The academic university year of 2005/06 has ended. It was a year full of excitement, a mingling pot of different nationalities all around the world. We learned each other's culture and languages, horizontally across from mainland China to United Kingdom in a single institution in Malaysia. To mark the end of the year in a joyous occasion, painted by the smiles of my friends from Nigeria all over to Pakistan we had a wonderful-camarederie-yet-not-the-last occasion in the heart of Kuala Lumpur last night. I enjoyed the time with Divij and other friends from India, we had a farewell conversation echoed by the sound of music in the club. Up to this date, I managed to keep contacts of my international friends as I believe in the future they might be helpful business associates in light of globalisation, with a dynamic network effect. They might be the future accountants, CEOs of the national companies, economists, politicians, and other professions and with a strong platform in forging the economic and business cooperations across the region; we as professionals may contribute a piece of our mind for the betterment of the world. With this, allow me to wish happy summer holiday and let the time proves that our future rendezvous is not impossible.
To Kamol who has been back to Bangkok, keep on raising out your valuable views for your country's better situation. To Divij, thanks for the hope that all of us are going to be successful in the future. Insyaallah we shall talk again in Delhi, perhaps. To Michael from Myanmar, eventhough the insensible regime prohibits your freedom to land your feet in your own country that does not mean the spirit of nationalism will fade away, I will do the best to find an alternative job for you here in Malaysia. To the rest especially Muzzie, Harith, Helmy, Ratna, Rosdanial, Vashti, Amina, Sara, Yana, Shereen, Khalis, Fahmi, Haroun, Husni, Aiman, Harith Treetrunk, Nabil, Wilson, Njoroge, Amri, Moodi, Abbas, Raninda, Fairuz, Shazlan, and Agus; thank you for the presence in the university.
We shall meet again -
Mohd Sharazad Saiful Bahri,
BA (Hons) Business Economics and Management,
Nottingham University Business School,
University of Nottingham
Friday, May 26, 2006
Saturday, May 20, 2006
IMF hidden agenda
It is just another ordinary Saturday in the rainy month of May as I write this. I went to KLCC at noon accompanying my little sister to Mont Kiara Medical Centre for her dental appointment. My advanced-plan in organising personal agendas during the upcoming summer holiday resorted me to pay a visit to Times Bookstore.
In light of the globalisation around the world nowadays between developing and developed countries I decided to buy a book called 'Globalisation: and its discontents' by Joseph Stiglitz who is the winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics 2001.
One of my agendas then during the holiday, opening up my mind in evaluating the forceful argument that has yet been made against the IMF and its policies; as commented by Benjamin M. Friedman, New York Review of Books
In light of the globalisation around the world nowadays between developing and developed countries I decided to buy a book called 'Globalisation: and its discontents' by Joseph Stiglitz who is the winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics 2001.
One of my agendas then during the holiday, opening up my mind in evaluating the forceful argument that has yet been made against the IMF and its policies; as commented by Benjamin M. Friedman, New York Review of Books
Wednesday, May 10, 2006
Kalimullah speaks on love
Post-writing of mine on love I discovered an interesting article by Kalimullah Hassan who is the writer for The News Straits Times Malaysia. I was amazed by the hygiene views from him and read it, you may.
Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defences, you build up a whole suit of armour, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life ...
You give them a piece of you. They didn’t ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostage. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like ‘maybe we should be just friends’ turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you- and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.
OUCH! This passage is from Neil Gaiman, the English-born American novelist, screenwriter and children’s book author.Love or shattered love both evoke strong emotions and reactions. Those who were young once can empathise with Gaiman’s spurned lover for surely, like most teenagers, they, too, went through such heartbreak.
It’s like this. When you are in love, nothing can go wrong. The freckles on your loved one’s face "add to her striking looks" and the wispy moustache on his face "makes him look macho".
But when love turns sour, the "freckles and all" bother you. When love goes bad, that wispy moustache, actually, makes him a wimp.
Strange thing, love. It’s understandable why Gaiman hates it so much.
Some time ago, Donny Osmond’s song Puppy Love was the favourite tune of many a teenager. Osmond mirrored the views of teenagers then — and now — when he sang that the elders don’t really understand.
