What’s in a name?

What’s in a name?

By MARINA MAHATHIR

MUSINGS

Sunday, 31 Oct 2021

IF you watch The Daily Show hosted by comedian Trevor Noah, you might know of a segment on the satirical news TV show where one of the reporters Jordan Klepper goes out and interviews Trump supporters. He asks them very simple common-sense questions in a very respectful way and then listens as they respond. And in doing so, they pretty much hang themselves.

One of my favourite segments is when a Trump-supporting man and his wife lament the end of civility in American life. “Why can’t we all just get along?” they ask. Klepper agrees and puts it to them that we should not be rude to each other especially by not making any one-fingered gestures to one another. The couple nods in agreement. Then the camera lingers on the man’s t-shirt which depicts Donald Trump giving the finger “one for Biden, one for Harris”.

Looking at this colossal lack of self-awareness among the interviewees, I was reminded of some similar sorts in my own backyard, the sort of people who don’t mind standing up in public and spouting things they assume are original and clever. They’ll take something innocuous and extract and extrapolate from it all sorts of meanings that aren’t meant to be there and spin it into one giant controversy. I have to say it takes a lot of brainwork to do this, work that might have been better used to, say, give ideas on how to improve people’s lot in life perhaps.

I’ve asked this before, and may never get the answer, but really, what is the thought process here? In the case of a recent brouhaha over the name of an alcoholic drink, how did this begin?

Did somebody “accidentally” wander into the alcoholic beverage corner of a supermarket and while perusing the whiskey offerings (because what else do you do in the alcohol section?), came upon one whose name sounded somewhat... um...local. Eyebrows suitably heightened, this somebody’s grey matter starts to whirl. Have they found the perfect opportunity to make a name for themselves?

Here’s where the language gymnastics come in. Once again Malaysians proved their limitless ability to show their ignorance and embarrass ourselves in front of the world.

It reminds me of the time when the pop singer Dua Lipa came to visit. Ms Lipa happens to be of Muslim Albanian and Bosnian heritage although she was born and bred in the UK. She happened to mention that she calls her father Babé which must mean Dad in her mother tongue. Outrage ensues! How can she call her father after that short-legged snout-nosed pink creature we’re forbidden to eat??

Never mind that in Albanian, the word for the said animal is “derr”. Can you imagine Albanians coming here and being indignant every time one of us says “de-ngan” or “de-pan”? But no, in the entitled world some of our fellow citizens live in, other people must change their words to suit us.

Although of course we change words too so that our sensitive natures won’t be disturbed. I’m sure someone has told Ms Lipa that the next time she comes to Malaysia, she must refer to her father as Khinzir.

Back to our most recent event that got some people’s knickers in a twist. Whoever it was who spotted the bottle label in the first place, then shows us the effect of our education curriculum that doesn’t talk about the history of the tin mining industry in our country. Instead of thinking that the word means “tin”, in a prime example of the literalness that besets a lot of our folks, he assumes that it must be named after his mother or aunt. How could anyone name a whiskey after his sainted mother, for heaven’s sake!

He rushes off to tell his equally literal friends and puffs of smoke ensue from their heads as they ponder how to turn their small-time outrage into something bigger. Then someone remembers that the Prophet (peace be upon him) had a daughter named Fatimah! What an opportunity to prove one’s religious credentials, by defending the honour of a long-dead woman who had no idea she’d unwittingly lent part of her name to a metal AND an award-winning whiskey. The Malay Fatimahs who came after her are nicknamed Timah. So the whiskey manufacturers must have intended to insult her, despite the fact that nobody knows what the original Fatimah was called at home.

Outrage grew in direct proportion to every new insult dreamed up in someone’s head. Even women got into the game. One suggested that drinking Timah whiskey would be like ‘drinking Malay women’, conjuring up a sexualised image that had not been there until then. Should we all now check what our names have been used for in case there’s a possibility of some imagined assault on our bodies? My name sounds like the places where you tie up boats. Maybe I should consult someone as to what a carnal-minded politician might make of it.

