Simple guide to success in Malaysia

SINCE everyone in this country is an expert in giving advice to everyone else, I thought I would join in and generously give my totally unsolicited counsel to all those aspiring to join cupboards or closets of any kind. Any likeness to anything familiar around us is naturally a complete coincidence.

First of all, please get it out of your head that you are wanted or needed because you have expertise of any kind. Who cares if you have a double degree in How to Make Anything Good and How to Make Anything Better? What you need is a PhD in How To Make Your Boss Feel Good, with a minor in How To Make Your Boss Look Really Good. It would also help if you have expertise in How To Clean Up Messes, especially if it involves getting rid of Messy People.

Secondly, you have to audition for the job. Don’t ever expect to be picked out of obscurity like some Cinderella. Let’s not forget that Cinders didn’t really get an invitation to the Ball – her ugly stepsisters did. And they worked hard for it by making sure they got noticed.

So find a way to get attention. Never mind if it means making a spectacle of yourself. Who cares if you look and sound like a fool as long as your potential Boss likes it? The path to position and lucre is strewn with puffery and pomp! Pledge loyalty, even if nobody asked you to. That counts as double points.

Thirdly, always be humble and say you had not expected this at all but it must have been Divine Intervention. Who in their right mind would question what the Almighty wants? And He must have spoken through his vessel, your soon-to-be Boss. George W. Bush said God made him President to do His will on earth. Surely if an American can claim that, we can too.

Fourthly, don’t be picky about what you are given. Just be grateful! What does it matter anyway? It all comes with nice perks like a nice house (there must be a renovation budget), a nice car with a driver, first-class travel for you and the Mrs, and all sorts of other things you’ve only heard about from others but can now experience firsthand.

So what if the work is crushingly dull? Someone else can read all those papers for you and give you a summary. And oops, if you miss a few things in there, there are lots of people you can blame, even despatch clerks. Why worry? You’ve hit the big time.

Fifthly, now that you’ve got it, your job is to smile and nod your head. Vigorously. All the time. Get yourself photographed with the Boss as much as possible, preferably looking at him with utter adoration. If you can hold up a suitably adoring placard, that’s even better. However, some have found that this is no insurance for job security. Maybe practise hand-kissing as an alternative.

Sixthly, let’s not forget that you are a package deal, which your spouse is a part of. Train her well because her job is as important as yours. Quite the opposite from you, her job is not to compete with her Boss.

So make sure that if you want to buy pretty expensive things for her (and now you can!), don’t let her wear them in front of her Boss, especially if she looks quite hot in them. Support local brands and dress your other half in them. Leave the international imports to her Boss and coach her in the right admiring phrases to murmur.

Seventhly, ever seen the TV series Entour­age? That’s what you need, an entourage. Surround yourself with all sorts of folks who can be given menial jobs dressed up as important ones by putting them in the right clothes. No Big Man is without his entourage to carry bags, check him in at airports, that sort of thing. Never ever have to do a single thing yourself again.

Eighthly, be part of an entourage yourself. It is highly important that you keep yourself within your Boss’ line of sight at all times because you don’t want him to forget you exist or overlook you the next time he wants to clear out his cupboard. So follow him everywhere; after all, that is your main job.

It’s also your spouse’s job to be a handmaiden in her Boss’ entourage so if she gets called upon to serve, give her your blessing. It will be rewarding.

There you have it – eight tips for succeeding in life in our dear country. The folks out there who have to actually work to survive each day wish you lots of luck. Drop some crumbs some time.

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Looking for positive inspiration

It’s great to meet youths who want to change things. 

I’VE been told that recently I’ve become strident and fierce in my columns. This was a bit of a surprise; I thought I’ve always been fierce and strident. But I suppose my readers see a noticeable uptick in the tone of my columns these days, hence the comments.

Is it surprising though? I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s holding my head in despair at the endless drama that our country is experiencing daily these days.

It would be one thing if it were a drama where everyone goes home happy at the end of it. But here we seem to slide from bad to worse, on a greasy slope with no brakes.

I’m not going to comment on the “high-level” goings-on since that is well covered everywhere. Except to say thank God for the alleged “whistleblowers” and “leakers” whoever they might be because if it were not for them, we would still be in the dark, not realising that our entire carpet is being pulled from under us. There must be some people with a conscience after all who can no longer tolerate the blatant disregard for our people anymore.

