Time for restraint, reflection and respect

It is also the time to show the strength of our faith, our spirit and our discipline.

IT is the first week of Ramadan and as always the body is taking time to adjust. I feel lethargic and sleepy and it takes enormous will to work up the energy to go to work.

But bills don’t stop needing to be paid, letters answered or columns written during this one month of fasting.

I just have to wait a few days before I get used to the daytime deprivation of food and water and will feel normal again.

I like Ramadan because it gives me a sense of a break from the usual routines. Just because there isn’t a break in the middle of the day for lunch makes me rework my daily schedule so that I can get home early enough to rest before the breaking of the fast.

But I expect there to be days when I work right up till buka puasa and won’t even notice it.

Most of all, I’m hoping for some benefits from not eating after a year of mostly undisciplined indulgence in all the wrong types of food.

For me, Ramadan is a time of restraint, reflection and respect. By that, I mean not just refraining from food and drink but from the worst sides of ourselves.

At other times we may be bad-tempered, inconsiderate, gossipy and unthinking but during Ramadan we are supposed to put those sides of us on hold, at least in theory.

I read about how a woman was beaten by her husband because she didn’t wake him up early enough for sahur. It really makes you wonder why the spirit of Ramadan, on its very first morning, was so lacking that a man could be driven to violence in this way.

No doubt there will be some who blame the wife for being “derelict” in her duty to wake her husband but I have to ask: could he not have woken himself, and even if she woke him late, was violence the proper response to this?

Ramadan gives us time to reflect on many things. I like waking up for sahur because the early hours of the morning, amidst the cool and the solitude, gives me time to think about many things.

Sometimes it’s just practical things, like making lists on what I have to do for Raya. Other times, it’s about what it means to honour the spirit of Ramadan.

I try and think of good things I want to be and do and not about things that make me angry or sad. I make a promise to myself to deal with difficult things with greater equanimity.

If people gave themselves time to reflect more during this month, then perhaps they would not do things hastily without thinking of the possible consequences.

If you set out to do something obviously insulting, would you not expect some reaction to it? Did you think about how you will deal with this reaction?

On the other hand, faced with such blatant attempts at publicity, do we succumb to our basest instincts and provide the reaction that would generate the desired attention? Restraint and reflection should really be practised on all sides, but especially by the ones fasting.

Which leads me to respect another part of the spirit of Ramadan.

Yes, in this country, people need to respect that it is Ramadan and that most people are fasting. But on the other hand, those who are fasting are also obliged to respect others who may not be fasting.

We are, compared with many Muslim countries, already one of the most tolerant in that we don’t shut down totally just because many of us are fasting.

In other countries, they simply turn their daily schedules upside-down. Whatever you do in the daytime, such as eat and work, happens at night instead. In actual fact, precious little work gets done and the whole month becomes festive.

But the practical side of us knows that the world is not going to stop just because some of us are fasting.

We still need to work during regular hours because that’s when the rest of the world is working.

Indeed I’m grateful for this because sleeping all day just makes me grumpy and lethargic.

But fasting doesn’t mean we have an excuse to do shoddy work. That means we have no respect for our work and those who employ us. Nor does it give us the licence to demand respect from others.

To say that others have to be extra-respectful or sensitive to us because we are fasting is demeaning and disempowering. It is a bit like being disabled and asking for more crutches to shore up our weaknesses.

Ramadan is after all the time to show the strength of our faith, our spirit and our discipline.

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Working together to find 'cures'

Many issues cut across boundaries and require several different ministries to cooperate in order to find solutions instead of only working in isolation.

WHEN it comes to some issues, I sometimes wonder if they’re too important to leave to mere politicians to handle.

There we were with smoggy skies and unbreathable air again. I repeat, again. After the previous bad experiences and many promises by our leaders that they would do something about it, not only did the haze return, it was actually worse.

Did we learn anything from the last time? It started down south in our neighbouring country. They were choked out completely.

You would think that we would start wondering whether we would be hit next. Instead we twiddled our thumbs and watched as the haze made its way north, disrupting everything along the way.

Could we not have foreseen this? And therefore could we not have done something quicker to at least mitigate it? Or issue warnings to those most vulnerable or susceptible to be alert to the risks to their health? Before the 100% rise in asthma cases actually occurred?

