Mandela. Ke Nako.

As the news about Nelson Mandela's death sank in, I was moved to write something about his extraordinary life. Only I don't know exactly what to write. It's almost impossible to write anything that anyone doesn't already know. We've all taken him for granted. If you've read one of the one hundred or more books about him, you're already one up on me. I've not read any.

The day Mandela was released from prison, I was in Japan attending a technical course and visiting Taoist temples in Kyoto. Almost all major Japanese TV stations carried this momentous event (Mandela's release, not my temple tour). It's in high-tempo Japanese, so I couldn't understand a thing. Even Mandela, after 26 years in prison, spoke in Japanese. To make it worse, the telecast was continuously broken by slapstick detergent commercials. But his famous walk of freedom with his wife and supporters would never need any language. I could see that Mandela was just plain, old-fashioned happy to be free after so many years incommunicado. No defiance and no bitterness lurking.

I flew back home the next day. My eldest greeted me, his right hand raised: "Mandela". We hugged and laughed. He did what he'd seen, and repeated a thousand times, on TV. It's easy for his mother to drill him to say Malay-friendly names like Mahathir and Mandela. Next time she should try the Reverend Jesse Jackson.

I think Mandela is one of the most quoted and studied statesmen in modern times. I'd agree that apartheid wasn't exactly modern, but I'd always consider anything after the Second World War as technically modern because that would conveniently include me. Unlike Arsene Wenger, Mandela was never a philosopher. He spoke in clear and regular language. Facebook pages are now flooded with quotes from his famous speeches and writings. For me, the one that stands out was an inspiring foreword he wrote in a book celebrating the life of Diana, his good friend. I don't know which of my two boys had a crush on the late Princess of Wales and bought this book. It's heavier and more expensive than the coffee table, with loads of glitzy and grainy photos of all sizes and shapes. Neither of them would own up. I only read the foreword, all of one page. Mandela wrote simply:

"We can not all be a famous British princess. We can, however, all try to do what we can to insist that every human being is precious and unique."

Well, that's flowing and flawless. I could almost picture the great man at his desk pondering and penning those thoughts.           

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Catching Fire

My blog clocked up its 20,000th pageview early last month. With an average of one posting a month, it took me about 14 months to get my second 10,000. I don't have the industry average, but 10,000 of anything in 14 months is very slow. More than 15,000 fake ICs were "issued" in 14 months. Subang Jaya exit funnels out 10,000 cars in one morning.  Only KLIA 2 is slower.

Lots of numbers, and why not? Datuk Zaid Ibrahim racked up 10,000 views in one evening last July when he wrote in defence of the four troubled Malay beauty queen aspirants. According to him, Malaysia is a model democracy and these girls should be free to "maximize their talent". Allowing the word talent a generous metaphorical context, it's hard to argue with the logic because we didn't lift a finger when hundreds of other Malay girls with no talent tried to maximize their talent through Akademi Fantasia.

I knew Zaid. We used to share a swanky 20-bed dormitory forty over years ago. Thing is, he never talked about democracy or beauty queens at the time. So I can only conclude that he wrote the blasphemous piece just to get 10,000 views, which he got, plus 130 comments. Many were up in arms, suggesting that he immediately repent. One comment urged him to perform the Haj because he's rich. If he registered with Tabung Haji today, he should be able to do it in 2048.

My most viewed entry drew a paltry 900, a post on a family trip to Paris and a brush with the gypsies. The relatively high traffic could be due to a picture of a nude castle we visited, one of the 10,400 known castles in France. Unsuspecting online junkies searching for vintage French wines or fake Longchamps or Last Tango in Paris DVD could have been steered into my blog. I don't really know.

A post on Malaysia-Indonesia spats had a surprisingly good outing with 800 views. I know Indonesia has 200, maybe 400, million people, but none of them can speak or read English. They didn't read my blog. So who read the blog? Apparently the Americans. The statistics showed more than 70% of those who viewed this particular posting were from US. Why this abnormal American interest? Even with my strong sense of deduction developed over eight seasons of Monk, I still couldn't unlock this mystery. I finally found the answer recently: White House was hacking into my blog to snoop on both Malaysia and Indonesia. Bugging my blog is a lot cheaper than flying drones.

At this rate, I'd need another 100 years to get 1 million views. Maybe longer. Nowadays nobody read anything. Even if they read, they'd read no more than 10 words at one time. Blogs are losing their edge. Not because Papagomo is in jail, but because tweets and texts are much easier to read. They technically contain no words. David Beckham's recent illiterate tweet to Manchester United fans "Youre team are loosing very bad to Manchester City" was read by two million followers. Art is succumbing to anarchy.

In this state of flux, some bloggers take the easy way out by resigning to writing for themselves or watching Azhar Idrus on YouTube. Like flagging brands, bloggers must reimagine and reinvent to remain competitive. Misleading titles like the above is a good start.

 

Old Boys Weekend : Beberapa Catatan Kenangan

Old Boys Weekend 2013 at Tiger Lane is only a few days past. Is it too early to reminisce? 

OBW13 was my OBW2. My second OBW, sad to say. I’m not from Class of 2011 and 19 years old.  I’m from 71 and 60 years old. It’s just that I showed up only for the second time. My first was in 2010. Where was I before that?