I was talking to some young people recently who want to spread the “virus” of positivity among our people because there is so much negativity around that it cannot be good for anyone. It’s wonderful to meet young people who are not yet jaded and disillusioned and who have the energy to want to change things.

They are right; there is too much negativity around, coupled with apathy that is unproductive. We complain endlessly but forget that complaining by itself does nothing except make others complain, too.

Indeed, while it is certainly part of the Malaysian make-up to constantly grouse about something or other, of late it’s taken a mean-spirited tone as well. There is undoubtedly much to complain about these days but at the same time there are many Malaysians, mostly ordinary people, who are doing many things to change our social landscape, to make it more open and accepting, to build peace and create harmony in our multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multi-religious mix.

Some of these efforts may be one-off, some may take a while to bear fruit, and some may not work at all. But far more important than the immediate results is the process of engagement with one another towards a common goal through an event, shared interests or anything else that brings people together.

We’ve seen ordinary people step up so many times over the years, to help one another, to show that Malaysian citizens are so much better than their failing and flailing leaders. We’ve banded together to help those affected by the floods in Kelantan, we feed the homeless, we’ve demanded a humanitarian response to the boat people floating about in the Indian Ocean. Always a step or two ahead of our Government.

Yet I see people being unkind and mean spirited about these efforts for unexplained purposes. If people are doing good, why put them down? What are those who are willing to roll their sleeves up and help others doing that might affect those who do nothing, except perhaps make them feel some shame for their own inertia?

Is the cynicism about everything so bad that we can’t even differentiate between sincere and insincere efforts? Or is it just our addiction to putting down everything others do as simply a craving for publicity?

I don’t blame our cynics entirely. After all we look to our leaders to set the example of good behaviour. When they completely fail us, how can we complain when our people do the same? How can we excoriate anyone for thinking wombats and pigs are the same when we don’t have leaders who display any higher level of knowledge anyway? How can we check those who pass on unfounded rumours of racial riots when some of our leaders are often quick to do the same? When our leaders are silent on these issues, how can anyone feel optimistic that reason will prevail?

We’re all looking for positive inspiration these days and yet it’s so hard to find any. Our leadership is too lazy even to remind us of the need for restraint during Ramadan, and has nothing to say when people go overboard. In its absence, we have to inspire ourselves.

Perhaps we need this holiday weekend to come up with some inspiration. Perhaps if we take a break from the news and focus on family and the joys of celebration, we can recover our reasonable centre.

With that, I’d like to wish everyone a Selamat Hari Raya, maaf zahir batin. May the advent of Syawal bring an end to the current madness and instead usher in new light and new hope, God willing.

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The anarchy of bad manners

I’M usually quite unshockable but occasionally I see something that really knocks my socks off. That was my reaction upon seeing a video recently. It was not pornography or anything mildly like it but it was still horri­fying.

In the video, two Caucasian men found that their car had been blocked by a pasar Ramadan stall.

Understandably they asked the stall owner how they might get the car back.

Less understandably, the stall owner started screaming and shoving at them.

Others joined them and all were shouting and manhandling these two men.

Some even yelled at them to “balik lah ...” (go home), although it is unclear where to.

What was shocking to me, besides the fact that this was obviously during Ramadan when we are meant to exercise restraint, was the sheer over-reaction to something which could have been resolved so easily.

Surely it is reasonable to ask someone who is blocking your car what to do about it?

Surely the response should have been an apology, followed by an explanation of when the stall would pack up for the night, thereby releasing the car.

What was the need for all the shouting, screaming and shoving?

I don’t think any civilised person watching this video could have felt anything but embarrassed, as I did.

What has happened to the sopan santun (manners) that we are known for, more so during Ramadan?

I grew up having manners drilled into me and if there’s one thing I am old-fashioned about, that would be it.

So I find it hard to understand when people are rude for no apparent reason.

Those who follow me on social media will recall a recent episode when I had to give a little lesson in courtesy to a young man.

He has since apologised and I’m sure it wasn’t normal behaviour for him.

But where would young people learn about manners but from adults?

When we have parliamentarians saying the rudest things to fellow Members of Parliament and mostly getting away with it, when we have adult men who think it’s funny to go shake their posteriors at a woman’s house, when we have people flying off the handle over the simplest things, why would not our young also devalue courtesy and politeness?

If you’re polite, it is not news and you don’t become famous.