We’re of course not alone in trying to make a point out of innocuous words. I recall Americans wanted to change fried potatoes from “french fries” to “freedom fries” just because the French didn’t agree with their plans to invade Iraq, possibly on the grounds that it would de-freedomise the Iraqis. Ordering freedom fries rather than French fries became a patriotic gesture, an easy cheap way of showing your support for your country marching into another to destroy it.

We laugh at the Americans for their silliness. Yet we’re so unaware of the increasing number of times when other people laugh at us.

When people are worried about the tanking economy, climate change, the slow disappearance of democracy, and the pandemic, some people insist that a drink they would never touch cannot be named after a metal that helped prosper our country, nor that the man depicted be shown in a beard and skullcap because those are also exclusive to us.

Marina Mahathir worries that our brains are quickly going down the drain because we are led by the most clueless people on earth. The views expressed here are solely her own.

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‘Brain fog’ during the pandemic

 ‘Brain fog’ during the pandemic

By MARINA MAHATHIR

MUSINGS

Sunday, 26 Sep 2021

HERE’S a question for those days when there’s nothing to watch on TV: what exactly goes on inside a politician’s head? When you read about some mind-boggling pronouncements made by some politicians in power, can you help but wonder what resides inside their craniums to make them come up with these things?

In mid-August heavy rain caused a landslide and flash floods in the Gunung Jerai and Yan area in Kedah that resulted in homes being destroyed and six lives being lost. Speculation mounted as to what could have caused this devastation, especially when there have been photographs of alleged logging in parts of the mountain. This in a state where there has already been reported logging activities near water catchment areas, with video scenes of hills stripped bare and piles of logs waiting to be mounted on lorries to be transported elsewhere.

Despite all this, you’d think that the minister in charge of the environment would order an investigation into what happened in Gunung Jerai. Instead, he takes a personal look, sees felled trees with roots intact and concludes from his own miniscule experience in environmental science, that rather than any greedy human, God was at fault. The same God who gave us this beautiful forest to enjoy decided one day to wash it all the way down the hill and take some bodies along with it. I can’t wait for the next pronouncement, that the six people who died must have committed some terrible sin, like dress up in women’s clothes perhaps, and therefore were punished by drowning in flood waters.

See, you can’t sue anyone for neglect when they were never, God forbid, responsible for it.

Then there’s the one who decided that Malaysian women are not worth protecting, that they don’t have the right to confer their citizenship to their children who happened to have been born abroad. Apparently, such citizenship cannot be “arbitrarily” given to anyone who asks. Especially if they happen to be females who had the gall to marry a foreigner. Of course, Malaysian males who marry foreign women and had children all over the world don’t even have to think about whether their offspring can have Malaysian citizenship or not. They can get them automatically!

What kind of brain thinks that giving citizenship to the foreign-born children of Malaysian women should be arbitrary, while automatically giving to those of Malaysian men, is in any way just? The Constitution apparently says so, if you read it literally. But as High Court judge Akhtar Tahir ruled, Article 4(1)(b) of the Federal Constitution together with the Second Schedule, Part II, Section 1(b), pertaining to citizenship rights, must be read in harmony with Article 8(2), which prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender.

It’s the sort of brain that essentially thinks of women as inferior to men, that resents women for having chosen foreigners over locals to marry. In this way, the law is set up to punish women who made these choices. To ensure their children have Malaysian citizenship, women have to travel back to Malaysia before their seventh month of pregnancy because airlines won’t let them fly otherwise. Not only does this incur expenses, it means an enforced separation from their husbands for at least two months. The realities of this for many such women highlight the fallacy of one myth: not all women marry rich foreigners.

