Muslim man to death because they thought he was eating beef. It has to be noted that all this is occurring in a scenario where a rightwing political party has gained power.

After his death, tests of the meat in his fridge showed that, poor as he was, he may have been eating mutton and not the more expensive beef. It just goes to show that anyone can kick up a fuss about food, if provoked enough, even to fatal consequences.

Malaysians are not dissimilar. We love our food. And some of us are rather obsessive about the religious pristineness of our food. Which is not the same as being obsessive about hygiene, I might add.

So if someone should suggest that the 1000-calorie-a-bite bar of chocolate should have the slightest hint of porcine DNA, without so much as demanding to see the lab test reports, our people will go hysterical.

Ever-alert that someone wants to taint their pristine bodies, the same bodies that consume more sugar than any other South-East Asian country, their antennae are perpetually tuned to whoever may next cause offence, intentionally or otherwise.

Now unlike India where people speak English and understand that ‘no’ means ‘no’, in Malaysia, ‘no’ can mean ‘maybe got something else which someone insidiously put in because they want to taint us’.

Thus a sign that says ‘no pork’ doesn’t just mean that. It also means ‘we won’t know if there is anything else we shouldn’t be eating.’ It is a wonder how Muslims in Malaysia haven’t starved to death from food anxiety every day. What on earth do they do when they travel?

Of late I’ve noticed restaurants with names that make it so clear exactly what they serve that nobody with half a modicum of brain could fail to realise what food of the non-vegetarian kind it is. But even then there is room for confusion.

If people are so protected from the sight of little fat pink creatures with curly tails to the point that even the movie Babe was once banned (funny, I never knew movies were free in Malaysia!), then they may not recognise the icons used in the restaurant’s graphics. When we start seeing people exiting restaurants in a panic all of a sudden, we’ll know what happened.

At that point, I’m sure our ever-righteous leaders will step in with a law to ban restaurants from serving pork in order to save fragile Muslim souls from ever being offended, regardless of whether they ever go into those restaurants or not. Never mind that there is a much higher likelihood of Muslims dying of diabetes from too much nasi lemak and fast food than from inhaling the smell of non-halal food.

All of these are of the utmost importance these days. Our bodies must be presented on Judgment Day in pure form, never mind if they are flabby and overweight from unhealthy halal eating habits and lack of exercise.

Never mind also that the brains these bodies are attached to are atrophying from lack of use. Never mind also that the hands attached to these bodies sometimes handle money that may not be righteously earned.

These are all irrelevant. What matters is that we must be perpetually on guard against all manner of insults and intent to injure.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world is passing us by.

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Humour will get us through

FIRST of all, let me wish everybody Gong Xi Fa Cai! May the Year of the Monkey be one of prosperity and happiness, despite the depressing circumstances facing us now.

What depressing circumstances? Well, the economy is hardly what anyone would call dynamic. I know many retailers and businesses are saying that things have really slowed down, even during the festive seasons.

Things are simply more expensive to import, what with our ringgit in the doldrums. The Goods and Services Tax (GST) hasn’t helped, of course. And virtually nobody was fooled by the 3% reduction in Employees Provident Fund contributions.

What is the point of having that little bit more money now when it is going to be GST’d every time you spend it? Better to save it for old age and earn some interest on it.

Then, there is just the state of things. We’re now facing a Government which literally thinks that, one, it can do what it wants with impunity and, two, that we are all fools who will believe anything it says.

If you say something it doesn’t like, here’s what will happen to you: if you’re not a well-connected person, they’ll charge you with all sorts of crazy things, including for saying things within your professional capacity, drawing cartoons or dropping balloons. (You have to wonder about a government that is scared of cartoons and balloons.)

If you’re a well-connected person, your way out may be well lubricated with lots of monetary inducements. Proof of this is that the first act of the new leader is to ask his boss for money, which he gets instantly. (You also have to wonder about people who think they can always buy support.)

Then, you get the endless stream of untruths about a supposed very big gift. I decided to read up on Arab gift-giving customs and learnt a few things. It’s a very delicate issue.

For one thing, if you’re a subordinate, you simply do not give gifts to someone ranked higher than you. Royalty is presumably ranked way above any commoners regardless of whatever position they may have at home.

