The Memoirs of War

I just get back from my short journey to down south, Singapore for some Christmas celebration observation last 26th December. The trip went very well, although there is nothing much to elaborate about Singapore since the familiarity with Malaysia, in landscape and other thing. Back in my shore and my senses was awaken by two shocking news: the passing of Yamtuan Besar Negeri Sembilan and the onslaught of Palestinians by Israelis latest bombing on Gaza.

During the 5 hours bus journey from Kuala Lumpur to Singapore and on the way back, I managed to read almost the whole book (except the epilogue) of my latest reading food, Dispatches from The Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters and Survivals by Anderson Cooper. While my emotion was touched, and my tears was flowing down my cheek, I just simply cannot tolerate war. Disasters is unpredictable (but some do) and you cannot do anything about it as it comes naturally, but war is clearly the definition of human craziness. I remember recalling the pictures of Pol Pot inhumanity in Cambodia during my primary school mission to Cambodia for some Muslim charity movement back in my school days. Being just nine years old kid, I was not ready for any barbaric torture to human being, ironically done by human. Reading Anderson Cooper's piece back on the bus, I realize I still not ready yet. And I believe everyone's out there as well.

Can you imagine the portrait of Palestinian kids and women in the midst of unstoppable bombings? Can you manage to live with that? The world has seen that terrorism is not the answer. People's dying out there. If the authority can trying their best to counter terrorism by preventing liquids on airplane, by doing nude check on airports and so many other ridiculous things, please stop the bombs on Palestinians. They deserve to live peacefully and happily like any other human race on Earth. The news reported that thousands have been killed, and more to come. What do you expect when you bombarded the city with tonnes of bombs and explosives, and people will stay safe?

Ironically, Israel starts to send medical supplies and the so-called helps to the people of Gaza with message sounds like 'Our bombs are not intended on public, but the terrorist'. Spare me some laugh. If the Hamas so-called terrorist is the main reason, then just point your focus to the suspected person. Why need the bombs and violence? If terrorism has any need to be countered by terrorism act, then I can see that this thing is going nowhere.

Dr.Mohd Asri has urge everyone around the world to stand your thoughts and reflect your ideas to stop the violence in Middle East. For God's sake, not just by being Muslim, but for everyone's right to live in this Mother Earth peacefully and happily, the bombing has to be stopped.

Life and How To Survive On It by Adrian Tan

I found this from one of my friend in her Facebook note and it totally move me inside out. I haven't heard any good and moving speeches for so long (except from Barack Obama or Tun Dr. Mahathir), so this one is one good motivational piece to think about.

This speech is by Adrian Tan, a Singaporean and a litigator, during Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University graduation ceremony. Read this until the end, relate it to your life and think.

It's going to be a bit lengthy but believe me it's a worth read.

Happy Friday y'all.

More info about Adrian Tan is here.

Life and How to Survive It

I must say thank you to the faculty and staff of the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information for inviting me to give your convocation address. It’s a wonderful honour and a privilege for me to speak here for ten minutes without fear of contradiction, defamation or retaliation. I say this as a Singaporean and more so as a husband.

My wife is a wonderful person and perfect in every way except one. She is the editor of a magazine. She corrects people for a living. She has honed her expert skills over a quarter of a century, mostly by practising at home during conversations between her and me.

On the other hand, I am a litigator. Essentially, I spend my day telling people how wrong they are. I make my living being disagreeable.

Nevertheless, there is perfect harmony in our matrimonial home. That is because when an editor and a litigator have an argument, the one who triumphs is always the wife.

And so I want to start by giving one piece of advice to the men: when you’ve already won her heart, you don’t need to win every argument.

Marriage is considered one milestone of life. Some of you may already be married. Some of you may never be married. Some of you will be married. Some of you will enjoy the experience so much, you will be married many, many times. Good for you.

The next big milestone in your life is today: your graduation. The end of education. You’re done learning.

You’ve probably been told the big lie that “Learning is a lifelong process” and that therefore you will continue studying and taking masters’ degrees and doctorates and professorships and so on. You know the sort of people who tell you that? Teachers. Don’t you think there is some measure of conflict of interest? They are in the business of learning, after all. Where would they be without you? They need you to be repeat customers.

The good news is that they’re wrong.

The bad news is that you don’t need further education because your entire life is over. It is gone. That may come as a shock to some of you. You’re in your teens or early twenties. People may tell you that you will live to be 70, 80, 90 years old. That is your life expectancy.