Are women’s votes valued at only half that of a man’s? Women understand an insult when they see one, whether they have children born abroad or not. Faced with the possibility of losing the female vote, the government is now trying to cover its tracks by saying that the reason that they appealed the ruling is because they need time to amend the Constitution. If the intention is good, why not take the direct route instead of creating anguish among the women affected and conflict with your own colleagues? Wouldn’t so much time and angst have been avoided just by saying ‘OK, let’s amend the Constitution’ ?

If there’s a pattern to the workings of this particular mind, it’s an inherent dislike for foreigners of any sort. At the bottom of the heap are refugees and undocumented workers. Only such a mind can decide in the midst of a lockdown to go after poor migrant workers who may have become undocumented because the pandemic has caused them to lose their jobs. At a time when we need to get every human in our territory vaccinated so that everybody is safe, this brain thinks of the best way to sow distrust, causing foreign workers and refugees to hide. Since this order also comes from someone so powerful, is it any wonder that the workers who do risk showing up at vaccination centres get such disrespectful treatment? It’s already been made clear that there are two types of humans in our country: those to be tolerated because they’re citizens and those that can be shouted at because they’re not.

On the other end of the scale is the new policy of insisting that the foreigners be made to keep RM1mil in their bank accounts if they want to live here under the MM2H programme. Many of them are retirees living on pensions and some have been here for years and have bought property here. Being here means they bring foreign currency into our local economies. Why shoot ourselves in the foot with this arbitrary policy? What sort of thought process does something like this undergo? Apart from a dislike of people who aren’t Malaysians, that is.

These are just some of the recent mind-blowing pronouncements that we have been subjected to. We already have this pandemic to deal with, and all its attendant impacts. Do we really need our intelligence insulted almost every day? Aren’t there really important things to deal with rather than hounding sexual minorities and passing religiously conservative laws?

Talking of which, it’s painfully obvious that those basking in their new agreement with the government didn’t have these new amendments to the Syariah laws in their sights. Nor have they said much about it. That’s what you get when you don’t have diverse negotiators.

Marina Mahathir is also examining her brain to see whether she’s being infected by the thought processes she’s being subjected to in the media every day. So far she’s remained stubbornly consistent.

The views expressed here are solely her own.

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Let’s embrace the disruption

Let’s embrace the disruption

By MARINA MAHATHIR

MUSINGS

Sunday, 29 Aug 2021

If this Merdeka is to have any meaning at all, we need to free our minds from the same old formulas.

IN years past, every time Aug 31 comes around, inevitably reporters will ask me for my thoughts on Merdeka because I was born in the same year as independence. But this year, I hope nobody asks me what my thoughts are. I am too exhausted for any such thoughts.

I can’t think of anything to say because the last thing I feel is free. Merdeka means freedom or independence, but I feel shackled in every way.

First, I am physically tied down, unable to go anywhere meaningful because of our prolonged Covid-19 lockdown. Apart from walks around my neighbourhood and occasional trips to the supermarket fully masked, I remain in my house day after day. I don’t mind it much because I do have a nice spacious house and work has continued online. But only seeing my colleagues online has become increasingly surreal, as if none of them are flesh and blood, only images on my laptop screen.

We recently had an intern none of us met from the time she joined us to the time she left. I only know her up to her shoulders; I have no idea how she carries herself in person which would have told me so much more about her. If asked, I can only describe her in one dimension, that of the work she produced and nothing else.

This is what we lose when we continually work from home, the ability to see our colleagues as whole persons. We’ve only mildly overcome this with occasional social Zoom calls where chats are about everything except work. It’s not enough.

I also feel imprisoned by not being able to see my parents. They are well and they are safe but at their age, only by seeing them in person will we notice the little things that matter. How one seems a little wobbly on her feet or how she wants to know every detail of their grandchildren’s lives, questions that don’t always occur to them in the chaotic conversations of a Zoom family gathering. We’re not there to grieve with them when they hear news of friends who have succumbed to the virus or just old age. Nor are we there to oversee a house that might so easily endanger fragile bones or have plumbing problems that might escape the notice of poor vision. We can only care so much for our families from a distance, with voice-call admonitions to take care or to send over needed equipment but without being able to show them how it works.

