time to bitch

Wow! It’s been a really long time since I last blogged. Facebook is killing my blog. It’s just so much easier to update my Facebook status, plus since Facebook is not exactly public, I can write about stuff I can’t blog about here. However, I still find blogging more appropriate for lenghthier bitching sessions.

In today’s Star Metro Central on page M8 in the Sights & Sounds column (also found online), Xandria Ooi’s first sentence in her article entitled “Looking back to the past: It’s the imperfections that make things appealing” was: “Almost every one [sic] I know, has a Blackberry, an iPod or a flat-screen TV set.”

I know lots of people who don’t have either of those things. Some people are just overpriviledged and don’t mix around with lesser mortals like us. Tak malu ke?

dibawah pokok demokrasi

Saya amat suka dengan idea menamakan Pokok Demokrasi secara rasmi dan menanam lima anak pokok yang diberi nama Amanah, Adil, Telus, Kebajikan dan Wibawa. Saya berasa amat bangga dengan tindakan simbolik ini oleh rakan-rakan sepejuagan saya. Walaubagaimanapun, saya berasa amat sakit hati membaca teks yang tertara pada plak di bawah pokok itu, dengan penggunaan Bahasa Melayu yang kekok berserta dengan kesilapan tatabahasa.

Saya bukannya pakar Bahasa Melayu, bahkan saya mengaku bahawa saya tidak begitu fasih dengan bahasa kebangsaan kita. So I guess I’m no better, so aptly reflected in this sentence where I have to switch back to English once the discussion starts getting complicated. Perhaps it’s a symptom of how the national education system has failed me. All my years in school when I was using Malay on a daily basis, I never really needed to think or reason. I’m guessing most of my analytical skills were honed outside of school where the operating language was English in my case; which brings to mind, other than Bahasa Inggeris, all subjects in school were taught in Malay and yet my command of the language is still pretty pathetic, so I’m guessing that any improvement in English proficiency by teaching kids Science and Mathematics in English would be minimal at the cost of losing terms like janjang, pengamiran and persenyawaan ganda dua.

Getting back to Pokok Demokrasi, I guess it’s just a publicity stunt and I can’t expect too much from it.

slumdog miracle

It’s a miracle! No, not Slumdog Millionaire’s achievements at the Oscars but rather how fluency in English is achieved by rolling off a train! It would have been a great movie for me if not for the miraculous language switch.

I like how Mukul Kesavan put it in his article “Lost in Translation: Slumdog Millionaire uses Hindi as authenticating décor” for The Telegraph, Calcutta:

“The transition from child actors who in real life are slum children to young actors who are, just as clearly, middle-class anglophones is so abrupt and inexplicable that it subverts the ‘realism’ of the brilliantly shot squalor in which their lives play out.”

Read the entire article here.

state of flux

Sorry for the really long absence, but my life is currently in a state of flux. I finally bought an SLR some time back and I now have a huge backlog in my photo sorting and cataloguing. I’m also preparing to move soon. My room’s in a HUGE mess, and my schedule’s pretty much so….

another new toy

µ 1030 SW, originally uploaded by dckf_$êr@pH!nX.

It’s waterproof, freezeproof, dustproof, shockproof, has a wide-angle lens, and it fits in my pocket!

my first online photo contest

over the rainbow, originally uploaded by dckf_$êr@pH!nX.

I’ve entered this self-portrait for a Lonely Planet photo contest on Flickr. This is the fist time I’ve entered a photo contest online. I’ve entered a photo contest once before this; it was an internal competition for staff. This was the photo I submitted which didn’t win:

ruin somebody's life

perKENAkan orang, originally uploaded by dckf_$êr@pH!nX.

How apt!

don't you dare fall down

don't fall down (made possible by the pride group), originally uploaded by dckf_$êr@pH!nX.

me and golden weeks

IMG_5583a, originally uploaded by dckf_$êr@pH!nX.

Finally, on my sixth trip to Beijing, I went sightseeing. The first time I was there, I didn’t have enough time to do any sightseeing. The subsequent trips before this were during winter and I didn’t feel like walking around in the bitter cold. This time around, the weather was quite comfortable. Unfortunately it was Labour Day Golden Week (a week-long public holiday), so I had to fight for space with billions of Chinese residents! The last time I went sightseeing in Mainland China was in Shanghai, it was the National Day Golden Week. So both my sightseeing experiences in Mainland China have been characterised by spectacular crowds of millions!

pink dolphins

pink dolphin, originally uploaded by dckf_$êr@pH!nX.

The pink dolphins in Hong Kong are really pink! Whenever I read about pink dolphins before, I had always imagined them to be rather grey with pinkish undertones. The dolphins I saw were Chinese white dolphins (Sousa chinensis), also known as Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins. They are born dark grey and gradually lose their pigmentation as they mature. It was definitely worth the chionging straight after a fourteen-hour flight without sleep!

lots have changed since

I’m back in Singapore now after a Singapore-Hong Kong-San Francisco-Hong Kong-Singapore flight and a trip back to KL. Lot’s have changed since I was last in KL during Chinese New Year. New government, new politics, new media, new car, new homelessness, new ancestry!

The new socio-political scene of course I knew about. Who didn’t? What I didn’t know was that my dad bought a new car and sold off the older one. This car is by far the most far-removed from my taste among the many cars we’ve ever had (nauseating purple coat of a previous car aside). My parents have also sold off our house and have nowhere to move into just yet.

The most interesting piece of information I got was that my mum’s birth parents were apparently Hakka. This means that I could very well be of a hundred percent Hakka decent (since my dad’s Hakka too). For some reason, this new knowledge has a rather profound impact on me and what I perceive as my identity. Half of my biological heritage has always been somewhat of a mystery to me but somehow I’ve been quite comfortable with this uncertainty. This revelation has been rather unsettling. I’ve always been quite “connected” and fascinated with my Hakka roots despite not being able to speak it. I’m quite sure that my inability to speak Hakka contributes greatly to this perturbation.

artistic pachyderms?

This is pretty amazing indeed. It’s sad enough that they’re in captivity, I hope no additional torture was involved in training them….

harowa, kl & sjørslev

IMG_4590a, originally uploaded by dckf_$êr@pH!nX.

I was fortunate enough to have had the opportunity to visit a friend in Denmark recently. It had been seven years since we last met in KL. She now lives in village called Sjørslev (pronounced something like "shars-lef") with her husband. We only had a few hours together but it was really good catching up with an old friend.

I never thought we would ever meet again after we first parted in Harowa, Bangladesh nine years ago, but she came to visit us in Malaysia and this time I visited her in Denmark. The four of us (me, her and two other Malaysians) spent almost a month together teaching English in Bangladesh and became pretty close friends as a result. It would be nice to have the three Chinese and the Viking at the same place at the same time together again.