March 2013
2 posts
normal service will be resumed shortly
Dear readers (or, hi Ma),
There’s a federal election coming up in Kuala Lumpur and anything that smells subversive has been shut down for the time being. I’ll continue to post columns once we’re up and running again.
Cheers,
H
enter the dragon
Malaysia, like many scions of the Commonwealth, likes its football. Unlike other well-behaved former colonies, however, Malaysia’s affection for and aspiration to this most British of institutions manifests itself with the haphazard zeal of a dog with a full bladder.
Territory could best be marked with a player in the Premier League, but Titus James Palani seems to have disappeared. Instead, we...
February 2013
2 posts
new year's fray
Spring Festival in Beijing is loud and quiet all at once. The fireworks start at 6 in the morning and don’t stop until – actually, I’m not sure if they stop at all, so that’s one more thing they have in common with the interminable Katy Perry confection.
It can be quite disconcerting at night, when you hear explosions of uncertain origin. The sounds reverberate off clusters of buildings tall and...
it is written
Our high school did this thing where kids were clumped into different groups for BM, English and mathematics based on their aptitude. I’m sure this was meant to be so the bright lights could shine on without suffering those whose aptitude merely flickered, but it sat about as well as a rhinoceros on a bicycle. Nevertheless, Introduction to Segregation had one unexpected benefit.
Shuffling seats...
January 2013
2 posts
the “D” is silent, the squibs are not
Irritation is the warmest of blankets, and no one should be denied the right to wrap themselves in it. Those who are unamused by Quentin Tarantino’s new joint, Django Unchained, are no exception. So you can understand the stance of director Spike Lee, who is refusing to watch the film on principle – here is a white man, one with a mouth as smart as it is loud, turning his camera on one of the...
arbitrary denominations of chronology
So it’s New Year’s Eve in Beijing, which has been enjoying the frosty kisses of snowfall on numerous occasions this past month. I have been very seriously assured by a very serious editor that it is the coldest winter the capital has endured in at least a decade, and it feels like it: Any breath outside that isn’t taken through the veil of a scarf feels like a hit of liquid nitrogen delivered...
December 2012
1 post
never again, for at least until tomorrow
The island state of Tasmania sits at the southernmost tip of Australia. It is home to vistas of retina-searing beauty, ongoing environmental brouhahas that gave rise to the world’s first Greens party, and a number of ancient penal colonies.
One of these, Port Arthur, is among Tasmania’s biggest tourist draws. It is sleepy and peaceful, the bones of old buildings in stately repose among vivid green...
November 2012
2 posts
the generation gab
Hipsters, hippies, hippopotami. Trying to squeeze a period’s subculture into an all-encompassing label is like trying to squeeze toothpaste back into a tube – it’s incredibly messy, and invariably unsuccessful.
Of course, that doesn’t stop people from trying, as evinced by this New York Times op-ed from earlier this month. In it, Christy Wampole asserts that the prevailing disease of our...
la cour des grands
In 1998, when I was busy pretending to study for the SPM examinations, my father came home one day and announced he had tickets to the World Cup. This caused mass delirium in the Raj household, the solitary exception being my brother, who decided that he was going to be too occupied with PMR to go to France.
Inspired by his sensible outlook, and demonstrating the foresight and sound judgment that...
October 2012
2 posts
on the enduring genius of Slam Dunk
There was a period in the late ’80s to the mid-’90s when the South-east Asian obsession with all things Japanese crystallised into something close to perfection: local reprints of manga. I cannot recall what I was studying in the lead-up to UPSR, but I cannot forget running down to the newsagent’s to buy the latest edition of Doraemon or Slam Dunk.
These were reprints of Japanese comics that...
paper dragons
It was very hot on Monday. Half a decade in Melbourne has taught me to enquire politely as to the weather, in the manner of one asking after the health of a mostly unloved aunt. “Does she still like chocolates? Great, I’ll bring an umbrella.”
Beijing, however, is charmingly stubborn in its resistance to this sort of scrutiny. Sure, you can go online and attempt to interpret anthropomorphic...
September 2012
3 posts
overcoming ouroboros
This isn’t a review of Looper.
This is a review of Looper: it’s fantastic. Go watch it.