But if you’re crass and crude, you get headlines and everyone remembers your name.

There may be reasons for rage but what I don’t get is the infantile way it gets expressed.

Name-calling, jeering and shoving is the way of juvenile hooligans, not mature adults.

Have we regressed to such a childlike state that those are the only ways we can express rage?

What next, mass foot-stomping?

Everything today points towards a society that is encouraged to express itself in mob-like behaviour.

One person needs to just say that they are offended by something and for no rhyme or reason, entire hordes of people decide that they should be offended, too.

Indeed they even look at ways to be offended.

And when you have leaders who say that the onus is on minorities to behave a certain way so as not to offend the majority, what else could you expect in response?

Are we all supposed to live in such a way that we constantly have to look out for offen­ces imagined in other people’s heads?

Every time we go out, are we supposed to be always on the lookout for ways to avoid offending total strangers?

We might go to a government department where, as taxpayers, we may reasonably expect fast and efficient service.

Instead we are treated as if we are offensive creatures because of our choice of clothes.

How does the sight of anyone’s legs affect the efficiency of the service?

If such a sight was too distracting, even through an opaque desk, then there is something wrong with the person serving the customer, not the customer herself.

Why do people whose salaries depend on us paying our taxes get to play both fashion and moral police?

All this could so easily be solved if we had the type of leadership who would come out and say that we should all stop this nonsense about petty things and focus instead on more important issues.

For example, how to get our currency to rise again, or how to manage the high cost of living, or how we can work on bringing people together, rather than tearing them apart.

But obviously, with a leadership so silent they might as well not exist, the anarchy of bad manners continues unabated. Is it a symptom of something?

Do people get ruder because they feel rudderless?

Doesn’t anyone want to know?

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It’s a troll’s world out there

ON social media there lurks a creature called the troll. What a troll aims to do is to make life miserable for someone.

He (and sometimes she) does this by posting nasty comments about that person, or instigating others to also troll the person.

Wikipedia describes a troll as “a person who sows discord on the Internet by starting arguments or upsetting people, by posting inflammatory, extraneous or off-topic messages in an online community (such as a newsgroup, forum, chatroom or blog) with the deliberate intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion”.

I was at a recent forum listening to an American woman, Lindy West, who had a real problem with trolls on Twitter.

Suffice to say that women are often the target of trolls.

West seemed to have been a specific target, mostly because she is a large-sized woman with very confident feminist views.

One troll was particularly vicious, attacking her relentlessly.

But to cut a long story short, West finally met the troll and he admitted to her that the reason he trolled her was because he hated the fact that unlike him, she was a confident happy person despite being plus-sized.

In other words, he trolled because he had his own issues.

Which is a useful thing to remember when one gets trolled.

It’s not you that has a problem, it’s them.

And you have two choices of what to think about them: ignore them or feel sorry for them.

While West managed to sort things out with one troll, it is of course not possible to, as she said, hold hands with every single one.

Ultimately, you can’t solve their problems for them, especially when they don’t even think they have problems.

In our dear country, the advent of social media has given rise to not just one troll, but a multitude of them.

They snipe at you for any reason at all, for what you say, or don’t say, for what you wear or don’t wear, for whatever you do.

They seem to spend their entire lives thinking up nasty things to say, frequently misspelled and with the sort of perverse logic that only people with damaged frontal lobes can muster.

Nothing pleases a troll more than to whip others into one big hysterical mob over an issue that they made up in their own sick minds.

And because people know that trolls punish non-followers by then training their sights on them, most people conform and join the mob. It’s safer that way.

Our Malaysia seems to have become a nation of trolls.

At the slightest thing, without any provocation, a troll makes a suggestion and suddenly a heaving mass of hysteria begins, aided by a media ever-watchful for sensationalism.

Like a ball of dough, the troll gathers more and more adherents until it grows into one seething globe of rage, spitting venom at the poor victim, uncaring about what hurt might be caused.

Yet, these same people would be the first to feel insulted should anyone have the temerity to suggest that there may be something wrong with their moral compass.

Hiding behind self-proclaimed piety, they shout their indignation with name-calling, insults and insinuations.

You have to pity the Malaysian troll. What poor unfulfilled lives do they lead that the only joy they can get has to come from making someone else miserable?

How boring are their lives that someone else’s hard-earned achievement is taken as an offence to their own suspect morals?