And they called it puppy love
Oh, I guess
They’ll never know
How a young heart really feelsAnd why I love her so
And they called itpuppy loveJust because we’rein our teens
Tell them all it isn’t fair
To take away my only dream
That’s what my kids tell me now. I don’t understand. What is there to understand? I have been through it.
Didn’t my Standard Five trainee teacher break my heart when she went back to Day Training College after two months and never contacted me?
I still remember her house in Lahat Road in Penang. That’s how smitten I was.
Didn’t my Form Three teacher do the same when she upped and went and married that dentist in Bukit Mertajam?
And I still remember her white Datsun 100A and that she used to take off her shoes when she drove it.
(I used to jostle with a few other lovesick classmates to carry her bag when she drove in. That’s how I knew she took off her shoes when driving.)
And my first "real" love — someone my age — forsook me when she became engaged to that engineering student who won a scholarship to Brighton University.
Of course, I understand. There is time for love and there is time for studies. Now is the time for studies. Love can come later, I tell them.
The problem with kids is, like Benjamin Disraeli said, they don’t realise that "the magic of first love is our ignorance that it can ever end".
End it surely does. Rare are those who say that they married their first love and have since lived happily ever after.
The reason everyone talks about their first love is because there was a second and a third and…
So, logic dictates that, in time, you will find your lasting love.
Why, therefore, forego the "more important" things in life now like your books, earning a degree and getting a good job instead of "wasting time" on a romance that in all probability will not last?
My friends, too, have this issue with their children. So we must be right and the children wrong. Right? Well…
After one such discussion with the children — they’re all in their teens or early 20s — I was reminded by my wife that we, too, were young once.
She’s the smart one in the family with her worldly wise views. It’s just that when you are set in your ways, like I have become, you don’t want wisdom to interfere with your ways.
When did I stop being a child and become a father? And a father like my father who, when I was a child, I thought did not understand me either.He didn’t like it when I borrowed his car and took my college-bound girlfriend out till late.
He didn’t like it when his friends told him that I was seen in town holding hands with her.
He didn’t like it when I tore pages from my schoolbook to write love notes which were never sent to her.
He didn’t like it when I went to the bachelor parties thrown by Munusamy and Goh Beng Huat, where the music was made for slow dances.
He didn’t understand.
I actually thought that he didn’t love me and I once ran away from home for five days, staying at a friend’s house in Penang.
Even when he came looking for me and found me and burst into tears when he saw I was safe, I didn’t realise that he loved me.
Now I know better. Because I am the father that he was — always meaning well, loving the kids very much, yet, sometimes forgetting that I, too, was young once.
It takes us a long time to realise that our sons will grow up to love someone else because that’s the way life is, and that’s the way it should be.
It takes us a longer time to realise that our daughters will one day find another man in their lives — besides their father — and will go away.
Now, the fear sets in. They have new loves, they are going away to college, they are going to get married — so who’s going to be with us when we are old and frail?
These are the real worries but, I think, we sometimes just don’t want the kids to be hurt because we know that their hearts will be broken.
We cannot bear it when they pine for a love that could not be.
The last two verses of Puppy Love go thus:
I cry each night my
tears for you
My tears are all in vain
I’ll hope and I’ll pray
that maybe someday
You’ll be back in
my arms once again
Someone, help me, help me,
help me please
Is the answer up above
How can I,
how can I tell them
This is not a puppy love.
Didn’t we go through that as well and isn’t that why we want them to focus on real things such as studies and college?
No. Not really true, is it?
If we really are honest with ourselves, we have never forgotten our first loves.
We can remember the shape of their nose, the colour of their glasses, the wave of their hair, the smell of their soap and shampoo….
Each time we fell in love, it was a great feeling.
Our friends would call us stupid, love-sick puppies and we’d think they envied us.
Our fathers would rant and rave and we’d think the old fellows don’t know what it’s like to be in love.
Walking in the rain was so much fun; the scorching sun was a good excuse to go to the waterfalls in Sik (Kedah); the cold nights were an excuse to sit close together; the warm nights were a reason to spend a longer time in Ponniah’s ais kacang stall.