***
This is an excuse to use spam as a verb, and to spam you with links. First is Rian Johnson’s Tumblr for the film. Next is Zachary Johnson’s lovely animated trailer and accompanying stills. Third is Film Crit Hulk’s delightful, sprawling, spoiler-free 27,000-word essay about the Looper gang at...
ogos 31
I am Assunta Hospital, where I came squalling into the world, where years later my mother would be held up at knifepoint while I staggered out after an asthma attack. I am Manila, where I grew up down the road from a dairy factory and developed a corresponding appetite that would take decades to accommodate spice. I am the holes on the beach in Queensland that my brother and I would dig to lie in...
August 2012
2 posts
on armstrongs
Cycling’s most frenetic chase is over, but there is no winner. Lance Armstrong’s decision to stop contesting the United States Anti-Doping Agency’s charges against him is somewhere between a loss for the athlete and a victory for the agency – there is an abundance of defiant posturing, an utter deficit of grace, another frayed thread in the sport’s tattered reputation.
Armstrong has the same...
the streisand amendment
The internet can be ugly, as anyone who has ever fallen foul of an anonymous comments board can attest. But no one really takes those ranting, venomous posts seriously, right? Wrong.
The cloak of invisibility easily available online is the root of a recent bit of fiddling with the Evidence Act, an amendment that seemed to prompt the airing of well-preserved arguments about privacy and free...
July 2012
2 posts
do yourself a favour and pack your bags
I’m moving again, for the fourth time in five years since arriving in Melbourne. This time it’s to the capital-E East, with the promise of adventure and a white Christmas. I shall miss this city, and the Yarra, the river that lazily divides it into cunningly named preserves of North and South. The former likes to pretend there is some sort of pioneer spirit attached to gentrification; the latter...
sleight of mind
True story – the only time I have been in Malaysia to vote, I registered, rocked up to the relevant primary school on voting day and handed in an empty ballot. Then I walked home, chest inflated with the pride at my small act of protest. I slept well that night.
I know. I want to slap me too.
In my defence, it was 2004, and I had a lot more hair and apparently a lot more faith in the electoral...
June 2012
1 post
and now for something completely different
It is little wonder that so many still casually divide the globe into creaky hegemonies of West and East; the USA is still riven by them, never mind the philosophical fault line of North and South, and what the USA does we tend to follow. I have never been to New York; the river of mongrel blood that flows in these veins has tributaries in Seattle and the state of Washington, overlooking the...
May 2012
3 posts
old adventures in public transportation
My life is buses. I wait for them in fierce heat and monsoon rain, ears pricking at the sound of their arrival. I run after them, yelling and waving. I sit in the long seat at their rear, where I can stretch my achy legs and stare out the grimy window, or into the yellowing pages of whichever novel I have deemed hardy enough for the rigours of travel. The buses are pink and red and yellow and...
could you be loved?
Last week, US President Barack Obama whispered those 10 little words that made the hearts of a great many people leap like salmon in fresh water: “I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.” You may agree. You may disagree. You may not care that my crush on Obama has now developed the ability to ambulate and reason independently, but I am now accepting donations for its university...
much assembly required
So a couple of weeks ago, the latest in a series of events that had been percolating for about six years took place. An aggregation of people, ordinary and extraordinary, stood up to oppressors and purveyors of injustice in a public place despite being told they could not do it. And the world watched, rapt.
I am speaking, of course, about The Avengers.
It’s hard to remember the last time I...
April 2012
3 posts
the privilege of the podium
I am not a Muslim woman. I worry about writing pieces like this, as an atheist with dangly bits; I do the same as a new resident of one of Melbourne’s most statistically whitewashed suburbs, commenting on goings-on in the country of my birth.
Perhaps Mona Eltahawy has similar concerns. The Egyptian-born writer has spent much time abroad; her piece in Foreign Policy magazine, Why Do They Hate...
there's no need for masks
This column was not published.
So the third edition of the Bersih rallies for free and fair elections has been scheduled for April 28 – we know the when, but not the where. Apparently Dataran Merdeka has not been gazetted as an area for peaceful gatherings; whoever wrote that into Home Minister Datuk Seri Hishamuddin Hussein’s speech has clearly never been there on a Friday night. Or a Saturday...
when i grow up
“Young adult” is one of my favourite oxymorons, right up there with “cautiously optimistic” and “authentic replica”. I’ve been addicted to young adult novels long before my body grew up, long before I knew it was a genre.
When I was 10 I smuggled one of Enid Blyton’s Mallory Towers books out of the school library under my shirt – not that I was stealing it, just that I was quite mortified when...
March 2012
2 posts
snatching attention
This past Friday, the debate between candidates for the position of Hong Kong’s chief executive got quite deliciously snippy. One candidate, Henry Tang, set the stage for what was to come by bowing primly to the audience before the debate – his way of apologising for providing Hong Kong’s satirists with much ammunition, including an affair and the illegal construction of a 2,400 square metre...
ban the ban
This column was not published.
