Let the human in us not be coloured

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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 10, 2008
Let the human in us not be coloured
MUSINGS
By MARINA MAHATHIR


When we talk about race, we talk about groups of people, but on a day-to-day basis, it is not race that matters but the human being that we are dealing with.

WHEN I was a student in the UK, one of the most hated politicians then was Enoch Powell who was constantly railing against immigration in Britain, claiming that it would alter the British “character”.

Powell was so strident with his views – expressing them in his now infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech – that his own Conservative Party, despite years of service that had enabled the party to win elections, eventually sacked him.

This was in a country that values freedom of speech. Yet the party felt that someone as extreme as Powell could not be a member any more, not if it wanted to move forward in an inevitably changing nation. He could say what he wanted, but outside the party.

We, too, have been known to sack people whose views did not comply with what the heads of the party regarded as theirs. This is not the same as censoring them, only that they had to do it outside. Thus the dignity of the party remains intact, not tainted by what they regarded as aberrations.

No doubt, sometimes regarding people as aberrations may be unjust because in fact they represent views that simply differ from the norm.

But dealing with such issues clearly gives everyone else an idea of what the norms and aberration are. Not dealing with it creates confusion and raises the possibility that maybe the aberration is not one at all, but in fact just the public expression of the norm.

We fought so long not to stereotype our people according to race by increasing educational and economic opportunities. Yet we still see it happening.

In local schools, children are pushed into certain sports not by ability but purely by race. Thus, Punjabis must play hockey and not chess, Malays must play football and not tennis, while Chinese must only play badminton.

Is it any wonder that they don’t excel in any sport? You have to wonder where the powers-that-be in that school got their ideas from, Mein Kampf?

When we talk about race, we make the mistake of lumping together a whole bunch of human beings, with all their individual quirks, whims and fancies, into what we think is a cohesive body. But it is not. If anything, sometimes race is the most tenuous thing that holds us together.

I may have told this story before. A long time ago, as I rushed through a crowded London Underground, an old Jewish man stopped me. Taking his handkerchief out, he insisted that there was something on my jacket.

It took me a while to understand that the man had seen someone spit on me and was now offering his handkerchief to clean the spittle off.

It was then that I became aware of the awful silent insidiousness of racism, that someone could have displayed such hatred on a total stranger, based entirely on colour of skin. In a way, I should be thankful it was only spit and not something worse.

On the other hand, the same incident made me realise that while there is evil, there can also be much good. I was also a stranger to the old man but he saw me as a human being entitled to respect and dignity.

Thus he empathised with the injustice that was done to me and sought to restore my dignity by offering his handkerchief for me to clean up.

He asked for nothing in return and indeed disappeared into the crowds soon after with not a word more.

When we talk about race, we talk about groups of people, a homogenous faceless group defined by general characteristics that we think of as applicable to all of them. But on a day-to-day basis, it is not the race that matters but the human being that we are dealing with.

I had one of those telemarketing calls offering free medical check-ups the other day. Disturbed by it, I started to question the caller for details.

The woman was undoubtedly of the same race as me. But the sheer rudeness and unprofessionalism of her responses showed that she had no respect whatsoever, neither for the person she was calling nor for her own company or job.

Did it matter what race she was? No, what mattered was that she was unable to make a connection with another human being, even when she claimed to be offering something ostensibly good for me.

Given a choice between these two people, I would sooner take the old man to tea than this woman. He and I have a common respect for human beings that she did not, despite our common ethnicity. Was he the aberration or she?

Since I believe that it is human to be kind, I prefer to believe she is.

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A matter of perspective

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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 27, 2008
A matter of perspective
MUSINGS
By MARINA MAHATHIR


What we regard as poor in Malaysia would be very rich in Bangladesh. Yet in some ways, their poverty has made them much more innovative than us richer Malaysians.

IT was a moment when I became aware of perspective. I was in Bangladesh talking to the staff of BRAC, the world’s largest NGO that does tremendous work in alleviating poverty.

They asked me what our poverty line was and I replied, relying on memory that it was about US$200 per month.

“Per month?” they asked, “that’s our per capita income!”

In fact, both of us were a bit off the mark. Our poverty level is at about US$218 while Bangladesh’s per capita income is now US$599 (although I have also found a source that says US$1,400).

But the point is, our monthly poverty level is way above their per capita income (ours is at US$14,400). That is an indication of how relative poverty is when you compare different countries. What we regard as poor here would be very rich indeed over there.