We could find an excuse for everything — as long as we were together.
Really, really, really… don’t you relish the memories of those days of puppy love? I do.
And it would be sad if we deprived our children of such memories to live on when they get older.
The important thing, though, is our last love, I must tell them. And I found it with their mother. (It’s true.)
For my late father, if he is watching me, I want to say:
"I became the man I think you wanted me to become. I know you loved me very much.
"But like you, after my episode as the runaway kid, I, too, will let the children be children.
"Because as you learned, I have learned. That’s the way it should be."
Just like what my father told me when I was in school indulging in the same scenario. Now I understand. God bless you father.
Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defences, you build up a whole suit of armour, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life ...
You give them a piece of you. They didn’t ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostage. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like ‘maybe we should be just friends’ turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you- and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.
OUCH! This passage is from Neil Gaiman, the English-born American novelist, screenwriter and children’s book author.Love or shattered love both evoke strong emotions and reactions. Those who were young once can empathise with Gaiman’s spurned lover for surely, like most teenagers, they, too, went through such heartbreak.
It’s like this. When you are in love, nothing can go wrong. The freckles on your loved one’s face "add to her striking looks" and the wispy moustache on his face "makes him look macho".
But when love turns sour, the "freckles and all" bother you. When love goes bad, that wispy moustache, actually, makes him a wimp.
Strange thing, love. It’s understandable why Gaiman hates it so much.
Some time ago, Donny Osmond’s song Puppy Love was the favourite tune of many a teenager. Osmond mirrored the views of teenagers then — and now — when he sang that the elders don’t really understand.
And they called it puppy love
Oh, I guess
They’ll never know
How a young heart really feelsAnd why I love her so
And they called itpuppy loveJust because we’rein our teens
Tell them all it isn’t fair
To take away my only dream
That’s what my kids tell me now. I don’t understand. What is there to understand? I have been through it.
Didn’t my Standard Five trainee teacher break my heart when she went back to Day Training College after two months and never contacted me?
I still remember her house in Lahat Road in Penang. That’s how smitten I was.
Didn’t my Form Three teacher do the same when she upped and went and married that dentist in Bukit Mertajam?
And I still remember her white Datsun 100A and that she used to take off her shoes when she drove it.
(I used to jostle with a few other lovesick classmates to carry her bag when she drove in. That’s how I knew she took off her shoes when driving.)
And my first "real" love — someone my age — forsook me when she became engaged to that engineering student who won a scholarship to Brighton University.
Of course, I understand. There is time for love and there is time for studies. Now is the time for studies. Love can come later, I tell them.
The problem with kids is, like Benjamin Disraeli said, they don’t realise that "the magic of first love is our ignorance that it can ever end".
End it surely does. Rare are those who say that they married their first love and have since lived happily ever after.
The reason everyone talks about their first love is because there was a second and a third and…
So, logic dictates that, in time, you will find your lasting love.
Why, therefore, forego the "more important" things in life now like your books, earning a degree and getting a good job instead of "wasting time" on a romance that in all probability will not last?
My friends, too, have this issue with their children. So we must be right and the children wrong. Right? Well…
After one such discussion with the children — they’re all in their teens or early 20s — I was reminded by my wife that we, too, were young once.
She’s the smart one in the family with her worldly wise views. It’s just that when you are set in your ways, like I have become, you don’t want wisdom to interfere with your ways.
When did I stop being a child and become a father? And a father like my father who, when I was a child, I thought did not understand me either.He didn’t like it when I borrowed his car and took my college-bound girlfriend out till late.
He didn’t like it when his friends told him that I was seen in town holding hands with her.
He didn’t like it when I tore pages from my schoolbook to write love notes which were never sent to her.
He didn’t like it when I went to the bachelor parties thrown by Munusamy and Goh Beng Huat, where the music was made for slow dances.
He didn’t understand.
I actually thought that he didn’t love me and I once ran away from home for five days, staying at a friend’s house in Penang.
Even when he came looking for me and found me and burst into tears when he saw I was safe, I didn’t realise that he loved me.
Now I know better. Because I am the father that he was — always meaning well, loving the kids very much, yet, sometimes forgetting that I, too, was young once.
