What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow out of this stony rubbish?
“Believe nothing because it is written in books. Believe nothing because wise men say it is so. Believe nothing because it is religious doctrine. Believe it only because you yourself know it to be true. ” Buddha
Google Trends is a service Google provides where you can see some interesting statistics on topics that have been searched on Google over time.
Spurred by a post I saw elsewhere on the web I tried out some ‘trend-spotting’ of my own. Interestingly, the country which searches for topics related to ‘sex‘ the most is Pakistan. India comes in at number three and Indonesia at number six. Out of the top ten, six are Muslim majority nations. And the number one city in the list is Bangalore. When it comes to searching about ‘god‘ Philippines comes out on top although the rest of the list is dominated by cities and countries of the developed Western world. The small city state of Singapore is at number five beating the populous nations of India (sixth) and Indonesia (seventh). But funnily enough Philippines also takes the top spot when it comes to searching for ‘atheism‘. The rest of the list is entirely dominated by Western nations with India being the only exception at number nine.
The fact that India features on almost all the trend lists I tried out may have something to do with its large and young population who make up for the world’s third largest in number of Internet users. (China, the largest, of course doesn’t feature in these lists for various reasons!)
If you notice I have refrained from drawing any inferences from these statistics and am merely presenting what I saw. You can draw your own conclusions and try out more keywords at the Google Trends site. And for a perspective on these trends please do also see this chart of the world’s top 20 countries in terms of number of Internet users.
Few people who are heterosexual can fully understand what it means to be gay and why homophobia exercises us so much.
To be gay is to grow up and live in a cage made of people’s put-downs, ignorant labels, derisive jokes, outright ranting and explicit laws. We see exclusions everywhere we look – in family traditions, employee benefits, in army service, in job promotion. We see hate scrawled everywhere – on posting boards, religious sermons, even in parents’ letters to far-off sons and daughters.
We hear silence when the censors have flicked the switch. Silence again when, even when our parents know we’re gay, they don’t have a good word to say about it. And more silence when we see so many others in our city who are clearly homosexual gag themselves for fear of exposure. But worst of all, we too often hear silence from our own lips, surrendering away our very own dignity.
The cage often looks inescapable. And we wonder sometimes if it may be wiser to just bear it all to our dying day, and take our fears, frustrations and futile hopes with us to our graves.
But some of us can’t do that. I can’t. If I did, all my parents’ and teachers’ efforts would have been in vain. I can do them no greater honour than to keep speaking about humanity over hypocrisy, honesty over hype.
…don’t worry Mustafa. Thus went a song, composed by Oscar-winning A. R. Rahman from a Tamil movie that was extremely popular when I went to college in Tamil Nadu. But there’s a far more renowned Mustafa in Singapore. It is Singapore’s only 24/7/365 shopping destination. And is something of a legend. If you find that incredible, here’s what Lonely Planet says about it,
A Singapore legend, as much cultural rite of passage as shopping experience, Mustafa’s narrow aisles and tiny nooks have everything from electronics, clothing, toiletries, tacky clothes (lurid Bollywood shirts always make great presents), cheap DVDs, gold, money changers, a supermarket (it’s the place to stock up on Indian spices and pickles) and sometimes half the population of Singapore.
All Indians who have ever lived, visited, transited in or through Singapore will probably recall with moist eyes this absoulte shopping heaven. Also for Indians living in Singapore, this is the place to find the Amul milk or the SRK DVD or the Cinthol soap that you can’t live without!
But, truth be told, it is nothing like heaven – it resembles the ultimate retailer’s nightmare – narrow aisles, stocked high and precariously with goods on both sides – if you so much as stop to look at some merchandise on such an aisle, you are going to hold up the traffic until Changi (that’s where the airport is)! But price-wise they are reasonable, variety-wise they are unbeatable and hours-wise they are ‘uncloseable’! So business is good!
