Athena

I would like to share an unfortunate incident during a recent holiday in Langkawi. I was out with my older son, we checked into Langkawi Beach Resort which is a five-minute drive away from the airport. The resort was like any other and we did not sense anything amiss.
On the next morning after i had checked in, my room was broken into while me and my son were still sleeping at 5.13 am in the morning. I was woken up by lights in the room and i saw an intruder but i could not twitch a muscle to do anything about it. My friends say it could have been ' pukau' and i cant help but admit it could be the reason. I saw the intruder walk about in the room ransacking and he walked through the front door of my room. He had known for sure that the resort has no CCTV and no security personnel on duty and this i sensed must be an inside job.
I lost all my cash, cards, personal documents and handphones. It was a wake-up call for me that the word ' careful' has no meaning at all these days. How careful can one be? I dont know. I was traumatised by the event. I was angry and frustrated that i could be a victim of such a scam and the hotel would not take responsibility.
My advise is when on holiday, keep cash stashed in more than one location. Dont carry cards and documents you may not need and dont stay on the ground floor of an open resort. More importantly, check the hotel security features before booking. Finally, never stay at Langkawi Beach Resort.

was flustered about two reports I read in the papers yesterday ( 11 June ) on a similar subject . The news about Kota Baru Municipal Council imposing restriction on what women should wear in recreation parks and the other on the ban on girls wear jeans to college in a state in Uttar Pradesh, India.

I am vexed, but not surprised that the PAS-run state government has gone for women’s clothes, after the slapstick on lipstick and heeled shoes. I laud Wanita MCA Datin Paduka Chew Mei Fun’s plucky statement criticizing this latest attempt to further thwart women’s freedom, or the little they have in the state.

She rightly pointed out that,“ … no one had the right to infringe on the way people dress whether for sports or work and even when resting at home”, and I totally agree.

We being Asians are brought up with the cultural values that define what is decent and what isn’t and going by this we should be given the liberty to be what we are. I am sure an average woman on the street would know when she had infringed on public decency without having the municipal council playing the schoolmaster.

Further from home, if we recall early this year there was an attack on girls at a certain pub in Mangalore, India by some activists and self-proclaimed guardians of religion and culture. Scores of female patrons in the pub were beaten and sexually molested by these champions of morality, a shameful irony.

Also in the news yesterday ( 11 June), we have colleges in Uttar Pradesh enforcing blanket ban on girls wearing jeans to colleges, supposedly as a crackdown on sexual harassment. This is like chopping off the entire hand to treat a cut on a finger.

I fail to understand why is the entire burden of maintaining culture and tradition always on women and not men, mostly in Asian cultures? Women have been an epitome of oppression and exploitation in the name of religion and culture practiced by the conservative male chauvinists and social patriarchs. Will we see any positive digression?

We are in living in cyber world today and we have far more important things to busy ourselves with than to be fussing over women’s clothing in the park and in colleges.

Sadly, save for Chew, the few women we have in power and position have chosen to be silent on this.

BHAVANI KRISHNA IYER
Petaling Jaya

THEY say the best things in life come free. Can freedom be one of them? But of late we are slammed with reprimands time and again that even basic freedom of expression comes not without a cost. I am confused and it has turned into fear and I have downgraded myself to being just an occasional blogger.

Freedom is a bottomless pit and the end is not seen but only imagined; the better your imagination, the better you enjoy this commodity.

Coming to personal freedom, do we realize how much of our net worth as a person is being compromised in the name of dos and don’ts that come dressed up as rules and regulations, at work place for example. In addition to these we also have the codes of conducts and ethics that everybody talks about but nobody is able to clearly define.

A friend who is lucky to be have a plump job complains that her freedom as a person is at stake. Her workplace dictates just about everything for her, from what time she has to hop out of bed, to what she wears to work and how she should conduct herself. This, she considers a severe encroachment into her privacy as person. I was all ears but I thought she was over-reacting.

I know of a friend who has discarded her stilettos for flats so that she could marathon her way to swipe in by 8 am or she is darned. She is also monitored on how many times she leaves the office for pees and poos and whatever else. The toilet happens to be outside and she has to swipe in an out to get to the toilet.

And then there is the most abused term called ‘office-attire’. No this and no that but only those that do not ‘provoke’ and ‘distract' other fellow workers are allowed. I, for one get provoked by attitudes more that clothes and so can we have people wear the right attitude to work?