It's a two-day homage to alma mater, a heady mix of one-sided games, grand dinner, rugby, school song, Mr Lau, rugby. And a dandy time to recollect and rerun old jokes and hostel heroics. And rugby.

The AGM was my first, and it's fast, and it's furious. The decibel hit the roof when the constant question of coffers and contributions cropped up. Financially we're under water (what else is new?). Mr P had to become Mr B.  Let's bite the bullet and sell our all-conquering rugby team to a mad Arab. Rebrand it Etihad Tigers or Qatar Queers for all I care.

I'm not sure who's foul, me or the weather. Every time I attended old boys dinner, it rained. Either way, it's a treat. Old boys reunion is a model of equal opportunity: a 60-year old is an old boy and a 20-year old  is an old boy.
 

Dinner and show was the climax, and this time around, it felt grander than my last one. These young people surely knew how to organize. Rain apart, the atmosphere was faultless. The stage and the props and the lights and the sound. Not exactly Montreux, but brave enough.

I’m no music maestro, but I thought the Ghazal fare was gorgeous, especially for a low-hormone audience like me. The Ghazal-pop fusion with a hint of hip-hop was pleasing and delightful. My flagging senses were all fired up. The repertoire romped home with glorious Ribaibaru, Ghazal in Japanese. Nice.

Class of 86 were class.  97 of them stormed this reunion, all clad in loud yellow strip. Or was  it orange? They’re the biggest contingent ever.  Wonder how they did it. (To think that only nine from our class made it this time). Imagine if every batch had the same turnout. We’d have a sold-out crowd of 5,000 old boys!

What else can we say about Khalid Siran? An old boy like no other. A 62 alumnus, he’d never missed even one OBW. His modus operandi warms your heart: he’d travel all the way from Pontian and check in for OBW in the small hours. Let’s all cheer him on. We talked and talked about love, loyalty and friendship. He walked, and showed us how.

The Wangge platter looked like the real thing. But the food station was about one km out, well beyond our reach at the far end. Weak knees and all, who’d want to travel on heavy pitch? We’d to skip Cendol and Satay. Ahmad Darus and Dr Ibrahim had to calm down their wives on the way back.

Empty tables are never a pretty sight. I don’t have the exact number, but I think only 600 turned up for this edition, and the last one, and before that. Some of the Facebook heroes and trolls were missing. Only 10% of total old boys bothered? I don’t have an industry standard for old-boys shindigs, but we should be more ambitious. How about 1000 for OBW14? Even 2000. Ask 86 how they did it, and we’ll do it.

Mr President’s speech? Valiant, passionate, spirited. Except that it’s OBW13, not PRU13. Hahaha.

Finally what passed for music from the lazy and live bands toward the end was slightly more exciting than inter-house debates. Try harder, boys.  

Make no mistake, 93 has done a fine job. It’s much easier to organize a wedding reception. Turnout is a perennial problem. Maybe we’ve to reimagine OBW, the concept, the program, the communication, to ramp up the turnout.

Less than 10% from my Class of 71 showed up. At this rate, we're Crass of 71. I’m equally guilty, I know. Not sure what can really motivate older old boys like us. Now that our age starts with 6, our train ride to Ipoh is 50% off (only RM16 one way, cheaper than luggage on Air Asia). Hamid is ready to transform his Ipoh weekend retreat into Hamid Homestay for OBW. One of us can be the head-honcho to round up all of us. Come on, let's crash OBW14!

Ah, before I forget, Yuzer, your stand-up skit about a fat Kelantanese at New York airport just fell over. You’ve to be a Kelantanese to tell that joke. Your paid-by-Colgate my-teeth-can-crunch-ice routine is more hilarious.     

All Those Years Ago (Part 1)

It's lights out finally for me in August 2009. I'd thought this day would never come. But it did, slow but certain. The feeling was one of relish, and a slender sense of loss. The clouds were gathering outside Level 79 of the iconic Twin Towers as I took one last sweep of the breathtaking view. I could still make out, amid the throng of sprouting structures, the one building behind Ampang Park hardly a mile away, where it all started. Karmic or quirk, life does come in full circle.

Retiring isn't supposed to be easy. A typical professional footballer would defer his retirement at least three times before he finally bins his boots for good. A typical Petronas engineer would sign a two-year contract just to feel useful. A typical prime minister would never want to retire. It's best not to get overly emotional because retirement is a two-way thing. There's always a sweet side to anything. I had stacks of unopened CDs and the Economist at home. There's no better time.

I joined Petronas 2 May 1979, a Wednesday. That's 34 years ago, around the time when bell-bottoms and Afro were all the rage. I would've preferred to start anything on the first of something and a Monday, ideally both. No, it's not Chinese astrology or anything like that. It's just that very little seems to happen on the second or on a Wednesday, and absolutely nothing on both.

Landing a Petronas job those days was easier than piece of cake. All you'd to do was apply, turn up for a short interview, laugh along with the interviewers,  and speak reasonable English. Nowadays I heard you've to undergo a half-day waterboarding and face a battery of trick questions just to qualify for another half-day interview to qualify for yet another half-day interview before you're finally rejected for no reason.