There are of course people worse off than us, those who have lost their family members and who have been unable to say goodbye in the final hours. I can’t imagine what that must feel like, especially if you weren’t able to see them for months on end before they fell ill. No closure, no freedom from grief.

Perhaps the worst feeling of being imprisoned is the one that beleaguers your mind day in and day out. All the “what ifs” if you didn’t have to be confined to home, district, state or country. But even more so, when you notice the very real attempts at locking down your mind and body that has been happening in our country for the past year.

Efforts at thinking seems to be not only discouraged but downright suppressed so those who have something to say that even mildly dissents from the norm are punished as if they’d committed the most heinous crimes. Anyone who mentions the many white flags that have sprouted over people’s homes are told to delete the posts or take down the flags. Young people wanting to memorialise those who died of Covid-19 are taken away in black Marias. Parliamentarians wanting to do their jobs are stopped by no less than the riot squad.

Has anyone given a good explanation for these nonsensical moves? “Violations of SOPs” is the weakest and least believable excuse. These reactions are really motivated by embarrassment at the truth laid bare.

They underscore our government’s total failure at safeguarding the people through well thought-out science-based policies instead of political jujitsu’ing to ensure the survival of some of the most unfit leaders we have ever seen. Leaders who cannot fathom a simple fact: pandemics thrive when democracy dies.

Through what can only be described as sleight of hand, we now have a leader that the entire world’s press cannot help but describe as coming from a scandal-tainted political party. On that score we must be a world first: the only country where the government in power is the one that lost the last general elections. Our new leader is not even the leader of his own party because those are so tainted, none of us can endure the shame of having them at the helm again. You must wonder what Malaysians did that we are handed scraps at the bottom of the barrel like this?

If this Merdeka is to have any meaning at all, we need to free our minds from the same old formulas. Covid-19 has up-ended everything that we thought we knew so we might as well embrace the disruption and think differently.

Maybe we should look at people we never thought of as leaders before. There have been so many ordinary people who have stepped up with ideas to help the needy far more innovative than anything the government has come up with.

There are those who have not waited for support or contracts before they did anything. They’ve simply gone and done, thinking of themselves least of all. Those are the leaders we need.

If this Aug 31 you’re feeling like you can’t breathe, not because of a tiny virus but because of the virulent strain of anti-democracy, start prying that chink of hope open by supporting people with the leadership qualities you want. It’s our only chance.

Marina Mahathir is wondering why, despite two vaccinations, not going out and always wearing masks when she does, she still feels as if something is not letting her breathe. The views expressed here are solely her own and do not necessarily reflect those of The Star.

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The power of knowing what you don’t know

 The power of knowing what you don’t know

By MARINA MAHATHIR

MUSINGS

Sunday, 25 Jul 2021

AS we wander through the dark Covid tunnel wondering when the next train is going to hit us, our minds also turn to the people who are supposed to stop those trains. Thus far the barriers they have put up – lockdowns, fining innocent people, hunting down migrant workers and refugees – have been knocked into splinters like so many chopsticks. And still they insist that their policies work and indeed have been successful.

But then they’re in the nice, air-conditioned tunnel riding on the gravy trains. Not likely to be run over any time soon.

There’s a quote often misattributed to Albert Einstein that says that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Whoever originally said it, we now know that it’s true, with the rise in our Covid-19 cases and deaths as proof.

It’s obvious that our leaders and policymakers don’t read. They don’t read the science which is why they do unscientific things like disinfect roads. Nor do they read the signs that come in the form of white and black flags. Or they do, but instead of feeling ashamed, they feel insulted and claim that the appropriate flags should be blue. But they also haven’t noticed how we’ve become blue in the face trying to make them see sense.

It’s also clear that they’ve been blocking out bad news. How else to explain anyone who believes it when hospitals clean up their disaster areas or when they are told that people’s kitchens are full of food? I didn’t know it was possible to be blind and tone deaf at the same time.