I don’t know what it is about our country that we are so resistant to actually doing anything about prevention. No, I misstate that: we love preventive actions, especially if they involve detention or the prevention of so-called immoralities. Mostly, by methods for which there is no evidence of their effectiveness. But to do the actual hard work of studying and analysing an issue in order to find a fact-based implementable solution seems to be beyond us.

On Monday, I sat in a plenary session at the 7th International AIDS Society Conference on HIV Pa­tho­genesis, Treatment and Prevention and listened to a doctor from Cambodia talking about their ap­­proach to managing the global epidemic.

He described the progression of their HIV programme as Cambodia 1.0, 2.0 and now 3.0 supported with a lot of analysis of their data. I truly don’t know how accurate his analyses were but I was impressed at the issues that they were striving to address, including sensitive ones like sex work.

Although I have not been involved in HIV for seven years now, what seems obvious to me is that at most, we are at Malaysia 1.5 when it comes to HIV. That is because we are one of the few countries in the region to have implemented harm reduction programmes and to provide free anti-retroviral treatment to Malay­sians living with HIV. But that was a while ago and although that’s something we should be proud of, we really have not moved on.

Trying to get updated statistics on HIV is difficult enough. But even more difficult is trying to get analyses of the statistics, or of other factors that contribute to the HIV epidemic, whether on the prevention or treatment side.

I listened to a South African professor talk about the issues of transitioning care for children with HIV who grow into adults, and wondered if anyone here was also thinking of the same thing.

The same is true of every government department, not just health.

It would be interesting to know if the new Youth and Sports Minister will commission studies to truly find out why some of our young men become Mat Rempit, or get into drugs, or are so absent from our tertiary institutions. Or are those issues to be left to the police, or to Education?

If there is anything new our current Government can do to truly make a difference, it would be to recognise that many of these issues are cross-cutting and need the engagement and cooperation of several ministries working together and not in isolation.

Similarly, our Women, Family and Community Development Ministry would do well to get someone to do a truly in-depth study of why child marriage or incest happens and what can be done to prevent these. Or why children keep drowning during the school holidays. Do we even really have facts on why so many babies get abandoned?

However, we seem to have no appetite for knowing the real reasons why these issues arise in our society. Instead we would rather rely on speculation based often on someone else’s shallow knowledge or worse, prejudice. This was how we got ridiculous “guidelines” on how to spot gay people, all of which seem to be based on watching a cheap telenovela.

If we are going to seriously right whatever is wrong in our society, we need to face them squarely.

Today I heard a presentation on the dismal state of the Malayan tiger and it’s obvious that the problem is human greed, in all of its forms. But unless we own up to that, then we can bid our tigers goodbye. How sad would that be?

We need to be able to hold up a mirror to ourselves and simply accept what we see. Then find realistic ways to make us be better so that we look better.

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It’s a crime against women

How can we call ourselves moderate when after 56 years of never whipping women we now want to engage in public spectacles of such a barbaric nature?

SOME time last week, one of our state religious departments proudly announced that it had subjected 24 women and 17 men to a whipping for the “crime” of incest and sex outside of marriage. They even recommended that the next round should be done in public because the sight of the agonised faces of the victims is apparently sure to induce fear in anyone watching, thereby lessening these crimes.

Actually, if anyone has ever watched public spectacles such as canings and any sort of public humiliation of individuals, the last thing that happens is that the audience feels empathy for the victims. Instead they tend to take the side of the punisher and encourage them even more, partly in the belief that this makes them seem more righteous. Few ever put themselves in the shoes of the humiliated, believing that it will never happen to them.

So the logic that such a punishment will act as a deterrent is faulty, just as the death penalty has never deterred anyone from trafficking drugs in our country. Those who say that without these laws, things would have been worse have never been able to provide the evidence for it.

It’s interesting that our morbid interest in public punishments only extends to women and only for sexual crimes. Why not for murder or drug trafficking, where the perpetrators are more likely to be men? Would that not deter men from such crimes?

More faulty is the logic behind punishing women for incest. As in statutory rape, incest is equally a problem of power dynamics, where one party, usually the woman, is unable to refuse sexual overtures from someone who has more power than her. In this case, the person is her father, uncle or brother.

Often the abuse has been happening for years effecting all sorts of trauma for the victims. Why compound it by punishing her, and then multiplying it by wanting to do it in public? Why do we shake our heads in disgust at Western men who lock up their daughters in basements in order to rape them and yet feel nothing when the same happens to our girls?