Jobs were plentiful during my time. There were only five local universities and they produced about 500 graduates a year to cater for 50,000 jobs. Compare that with 500 universities now churning out 50,000 law and business graduates to fill 500 jobs, you get the idea. A campus friend had five job offers while waiting for his final exam. I mean exam, not exam results.

Nowadays only graduates with at least 3.85 cgpa are called for interviews.  It looks smooth sailing for the high achievers until they discover that almost everybody has 3.85. The schools and the universities and the ministries and the whole country for that matter now are dumbing down the exam questions and grades. I failed my Form Five Chemistry, but my daughter got an A. Our genes are no more than two links apart, so how's her Chemistry grade possible?

Petronas took in people in bulk or crowds of twenty to thirty at one time. It’s not possible to cherry-pick because candidates were in short supply. The HR policy at the time was to hope that half of them would later turn out to be at least half-good. There's a recruitment drive or something for some projects with dull names like MLNG, ABF, SPAD. Ok, delete the last one. So if you missed one interview for a job in a dull project, there's another interview in two weeks' time for another job in another dull project. Life was that good.

To this day I'm still not sure what had actually lured me to Petronas. Youthful bravado? Herd instinct? Cold cash? Probably all three. Created from scratch just four years before, Petronas was an uncharted terrain and a bit of an enigma.  A friend at Shell rolled his eyes when he discovered that I'd joined a government-owned oil company. Oil and government together used to be an oxymoron, just like "fast food" and "German pope". The word "government" would evoke the unmistakable charisma of JPJ, Immigration Department etc. To him a prim and proper oil company had to be one of the horny "Seven Sisters", you know, Shell, Exxon, Chevron and other cissy-sounding types. It's hard to blame him as there's nothing to impress him, certainly not our head-office at ENE Plaza.

ENE was short for Empat Nombor Ekor. And this piece of real estate with the unfortunate moniker was located smack in the middle of a seedy Jalan Pudu neighbourhood, sharing the low lights with an eclectic mix of pubs, massage parlours and a Georgian gaol (or jail, if you insist).  A less literate tourist would mistake us for a gambling den.

It's still early days, of course. Spirits were high and jokes were generous. There's very little movement in and out of ENE to suggest anything remotely ambitious brewing up. I'd already had a firm and paid job at a local bank with a Malay name. Pay wasn’t really top-bracket, but at least this bank had a vision of where it was heading. Leaving this relative luxury to join the masseurs and the jailers was, admittedly, reckless and gungho. What if the fledgling oil firm went under, the way of the sexy sisters? At this point, nobody talked about challenges or trajectories, all I ever wanted was some money to buy cigarettes. Could this be an early career nightmare?

Actually it's a dream move. I was joining a company primed for greatness, a company on the verge of a storybook journey from a homey backwater to a world beater. Fits and starts soon turned fast and furious as nothing could break a company bent on becoming champions. I enjoyed all my thirty years in Petronas, and I'd never trade the experience for anything, not even playing with Maradona (footballer, not Madonna). Even deep in retirement now, my pulses still race whenever I pass our service stations.

Today Petronas is pop culture. Working for the national oil company is suddenly so cool. Twin Towers, Fortune 500, F1, one thousand service stations, what's there to doubt. The HR policy, as expected, has now been completely transformed. It's now more strategic, dynamic and responsive: female staff now retire at 60, men at 55. 

My Shell friend, aha, what happened to him? He’s rich and retired after a successful career and overseas gigs. But his juniors are doing even better: they’ve left Shell to join Petronas Carigali.

It looks easy now, all’s in place. But the global gloom, economic disorder and unforgiving oil dynamics means the action will be just as relentless, if not more. In hindsight, it’s actually easier when I came in because there’s nothing. Nothing could possibly worse than nothing. The game has changed so much. Where we’re now, the only way forward is to buy up Norway.

As the old guards depart, the new warriors meld in. I’ve faith in the younger crop to push ahead with our ambition and agenda, whatever it is now. They aced the interview, remember? Most come with some serious degrees, faux English, good looks. Passion, talent, twitter. Half of them were emotionally and culturally connected with Petronas long before they came in: their mummies or daddies or both worked for Petronas.

Back to 2 May 1979, my first day. As it turned out, Wednesday was wondrous because I didn’t have to work in ENE Plaza after all, not even near Pudu area. I’d to report for duty at the old Domestic Marketing Division (DMD) located at the fourth floor of the old MIDF Building, behind the old Ampang Park. We’d to share the floor with the International Marketing Division (IMD). Both DMD and IMD went along quite well, although the IMD guys tried their best to look, ahem, international.

I was impressed with what I saw that Wednesday morning: open-plan office, low ceiling, typewriters, typewriter chatter, typists, typists chatter, files, more files, leather-like chairs and second-hand smoke. Honest to goodness. No frills, no frippery. I could feel the warmth and welcome as people nodded and smiled as I sheepishly walked past. As I was settling down, I realized how crowded the office was, with heavy pants and big hair-dos taking so much space. The air was the minimum required for all of us to remain clinically alive. One more new guy tomorrow, everybody would suffocate.

All the guys have now retired. Except for two.

