As part of their campaign, opposition party leaders are promising a smidgen of the freedom of speech - the freedom to hold public protests. I have to admit, superficial as it is, they've accentuated the key issue that is the most recent of public discontent against the government - for now. In the wake of the many recent protests that were effectively attenuated by false reports, this is the one issue that might stand a chance of swinging votes. It's a faint flicker of hope, but it signals at Malaysians' awareness on the importance of voicing their disagreements and taking action against injustices, be it social, political or of any other motivation.

What saddens me, though, is the near fecklessness of this promise. Take the US Presidential elections. All of the Presidential candidates, from both the Democratic and Republican camps, have been consistently pursuing issues that Americans are most concerned about - making education and health care more affordable, making health insurance more accessible, improving immigration laws, dealing with the situation in the Middle East more tactfully so their soldiers don't pay the price, finding alternative fuel solutions. I don't mean to glorify the Americans as the leading society of the world (as Obama puts it) , but I must applaud their discernment towards their rights and how to translate those needs into realistic demands.

As in Malaysia, these candidates' promises (or guarantees, as some of them prefer) is a response to what the American public are demanding for themselves. They want better health care, a better education system, a cleaner environment to live in, a safer country. They demanded that of their government and the candidates are wrecking their brains to come up with plans to fulfill those demands in order to stay in favor of the public. In a nutshell, the public gives birth to the kind of leaders that will best serve their interests, and vice versa.

The scenario we witness in Malaysia is similar, except that the issues that are gaining interest ones that will not go any further than a few months after elections. Year after year party leaders throw out promises of temporal nature and we lap them up in the hopes that they will lead us 'to a better future', 'build a better society', 'creating a "masyarakat glokal"' and all that nonsense. Year after year, the same places in the country are flooded during monsoon seasons. Instead of pushing for better drainage, flood victims are quickly pacified by local ADUN who stop by to hand out RM100 gift hampers on their way to the next luncheon. Every time the highway toll rises there's a public outcry and the newspaper's reader's section is filled with letters from disgruntled drivers. Sami Vellu feints concern with statements saying he will look into the matter and promises that the new toll rates 'will not burden the public'. With that the issue, with the help of the government-controlled media, is downplayed and we go back digging deeper into our pockets. For the rest of the election term, the Malaysian public pay the price for their choice in restless doldrums.

It paints a sad picture when a person is ill-equipped to choose what's best for himself/herself. I don't mean to incite public uprising and encourage people to overthrow the government. Countries that work on that system of anarchy are already paying a dear price. I think as Malaysians, our responsibility lies beyond the pickets and rallies. We need to arm ourselves with the more powerful tool - education - that would put the freedom of speech to good use. As a Muslim, I fully understand the responsibility to educate myself that is put upon me by God. We need to educate ourselves on the standard of living we so rightfully deserve, the equal opportunities that no Malaysian should ever be denied of, the right to formal education that no child should be deprived of. We need to demand to know where each sen of the taxpayers' money is going. We need to demand for a better education system. We need to demand that the impoverished of the society is not digging through the trash to make ends meet while we strive to build the biggest, the tallest the longest of materials.

We should make demands. Each of us has the right to do so. But first we need to enlighten ourselves on what those demands should be.

Travelers' Guide to the Worst Time to Visit the Falls

Tagged

THE LINKING TAG The rules :

1. List out five favourite links - the links can be of business sites, affiliate links or whatever that suits the blogger.
2. Tag five more people to share their links, so hopefully, at the end of the tag, we would be able to share good links with each other.
3. The links MUST be clean. No X-rated sites (which basically put my blog out of the running).
4. List out only FIVE links.
5. You MUST tell FIVE people you choose.
6. Provide the link back to the person who tagged you. Obviously, it should be an active link.

I'm relatively new to the art of tagging. I was last tagged by Nyonya, which happened to be my introduction to tagging, and I didn't exactly follow through with the swing either. Upon reading the rules for this one, I can immediately surmise that I'm about to fail at executing it. To start off, I don't follow people's blogs as religiously as I think I should. The blogs that I do follow are not ones you can actually tag (read my list of favourite links and you'll understand). The blogs that I follow, that I can tag, have already been tagged by my tagger a.k.a. Nyonya. So here's a half-way effort of what tagging is suppposed to achieve i.e. a list of my favourite links:

1. Jason Mraz's journals I find this guy to be a literary genius whose ingenuity happens to find an outlet through music. His quirky, almost arcane brand of music is hard to place in any specific genre. As for his writing, I'd best describe it as factual surrealism. An old major in front of his window is a tree, Times Square is the best place to absorb, lovers are chain-smoked to achieve a sense of stability. I love weaving facts with fantasy and Mraz sits way up there with Gabriel Marquez and Michael Ondaatje.

2. CNN For reasons I can't quite finger, I have been having suffering from a case of an increasing ardor for keeping up with the world. Of the many news networks, this is serves me prefectly.

3. Anderson Cooper 360's blog I came to know of Cooper through Oprah. His Planet in Peril report cinched the deal for me. I like his zeal and his team of young, fiery reporters who drop a tear at the sight of a tiny Amazonian lizard that's been displaced by deforestation. Plus, he's quite an eye-candy (closet-homo or not).