It takes us a long time to realise that our sons will grow up to love someone else because that’s the way life is, and that’s the way it should be.
It takes us a longer time to realise that our daughters will one day find another man in their lives — besides their father — and will go away.
Now, the fear sets in. They have new loves, they are going away to college, they are going to get married — so who’s going to be with us when we are old and frail?
These are the real worries but, I think, we sometimes just don’t want the kids to be hurt because we know that their hearts will be broken.
We cannot bear it when they pine for a love that could not be.
The last two verses of Puppy Love go thus:
I cry each night my
tears for you
My tears are all in vain
I’ll hope and I’ll pray
that maybe someday
You’ll be back in
my arms once again
Someone, help me, help me,
help me please
Is the answer up above
How can I,
how can I tell them
This is not a puppy love.
Didn’t we go through that as well and isn’t that why we want them to focus on real things such as studies and college?
No. Not really true, is it?
If we really are honest with ourselves, we have never forgotten our first loves.
We can remember the shape of their nose, the colour of their glasses, the wave of their hair, the smell of their soap and shampoo….
Each time we fell in love, it was a great feeling.
Our friends would call us stupid, love-sick puppies and we’d think they envied us.
Our fathers would rant and rave and we’d think the old fellows don’t know what it’s like to be in love.
Walking in the rain was so much fun; the scorching sun was a good excuse to go to the waterfalls in Sik (Kedah); the cold nights were an excuse to sit close together; the warm nights were a reason to spend a longer time in Ponniah’s ais kacang stall.
We could find an excuse for everything — as long as we were together.
Really, really, really… don’t you relish the memories of those days of puppy love? I do.
And it would be sad if we deprived our children of such memories to live on when they get older.
The important thing, though, is our last love, I must tell them. And I found it with their mother. (It’s true.)
For my late father, if he is watching me, I want to say:
"I became the man I think you wanted me to become. I know you loved me very much.
"But like you, after my episode as the runaway kid, I, too, will let the children be children.
"Because as you learned, I have learned. That’s the way it should be."
Just like what my father told me when I was in school indulging in the same scenario. Now I understand. God bless you father.
Don't close one eye this May
This whole month of May is the examinations period as a mean to end my first year degree. There are six papers and I am doing the best, the rest is upon God's wind of success.
There are many interesting issues on the surface lately including the heating-up 'closed one eye' issue by an irresponsible MP as a resulf of when a power holds by a blind man, again. This revelation of misconduct has been steered by the resignation of Datuk Shahrir as the Chairman of Barisan Nasional Backbenchers Club (BBC) when he supported the Opposition motion headed by Lim Kit Siang which proposed a transparency investigation on the inappropriate action by the blind man, as the Whip (affinity to an oath of allegiance to the party) steps into the parliamentary act.
Till today, I am still finding the most accurate definition of democracy in Malaysia but to no avail. I am in a state of perplexity.
However, the perplexity indulged by democracy vanished as I read the newspaper regarding the landslide win gained by PAP Singapore against the Opposition party, echoed by the comments by Lim Kuan Yew, 'A strong opposition is vital in order to sustain the credibility and transparency of the public'
Come what may, this May is the most important month in my first year university.
Welcome home Anwar.
There are many interesting issues on the surface lately including the heating-up 'closed one eye' issue by an irresponsible MP as a resulf of when a power holds by a blind man, again. This revelation of misconduct has been steered by the resignation of Datuk Shahrir as the Chairman of Barisan Nasional Backbenchers Club (BBC) when he supported the Opposition motion headed by Lim Kit Siang which proposed a transparency investigation on the inappropriate action by the blind man, as the Whip (affinity to an oath of allegiance to the party) steps into the parliamentary act.
Till today, I am still finding the most accurate definition of democracy in Malaysia but to no avail. I am in a state of perplexity.
However, the perplexity indulged by democracy vanished as I read the newspaper regarding the landslide win gained by PAP Singapore against the Opposition party, echoed by the comments by Lim Kuan Yew, 'A strong opposition is vital in order to sustain the credibility and transparency of the public'
Come what may, this May is the most important month in my first year university.
Welcome home Anwar.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