Subordinates may of course be given gifts but the value of the gift has to be carefully calibrated: not too expensive and not too cheap either. One interesting fact: if you’re a man, you should never give gifts to an Arab man’s wife or even ask about her. I wonder if it works the other way round.

But what does cross many cultures, especially Middle Eastern and Asian ones, is that you should never return a gift. It would be considered grossly insulting. If it is inappropriate, then the recipient should return it immediately with a polite note explaining why.

You certainly don’t wait for a while before returning it, and that too while retaining some of it. I can’t think of a single culture where this would be considered polite. Perhaps some cultural anthropologists can enlighten us.

Perhaps this is why there has been some consternation among the alleged gift-givers about the return of this gift. They must be wondering: “Does he mean to insult us?”

They seem pretty sure it cannot have been a gift but rather an investment because it would make more sense. I think there is a book to be written called Saving Face for Dummies.

Meanwhile back home, someone has the awful job of having to explain all this and is truly making a hash of it.

“I know but I can’t tell you” is thundered in the same breath as “I don’t know why they gave it. It’s personal!”. All the while, papers are waved which should have been under lock and key.

And as all sorts of international authorities are piping up about the inappropriateness of all this, some bright spark tries to lecture them about not interfering in our internal affairs while forgetting that if we put money into overseas accounts, it is no longer internal. (Some people should really get out more.)

And then there are people who think the world is as gullible as us when they can blithely say that they received gigantic commissions for doing “a job”, yet feel the need to reinvent themselves as a scholar. Isn’t the very concept of gigantic commissions problematic?

How do we keep our sanity amidst all this monkey business? Why, with our unique Malaysian sense of humour, of course!

It’s so easy to know who’s on the right side of things: it’s those people who draw and write the wittiest responses to all the nonsense. There is virtually no way to humorously defend corruption, after all.

Oh, I forgot: it’s “let’s move on”.

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Educating our young ones

If we keep treating our children as infants throughout their school life, we should not be surprised at the consequences.

I HAD another of those moments when my mouth simply gaped recently. A friend told me the text that was used in his daughter’s school for her SPM English Literature paper was the Grimm fairy tale Rumpelstiltskin.

I was shocked. For one thing, the Brothers Grimm were German, not English. For another, Rumpelstiltskin is a story for little children, not 17-year-olds and definitely not worthy of an exam.

In comparison, the equivalent British school exams in English Literature look at authors like Thomas Hardy, Jane Austen, George Eliot and, of course, William Shakespeare. How does anyone study English Literature without studying Shakespeare who was so influential in the English language? Do our students even know of the many common phrases we use daily which originated from Shakespeare?

Some might say that English Literature is not important to us since English is not our native language. But a look through the Bahasa Malaysia literature texts doesn’t impress either. I haven’t done Malay Literature since my own school days so I might not know who are the great Malay writers these days. But surely it cannot be someone who writes about the adventures of a girl during her school holidays?

Our school literature syllabus seems to suggest that our students cannot handle any form of sophisticated writing at all. I looked through an exam tips website on Rumpelstiltskin and the values our students are supposed to derive from the story are absurdly childish – don’t boast, don’t tell lies, don’t be greedy. There is no nuance or ambiguity to any of it. Students are simply told what to think about these stories with no room for opinions of their own.

Is this the state of our education today, one that treats our children as infants throughout their school life? How are they meant to handle the complex world we live in?

I was in London not so long ago when I went to view an exhibition of the works of Ai Wei Wei, the Chinese artist known for having been kept in solitary confinement for eight months and then banned from travelling because of his critical views on what was happening in China. His works are beautiful, thought-provoking and often moving. There were reconstructed trees, marble grass and straightened steel rods made from wreckage of buildings destroyed in the Sichuan earthquake in 2008. The stories behind these works tell about censorship, groupthink and cover-ups of the true costs of natural and manmade disasters.

People form long queues to view this exhibition. But what I really found astounding were the groups of schoolchildren being taken around the exhibition by their teachers. Surely this was too sophisticated for them? But apparently it was not.

Children can surely learn about art and beauty from a young age, as well as what messages artists want to convey through their work. What child doesn’t understand unfairness, or not being able to give an opinion? Which child would not be moved by the long lists of names of the schoolchildren lost in the earthquake, killed by the shoddy workmanship of their schools?