This was evident in a field trip I made to a village outside Dhaka to visit women members of the Grameen Bank microcredit project. Over the past 20 years, these women were able to set up small businesses that in turn enabled them to raise their living standards, own property and become more self-confident.

But to understand how their lives have improved, we have to understand what they started with. They started with virtually nothing: no property, no clean water, no opportunity to generate any income nor send their children to school. Now, through the loans they obtained from Grameen Bank and other microcredit facilities, all these have come true for them.

But if Malaysians were to visit them, they would still think these women were poor.

They may have TVs, fridges and mobile phones but they still live in homes with only two rooms, one of which is a bedroom-cum-kitchen. They may own a fleet of rickshaws but no cars. They still buy provisions from the little village grocery shop, not from any hypermarkets. Their children still run around the village in bare feet.

I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing. While I would certainly wish for better health and nutrition standards for all poor Bangladeshis, these initiatives and many others that I saw there have made genuine improvements in their lives.

I visited a school for slum kids that has done so well that these kids regularly best their richer schoolmates when they join the mainstream school system.

I visited a safe motherhood clinic that has done much to cut down on maternal and infant mortality in the slums. In many ways, they are doing what we did in the early years after independence.

Yet in some ways, the poverty has made Bangladeshis much more innovative than us richer Malaysians. They have a genuine Nobel laureate in Prof Mohamad Yunus and Grameen Bank for the sheer simple ingenuity of microcredit. We don’t.

Their people may be poor but not lacking in entrepreneurial spirit. Who hasn’t heard of the Telephone Ladies, village women who found a way of making money through the hiring of time on their mobile phones? Or the enterprising villager I saw who installed a satellite dish and is providing cable TV to her fellow villagers?

When people need to survive, they become resourceful and inventive. Sometimes I think that is what we are lacking here; perhaps because we are generally comfortable, price hikes notwithstanding.

The existence of so many NGOs doing excellent work among the poor in Bangladesh may point to a failure of government to provide the basics but it also illustrates a lively grassroots movement, dedicated to empowering the poor and marginalised.

Indeed, it was interesting to me that everyone, from government right down to poor villagers, is not reticent about using the word “empowerment” and means it as well. Here, it is treated as if it’s full of germs.

In Malaysia, we expect the Government to provide everything. It is rightly the Government’s responsibility to provide us with good education, healthcare, infrastructure, law and order. But, sometimes I think this has created a dependency on government that stifles creativity and innovation.

Beyond the basics, how do we help and support the marginalised, the disenfranchised, the disabled, the uneducated and the impoverished? We seem to think that throwing money at them is all it takes.

When was the last time we heard a Minister talk about empowering anyone? Instead, almost always somebody else is blamed for problems: parents, teachers, women, the Opposition, foreigners.

In the past, Malaysians used to go to Dhaka to study at university there. These days Bangladeshis come here to work, mostly as menial labourers.

It’s an abject lesson in not taking development for granted and how, through poor leadership, it can be lost overnight. We should heed that lesson.

Happy Merdeka!

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News break of a different kind

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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 13, 2008
News break of a different kind
MUSING BY MARINA MAHATHIR
In the developed world, where information assaults you everywhere, it comes as a relief that the recent headline events unfolding in Malaysia hardly merits a mention.



YOU would think that in these days of information overload, you’d have to hide in a cave somewhere remote in order to escape any news about our beloved Malaysia.

But in fact I did not have to do that at all when I was on a break recently.

I was in the middle of the developed world, where information is hardly difficult to come by, where it almost assaults you from everywhere.

You have TV, newspapers, advertising billboards flashing you news almost wherever you go. There is no escape.

But where did Malaysia figure in all this? Nowhere. Which may come as a relief to most of us, given the general unsavoriness of recent events.

On the other hand, it may mean that there is simply no news about our country worth reporting on.

What we might consider a disaster of a country right now isn’t bad news enough to warrant a mention at all in Western newspapers. There might be some who ask why we should care at all.

Indeed, we are certainly well covered in our neighbours’ papers. But is any of it positive?

Is the tone one of envy at our successes or general smirking at our rapid decline?

No doubt it was a week in which trying to get any column space or airtime was particularly difficult.

The two biggest stories in the week I was away were Obama’s rockstar-like tour of Europe and the capture of Radovan Karadjic, the Butcher of Bosnia.

One good guy and one bad guy are a bit hard to beat.

Almost a quarter of a million people turned up to listen to Obama when he spoke in Berlin, most of whom would never be able to vote for him.

Yet they looked like they wished they could.

The Americans know how to stage these things very well, building a catwalk in front of the Victory Column and working out all the best camera angles.