I love that term: life expectancy. We all understand the term to mean
the average life span of a group of people. But I’m here to talk about a bigger idea, which is what you expect from your life.

You may be very happy to know that Singapore is currently ranked as the country with the third highest life expectancy. We are behind Andorra and Japan, and tied with San Marino. It seems quite clear why people in those countries, and ours, live so long. We share one thing in common: our football teams are all hopeless. There’s very little danger of any of our citizens having their pulses raised by watching us play in the World Cup. Spectators are more likely to be lulled into a gentle and
restful nap.

Singaporeans have a life expectancy of 81.8 years. Singapore men live to an average of 79.21 years, while Singapore women live more than five years longer, probably to take into account the additional time they need to spend in the bathroom.

So here you are, in your twenties, thinking that you’ll have another 40 years to go. Four decades in which to live long and prosper.

Bad news. Read the papers. There are people dropping dead when they’re 50, 40, 30 years old. Or quite possibly just after finishing their convocation. They would be very disappointed that they didn’t meet their life expectancy.

I’m here to tell you this. Forget about your life expectancy.

After all, it’s calculated based on an average. And you never, ever want to expect being average.

Revisit those expectations. You might be looking forward to working, falling in love, marrying, raising a family. You are told that, as graduates, you should expect to find a job paying so much, where your hours are so much, where your responsibilities are so much.

That is what is expected of you. And if you live up to it, it will be an awful waste.

If you expect that, you will be limiting yourself. You will be living your life according to boundaries set by average people. I have nothing against average people. But no one should aspire to be them. And you don’t need years of education by the best minds in Singapore to prepare you to be average.

What you should prepare for is mess. Life’s a mess. You are not entitled to expect anything from it. Life is not fair. Everything does not balance out in the end. Life happens, and you have no control over it. Good and bad things happen to you day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment. Your degree is a poor armour against fate.

Don’t expect anything. Erase all life expectancies. Just live. Your life is over as of today. At this point in time, you have grown as tall as you will ever be, you are physically the fittest you will ever be in your entire life and you are probably looking the best that you will ever look. This is as good as it gets. It is all downhill from here. Or up. No one knows.

What does this mean for you? It is good that your life is over.

Since your life is over, you are free. Let me tell you the many wonderful things that you can do when you are free.

The most important is this: do not work.

Work is anything that you are compelled to do. By its very nature, it is undesirable.

Work kills. The Japanese have a term “Karoshi”, which means death from overwork. That's the most dramatic form of how work can kill. But it can also kill you in more subtle ways. If you work, then day by day, bit by bit, your soul is chipped away, disintegrating until there’s nothing left. A rock has been ground into sand and dust.

There's a common misconception that work is necessary. You will meet people working at miserable jobs. They tell you they are “making a living”. No, they’re not. They’re dying, frittering away their fast-extinguishing lives doing things which are, at best, meaningless and, at worst, harmful.

People will tell you that work ennobles you, that work lends you a certain dignity. Work makes you free. The slogan "Arbeit macht frei" was placed at the entrances to a number of Nazi concentration camps. Utter nonsense.

Do not waste the vast majority of your life doing something you hate so that you can spend the small remainder sliver of your life in modest comfort. You may never reach that end anyway.

Resist the temptation to get a job. Instead, play. Find something you enjoy doing. Do it. Over and over again. You will become good at it for two reasons: you like it, and you do it often. Soon, that will have value in itself.

I like arguing, and I love language. So, I became a litigator. I enjoy it and I would do it for free. If I didn't do that, I would've been in some other type of work that still involved writing fiction – probably a sports journalist.

So what should you do? You will find your own niche. I don’t imagine you will need to look very hard. By this time in your life, you will have a very good idea of what you will want to do. In fact, I’ll go further and say the ideal situation would be that you will not be able to stop yourself pursuing your passions. By this time you should know what your obsessions are. If you enjoy showing off your knowledge and feeling superior, you might become a teacher.

Find that pursuit that will energise you, consume you, become an obsession. Each day, you must rise with a restless enthusiasm. If you don’t, you are working.

Most of you will end up in activities which involve communication. To those of you I have a second message: be wary of the truth.

I’m not asking you to speak it, or write it, for there are times when it is dangerous or impossible to do those things. The truth has a great capacity to offend and injure, and you will find that the closer you are to someone, the more care you must take to disguise or even conceal the truth. Often, there is great virtue in being evasive, or equivocating. There is also great skill. Any child can blurt out the truth, without thought to the consequences. It takes great maturity to appreciate the value of silence.