4. Amnesty International I don't exactly have the resources to adopt a child, travel half-way across the globe to help build a water system or petition for a polotical prisoner's release, so I figured, until I can do so, I'll keep up with the literature.

5. Dakwah.info You can't live without some sort of spiritual nourishment, can you?

Come to think of it, all the links on my blog are ones I visit frequently and are equally important to me. I listed the five above because I think they're worth sharing.

Unfortunately, there's only one person I can tag and that is YOU. Happy tagging!

Sweet dreams

I had a recurring dream as a child which left me painfully baffled until I learned what dreams are made of. Unlike the recurrent dreams of adulthood, this one is always pleasant. Towards the end of every dream, when morning light starts to penetrate my eyelids and my dad's voice begins to pull me back into reality, my dream would ebb away with a trail of candy. The feel of the little sweets in my palms causes my to hurriedly wake up so I can savor them. Of course, I'd see that my hands were empty and there was only the mute morning light laughing at my silliness. For a long time I tried to fathom the mystery of my dream candy. One moment they were there in my palms and I distinctly felt the crisp wrappers prickling my girl-child skin. Then I blinked myself back into the sphere of conciousness and they were gone. By that age I'd already undestood that dreams stay in that world you visit when you're too tired to deal with the one you're in. This one, however, got me chasing it because I physically felt the candy in my hands. Being five years old, I thoroughly understood the importance of candy and any candy left uneaten is almost as sinful as sin itself. I wanted so much to atone for that sin that I often tried to will myself back to sleep. That is, until the day intervened and play and bath and friends and dolls became priority and I forgot about the dream until the next time it came visiting, inevitably leaving with another trail of candy for me to pursue.

Question to self

Is active blogging a sign of a social life in dire straits?

MacBook Air

Yummy.

Discussions over pizza/random ramblings

It's always amusing to see what kind of hair-brained scheme the clowns in power will come up with to lure in votes come election time. One scheme for this year seems to covet the most innocent of voters - the infringed and impoverished minority susceptible to the meagre promises made by politicians. Parents of school children who are on the RMT will be called to school for a special ceremony to recieve certificates (of achievement?) in recognition of their child being in the program. FYI the RMT stands for Rancangan Makanan Tambahan - a supplementary food program to provide kids from impoverished families with a stable and healthy diet. (What kind of food these children are getting through the program - now that's a whole different can of worms!) But this is not going to be just a simple ceremony for according certificates. How can it be, when the local politician (or whoever holds the most clout in the area) will be invited, speeches given, food catered and served, buntings hung and loads of kow-tow given, all at the expence of the innocent John. Q. Taxpayer. What it will hopefully do is boost the image of the powers-that-be in the eleventh hour of campaigning.

Let's consider for a second the ingenuity of this magnanimous gesture of pseudo-recognition. If my child were on the program, yes, I would very much like to be invited to the school to be recognized. I would very much like to recieve a certificate that would remind me of my daily struggle to simply feed my children. I would really love to go up on stage and have a hundred people applaude me for unwillingly depriving my child of his or her most basic need. People like me, whose children are 'previliged' enough to be on the program, are majority working on a daily wage. If I miss a day of work, I'd miss out on the day's wages. But hey, this ceremony is such a big honour that I wouldn't mind leaving work for one day.

Really, I don't mind depriving my child of another day's meal because the powers-that-be are generous enough to put up a ceremony for me. The rest of my children will go hungry too because only one child per family is allowed on the program. But hey, the powers-that-be have a budget to work with just like me. They can't afford to feed all of my children through RMT, although they all go to school equally hungry. If they do that, then there'd be no money left to spend on the more important things. You know, things like the chauffer driven luxury car to transport the bigwig from his mansion to the ceremony. Or for tipping the local press so they'd make this event their cover story for tomorrow's print. Or the colourful buntings and decorations that someone will take home as theirs at the end of the day. Or the votes that this glorious occasion will garner for the-powers-that-be. Or the heavy, embossed, signed, and sealed certificate that I'll take home and...serve to my children for dinner, perhaps?

Rejection is...

...a hard pill to swallow.

Farther Apart, Closer at Heart

My family, immediate and extended, are going through a growth spurt. There was a pacific lull while all my cousins, including myself, were busy with school, varsity and then onto the shores of the Malaysian workforce. Then all of a sudden, within a few months of each other, they started getting married, one after another. Then, of course, the married ones began to actively procreate, my sister included, myself excluded. The pattern of reproductivity was so strong and contiguous that it almost seemed like an epidemic. When one of my cousins, the first one hitched, gave birth to a baby boy I could almost see the entire clan physically leap into a new phase - a phase where motherhood is a norm and organizing another wedding is simply a matter of repeating the previous one with minor adjustments here and there. We keep in touch through emailed baby pictures and the usual 'Oohs' and 'Aahs' over cute baby feet and adorable baby tooth-less gums. It was while we were drooling over baby-drool that I realized I have had very little to do with this new addition of the family other than to gaze at his photos. In other words, we're strangers to one another. This realization stood in contrast to the fact that my cousins and I practically grew up together. Suddenly there are these tiny little indivuduals appearing in this little circle that I've grown accustomed to. Now my sister's about to have one of her own. Since we're thousands of miles away, any relationship I would have with the baby will be through pictures. Here is a person who came from the same gene pool as I did and we're going to be total strangers. Now that is something I find to be quite strange.