It almost became immaterial what he had to say; it was the image of Obama in front of that sea of people that was the message that his campaign team wanted to send back home: our boy is not only cool at home, he’s also cool overseas.

Why, no less than the President of France has pretty much endorsed him as his counterpart before a single American vote has been cast.

Indeed, before Obama has even been officially nominated as the Democratic candidate.

The Americans know everything about image building; we should learn a thing or two from them.

Also keeping foreign relations in mind was the Serbian government that suddenly “found” Radovan Karadjic after 13 years.

It turns out that all the while he had been in Belgrade, posing as a long-haired bearded alternative medicine practitioner, a species of folk normally associated with peace and calm, not the wholesale butchering of hundreds of thousands of people on the basis of their religion.

The reason he was finally captured was not because the new Serbian government had a sudden attack of conscience but because they wanted to curry favour with the European Union in order to join their august company.

Still it was nice to know that Karadjic won't be laying his “healing” hands on anyone anymore.

Meanwhile, Obama was doing some laying of hands of his own.

I watched him live on TV answering questions at something called the Unity Summit, a rather odd name for a conference of every type of journalist in the US, except white ones. But I must say he deftly answered some very tough questions.

The representative of the National Association of Native American Journalists asked if he was going to apologise to Native Americans for past wrongs perpetrated by the US government since the Australian and Canadian prime ministers had apologised to their own indigenous people.

He answered it pretty adroitly

by saying it’s better to raise their living standards and increase

their opportunities for advance-

ment than just to apologise for the past.

It made me wonder if we had a National Association of Orang Asli and Other Indigenous Malaysian Journalists to ask the same question of our leaders.

He handled the representatives of the National Associations of Hispanic, Asian-American and Muslim Journalists (“When are you going to visit a mosque, Senator?”) in similar vein.

It was interesting, insightful into his character, and quite entertaining.

Also, impressive, when you consider that he just got off the plane after a whirlwind tour of Europe.

Then I get home to a country where you have to wonder if even this mainstream newspaper was being ironic when they headlined a story on how some students had questioned our PM by saying they had “grilled” him.

And yes, it was the editors who had put the word “grilled” within single quote marks.

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In the name of their fathers

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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 16, 2008
In the name of their fathers
MUSINGS BY MARINA MAHATHIR
The recent announcement that Muslim adopted children must use the names of their biological male parent and not that of their adoptive fathers, as previously allowed, is causing anguish to many an adoptive parent as well as



I wonder what is it about us as a society these days when common sense has now become less commonplace?

Once upon a time we trusted ourselves, in our instincts and in our own values to do the right thing. We empathised with those in unfortunate circumstances and did our best to mitigate their situations.

These days people trust their natural instincts less, preferring to refer to others who tell us they are in authority.

We abdicate the responsibility to think and instead ask for guidance from others and follow that advice even when sometimes instinctively we know that the advice is unfair and incorrect.

A fine example is the recent announcement by the Home Minister that Muslim adopted children must use the names of their biological fathers and not the names of their adoptive fathers, as previously allowed.

Ostensibly, this was to fall in line with a fatwa made eight years ago but whether this solves problems or creates them seems to not be considered at all.

In the first place, the assumption seems to be that adoptive parents always know who the father of their adopted children are. But since babies are often adopted from unwed mothers, the fathers are not always known.

What if the babies are the result of liaisons with foreign fathers who gave false names? What if the babies are the result of rape?

Sometimes babies are adopted from a different race. If Baby A was originally Chinese or Indian and not born Muslim, do they then have to be known as Baby A Tan or Baby B Ramasamy?

Some have argued that the reason for keeping adopted children’s original names is so that they will not accidentally marry their own siblings.

Perhaps there was a risk of this in the days when people did not travel much outside their own communities or tribes.

This is possibly why the Chinese advise against marriage between two people with the same surnames. But with more than two billion Chinese sharing many common surnames, the chances that a Tan from one end of the country being related to a Tan from the other end of the country has become remote.

But if the logic is that you should take your father’s name so that you won’t marry any of your father’s other children, then what protection would you have against marrying one of your mother’s other children (by a man other than your father) that she might also have given away?

Furthermore, the converse logic is also problematic. If you don’t share the same surname as your adoptive siblings, then presumably you can marry them, even if you have grown up with them all your life.

Biologically this may be all right but socially and morally, would this still not be regarded as incestuous?

Woody Allen was neither biologically or even ethnically related to Soon-Yi Previn, yet people still found the liaison between them repugnant because she was his wife’s adopted daughter.