***
It has been a productive period for bans, one that started off with matters reproductive. Peter Mayle’s Where Did I Come From? was removed from shelves last month, and an international artiste wasn’t allowed to perform either. You may have read something about the latter, but I have been asked not to write about it so I’ll be good.
What I will say is that it...
February 2012
1 post
public relations
In the past couple of weeks, that old adage about bad publicity has taken a bit of a battering. And – if I don’t say it, someone else will – so did a customer of Kentucky Fried Chicken, now so consumed by branding that it trades under its acronym.
While we’re on the subject of consumption, I don’t know what is most depressing about this fast-food fracas. KFC is quite the cash cow (or chicken,...
January 2012
2 posts
do the evolution
It was the story that made a nation refresh their browsers in disbelief – the acquittal of Anwar Ibrahim.
The list of events, epithets and connotations attached to the opposition leader’s name over the years is so long that you could print it out and give it to him to wear in an approximation of a turban. Even so, “innocent” was a new addition to that unwieldy headgear, particularly when the...
fangs for the memories
There was a truly momentous event over the holiday season, something this column couldn’t cover because we didn’t have a Boxing Day edition – a battle royale between William Shatner and Carrie Fisher. Okay, more a duel of YouTube videos, but when Captain Kirk and Princess Leia put up their prerecorded dukes, the internet pays attention.
Wars between Star Trek and Star Wars fans are fought with the...
December 2011
1 post
bone idols
Sócrates died last week. Not the Greek philosopher, but the Brazilian footballer who shared his name and some of his rapacious intellect, combining a cool thoughtfulness on the pitch with a radical fire off it.
The many eulogies to have cropped up since his passing made mention of Sócrates’ drinking, the thirst which claimed his life – but not too much mention. This is hardly the first time great...
November 2011
2 posts
just for one day
Here are three things guaranteed to make football fans of a certain vintage feel the weight of years. First, in April last year, Portsmouth’s Lenny Sowah became the first player born after the 1992 formation of the English Premier League to start a match in the competition.
Second: in July 1994, after scoring a goal against the Netherlands in the semi-final of that year’s World Cup, the Brazilian...
underground industry
The trouble with worrying about the environment is an inability to grasp chronological scale. To illustrate, I’d like to bring in a guest speaker, Mr. Arthur C. Clarke:
“Few governments had ever looked more than an election ahead, few individuals beyond the lifetimes of their grandchildren. And, anyway, the astronomers might be wrong … Even if humanity was under sentence of death, the date of...
October 2011
3 posts
it's like being in a foreign country
I’d like to tell the lady at the Chinese embassy, the one who finally gave me a visa on my fifth trip and then sweetly told me that there would be “consequences” were I to work while I was in the country, that not one word of this column was written abroad. So there.
This week’s title is an immortal line from the footballer Ian Rush, interviewed after leaving Liverpool for Juventus of Turin. But...
notes from a smaller island
I love landing on islands. This is the language of privilege, in these days of smooth flights and economic turbulence, but I do – especially at night, when the ocean is black and vast. I peer out of windows to see the first faint pinpricks of light, ships and boats of various sizes. Then fire seems to erupt from water, a city or an airport or an aggregation of buildings blazing into sight. In Hong...
we need to talk
Last week, Andrew Bolt lost a court case, and Australia is still reeling. Bolt is a columnist for the Herald Sun, a right-leaning tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited. He writes a blog with a large readership; there are justifiable claims for him to be Australia’s most-read columnist.
In 2009, Bolt wrote two posts that questioned the “Aboriginality” of several prominent fair-skinned...
September 2011
2 posts
drawing the line – in sand, blood or newsprint
Rupert Murdoch casts a long shadow. So long, in fact, that when he started wobbling atop his pedestal, many observers must have felt they were experiencing a rather fickle eclipse.
A similar majority probably weren’t surprised by the phone-hacking revelations. For decades, it was understood – outside the flak jacket surrounding News Corp – that Murdoch didn’t just carve media and politics into...
fire and water
The blaze in London has died down, but not in the minds of its citizens. Not before the flames licked other cities. And now we sift through the ashes, trying to divine reason from ruin.
It is easy and instinctive to denounce the rioting. More difficult, however, are the efforts to understand it, to gain an insight into the minds of the people laying seemingly wanton waste to their...