The Curious Case of Non-Random Shootings

35 shootings in four months. Ten shootings in seven days. Four straight shootings in 26 hours. No, I'm not talking about cruelty in Malay film industry. I'm talking about our own safety in our own country. I've said it many times, and I'm going to say it again, and you may want to repeat after me: This country is going to the dogs.

You'd normally rely on the government to somehow do the right thing in chaos and crisis, like when our country was attacked by currency pirates, Sulu pirates, Lee Kuan Yew. But now the leadership appears to be all at sea. I know it's difficult to come around after a bruising election, but I'm sure the government is game enough to conjure up something sensible to calm the nerves.

But this time around, the government just flailed on with some foggy statements and feeble gestures to quell the widespread fears and disquiet. Butt of the blame fell squarely on the repeal of the Emergency Ordinance, although the connection is, at best, circumstantial. The IGP reassured us that all victims were targets, meaning all shootings were not random or drive-by types, meaning we're not tailspinning into downtown Detroit. Nobody is actually celebrating. A shooting is a shooting, like fat is fat.

Listen to TV3. Funny how they'd proudly report that cases are being investigated under kanun keseksaan dalam kurungan or something, which makes it all appear like somebody's pet cat has been abused. Call it kanun or lanun for all I care, please catch the culprits now.

Less funny was the move to promote five very senior police officers to a newly created rank of senior deputy or deputy senior something, with better pay, perks and all, while the bloodshed went on and on. I'm sure these good officers wouldn't mind deferring their promotion to a quieter time, or at least when one or two hotshots are nabbed.

But the most bizarre of all was the statistics bandied about by the home minister in Mingguan Malaysia, itself no less bizarre. The minister alleged that EO abolition had freed 2,600 criminals. These criminals each has 10 right-hand men, who in turn have another 10 right-hand men each. This elegant snowball effect gives us a staggering total of 260,000 criminals on the run and lurking in your neighbourhood. But why stop at 260,000? How about their cousins, classmates, clients, and sundry sympathizers? That's another 10 each, and the total now is 2.6 million, more than 10% of the population. The minister is a PhD, so he can't be wrong. My only hope left is that, since it's Mingguan Malaysia, the minister has been grossly misquoted. He meant right-handed men, not right-hand men. So it's only 2600 criminals, the rest are just right-handed men, like you and me.

The statements and statistics are nothing more than a clever misdirection. Serious crimes are surging, with or without EO, ETP, ECER, EBITDA and other abbreviations. What's changed is the MO, another abbreviation. It's strange that nobody has questioned why the shootings spiked after the election. Is this pure coincidence? Or the criminals are partly motivated by the chance to taunt and thumb their nose at the 47% government and the tough-talking home minister. Who knows. You might get a PhD if you could, with clever statistics, prove this right or wrong.

It's a sad, sad situation. Crime has declined sharply across the civilized world in spite of the deep recession. While committing crime is out of fashion everywhere, it's all vogue here. Nobody has explicitly blamed the police, apart from mild insinuation from DAP.  I wouldn't want to upset anybody who carries a gun. But face the facts. 35 suspects and none was caught. One had his film-star footage posted across all media. It's a no-brainer that the main deterrent to crime is the fear of being caught. But what's there to fear if nobody gets caught? Of course, the usual excuses just rolled in, inadequate police numbers, rampant gun-running, Indian gangster movies, red bean army.

To be fair, how far should the police go if people are hell-bent on bashing each other. At the core is the all-round culture and climate of corruption, law-breaking and other wrong-doings. Commercial extortion is rising and hiding behind the outrageous price of food and fruits, data plans, astro packages, medical degrees, check-in luggage, nasi arab, the list is long. Violent crimes and confrontations should blend in quite nicely.

There's no sign of a breather. While I'm writing this the tally has increased to 37 with a couple of shootings reported yesterday. And police made a breakthrough finally when they arrested and charged......a taxi driver. No big deal, half of the taxi drivers on the road should be arrested and charged anyway. The government isn't any closer to nailing the problem. Nobody has a clue. Nobody except Nancy Shukri. The minister suspects the shootings are mostly gangland revenge perpetrated by ex-EO inmates. Clever girl. And she's dead set on replacing EO with another preventive law (maybe XXL or another suitable abbreviation being worked out in a lab in Putrajaya). DAP reacted by appointing Teresa Kok to look into this. PKR should let Elizabeth Wong enter the fray. Another turf war is brewing up.

While waiting for Nancy and Teresa, I think we should immediately stop the on-going shooting of KL Gangster 3. Nobody has yet proved any causal link between the KL Gangster shootings and the current spate of shootings. But, as Ronald Reagan has wisely reasoned out, why take the chance?



           

              
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The Project

 

One of the known pleasures of retirement is the unfettered freedom of pursuing a passion (assuming your job is not a passion). What immediately comes to mind is finishing off all the 200 business books you bought on the run at airports since 1985. But, seriously, the list of pursuits can be long and demanding, ranging from safe ones like visiting relatives to chancy ones like visiting Somalia.  In my case, I've a backlog of untouched "The Economist" magazines dating back to 2009, about 150 copies in all. Never mind the stacks of unopened cds and dvds with wacky titles like "Boards of Canada" (Pop music, not shale gas regulators) and plot-spoilers like "The Assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford" (Brad Pitt flick). You've to be fully retired and stress-free to be turned on.