If we keep treating our children as infants throughout their school life, why should we be surprised at the consequences? We see adults with embarrassingly shallow capacity for analysing the information they get, who are easily provoked to react to gossip and false stories, who constantly harp on the least important points of any piece of news and who refuse to read anything in-depth because it contains too many long words and therefore is too difficult. And who will vilify anyone with more knowledge and maturity than them and call them names as a way of distracting from their own ignorance?

The infantilising of our people doesn’t only occur in schools but all the way to the top where we’re often expected to accept the most ludicrous explanations for all sorts of things, from missing funds to polluted waters to what constitutes terrorism. To be sure, there are many of us who do not accept these explanations but the very audacity of the people offering them is what is insulting and unacceptable. (Maybe when we get rid of them some day, we can just say it’s because they smell bad and they cannot complain about that.)

I listened to Turkish author Mustafa Akyol recently who said that the intelligent response to Islamophobia is not to ban people or books but rather by countering it intellectually. While I agree with that idea, it does presume that Muslims in our country have the intellectual capacity to do that.

But how do people still reading Rumpelstiltskin at age 17 counter the views of much more intellectually sophisticated people like Richard Dawkins and the like?

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Unnecessary hoo-ha and nonsense

Common sense has slowly been taking a back seat over the last few years, as people get hysterical over the most ridiculous things.

FOR a country that loves having laws to govern everyone’s beha­viour, we are very peculiar about ensuring that people follow them.

For some people, we bring the full force of the law to not only pu­nish them but to also set as an “example” to others.

For others, we sometimes wilfully ignore the law and let them do what they want.

Then there are the people who ignore court orders because they say it conflicts with some other law. Why they don’t get charged with contempt of court, I don’t know, but I don’t have to be a lawyer to think this is weird.

Then there are people who stretch laws to mean and do other things.

Like assuming that fathers are the only parents of a child and therefore what they say goes. (To the students to whom I was explaining what gender discrimination means today, there’s your example.)

Additionally there are people who make things up because it’s a law that only exists in their head.

A Muslim parent whose child goes to a Chinese school talked about how it was not enough for the religious studies teacher that there is halal food available in the canteen, but that the Muslim kids had to sit apart from their non-Muslim friends as well.

Does she think that non-halal food can be breathed in?

Some people will undoubtedly say that children have a habit of sharing food and utensils so some may inadvertently eat some non-halal food.

But of course sharing even all-halal food isn’t very hygienic either and is something parents should teach their children not to do.

Thinking about this story, I rea­lise how common sense has slowly been taking a back seat over the last few years.

Some people can really get hysterical over the most ridiculous things.

The unnecessary hoo-ha over the eventually false story of pig DNA in chocolate comes to mind.

Then of course there is the obsession with the cross appearing everywhere.

Apparently if you live in a house where there is something that looks like a crucifix on the roof, you will change your faith as easily as you change your underwear.

It never ceases to amuse me how, while Muslims find it so difficult to convert anyone else, all it takes to convert a Muslim to some other religion is the sight of a crucifix, a statue, hearing a song, drinking some water and even, as I was once privileged to be told, looking into the eyes of the Pope.

Our faith is a delicate thing, which we hang on to by the thinnest wisp of a thread, vulnerable to whatever “infidel” breeze might blow our way.

As it happens, I spent 12 years in a Convent school where there were crucifixes everywhere inclu­ding a giant one on the roof of the school.

Not a single one of the Muslim girls who studied there has left the faith. But maybe our generation are stronger than the people today.

I don’t understand why we are not ashamed to admit our faith is weak, and that we should constantly protect it.

Other people don’t seem to have the same problem.

I talk to young foreigners about the practice of Islam in Malaysia very often and, as far as I know, none have converted yet.

I may have dispelled some stereotypes about Muslims however, particularly the one about us having no sense of humour.

Logic is not our strong point either.

I saw a video where a uniformed man was briefing some academics on how to spot terrorists.

He talked about their distorted beliefs about religion and their lite­ral reading of the Quran.

I thought he was doing a fair job until he decided to give some examples of people to be wary of.

All of a sudden, he cited some of the most progressive people in the country as those most dangerous.

The sheer illogicality was breathtaking. I think even the terrorists would be puzzled, because the very people he mentioned in the same breath as terrorist ideology are not exactly popular with the angry, head-chopping, bearded crowd either.

