Kash’s World

I ran into a relative last week in a shopping centre and he was with his kids. I though the wife had gone to get car from the car park but it turned out she was in the hospital with dengue fever.

That was the third case I had heard about in my circle of friends recently and that made me wonder how bad the situation was.

Turned out, we are in the midst of a massive outbreak covering the whole of South East Asia and which could very possibly be the worst since the massive outbreak in 1998.

Just look at the specs. By the first six months of 2007, Thailand had recorded almost 24,000 cases, Cambodia 17,000 and Indonesia 68,000, with 748 deaths. Myanmar, Singapore, Vietnam and the Philippines have all seen dengue rates higher over last year’s figures.

The latest news shows Indonesia at more than 120,000 cases and Thailand and Malaysia with a combined 80,000 cases.

That is something to be very worried about as the monsoon is yet to arrive.

Check your homes to see if you have brreding grounds that favour this striped devil.

I’m also wondering if our health authorities should check out the M.I. Dengue monitoring system.

There are good prevention tips and related info here and here.

Is our man in space an astronaut or not? He doesn’t appear to be according to Jeff Ooi. Apparently the first Malaysian in space is a space participant. Malaysiakini however refers to him as an astronaut.

But generally, most official space agencies including the Russian agency say he is a space participant.

That’s not bad at all; he is after all the first Malaysian in space.

The only problem is that he is being passed of as an astronaut in Malaysia. Never mind that becoming an astronaut takes years and years of training (as far as I know!). If a Malaysian can become an astronaut in a year, it would be an insult to those who pursue that vocation all their working lives.

With information being so easily accessible these days, the Malaysian media is in a very delicate situation. Should they term him an astronaut/cosmonaut and risk being corrected by the international media? There’s also the danger, as is happening, that some pesky Malaysians will start asking why he was called an astronaut in the first place and why government money was used.

The problem is solved in the typical Malaysian way. Why call him an astronaut or a space participant; let’s call him an ‘angkasawan’ instead.

Never mind that that’s a Malay word. We are after all famous for our Manglish and there are precedents.

For example, we all do it unconsciously. Most Malaysians write non Malays names as Mr/Mrs and Malay names as Encik/Puan even when they are writing in English when it should rightfully be Mr/Mrs for everyone just as it should be Encik Lim or Puan Saraswathy in Malay.

I also remember that many years back someone had the bright idea that illegal drugs should be called ‘dadah’ even in English. So all newspapers used to refer to drug busts as ‘dadah’ busts. Thankfully they seem to have stopped doing that.

Even the Malay language is not spared from mangling. Never mind that at other times we protest the creeping introduction of English words into the Malay language, as in: Mana you pergi?

When the Palace of Justice was completed, authorities realized they had a major problem. If they call it by its proper name, ‘Istana Keadilan’, in Malay they would have it inevitably associated with Anwar Ibrahim’s Keadilan opposition party.

Again Manglish came to the rescue and it is now referred to, in English and Malay, as the Palace of Justice.

As in Malay papers writing, “Perdana Menteri telah melawat Palace of Justice dan berjumpa dengan Ketua Hakim.”

Another really funny thing about our angkasawan adventure is that no one has quite picked up the fact that DAP’s logo is the rocket. Had the same people who decided that we should say Angkasawan in English and Palace of Justice in Malay realized that early enough, we might have saved RM25 million just so the DAP does not take the opportunity to say that their rocket sent a Malaysian into space!

Update

 Here’s another funny posting I came acroos

Just about everyone is championing a language. Unfortunately they are all happen to be different languages and that is causing a lot of problems. Must languages cause so much disunity and conflict or have we been approaching this issue from the wrong direction?

Malaysia, by the way, happens to be a frontline state in the battle between languages. On one side we hear, “I will die to preserve the Malay language!” while yet another group proclaims, “Chinese schools must be allowed to remain because we must preserve our mother language!”

This language thing keeps haunting us. Although Malaysians are experiencing a particularly scary version of this ghost; it’s the same all over the world.

Read more

The most popular response these days to anything are the words “Correct! Correct! Correct!”. I’ve been doing it too and it’s quite fun to see how many ‘Corrects’ I can say until the other person catches on.

Chances of the person not knowing the inside joke is slim – most people have hear of the so-called Lingam tapes where a prominent private lawyer appears to wield incredible power over the judiciary process.