 

The day after I left Petronas for good in 2009, I sat down and read. In no time I found myself collapsing into a reading binge, or binge reading, you choose. I read, read, read, read, days on end. I tore open the wraps like a hungry wolf, downing two or three copies of the cold magazines in one helping. I had something like 126 more copies to go when I happened upon a feature on aging: a scientific study has revealed that degradation of memory power and thinking skills late in life can be prevented by regular sudoku, ballroom dancing and memorizing. I can accept sudoku and, grudgingly, ballroom dancing, but memorizing? A paradox of sorts. If you lose your memory, you've to memorize. So counter-intuitive, it's like, if you lose your appetite, you should eat more. What should be memorized? High on the recommend list was poems, song lyrics and War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy.

I was actually struggling with a failing mind. Not mine, but my father's. We're losing him. His memory was patchy and he lived in lapses. He'd lost most, if not all, sense of proportion. Every action or inaction was flawed. Once he drifted out of my sister's home in PJ and I'd to recover him at the Sungai Way police station when he couldn't find his way back. A kind cabbie had sent him there when my old man flagged him for direction to Kg Laut, his home in Kelantan. Looking at him, I could almost feel all the emptiness. It's too late for him to memorize poems.

Maybe it's about time for me. I was already doing a lot of reading. It's just one additional step. Instead of read and read, it's read and read and retain. Reading the pompous and ponderous magazine is tough enough as it is, now I've to memorize it, just to keep my mind in operating condition. Please, Petronas, give me back my job and any bad boss. I don't want to be the first and the only person to memorize 150 issues of the Economist. I took a while to gather myself and finally settle for poetry, as recommended by the dreaded study. Poems are certainly prettier and friendlier. Some are devilishly easy to memorize, they come in ten lines of one gorgeous word per line. Example: Sepi, Sepi, Sepi. So easy. There's a Malay masterpiece with half-page of binary glory: "tak, tung, tak, tung". Still it all looked wishful and daunting as I couldn't bring myself to memorizing anything bigger than grocery lists. I was flicking through an old favourite "sajak-sajak pendatang" by Muhammad Hj Salleh when it suddenly dawned: why not memorize the "ultimate poetry", the Quran?

The start was slow and painful. Actually I didn't even know where to start. According to Obama, I was showing all the symptoms of poverty of ambition.  Al Fatifah is cakewalk, then comes Surah Al Baqarah, a page turner (45 pages, 700 lines) in classic Arabic. No pictures, no pie charts. Lucky thing I'd the benefit of a training on lateral thinking by the thinking maestro Edward de Bono. Why follow the flow? I could start from the end and memorize shorter and snappy surah first. It should be easier and more motivating this way.

Not so fast. The going was still heavy, with the usual dithering and pussyfooting. I knew too well that a project without timeline and stiff fines will get delayed. The only projects that finish early are those with toll booths. In my case what's needed was probably a little something that could push the plot forward, so to speak. A turning point, or  the killer nudge.

It came. I was doing my haj in November 2010 and my "project" bore the brunt due to tight schedule, rude crowds, noise, dust, strange food, huge Nigerians, and other excuses. Somehow in the morning of 10 November, after days of stalling, I finally managed to ace Surah Al Bayyinah (The Proof, eight verses, eight lines). That very evening, during the maghrib prayer, the grand imam came on and recited loud and clear.......Al Bayyinah. God, what's this. The odds of this happening are something like 1 in 1200, or less than 0.1%. This might well be pure coincidence or statistical quirk, but it's all the proof I needed. I was, to say the least, overjoyed, inspired and all fired up to push on. No targets, no timeline.

What's the point of all this, you wonder. Let's be clear, I'm not trying to compete with Ustaz Haslin Bollywood. Or trying to show off or something. Thing is, there's nothing to show or shout about. People memorize the whole Quran at twelve or earlier in less than two years. I started at 57. I'm into the 28th juzuk after two and a half years. Don't panic. I started from the back, remember. So it's only my third juzuk, about 45 pages, only 7% of the whole Book. If I soldier on at this santai speed, I'll be done earliest in 2041, still ahead of Kajang-KL LRT line. No, that's grandiose. Seriously, I'll be more than happy with 20%.

Memorizing is fun. This is what I want to pass on. You've to believe me. You should try it today. Just do it anywhere: traffic jams, LRT, Firefly flights, performance meetings, Malaysian Super League games. Put on your Beats By Dr Dre knock-offs for style and impact. You'll get high and plenty of kicks and chemical reaction at the end of every page you memorize. You'll waltz your way through a tapestry of God's graceful words and verses, flowing prose and rhyming lines. No pain here, only pure pleasure. Along the way, you'll pick up Arabic, and, if you're talented enough, you could create your own signature tune. Or two tunes, an uptempo for daytime traffic and slower one for romantic nights. Hit a few bars to calm down your eager husbands. My tone is dead flat day and night, prompting friends to suggest that it's good enough for reading weather forecasts. 

Ah, my old man. He passed away in his sleep early this year. I owe him everything. I'm sure he likes what I'm doing.