As the sister of several adopted siblings, I know at close hand the problems associated with both having the same as well as different surnames.

All my adopted siblings knew their status from childhood but the problem came from outside the family, not within. People did not treat them the same as us biological children even though they have the same surname.

In some cases, they simply disbelieved their relationship because of the different surnames. Perhaps it is because we are not an ordinary family but I imagine that even in ordinary families, you can still have this problem.

Besides, in Malay families, we do not have surnames. Not every “bin Ali” is related to every other “bin Ali”. You would have to trace back each person several generations on both sides of the family in order to be certain they are or are not related.

How is that possible with adopted children, especially orphans or abandoned children?

This new policy is one that is causing anguish to many an adoptive parent. Adoption has often meant a better life for many orphans. Couples adopt so that they can provide a loving home to children who would otherwise have never known a family.

I know some couples who've adopted children who turned out to be hearing-disabled and they have done everything they can to ensure that their children lead as normal a life as possible.

Already this policy is causing people to hesitate before they adopt. Many others are concerned about the emotional turmoil that public knowledge of their non-biological child’s status will cause, as opposed to private acceptance within the family.

One has to wonder who exactly is to benefit from this new law? It is certainly not the adopted child.

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Toxic shock syndrome

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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 2, 2008
Toxic shock syndrome
MUSINGS BY MARINA MAHATHIR
Anyone who has an opinion finds a counter-opinion. Neither is necessarily founded on truth.



JUST when we thought the atmosphere in our beloved country was toxic enough, it just got even worse.

I don’t know if anyone finds politics and politicians in our country as tiresome as I do these days.

And I mean those of every stripe and shade. Somehow none of them seem capable of behaving like normal people with normal instincts.

Everything is seen and done through a political lens.

Which is fine except that that’s not the way most normal people think.

The worst thing is that after a while, they start infecting others and even ordinary people start thinking the same way.

So people start looking at things through a distorted lens without even realising it.

For instance, it seems an automatic reaction for politicians to regard everything their opponents do as wrong, regardless of what it is.

So even if it is something good for the people, their opponents will impute some sinister agenda to it.

I would be happy to receive anything that makes my life easier from anyone, and I really don’t care to be told that it really isn’t good for me without a convincing argument why.

But how silly has the situation become that even their supporters start thinking the same way, even when their own lives are affected by what their leaders do.

On the other hand, politicians also are quick to defend whatever their own colleagues do as good, regardless of what it is.

If what their colleagues do is totally unconscionable, at the most they will react slowly and gently.

A case in point would be the bocor case last year, when after a rather long time, a non-apology was offered after much persuasion by their own party mates.

This type of attitude seems to have seeped into other people, too.

Double standards seem to prevail.

For instance, the same people who call

for justice to be blind seem to not want to apply this same standard to those they don’t like.

One would think that to prove that justice is indeed non-discriminatory, one would bend over backwards to insist on justice for those one has no great love for.

Instead there is a scramble to take every little bit of gossip or opinion as true.

Yet, if the same were directed at those they like, the response would be that these were “scurrilous” and “politically motivated.”

What sort of example are we setting for the general public with this?

Nowadays everyone sees so many plots and counterplots in everything that the atmosphere has become truly toxic.

Anyone who has an opinion finds a counter-opinion. Neither is necessarily founded on truth.

So there is no advance towards any sort of resolution.

Everyone seems to find it shameful not to have an opinion, even if it is not founded on anything they actually know.

There is no pausing to reflect and consider. To try and learn more so that one can give a measured response to anything.

Even ministers give knee-jerk personal opinions in unbecoming ways.

Small wonder that everyone else feels that they can make foolish unconsidered statements as well.

Not that the media is of any help. News today is simply a string of sound bites.

You get the impression that reporters ask for only three words of reactions rather than a proper explanation of what anyone thinks of any issue.

Responses do depend on the questions being asked as well, and in my experience many of the questions do not go beyond “What do you say to what so-and-so said?”

Unfortunately, politicians lap up the opportunity to show how glib they are.

Perhaps it goes back again to our general attitude towards information.

We want it quickly and in small bits. We don’t want long studied explanations about anything and then have to think about them.

Rumours, gossip and hearsay are what we want to believe.

Unfortunately there are many purveyors of these.

Maybe we should just boycott politicians and politics for a while. Or demand that they behave like normal people and concentrate on real issues.

People are trying to figure out how to feed their families.

That is the most important issue of all. Hungry people are neither patient nor good-tempered.

Nothing except good policies to manage this issue is going to matter.

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