Anyway, in case, you’ve been missing out on the fun if you can call it that; I’m sickened by the implications of the video, you can watch it on Youtube here and get the executive summary of the case on Jeff Ooi’s blog here.

Since the story broke a lot of people probably assuming that I am an expert on mobile phones have asked me if the video is genuine and what phone was used to capture this explosive video.

There’s also this letter in Malaysiakini asking for technical experts to help determine if the tape is genuine.

Well, I’m no expert but I may be able to contribute a little bit. Read on …

Read more

In 1988, under very similar circumstances to what’s happening today, the people of Burma rose up in protest against economic hardships and brutal rule. Scenes that are taking place in Burma today are remarkably similar to that famed but ultimately failed uprising. You can get the story here and here.

But there is one major difference between what happened then and now. Burma, under its military dictators, has always been a closed country. It was and still is difficult to get an entry visa unless of course you are one of the businessmen doing very lucrative business in that country. So when in 1988, protests started, there was very little media coverage because few if any journalists could cover the situation on the ground. More than 3000 people, some claim far more people died, died because the rest of the world could not look into Burma.

Not this time, however.

Thanks to modern communications and the latest gadgets, the junta leaders have failed to keep the eyes of the world away from Burma. Okay, like 1988 the generals have managed to keep the media away thus far. BBC reported a few days ago that their reporters were not being given visas to enter Burma. But this time round, the world is being given an unprecedented view of the latest atrocities that are taking place as the regime cracks down violently on the monks and other protesters. Unlike 1988, graphic images and heart rending reports have emerged within hours of events.

Citizen journalism, in its purest form, has kept a steady flow of images, videos and news flowing out of Burma. People have been using mobile phones and the internet to record and upload breaking news.

Over the years, as more and more dissidents fled the country, they had set up online news sites to keep the world informed of what is happening in Burma and also to keep their fellow citizens inside Burma informed of what’s really happening there.

It’s funny when you think of it. Mobile networks were probably set up in Burma with active partnerships with junta leaders. It’s an open secret that one can only do business in any dictatorship by cutting a deal with the regime leaders.

Now those same mobile and Internet networks are helping the people break the news embargo. The generals won’t be able to close the networks completely too. If they do that, most businesses there that have overseas dealings (read: their own companies) won’t be able to operate.

Update

The authorities have shut down Internet access and cut some phone lines. This has severely interrupted the flow of images and reports. Nevertheless, news is still flowing out in the form of phone calls.

And I’m betting that the generals won’t be able to keep the lid on the Internet for much longer. Business and the Internet is too closely interconnected for them to be able to keep it closed permanently.

Check out the sites below for the latest on the Burma situation.

www.mizzima.com

www.irrawaddy.org

Recently, I got to talking to a nice gentleman while I was out walking. He was a retired government servant and from what he told me, he was really doing a lot of wonderful social work.

He, his wife and his daughter too were involved in quite a few initiatives that were working to uplifting the status of the underprivileged.

All truly commendable and exemplary – except for one thing.

Every single activity was aimed towards people of one race which, not surprisingly, happened to be his own race.

After he left, I kept asking myself why people found it difficult to rise above racist beliefs and actions.

Could this gentleman not see that there were many underprivileged people from other races too?

He kept saying, “We must help our own race, there is no one else to help us.” Maybe he had become a racist without knowing it because that’s what he has been exposed too all these years in Malaysia.

He did get a bit uncomfortable when I managed to slip in the information that my wife was of another race.

Obviously, he’s not the first person I’ve met who thinks like this. I’ve had, and I’m sure you’ve all had the same experience. I’ve had quite a few people over the years telling me, “I stopped to help at the accident because I saw that the person knocked down was a [insert his own race here]”.

If we are ever going to do something about the problems we face in our country, we need to move away from being concerned about our own race and truly begin to see every Malaysian as a fellow brother and sister; even when we see the majority not doing it.

And I mean on every level. Be it education, economy or play.

If I was running this country, one of the first things I’d do would be to outlaw any organisation that has racial connotations in its name. No more soccer clubs for only one race, no more race based political parties, no more associations that promote only one race – I mean, there’s an Indian newsvendor association. Why? Is it because they have different issues from the Chinese and Malay newsvendors?

The nice thing is that I have been meeting more and more about people who have learnt to look beyond race. The best thing is that they come from, pardon me, all racial backgrounds – Malays, Chinese, Indians and all the other wonderful ethnic heritages that make up Malaysia.