In this case, the “partners” in these crimes were also whipped. However, there were considerably less men punished than there were women, and the media chose to highlight only the women. Perhaps this is because they were keenly aware that our Federal Constitution forbids the whipping of women and therefore, despite the entreaties of our authorities, immediately sensationalised the case.

What sort of a country do we live in when, after 56 years of never whipping women, we now do so? How is this progress? How do we call ourselves moderate when we want to engage in public spectacles of such a barbaric nature?

If my 13-year-old daughter reads that women are being caned for incest, what do I tell her? Don’t commit incest so you won’t be whipped? Does that make sense when it is unlikely to be her fault?

Our society has such an aversion to serious self-reflection that we fall back on the most medieval approaches to any issue even though none have been proven to work. Instead of the hard work that it takes to truly do prevention, instead of the care that should go into the protection of women and children from abuse, we choose the easy and lazy route. It must surely be the victims’ fault and we must therefore punish them.

Then we wonder why, when we allow the true perpetrators of such crimes to get away, the issue keeps recurring. Does it occur to no one that if we have harsh, and unjust, punishments for victims, it will send the message that they can never hope to get justice for the suffering they have undergone? What would be the incentive then to report the abuse that is happening to them?

Unless of course our leaders do not think this abuse is serious or warrants much concern. How else do you explain the silence with which our political leaders have greeted this barbaric act by the state religious department? Apart from women’s groups, no women politicians have said anything about this. Are the women who were whipped and their families not voters? Does winning allow impunity?

This shameful whipping episode illuminates the illness that besets our society today, where the fear of what others think overrides the fear of being unjust to another. Indeed, the injustice being perpetrated is not just against 24 women but all Malaysian women who now feel that the state is the last place to go to for help.

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Of toilets and political responses

Politics is not going to solve all our problems. Our dirty toilet habits are our own and we only have ourselves to blame, not others, nor the Government.

ONLY in Malaysia can I talk about toilets and still get a political response.

I was visiting Japan and commented about the super high-tech toilets there that do everything except make coffee (although that may well be coming soon) and some people still responded by blaming the Government for our dirty public toilets.

It’s enough to make any person get off social media before we lose our sanity permanently but this obsession with everything political is surely unhealthy and often misplaced.

Our dirty toilet habits are our own and we only have ourselves to blame, not others, nor the Government. Even if the Opposition became the government, we are not going to turn overnight into conscientious public toilet users.

That is, pun intended, a pipe dream.

Any visitor to Japan will not help noticing the extreme civic consciousness that the Japanese have.

On every train, there are signs and announcements reminding you to not talk on your mobile phones because it is likely to annoy others.

There are reminders that smoking can be irritating to non-smokers, even in special smoking rooms.

There is no litter to be seen anywhere and public toilets have special sound effects to mask your personal sounds, should you have any.

The service in restaurants and stores is beyond exemplary.

I left something in a restaurant restroom and only realised this an hour later.

A quick call to the restaurant elicited a promise to look for it once they get a chance (it’s a very popular restaurant).

An hour later, I got a call back to say that they found it.

On another occasion, the hotel concierge walked us to a nearby restaurant so we would not get lost.

Any question we asked was responded to with excruciating detail so we could not possibly misunderstand instructions or directions.

Sales assistants walked us out their front doors and bowed us farewell, even if we bought very little compared to others.

All pavements have yellow pathways for the convenience of the sight-disabled.

It is enough to make any visitor to Japan want to return often.

It is safe, clean and hassle-free.

Trains and buses arrive and depart at exactly when they say they will.

The only problem with Japan is the language.

If you don’t speak Japanese, you miss a lot of fine details.

Still, there is more English spoken and written today compared to when I lived there 27 years ago.

Furthermore, all you have to do is to look lost and someone is bound to offer help in perfect English.

The other problem is cost.

No matter how you look at it, and no matter what economic crisis Japan goes through, it is an expensive country to visit.

It is possible to eat and move about cheaply but by Japanese standards, not ours.

Still, for the many advantages of visiting the country, it’s probably worth it.

Which brings me back to our own. What would it take to become a country like Japan?

If it’s a lack of corrupt leaders, Japan has its fair share.

If it’s a political system that keeps one party in power, except for a brief stint out of power recently, they have the LDP back.

They are governed by a bunch of men in dark suits, and diversity among them is a distant dream.

Japan is one of the most conformist societies in the world; everyone wears a uniform of some kind.