My friend is distressed and I was careful not to add salt to her wound and so I went along. Yes, it can be troubling every morning when I have to decide on what to wear taking into mighty consideration that I am not a source of provocation and distraction, tough choice it is and a daily ordeal.

Another friend of mine thinks switching jobs is fashionable and she lives in that inflated pride and ego that she is in demand. She was telling me about how she had to subject her entire wardrobe for an overhaul in line with a memo from her new office. No more pants, no more short (even knee length) skirts. “I hated myself for the three years I was there as I appeared in work dressed in what might as well have been a pillow case with holes punched”, she fumed.

While it is recommended that employers should have a code of ethics which would include code of conduct and dressing, there are over-zealous HR personnel who stretch it too far. There are also employers who take complete control of their employers’ lives during office hours and beyond.

We have also come across companies which has clock in and clock out as a yardstick of performance. If you are, for example, 6 minutes late (with allowance of five minutes given as grace time) one is doomed. And you have five late-ins, for example, you will have a show-cause staring at you from your desk. For all anyone cares to know, it could probably be a female employee clocking in late as she had to pacify her wailing two-month baby before leaving for office or she could have been stuck behind a caterpillar making its way to work as well on the so-called highway.

Do we want quality of work output or quantity of time? Both would be ideal but can we have reasonable expectations? We instill fear in people, what we will have is far from commitment.

Can we have moderacy employed in our daily lives so that we can live out life and not merely exist fulfilling the scores of requirements, rules, regulation, blah blah blah. I end with a poem written by a great poet, thinker and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) and Asia’s first Nobel Laureate

Where the mind is without fear
and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been
broken up into fragments
by narrow domestic walls; ...
Where the clear stream of reason
has not lost its way into the
dreary desert sand of dead habit; ...
Into that heaven of freedom,
my Father, let my country awake.

Poor Karpal Singh had fallen off his wheelchari at the court in Kuantan and the NST found it fit to riducule his fall as if he had fallen from grace. My heart went out for Karpal who, despite his handicap is making himself useful to the profession as a lawyer and the nation as an MP. In fact the Govt should be laughting at themselves for having facilities which are not friendly to the handicapped, instead of throwing unsavoury words at him and hurting the sentiments of the physically challenged.
What an uncaring society we are breeding and living in.

I was in Genting Highlands recently and at the skyway cable car station there was a queue which was not too long. We were waiting for our turn to board the cable car when several times over some chinese-looking tourists shoved past us with no regard for the people before them. It went on and on and the people on duty at various stations at the sky way did not seem to notice this gross lack of curtesy. On enquiring I was told that they get a bunch of such tourists from mostly Taiwan and China who do not know what waiting even means.

I thought the workers should not let such tourists off easily. I was angry and wanted to tell off the guy who pushed past me to get into the gondola but Alas, how do i tell him ? They speak no English and this was the problems faced by the workers as well.

Next time around i thought i should give them a taste of their own medicine.

There was this talk floating in town last week that a certain employer would be win the Employer of the Year Award this year. I had a few friends who even thought it would be wise to put in an application to this employer for a possible employment. After all, it is not often we come across such caring employer. Buying a condo for over RM200K and standing as guarantor for a sports car loan are indeed exemplary deeds . All this for free or a fee we dont know but what if one's life is the cost of these ' favours'???

Girls these days are threading on risky ventures these days all for temporary bliss without knowing the hidden perils. If a single woman traps a married man for money and power, she must know and take responsibility of the consequences. If she has to pay for her misdeed with life, it would be too late to repent. We have women whose preoccupation these days seems to be serving married men and that becomes a salaried occupation. And married men we have would think nothing of having a side pillow. They say variety is the spice of life and all the more married men find this extra-marital engagements quite fulfilling.

So, in every instance of extra-marital affair, we must always remember that there is a willing giver and a willing taker. Why blame one and protect the other?

A day shy of International Women's Day, I was coaxed into watching this play by ST Bala titled Iruvar 2. I am not a regular play-goer but this time I thought why not and what a mistake it was.