Mustafa has an interesting history though. Some salient points gleaned from here and here are:
Mohamed Mustafa arrived in Muar, Malaysia in 1950 from Jaunpur, Uttar Pradesh in India. In 1952, he moved to Singapore.
He sold tea and snacks from a push-cart along with his brother, Samsuddin.
In 1956, Mustaq Ahmad, then aged six, joined his father in Singapore, after the death of his mother in India.
Mustaq started helping his father with the business and soon started on his own next to his father’s stall, selling handkerchiefs at fixed prices bought with his own pocket money. (I had read somewhere else that this was the point when he developed his business philosophy of modest profit margins but fixed prices – he just didn’t believe in the concept of bargaining!)
Mohamed Mustafa, inspired by his son’s business acumen switched from his tea and snacks business to selling clothes.
In 1971, Mustaq expanded the family business, setting up a small 500 sq ft shop and the company Mohamed Mustafa & Samsuddin Co. Pte. Ltd. came into being.
On the debate on foreign talent, Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong in his National Day Rally speech of 2006 said, “You get the right foreigner here, he creates thousands of jobs for Singaporeans, like Mr Mustaq and you need to get more people like him.”
He became a Singaporean citizen in 1991.
Here’s a video titled ‘A Night Trip to Mustafa Center, Singapore’ from McSilly’s Adventures, (with a very appropriate accompanying soundtrack!), to give you a feel of the place!
And here‘s a comprehensive Mustafa Survival Guide!
There’s a song stuck in my head and for once I don’t want it out…
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“Yes, ‘n’ how many years can some people exist Before they’re allowed to be free?”
Last evening went to the screening of Burma VJ – a very well-made, taut and engrossing documentary which focuses on the undercover reporters in Burma working under great personal threat to bring the images of brutality in their country to the world, the backdrop being last year’s protests that started with the monks, on behalf of the people, and soon became a popular uprising. Though sometimes a subject as strong as this eclipses the film-making, the director Anders Østergaard adds his powerful story-telling technique that resonates with the story to give us an end-product that is touching as well as thrilling. You feel the anticipation and anxieties of the reporters in a very real sense – I had goose-bumps! And you are also saddened at the inevitable end which is best summarised in the words of the narrator, Joshua, one of the reporters himself, (though he is talking about the ‘88 uprising), “So many people died for nothing”.
A highlight of the evening was a video conference with the director at the end of the screening. Amidst the inescapable inane questions from people out to prove their intellectual superiority, there were a few poignant moments. One was a Burmese man living in Singapore who got up to thank the director on behalf of his people. The moment attained greater significance upon personal reflection actually. Living in the comforts of Singapore, if I had to watch such brutality on familiar streets and avenues of my birthplace committed upon my own people, who were not as lucky as me to have escaped, I can very well imagine the sickness I would have felt at the bottom of my stomach. The other special moment was when the director, in answer to a question on how we could contribute, remarked that in a way we are already contributing by keeping the issue alive in the collective memory and conscience of the people of the world. Do not forget Burma and its people. Do not forget Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.
(In a humorous aside, the MC last evening was something of a dud, and posed the most number of questions to the director and most of them of the pseudo-intellectual variety. During one of his questions, I forget which one, he started by saying “Living in a free country such as Denmark or Singapore…”. And the whole audience burst into spontaneous laughter! I have no idea why! Wink wink!)
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“Yes, ‘n’ how many deaths will it take till he knows That too many people have died?”
Bomb blasts in Jakarta – one of my favourite cities in the world, if I ignore the legendary traffic jams of course!
JW Marriott – Just next to the hotel and part of the same complex, are the residential apartments Sailendra, which was the address of my boss and her partner, two of my favourite people in Jakarta.
Ritz Carlton – One of my best friends in Jakarta, an amazingly talented pianist, whose website I maintain, used to be a regular performer in the lounge bar there and I do not even remember the number of times I have relaxed to her music sitting in spacious, comfortable couches, after a particularly difficult day at work.