In order to be wary of the truth, you must first know it. That requires great frankness to yourself. Never fool the person in the mirror.

I have told you that your life is over, that you should not work, and that you should avoid telling the truth. I now say this to you: be hated.

It's not as easy as it sounds. Do you know anyone who hates you? Yet every great figure who has contributed to the human race has been hated, not just by one person, but often by a great many.

That hatred is so strong it has caused those great figures to be shunned, abused, murdered and in one famous instance, nailed to a cross.

One does not have to be evil to be hated. In fact, it’s often the case that one is hated precisely because one is trying to do right by one’s own convictions. It is far too easy to be liked, one merely has to be accommodating and hold no strong convictions. Then one will gravitate towards the centre and settle into the average. That cannot be your role. There are a great many bad people in the world, and if you are not offending them, you must be bad yourself. Popularity is a sure sign that you are doing something wrong.

The other side of the coin is this: fall in love.

I didn't say “be loved”. That requires too much compromise. If one changes one's looks, personality and values, one can be loved by anyone.

Rather, I exhort you to love another human being. It may seem odd for me to tell you this. You may expect it to happen naturally, without deliberation. That is false. Modern society is anti-love. We’ve taken a microscope to everyone to bring out their flaws and shortcomings. It far easier to find a reason not to love someone, than otherwise. Rejection requires only one reason. Love requires complete acceptance. It is hard work – the only kind of work that I find palatable.

Loving someone has great benefits. There is admiration, learning, attraction and something which, for the want of a better word, we call happiness. In loving someone, we become inspired to better ourselves in every way. We learn the truth worthlessness of material things. We celebrate being human. Loving is good for the soul.

Loving someone is therefore very important, and it is also important to choose the right person. Despite popular culture, love doesn’t happen by chance, at first sight, across a crowded dance floor. It grows slowly, sinking roots first before branching and blossoming. It is not a silly weed, but a mighty tree that weathers every storm.

You will find, that when you have someone to love, that the face is less important than the brain, and the body is less important than the heart. You will also find that it is no great tragedy if your love is not reciprocated. You are not doing it to be loved back. Its value is to inspire you.

Finally, you will find that there is no half-measure when it comes to loving someone. You either don't, or you do with every cell in your body, completely and utterly, without reservation or apology. It consumes you, and you are reborn, all the better for it.

Don't work. Avoid telling the truth. Be hated. Love someone.

You're going to have a busy life. Thank goodness there's no life expectancy.

What Perfume Do You Wear, Mister?

I was surfing the web and browsing through some blogs and columns before my eyes settled down on one topics, the body odor or BO. Having the experience of riding the train to commute to work everyday, I must say that BO plays an important role in your self image.

One of my college mate, fQrl blog about BO and daily KL commuters life in his blog, which I found amusing and annoyingly true. Through out my observation on Malaysian men (from friends, family and acquaintances), there are few types of men when it comes to perfume:

1-The metrosexual type: Those who dare to invest in perfume, and look and smell good all the time, including after bed image. Gosh, do we have Beckham in our shores? The metros tend to have different type of perfumes, suits with different situation and function.

2-The homosexual type: While homosexuality and metrosexuality is categorized in two different entity (homo is sexually attracted to same sex, while metrosexual more towards image and well-groomed mens), but I can see both are relatable. The homos somehow I think is likely to experiment more in fragrances, as they can wear ladies perfumes to experiment with (which somehow I think the metros confined within mens fragrances, just my opinion).

3-The heterosexual type: I can see this category is subdivided into few others small groups of people. But most of them is either, not wearing perfume at all, not even a deodarant and minyak attar (this type of people who normally has BO and annoys fellow commuters and their friend without even realize it). On the other hand, there are people from this group who manages to stand out from the rest and at least use one type of perfume, from one specific brand and use it for the dear whole life. This type of men has potential to be metros, just they need sort of motivation (financially etc) to be so.

Ehem, I am better not putting myself under which category.

I was also stumbled across a site of Pheromons Institute, who sells human pheromons specifically to attracts mens or womens when you are using it. Okay, this is interesting. Attracts people just by natural odor, without you even know what kind of smell it is. Dare to give it a try?