Perhaps it is the simple Japanese need to get along when so many people are squeezed into a small space, and constantly face threats both natural and unnatural.

If you have to share that space with 127 million others every day, then perhaps it makes you work harder at getting along with one another.

What more, when at any time, an earthquake, volcano or tsunami may suddenly strike and everything you have is gone.

Being all in the same predicament, I suppose, makes you more considerate of each other.

Our problem, on the other hand, is perhaps that we are geographically lucky, having a relatively small population with still a lot of space around us.

Having suffered no major disasters, we live our lives just for ourselves, caring little about how others feel.

We dirty public spaces, drive dangerously, provide sullen service and treat our inferiors, especially if they are from poorer foreign countries, like slaves.

When we say we want change, it has to be about more than politics. Politics is not going to solve all our problems.

Corruption or election cheating has nothing to do with dirty toilets or road bullying, for example.

Maybe we should just own up to responsibility for our own behaviour before we can really change.

And we can start by simply being mindful of others.

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A very Malaysian result

We gave every party just enough; not enough to make anybody ecstatic but enough that they can console themselves that they did partly well.

FOR the last year, it was almost imaginable that we would get to this day, after the general election.

Everything was put on suspended animation first because we did not know when the elections would be, then because we did not know what would happen afterwards.

Now we know and in many ways, it was a very Malaysian result.

We gave every party just enough; not enough to make anybody ecstatic but enough that they can console themselves that they did partly well.

It may not be good enough for the people who want all or nothing but the one thing about democracy is its unpredictability.

As Plato said: “Democracy ... is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder; and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike.”

This general election, Malaysians turned out in record numbers, which speaks well for our growing awareness of the importance of voting.

Yet we have kept our cards close to our hearts.

I went to several ceramah from both sides in the run-up to polling day and it was difficult to tell who would come out on top.

If you stay just within those you agree with, then it was possible to get a distorted view of things. But if you cross over to the other side, you get an idea that nothing is certain.

Unlike the cheerleaders, the most circumspect people were also the most cautious and refused to predict a definite outcome.

Perhaps there were a few heightened characteristics of the election campaign this time.

First is the incredible amount of advertising being thrown at voters from every possible direction.

You can’t drive anywhere without seeing banners and posters, some of which should have been taken down by JPJ for obstructing the view of drivers.

Social media talks about nothing else and even the most innocuous update gets connected to politics.

You can’t even play games online without having to first endure a political video.

To be sure, the campaign advertising war was hugely one-sided to the point of overkill.

Besides banners, posters, billboards and T-shirts, there was the free merchandise.

I once counted 12 types of merchandise in one markas.

I’m still wondering how wing mirror covers win elections. The money could have been better used to provide information on what candidates stood for and where you could meet them.

In the last days of campaigning, three human traits became obvious – fear, paranoia and mistrust.

All sides used fear to create paranoia and mistrust and unfortunately many allowed themselves to be used by politicians in that way. It made some Malaysians turn against other Malaysians as well as foreigners and tolerance, understanding and respect went out of the window.

This is not the future that we expected where all humans would enjoy equal rights. Instead, we fell to making distinctions between one human and another, based on suspicion and conjecture.

We should really reflect on how easily this ugly side of us came out when provoked.

No doubt we can blame various parties for creating an atmosphere in which this was possible. But we fell for it.

In the name of democracy, we be­­came undemocratic.

But this is the day after and we have to move on.

Again, do we rely on our leaders of whatever stripe to lead us in moving on or do we do it ourselves?

As the ever-cynical writer Gore Vidal said: “Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they’re both just aspirin.”

My feeling is that we will learn from this and we will focus on the next elections where we will insist that all sides have to earn our trust and therefore, our votes.

I don’t think we will succumb to manipulation any more.

I also think that the most crucial reform needed is in the media that truly needs to redeem itself from its outrageous behaviour during the campaign, dispensing with any semblance of objectivity or balance.

We need to demand from the media an accounting of how much it thinks it contributes to national unity and healing.

The people voted out the worst proponents of disunity and the media should take heed of that.

Meanwhile, we have to watch as a new government takes shape.

I would really advise the Prime Minister to stop thinking of Cabinet posts as a form of reward but rather as assigning tasks of huge responsibility.

For that he should not choose the same old faces.

To really show he is sincere about change, his criteria for his ministers should be talent, youth and gender, three things that were wholly absent before.

Only then will we believe this is a fresh new beginning.

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