The familiarity of these places which were attacked today probably stirs up the mind in this manner, a mind which is otherwise numb to violence by now. In a similar manner as when Bombay trains were bombed – trains which I have taken home almost every evening for five years – or people were gunned down like cattle at Victoria Terminus – a station that has witnessed many sad farewells and warm welcomes, including a few where I was a player.
But the recurring images in my mind are that of the friendly, helpful and always-smiling Indonesians working at these places – a few of them probably the sole bread-earners of their families. So will the suicide bombers, martyrs in the cause of Islam, reach heaven while thrusting these families, fellow Muslims, to hell on earth? Will some Muslim friend of mine answer me that? Please…
Bali, Bombay, Jakarta, London, Madrid, New Delhi, New York – How many deaths will it take?
This post was triggered by a couple of things. First, I was reading a nice guide the other day about buying stuff on Amazon and then getting them shipped to Singapore. Second, after I started serving Amazon ads, a friend asked whether it isn’t a bit pointless since most of the people who would pay a visit to The Waste Land would be from a non-Amazon country. Of course I would like to counter that by saying The Waste Land has a global audience! But who am I fooling?! So I suppose it is better instead to espouse the benefits of buying from Amazon even in a non-Amazon country!
Jokes apart, I am a serious Amazon fan and I have been buying CDs/DVDs/books from them for at least the last couple of years. And I truly believe there are definite advantages some times. Let me plagiarize from the guide I spoke of above, adding my own insights, to explain to you what they are!
Second is their customer service. Once I had ordered a few audio CDs and after waiting for double the average shipping time, when my shipment still did not arrive, I wrote to them. They immediately sent me the whole set again, no questions asked! (I ended up receiving two sets though!) They also have excellent return and refund policies in case you are not satisfied with your purchase.
Finally, believe it or not, it actually works out cheaper sometimes to buy on Amazon, even after taking into account the shipping charges. If you are buying a few titles together, you can get even lower shipping costs per item. The logic is simple, you walk into the CD/DVD/book store in your city – half the Western titles there are imported anyways plus the store puts in their operating costs and hefty margins. So do the math!
And of course you can do it all from the comfort of your home or office! So check out my Amazon recommendations or the Amazon ads and start buying through clicks on this page! Come on people, the charity “Keeping Suman drunk” needs your support!
…and he has an Economic Stimulus Package for Singaporeans!
Could not believe my eyes when I saw this at a local mall today. I was about to walk away shaking my head and clicking my tongue, when it suddenly occurred to me to record this for posterity!
Having stayed in South-east Asia for over 4 years now I have begun to get a little pessimistic about democracy vis-a-vis development, especially in this region. Can democracy lift these people out of poverty, bring development, progress? My answer has alarmingly started vacillating towards a ‘No’ sometimes.
A long long time ago they had kings and queens (Thailand still does and also Malaysia, sort of). The fate of the people depended on the character of the ruler – a benevolent one brought progress, a cruel one brought hardships.
Then came the colonialists (with the exception of Thailand) and the status quo was maintained. Reasons why Malaysia and Singapore are far better off than Indonesia or Cambodia could probably in some small measure be attributed to them being ruled by the British whose innate sense of justice made them a far more benevolent colonial power than say the Dutch or the French.
Then came freedom and with it dictatorships – Sukarno & Suharto, Mahathir, Marcos, Lee Kuan Yew are all at the top of the list of 20th century dictators. Some of them functioned under a kind of pseudo-democracy where everything was stage-managed to make sure they were returned to power term after term with overwhelming majorities. But what set them apart from other infamous dictators, especially in the eyes of the West was that some of them embraced capitalism and free-market economics with gusto. As a result they got very rich and so did their extended families and friends but also some development was achieved. Nowhere is it as true as in Indonesia perhaps. Soeharto’s crony capitalism is something so awe-inspiring in a negative sense that I have been planning to write about it for some time. Lee Kuan Yew was probably an exception in that he did not get filthy, stinking rich to attract attention – he did well but kept within limits.