For those of our leaders who did go to school, I recommend a book called Think Again by Adam Grant. It’s about “the power of knowing what you don’t know”. Grant wants us to accept that we don’t always know everything, that we can only grow and come up with better solutions when we decide that we need to rethink everything that we know. He starts the book by giving the example of the inventor of the Blackberry who was so sure he had invented the best phone and that he knew everything about human wants that he failed to see the iPhone coming.

To be able to rethink your ideas and beliefs, you need to be, most of all, humble. But most people, especially the higher up the totem pole they are, tend to cling to what Grant calls the arrogance of ignorance. They believe that they got up their perch because they are special and therefore everything they say must be true and smart. Even though people lower down the pole don’t think their bosses are as clever as they are supposed to be, they don’t want to say anything because of the danger of being gaslighted. In other words, trying to correct those on top of them might elicit the comeback, “If you’re so smart, how come you’re down there and I’m up here?”. In our feudal society, this effectively shuts minions up.

Grant goes on to talk about how most people over-estimate their abilities on any subject they claim to know. He gives examples of experiments where the more confident people are in their own abilities, the more mistakes they are likely to make. They are so sure of themselves, they never think they can be wrong. But he also says there’s an underlying force that can also cloud our vision of our abilities, our inability to think about our thinking. “Lacking competence,” he says, “can make us blind to our incompetence.” In Malay, we call it bodoh sombong. Can you think of anyone who might fit the bill?

What’s most needed is confident humility, the willingness to be open and to learn from others. But unfortunately, as we have seen time and again, that’s exactly what’s missing. There are people who blunder on, causing economic and social damage, without caring in the least bit about the human cost. By the time this column comes out, there’ll be probably 8000 people dead from Covid and countless others from suicide. Do the blunderers care? In Indonesia, the public gets apologies from Ministers when they make mistakes. Here? Not a peep.

Instead, we get a show of eye-watering arrogance when people, who need to be labelled VIPs in case we forget, pray in an enclosed place with 300 others and get away with it, despite their own warnings to the rest of us. Elsewhere 200 not very important folks pray on the road outdoors and immediately get investigated, resulting in only 49 of them, all foreigners except one, being arrested. Does it smell to you like it does to me?

Nothing is going to change unless people feel safe enough to give new ideas. In one experiment that Grant cited, people who have psychological safety – they feel they won’t suffer if they provide different ideas – reported more errors than people who felt less safe. But on closer examination, it turns out that while they reported more errors, they made less of them. “By freely admitting their mistakes, they were then able to learn what caused them and eliminated them....in psychologically unsafe teams, people hid their mishaps to avoid penalties, which made it difficult to diagnose the root causes and prevent future problems.” Sounds like that Klang hospital visit, no?

If we ever get rid of this lot, I think we should make it mandatory for anyone aspiring to rule us to read this book so that they won’t cling to their self-assumed smartness as if it came down from above. I might even sponsor all 222 copies of it.

 

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Talking straight

Talking straight

By MARINA MAHATHIR

MUSINGS

Sunday, 27 Jun 2021

We seem to have a ‘new dictionary’ where the words have one meaning for some and another for others.

IN the alternate universe that some of our leaders inhabit, a new dictionary is being invented. It takes words that are normally understood by most people to mean something and gives them new meanings indeed. The most famous – some might say “infamous” – is of course the word ‘soon’.

In most cases, for example, when mothers demand their children pick up their mess, “soon” usually means “now!” For most adults however, time expands a little and “soon” might include maybe within the next week or so, as in “I’ll call you for coffee soon”. However, when the word is sandwiched between “as” and “as possible” and spoken by someone with as much authority as a mother, it is usually taken as meaning “right this minute”.

Of course, you could fudge the “as possible” bit by saying that the possibilities are endless. Yes, tomorrow is a possibility but so is next year. But as any child knows, negotiating terminology with a clearly irritated mother is inviting trouble, the sort of trouble that causes a grudge to be carried for years on end, even possibly a lifetime. The question that the child has to juggle in his or her mind is simple: is it worth it?