    

    

    

(Stupid) University Rankings

I've to admit that I'm most intrigued by two modern inventions: 1. Arsene Wenger and 2. University rankings. They've nothing in common except for the "professor" sobriquet lavished on the overrated football coach by the illiterate section of the Arsenal crowd. But let's leave Arsene for a rainy day and turn to the more pressing business of university rankings.

A good day now hardly passes without another university rankings released by a newspaper (Wall Street Journal), a magazine (BusinessWeek), or, strange enough, a university (Shanghai Jiao Tong). Last week QS issued a brand new ranking:  best universities in Asia. Out of one hundred or so universities in Malaysia, five have been placed in the Asia top 100. I don't know much about this QS. It could well be another low-cost airline or even Perkasa in disguise, but they seem to have a soft spot for our universities. QS claims to be non-partisan and non-racial, which doesn't say much these days because Utusan Malaysia is officially a non-partisan and non-racial newspaper. So whenever our university or government functionaries want to look clean and cultured, they'd quote QS rankings, and avoid the more famous TI's Corruption Perception Index because it's not directly related to universities (It's hard not to agree with this logic).

I'm not sure who or what sparked off the rankings race, but my first encounter dates back to 1990 at a bookstore in PJ when I stumbled on a non-fiction work with a mundane title " The Best Business Schools". It's an honour roll of 40 top business schools in US ranked by BusinessWeek, plus an insider look at each school. I just had to buy the book because my school was in there. I didn't go to Harvard, wrong guess. HBS was second anyway. Number one was Kellogg (Northwestern University). My school just about made the cut. My reaction was: how? The school was so bland and spartan that all I could recall was braving a snowstorm one early morning to attend a statistics class. The Dutch professor was so inspiring that he cured my pathological fear of numbers, allowing me lead a normal life. There's no ranking of universities or anything in my younger days. Today you can read a review and ranking of door knobs on the internet. I chose the school only because its business program complied with basic human rights, meaning less quantitative, meaning less maths, and no periodic table.

Ranking of universities will soon overtake cricket as the most corrupt sport. If there's a ranking of all university rankings, I'm sure QS would be right at the bottom of the heap. Any ranking that places Malaysian universities in the top 100 is suspect. For those who've had both local and overseas college experience, it's not too hard to compare and conclude. Half of the local professors are world champions on Malay history, Malay politics and tongkat ali, while our rice and fruit taste and texture have not improved since 1964. They're actually brilliant and first-rate professors. But they can't express, create and engage in productive ground-breaking research because the universities are run by the government that, until today, is still fighting for our country's independence from the British. NGOs with eponymous titles like Desak, Tibai, Gasak, Korap and so forth will be up in arms and accuse me of conspiring with Air Asia X to run down the entire Malay race. OK, Mr Ngo, can you name two professors, just two out of the 2365 professors in Malaysia? For all the tough talk, they can name only one: Prof. Ibrahim Ali.  

Remember in 2004 when University of Malaya (UM) was ranked 89th in the world, higher than Nottingham and Indiana? The university and the whole country went berserk. I could see flags with number 89 fluttering all over the campus, and the literature-loving vice chancellor (VC) had all the time to pen a poignant poem on this. A year later he returned to earth with a ranking of 169th. The reason? QS mistook the Chinese and Indian students in UM for students from China and India. I'm sure QS would rank Nilai University College ahead of Imperial College when they find out that 90% of daytime student population in Nilai are Nigerians and Chechens.  

I've lost count of how many rankings in the market now. Easily a dozen, maybe  more. US News, Forbes, BusinessWeek, the Economist, WSJ, Financial Times, Shanghai J T, Times Higher Education (THE), Princeton Review. And QS, hahaha, of course. Some only rank the business schools. Some only US or UK universities. All of them seem to be consistent on the top five or six (Harvard, Oxford), but beyond that it's pretty much free for all. Worse, some universities rise or drop twenty places in one year in the same rankings. A top twenty in US News is nowhere in THE and vice versa. No Malaysian universities are in Shanghai's top 500 (let's ask them apa lagi China mau?). My school is no longer in the top 40. Now you know why I'm angry. The idea of ranking universities annually is plain bollocks. Universities are not flatscreens or androids. Their reputation and brand were built by the likes of Thomas Jefferson and Isaac Newton over 300 years.

Men are born to like lists and rankings, for the simple reason that lists read easier and sexier than The Lord of The Rings. So we have Fortune 500. Group of Eight. Gang of Four. Seven Sisters. Double mastectomy. The danger is that some people become morbidly obsessed with rankings. University of Malaya VC's only known KPI now is to get the university into the top 100 in the world before 2090. When I was in Petronas, we called this smart objective because it comes with numbers, time and plenty of stress. Incidentally Petronas has just appointed a hard-driving former VP with an honorary doctorate as VC of its prized university (UTP) to gatecrash the world rankings. QS ranks UTP outside the top 200 in Asia. With a joke location and Yiddish name like Tronoh, it can only be uphill. Should we learn from Singapore? The guys at National University of Singapore (ranked 2nd in Asia by QS) just laughed off the university's perennially high ranking. It's a joke, of course. The Chinese government of Singapore get its way with one simple doctrine. What they want they buy: water, maids, submarines, warships, islands, KTM.