The play started off with an aged couple exchanging warm words on the ocassion of their 35th wedding anniversary. I didnt think much of this till the play went on with other couples coming in to juxtapose the first couple. Every couple was heading for divorce and the chief issue is educated wife in high jobs. The men found such pursuit hot and were incapable of handling the situation. The men were still expecting women to be the maid in waiting at home and when this does not happen, the women are faulted. The first couple surpased three decades of marriage because the wife was a home make and she tolerated all the scoldings and beatings from the husband. She was the ideal wife as portrayed by Bala. The message was loud and clear that the verbal and physcial abuse must be tolerated by the wife as it is assumed that the husband beats her as he cares for her. Holy Shit !

While the play had excellent casting and dialogues, i was taken by shock at the sheer ignorance shown by the director ST Bala. With a play like corrupting the young mind ( especially that of boys), all the efforts by the various women's groups seeking emancipation and equal rights is down in the drains. ST Bala is at least 50 years behind time. He appears to me a very immatured man with chauvinistic ideas and ideals for women. I was distured with the message ST Bala was trying to relay to the masses and i would strongly oppose a play like going public.

The unfair and judgemental statements made on working and divorced women screams of chauvinism. The cruel part is these statements were made by the female casts. As one one main cast obsrved that divorced women are always viewed as second hand it would be impossible for such women to find genuine life partners was absurd and uncceptable by any standards.

ST Bala needs to grow up. I havent seen his other plays so I would not want to pass comments on his other works and neither would I want to stereotype him but Iruvar 2 needs reworking.

I had no doubts that The move Slumdog Millionaire would sweep a couple of Oscars and I was right. The eight categories under which the movie made the headlines is not surprising. Incidentally, I was watched the moview on DVD and I thought i will put in my two-sen worth here.

What makes the movie so exceptional? Is it the realism in the movie or the theme. I think it is a bit of both and the third factor is, loads of luck. The fact that it was an English moview made it all the more viewable. I have seen harsh realism in lots of other Indian movies and frankly this is no big deal but again, the moview reached a wider audience outside India.

I must say that i took offense of the title. Why must slums dwellers be referred to as dogs. It is grossly deragotary. Secondly, the showmaster who must at all times remain impartial was full of ridicule and cynicism? I dont understand why Anil Kapoor was presented in such bad light. Is this reality of reality shows?

The kids were great in their roles and the director deserves accolades for his fine casting. However, there were comments in bits and pieces in print and electronic media that the kids from the slums who were cast in the movie are still living the life of a slummer.

While on one hand we have the Indians rejoicing over the new found fame for Slumdog, there are industry epople who thought the movie was a 'pornogrpahy'of sort , showing the destitutes in bad light. I think , the movie capures reality. Behind all the huzz and buzz in the city of Mumbai and Calcutrra, we have slummers living the life of squalors and when has destitution ever been good?

Did i enjoy the movie? I suppose i did only after reading all the hype about the movie in the media. I was neither disappointed nor elated.

What madness is it in the silver state? They are running the state like running a teh tarik stall in the slums. I was talking to a friend of mine who has been a long time resident of Ipoh and words were hard to come by. This is typically the sentiments of the average people in the Perak.

The tit-for-tat is not doing any good for the state or the nation. Both BN and PR are going to the extremes. Where will all these end? As an ordinary citizen, I fear the worst.

The excessive show of power and greed is at the expense of the Rakyat. I see more by-elections coming ( on hindsight) and I dont know at what price.

I cant imagine how much money must have been thrown around so far but it is wasteful indulgence.

God save the nation - everyone( including the PM ) for himself and God for Everybody.

I have not seen the pictures and I have no regrets. What has happened to EW is a disaster brought by those in power and wanting to destroy her and her political future. I must say that i was pleased with the kind of support shown to EW by some, including some ministers. However, Albar's was disgusting and i am not the least surprised knowing him and the kind of stinking statements he makes in the Press on various issues.

Now, what i cant understand is the need for EW to quit. What she does in her room is a private matter. The pictures are nothing but an invasion of her privacy and people should just discard them and move on.

Perhaps EW has been too straight, she should have tried Lingam's 'looks like me, sounds like me' stuff and it would have been ok.

Gosh, whoever it is behind this dirty deed will one day pay for it. He must have a mother, a sister, wife and daughter in his life who will be the one through whom he will be made to pay.

To EW, all i can say is just move on. Be strong and May God Be With You