But the development was easy because there were no voices of protest. A toll road had to be built – no problems of demonstrations by people whose homes would be bull-dozed without adequate compensation. And with the media well-controlled those voices were perhaps too easily muted anyway.
But then came democracy, at least in Indonesia and Thailand. Though there is still many a rough edge, but Indonesia has largely a well-functioning democracy in place as did Thailand probably, before the military coup that ousted Thaksin. But the problem with democracy is that though it gives people a voice – but the loudest one which drowns out the rest may not always be the most reasonable; though it gives people opportunities – but they are prone to be grabbed by the haves more than the have-nots. So it comes to pass that the have-nots are not any better off than before. And with development slowing down due to protests which are louder and more powerful than in an authoritarian system, people soon start reminiscing about the good old days under a dictator! Believe me, I see it happening around me every day. It comes as no surprise then that even the Vice-president (Jusuf Kalla) of a democratically elected government (Indonesia) talks about democracy being only the means to an end and can be manipulated if the ends are not being met. And manipulation of democracy is what their predecessors had been doing all along! So is it just a matter of time before they slip back to dictatorships?
But ‘democratically’ elected dictators in Singapore and Malaysia have been more successful and there has been no real hunger for democracy in the populace of these two countries. In Malaysia the first rumblings of discontent amongst the minorities of Indian origin have started surfacing. But in Singapore there is no significant dissent, no loud voices of protest, yet. The reason is probably that Singapore has enjoyed a benevolent dictator at the helm who, since Lee Kuan Yew gave up office, has been carefully chosen. But the system survives on the personal integrity of one man. And if the maxim ‘Power corrupts’ ever manifests itself in Singapore, are there enough checks and balances in the system to prevent the country from sliding into chaos? This is a question I have asked quite a few Singaporeans. The answers have been mostly evasive which probably points to a certain fear inside that this could happen as history has too often proved.
So it seems that a benevolent dictator is the only real solution if you want to see development, fraught as it is with the danger of absolutely no system to reign in one whom power starts to corrupt. And that seems too much to leave to fate. I remember a time back in India when I entered my late teens and with it was on the way to become a part of the Great Indian Election where a billion people vote to chose their rulers in what is apparently the greatest exercise of choice and free will on this planet. (I say ‘apparently’, since the aberrations in the system are numerous.) This was before India became the ‘Fastest Growing Democracy’ that it touts itself to be. So things did not look as good as it does now and Indian politics was as nauseating as it is now. A few friends would often discuss whether we do really have a choice when we vote, whether choosing between many crooks is really an exercise that we were willing to undertake in the name of democracy. And we all ended up agreeing that what India needed was a benevolent dictator (the name of Kemal Ataturk was uttered frequently). But it took many years for that youthful idealism to fade and the realization to sink in of what the absence of checks and balances could result in.
So the answer to whether democracy will survive in South East Asia is a complicated and complex one. It is made more difficult by the absence of precedents in history. Democracy, in its present form is very new to the world. And even more recent in these parts of the world. Even the US of A, the torch bearer of democracy, took almost 200 years to get to where it is now, to iron out the imperfections in its systems, to make democracy work. And here we are trying to write-off democracy only after a decade or so. But Lee Kuan Yew says that Asians are not suited for a Western style democracy, that they needed a form that is suitable for them. And in this lies another issue – what works for the West might not work for the East. So who can tell whether even after 200 years we will see a mature democracy in an Asian country? Like I said, there is no historical precedent. But clearly the alternatives are no real alternatives – it is too much to stake on the whims and fancies of one man or a group of men who have no accountability. Democracy, warts and all, is still the most civilized, the most humane, the most rational, the most safe form of government known to man. It might take years, it might take decades, but we have to give it a chance. We have to make it work.