There's no way out. Rankings are here for the long haul. BusinessWeek has already expanded with a ranking of business schools for those who sleep in class (I'm serious). Princeton Review has its annual rankings of schools for lesbians, party goers and communists. I heard Platts (an oil and gas trade publication) is seriously considering its own university rankings. With  a long experience in rigging oil prices for Shell and BP, it looks like a natural extension. Petronas is a loyal and high-value Platts' customer with a hundred-year subscription to all its extortionate oil publications. There's certainly hope for UTP.






 

                  

Election Reflection

It's over now, I mean the election, just in case you're still holding your breath for EC's announcement on the date. Now is one dandy time to pause, ponder and reflect.

I know you're already overwhelmed by the relentless torrents of thoughts, theories and verdicts from part-time political pundits and psephologists, mostly struggling professors madya from local universities ranked 1456th, 1396th and 1354th in the latest world university rankings. All are mediocre except for a few who look clever and even Scottish (eg Karim, Farish, Noh Omar). Their narratives are decidedly lazy and agricultural. They pontificated that BN needed both urban and rural support to secure a two-thirds majority. I mean, it's like saying Indonesian maids are from Indonesia.

With plenty of time to burn, I've decided to weigh in. I pored over and rummaged through the numbers to make some sense of the election outcome and dynamics. No surprise that all the political analysts are biased, innumerate and, in the process, missed the more relevant points. So what can we really draw from the just-concluded election? Plenty to learn and take away if we're not lazy. For a  change, let's use the much-maligned Question and Answer (Q and A) format:

Q.Who won the election?
A. PR. Anything else is just gossip.

Q. But why does BN, not PR, get to form the government? So unfair.
A. Let's not mistake our election for a beauty contest, where the winner gets to rule for a year, visit places, or marry Hugh Hefner for two weeks. According to an expert in criminal law, we're adopting an archaic Anglo-Saxon democratic model called First In, First Out, quite similar to the trick used by the Welsh accrual accounting. It's devilishly simple: in any election, the party that comes first is out. This system differs slightly from the original democratic notion conceived by Plato or Pluto or some one-name Greek geek about 2500 before Greek bankruptcy. Most modern democracies like Zimbabwe, North Korea etc have long rejected this idea, more so now that Greece is part of Germany. Whichever way you look at it, BN, quite rightly, should form the government.

Q. Who's the best performer?
A. Consensus is a tie between Nurul Izzah and Taib Mahmud (and Taib's wife, don't forget). Nurul Izzah for jailbreaking the BN juggernaut. Taib for beating back PR and the other PR (guess). The less romantic plump for Teresa Kok, who racked up the biggest majority. She polled 61,500 votes, about 50% more than what PR had expected. This is all daft. Because the biggest winner is actually Zulkifli Noordin. PKR had expected him to get only one vote but he managed a massive 38,080. It's 3,807,900% more than expected. Take that, Teresa.

Q. Based on the election, is it safe to say that Khalid Ibrahim is the best living politician today?
A. I'm not sure about safe, but Khalid Ibrahim, Selangor MB, is definitely the best politician today. How? By not being a politician, that's how. For the past five years he's been banging his head on his transformation agenda: free water, free sand, and plastics-free Saturdays. In between, he mumbles and exudes the very charisma of a three-pin plug. People just fell for this refreshing, working-class, crony-is-cissy style. And how he blew away and left BN for dead on the night. 

Q. So there's a fraud?
A. What fraud? Our competent EC has just spent RM400 million of your good money to make sure that the election isn't another gold-bar multi-level scam. The guy at the polling station tallied my IC against his register and then screamed my name so loudly that the whole Kg Pandan knew I wasn't an Indon phantom. No fraud. Not a chance.

Q. Chinese Tsunami?
A. Both "Chinese" and "Tsunami" are overrated and overused terms, up there with verbal bores like transformation, gerrymandering, lol, samsung, Victoria Beckham. They've been given more credit than what they remotely deserve. And they're not even English to start with. Tsunami is, you know it, Japanese, Chinese is, well, Chinese. Japanese and Chinese are technically still at war (the siege of Manchuria hasn't formally ended). When did the last time you saw a Chinese speak to a Japanese? Exactly. So any expression containing both Japanese and Chinese words is immediately hilarious and can't be taken too seriously.

Q. Why couldn't BN do better? Where's the tipping point? Who's at fault? Will this repeat?
A. Man, I'm out of breath. There's just too many to pinpoint. Cows, videos, ambiga. But the feather that broke the camel's back was the submarines. Not one, but two. Maybe more, I don't know. This is unfortunate because Malaysia is historically a maritime nation (remember Parameswara, Hang Li Po, Sir Francis Drake?), but Malaysians are, genetically, scared of submarines. I watched submarine flicks U571, K19 and KL Gangster half-way and almost blacked out with claustrophobia. Naturally people won't vote anybody who's out to scare them.