The people wreaking havoc in Syria these days don’t believe much in women’s rights, for example.

So does it make sense to label women’s rights advocates as terrorists?

But maybe the illogicality and nonsense are deliberate. Our people tend to look up to those in authority so perhaps when they say that black is now actually white, and good is now bad, we will simply believe it.

That approach assumes that our people are all mildly intelligent, of course, and have shaky values to begin with. But it seems to work.

Maybe ultimately that’s the only thing about how we are governed that makes sense.

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Wishing for a better year

Instead of waiting for others to make improvements, maybe we should start by changing ourselves first.

It is finally the end of a very long year. As I meet with friends and others at various gatherings over the holidays, the mood is sober and pessimistic.

A year ago, we all wished for a better year in 2015 after the disastrous year that was 2014. But sadly, 2015 has not proven to be uplifting.

The hole we find ourselves in has been dug even deeper and we cannot see how we are to get out of it. Despite the seemingly bright outlook our leaders would have us believe, ordinary people everywhere, especially the young, know that things are tough.

Life in the city is expensive, more so if your salary barely keeps your head above water. Your hopes of living close to your job are slim, so you are forced to live further out, which means having to pay more for transport. Each month ends with very little spare change.

That is, if you have a job. For our graduates coming out of university, real life is a shock. Nothing they learnt in our public universities has prepared them for workplaces that value soft skills that they have not been taught.

The good jobs are the ones that require working fluency in English. Yet they are being told that they are a superior community that does not need it. Such a disconnect with the realities of life leads to frustration.

To divert attention from these frustrations, they are told that it’s someone else’s fault and the only way to ease the pain is to turn to God.

Other less devout people may annoyingly have better jobs and lives but they are at least not going to heaven, while you are assured.

It is this type of thinking that leads to even more resentment, which perhaps makes people unable to think clearly and see what is truly the problem. That those who keep telling you that you are unjustly suffering are actually the ones who are causing it. And that they can provide you with few answers beyond that redemption will come in the afterlife. Meanwhile, you have to feed your family.

This is the real dilemma we are in today –those we rely on to lead us into the future are in fact dragging us backwards and justifying it as salvation.

The more insecure our futures, the more they try to secure theirs by telling us that we are constantly in danger from outside forces and only they can protect us.

Foolishly, we believe them and hand over even more of our lives.

Perhaps I am being overly pessimistic. Perhaps things can be better. I hope so and I pray the following wishes for 2016 will come true:

1. That ordinary people will finally wake up from their stupor and realise that if we do nothing to save our country now, we’ll be looking at decades of misery.

2. That while some people’s ideas of how things will be better may sound fine in theory, real life may not pan out quite that way. History has shown that when you buy too much into politicians’ promises and give up any checks and balances, it will be really difficult to undo these later.

3. That greed and hypocrisy, the hallmarks of 2015, will finally be recognised and called out on, regardless of who it is. When people blithely insist that there is nothing wrong with taking money meant for orphans to pay for their trips abroad, or use people’s savings to pay dubious loans, then you know that honesty has become extinct.

4. That we return to the values that used to be considered good. Values such as honesty, trustworthiness, integrity and even courtesy and respect are now no longer considered values to be upheld. Instead, we see blatant dishonesty being exalted while those who dare to speak the truth are punished.

5. That we realise this constant need to prohibit and punish those who give alternative opinions and perspectives will eventually bite us back. Not just because the world is watching but because there are so many examples of countries that do this and are totally miserable places to live in.

Unless, of course, our leaders truly don’t care whether we are happy or not.

6. That we stop believing the constant lies and fantastical stories that we are being told. Our leaders live in parallel universes from us, where agencies that have done their utmost to divide people are praised for bringing “unity and peace”, where the greatest danger to us are liberals rather than the greedy and dishonest politicians.

7. That we start being a more considerate and thoughtful society, rather than one that is quick to condemn anyone who is different.

I hope we become a kinder society where we empathise more with those who have less and are proud of those who do well, rather than finding fault with them. I would love to see our society become more big-hearted rather than be so judgmental.

I don’t know if any of these are too much to ask. Perhaps change can only happen when we change ourselves, when we stop waiting for others to make the change for us.

Today our beloved Malaysia needs us, the people, more than ever. Let us not let her down.

Try and have a happy new year, folks!

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