Islamic Yoga

I was reading Rantings By Marina Mahathir, and I am so excited to see that this thing is actually existed in this world. All this while, we have been so offensive towards our own Majlis Fatwa, shutting our ears and pointing fingers, but as what I always said, never say no just yet.

Yes, Egypt does have Islamic version of yoga. Well, I do not specifically know what does Islamic version of yoga all about, but I guess it might change the philosophical side of Hinduism to more Islamic thoughts. For me, I am just interested in doing the pose, not the philosophical side of any kind of exercise (my Islamic faith alone would do, no need additional attributes of philosophy).

Since the yoga banned issue by Majlis Fatwa, I have received quite a few emails which I found a bit offensive. Most of them are just joke and prank email about 'What would Majlis Fatwa ban after yoga'. I am somehow feel a bit offended by this kind of so-called joke, it is not a joke for me after all. Even for yoga practitioner like me, it is very important that I am not against the fatwa or Majlis Fatwa itself. I am just feel that the exercise I have been practicing all this while is just in a physical form of exercise and I never chants or meditate in a Hinduism way, so I just keep doing it physically and not philosophically. Thus, I need to stress out that please respect Majlis Fatwa on whatever they decide and try to guide you, whether you are Muslim or not (especially fellow Muslims, obviously).

So what did I do? I read them at an glance and delete the email right away. If any of my friend or acquiantance read this post, please be informed that I do not want entertain any kind of similar email with that.

I need to continue studying, my exam is this Sunday, 7th December. Wish me luck, fellas.

40 Tips for Better Life

I know it has been too late to blog this piece out, because these are for 2008 (from what they say). But hey come on, better life is not specifically for 2008. It definitely can be applied for the dear of whole lifetime.

1. Take a 10-30 minute walk every day. And while you walk, smile. It is the ultimate anti-depressant.

2. Sit in silence for at least 10 minutes each day.

3. Buy a DVR and tape your late night shows and get more sleep.

4. When you wake up in the morning complete the following statement, ‘My purpose is to __________ today.’

5. Live with the 3 E’s — Energy, Enthusiasm, and Empathy.

6. Play more games and read more books than you did in 2007.

7. Make time to practice meditation, and prayer. They provide us with daily fuel for our busy lives.

8. Spend time with people over the age of 70 and under the age of 6.

9. Dream more while you are awake.

10. Eat more foods that grow on trees and plants and eat less food that is manufactured in plants.

11. Drink green tea and plenty of water. Eat blueberries, wild Alaskan salmon, broccoli, almonds & walnuts.

12. Try to make at least three people smile each day.

13. Clear clutter from your house, your car, your desk and let new and flowing energy into your life.

14. Don’t waste your precious energy on gossip, OR issues of the past, negative thoughts or things you cannot control. Instead invest your energy in the positive present moment.

15. Realize that life is a school and you are here to learn. Problems are simply part of the curriculum that appear and fade away like algebra class but the lessons you learn will last a lifetime.

16. Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a college kid with a maxed out charge card.

17. Smile and laugh more. It will keep the nagative blues away.

18. Life isn’t fair, but it’s still good.

19. Life is too short to waste time hating anyone.

20. Don’t take yourself so seriously. No one else does.

21. You don’t have to win every argument. Agree to disagree.

22. Make peace with your past so it won’t spoil the present.

23. Don’t compare your life to others’. You have no idea what their journey is all about.

24. No one is in charge of your happiness except you.

25. Frame every so-called disaster with these words: ‘In five years, will this matter?’

26. Forgive everyone for everything.

27. What other people think of you is none of your business.

28. Remember God heals everything.

29. However good or bad a situation is, it will change.

30. Your job won’t take care of you when you are sick. Your friends will. Stay in touch.

31. Get rid of anything that isn’t useful, beautiful or joyful.

32. Envy is a waste of time. You already have all you need.

33. The best is yet to come.

34. No matter how you feel, get up, dress up and show up.

35. Do the right thing!

36. Call your family often.

37. Each night before you go to bed complete the following statements: I am thankful for _______. Today I accomplished ____.

38. Remember that you are too blessed to be stressed.

39. Enjoy the ride. Remember this is not Disney World and you certainly don’t want a fast pass. You only have one ride through life so make the most of it and enjoy the ride.

40. Laugh when you can, apologize when you should, and let go of what you can’t change.

Some of the things sounds yoga-ish, but I strongly believe it is safe for us Muslims. Cheers for a better life, folks!