While their target can list “Won two gold medals at the SEA Games” on their curriculum vitae, what can they put on theirs other than “Looked at her outfit and imagined her private parts”?

There is a certain psychosis that afflicts trolls.

And when there are so many trolls in this country of ours, you can’t help but think that the entire nation is suffering from a psychosis as well.

And what is so surprising about it?

We have leaders who are often no better than trolls, making up issues when there aren’t any.

What is a minister who claims that a design on a telekung that looks like a crucifix is a plot to convert Muslims but an official troll?

Is not a religious leader who declares so many things haram that one can barely get out of bed without sinning nothing more than a troll in a robe?

With these types of leaders, who can blame the masses for their madness?

We need to recognise that it is a madness that we are experiencing and having to bear these days.

And like lunatics in the asylum, there can be no happy end to this.

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When cultural appropriation is inappropriate

Taking on another culture could result in the obliteration of our own

WHEN I was in university in Britain, I was always very irritated with one particular fellow student. She was English, pale as a lily, with reddish hair but she had a habit of always dressing in a sari complete with a pottu on her forehead.

What particularly annoyed me was whenever we had a student disco, she would be on the dance floor doing her version of Indian classical dance. Imagine doing the Bharata Natyam to Carl Douglas’ Kungfu Fighting!

It took me a while to understand why I was so incensed by her. To me, her wearing a sari and dancing in a disco the way she did was insulting to an ancient culture. I had grown up watching Indian classical dance and I knew what a refined and sophisticated art form it is. Therefore, I found this bastardisation of such an art form, which dancers take years to perfect, a real insult not just to India but to all of Asia.

I now know that what incensed me is something called “cultural appropriation”. This means the adoption of elements of one culture by members of a different cultural group, especially if the adoption is of an oppressed people’s cultural elements by members of the dominant culture. This would include wearing certain ethnic clothes in totally inappropriate settings or using cultural items for the wrong occasion.

Of course, in our globalised world where we know a lot more about different cultures and very often appreciate them for their beauty, we incorporate all sorts of things from all over the globe into our everyday lives. Some people now live in homes described as “Balinese-style” for example, although few realise that the modern version of the Balinese home is already a form of cultural appropriation by Westerners who moved to the island.

We might wear Indian jewellery with western gowns or quilted jackets with frog buttons in places other than China.

In Asia, we are used to borrowing from each other in so many ways – in our clothes, our language, our food, even some of our customs.

Let us not forget that we also appropriate much of Western culture into our daily lives. We wear Western dress such as jeans, we dance to hip-hop music, eat burgers and pizzas and even celebrate some holidays such as Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day.

Admittedly, most cultural appropriation is very shallow; we rarely know the origins or history of anything we take on. Mostly we simply join in the fun and there’s little harm in them.

Westerners too are often ignorant of the origins of our cultural elements but then they often profit more from them than we do, which should be a source of concern.

But what if some of the cultural appropriations we do are actually harmful to us? What if we appropriate another culture so completely that we obliterate our own?

By the strict definition of cultural appropriation, a dominant culture appropriates elements of a weaker one. But in Malaysia we find a weak culture appropriating elements of stronger ones. Mostly we have been taking on the easiest elements of Western culture such as the dress, music and food. But we have not taken on other elements such as being on time, general cleanliness or driving safely.

Some of us on the other hand, in not wanting to take on Western cultural elements, have instead taken on that of the Middle East. Mostly this has taken the form of dress but also sometimes in language and even music.

For instance, clothing meant for dry desert climates is now used in our hot and humid one. Arab words have replaced accurately descriptive Malay ones.

As cultural appropriations rely on stereotypes of the foreign cultures being taken on, the understanding of these is often shallow. Some see everything about Western culture as dangerous and bad, while at the same time seeing all that is Middle Eastern as good.

This is partly because of the perceived religious flavour of Middle Eastern influences. Some even think that the language spoken in paradise is Arabic.

Whichever way one sees it, our own culture is undoubtedly being eroded. How many people know much about Malay history, language or the arts? So many of our authentic performing arts are no longer allowed to be performed.

The craftspeople that carve, weave and sculpt are getting harder to find. All the elements that make up our culture, including our dress, architecture, customs, are disappearing through neglect.

Yet are our champions of racial superiority fighting for these? While they constantly blame others for the inferiority they feel, what are they doing to keep the true elements of their once-proud culture alive and well?

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