Q. PR's popular vote was about 51%. Why wasn't it possible for PR to get more, like 60%?
A. So obvious. It's due to DAP's poor performance. The party's support among the Chinese was low. Surprise? Let's look at some Chinese-heavy seats (i.e 90% of voters are Chinese) where DAP won big-time. Let's assume same voter turnout across all races and let's assume (conservatively) that DAP got its votes only from Chinese voters and let's also assume that I'm right. In Seputeh, 97% of the Chinese voted DAP. What? Only 97%? This is terribly low compared to, say, 100%.  In Mengelembu, it's mere 92%. It's disastrous 82% in Kuching. I can go on but the point is made: the Chinese don't support DAP. Now you see how I'm sharper than all those professors madya and those Scottish lookers combined (hahahaha).                


 

          

Election, At Last

 

So I was wrong. There's going to be an election after all. And it's next month, not in 2019. From now until the election day, our caring PM is also a caretaker PM. He's about half-way into proclaiming the dissolution of the parliament when the mainstream media (meaning Utusan Malaysia) and the alternative media (also Utusan Malaysia) went into orgasmic overdrive, declaring that Selangor and Sabah will soon be part of Malaysia. Who can blame them. They've been waiting for this moment since 2008, the last election. You won't find a country more captivated and consumed in election fever. That Malaysia and Malaria rhyme so well is no coincidence. Nothing is done without a stench of electioneering. Kelantan will transform from poor to very poor now that politics has overtaken batik as the biggest cottage industry. Believe it or not, this is the 13th general election, and our election process has been massively transformed. With the use of the ink, we're now on par with Iraq and well ahead of the Ivory Coast.

If you watch only TV3, you'd be led to believe that it's going to be a cakewalk for BN because if BN candidates lose, BN-friendly candidates will win. But if you add up all the cash bonanza, it looks tighter than Barca vs Real. With sentiments so finely balanced, there's all to play for. Thanks to EC and EC bashers, election will be more fun. They're doing away with nomination protests. This will allow candidates who can't spell their names to still contest, campaign and run down their opponents. Of course, we need more tweaks if we're really serious about benchmarking against election dreamlands like New Zealand, Denmark etc.

A 94-year grandmother is contesting to protect polygamy. Problem is, there's no age limit in Malaysia, unlike North Korea, where there's restriction on age and everything else. Horny granny aside, the sight of an 80-something icon and firebrand being towed around on the campaign trail is hard to stomach. I know about some US judges and senators who retired after 90 and how they appointed George Bush, legalized Elton John's marriage and reinstated slavery. I always believe that a physically weak leader (political or spiritual) is intellectually suspect. No, I'm not calling for a candidate who runs Boston marathon. But a candidate who can at least walk without help, think clearly and talk in plain Malay language without the need for Malay subtitles.  


It's well-documented that opposition parties either don't get enough airtime or don't get airtime. I've no problem with this because all the TV and radio stations belong to either the government or businessmen scared of the government. Fair enough. People have to eat. But why not make it official, I mean legislate a law, or even amend the constitution, to disallow opposition parties from using TV and radio. With the law, anybody even remotely related to the opposition can't be seen within 10 km of any TV or radio station. Draconian, yes, but it's a rule or law that's understood by everybody, just like running red lights or the advantage rule in football. With this simple regulation, nobody will complain, certainly not the ruling party.

This election is already spinning into a melee of manifestos. This is, of course, a sign of political maturity. And mockery. One manifesto contains 120 vague pledges or promises, and each promise has another 120 vague sub-promises with even more vague-vague sub-sub-promises, with suspicious words like kroni, sisipan, mapan, iltizam thrown in to confuse and upset the average readers like you. When you're just about to get the hang of the whole thing, another 100 additional vague promises are added. This is Suarez-style daylight trickery. Why not limit any manifesto to just one page and ten promises max using basic numbers and clear language like tidur, nasi, ayam, hutang, sekolah, mydin, astro. This way it's easier to determine which party might bankrupt the country faster.


In every election, single mothers and artistes are singled out for goodies. This election they get even more. I'm a Petronas retiree and technically not an artiste, so I don't get anything even though Petronas and I have paid billions of ringgit in income tax. I'd propose that  all Petronas retirees be reclassified as artistes, or even single mothers for all I care. This way, I'll get to share the goodies. Grocery discounts, insurance, free medical, low-cost real estate, subsidized TV serials, low-quality TV serials, you name it. But how can a Petronas retiree be deemed an artiste or single mother? Easy. Look up the law. Pull up any contract or agreement and read: male gender is female gender, plural also means singular. A court in Canada even ruled that a horse is indeed a bird. So why can't a Petronas retiree be an artiste or a single mother?

If I want to vote, I'll have travel to Kg Pandan to vote. I lived in the area in the early 80s, and I haven't changed my polling address. One candidate there is an ex-Petronas. We've never met but I heard he's a rising star, a Senior Manager at the age of 27, a chartered accountant of England and Wales, an engineer, an MCKK old boy. Breathtaking. Can you be more educated than that? At this rate, he should become a GM at 30, VP at 35, and burn out at 39. Somehow he decided to quit and write a clever farewell missive, and went on to become a political mastermind or something and, once again, a rising star. Since his widely celebrated revelation of financial/comical scandals and skullduggery in high places, political attack dogs have made valiant attempts to frame his "actual" reasons for leaving Petronas. I think there's nothing sinister. He just didn't want to be a Petronas VP, that's all.