Then there’s the definition of “lockdown”. Normal people think of this term to mean “stay home”, don’t anybody move at all. In the 16th century when people realised that the reason the plague decimated so much of Europe was because people kept moving from place to place, they basically locked down whole cities until it was safe to open up again. Even earlier, in the 6th century, the Prophet Muhamad had said “When you hear that [a plague] is in a land, do not go to it and if it occurs in a land that you are already in, then do not leave it, fleeing from it.” The Prophet knew instinctively about quarantines and lockdowns not because he was a public health specialist but because he was a wise man with plenty of common sense.

If only we followed his example. Instead we have played with the definition of lockdown by allowing loopholes the size of the SMART tunnel. Worse we allowed some people to blithely walk through those loopholes because they are supposedly famous, important and kosher.

In the old dictionary, public health measures applied to all. That’s why it’s not called for-some-of-the-public health measures. But since we’re now using the new backdoor lexicon, the meaning of public is now elastic. Everyone is “the public” except for some. There’s the very few who because of fame, and not necessarily any utility, are excluded from any of the rules that apply to the hoi polloi. Then on the other end of the spectrum, there’s the groups that are very utilitarian but have to abide by even more rules than the “public”: the migrant workers and refugees who clean our toilets and streets, plough our fields, make our gloves and build our buildings. These we cramp into centres where the social distance is perhaps 10cm rather than 100cm, not much different from the many prisoners in our jails. The virus is however not showing any respect for these distinctions.

Of course the other phrases that have now gotten different meanings are the ones like “we’re doing really badly”, which now means “we’re doing really well”. We are “the worst in the world” translates as “we’re not”. Where once people panicked at news that there were 200 cases reported in a day, now we think that 2000 per day means we’re on the road to recovery. The word “cluster” used to send chills of fear through our hearts but now we learn that actually most cases aren’t related to clusters at all, they’re just sporadically all over the place. Nothing to fear because we’re really doing well.

Even that well-used phrase “herd immunity” which used to mean that about 80% of us would have been vaccinated is now made of rubber. We’re well on target (another rubbery word) apparently because we’ve vaccinated 10% of our people. Or at least the 10% who have registered to be vaccinated. In Kelantan, only a quarter of the people who should be vaccinated have registered and out of that, only a quarter of those have had a needle poked in their arms. What was that target again?

But I must say, of all the alternative characterisations of words that are currently in use now, the one that I take the most offense to is the one that says that discrimination is not discrimination. Specifically, if a law says that a Malaysian woman cannot enjoy the same rights as a Malaysian man, then she is not being discriminated against because that’s what the law says. And everyone knows that laws, despite being made by men with certain neanderthal tendencies, are always “neutral”.

It would be nice to think that “neutral” means “impartial” but when we look at the impact of some laws, we know that they’re not. If women cannot confer their citizenship to their children born abroad, we’re basically exiling them. Men on the other hand can marry who they want, have children wherever they want and all those progeny can claim Malaysian citizenship. If I were to be unkind, I would think that the law was made to punish women who had the gall to marry foreigners instead of our own males, privileged solely by their gender. Some Malaysian woman should marry Bill Gates to test this theory out. Might we change the law because he might bring his billions here?

Maybe a side-effect of this pandemic is the inability to think straight anymore. Or it has made people who never had the ability become even worse. As a simple example, witness the deafening silence from the Education Minister on the multiple complaints of sexual harassment in schools. Presumably he’s a parent too, yet has nothing to say about making our schools safe for our children. Nor has the Multimedia and Communications Minister had anything to say about online cyberbullying. Does silence mean they agree with what is happening, do not believe it or simply have no idea what to say?

In this new normal dictionary, when nobody in government takes a stand on anything, who knows what to make of all this wordlessness?

Marina Mahathir longs for the time when people talked straight, when up was not down and good was not bad.

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