For the poor, the Millenium Development Goals are still too far

Eight years have passed since world leaders agreed on the Millennium Development Goals at the UN Millenium Summit.

Ironically, there are also eight areas that were and are to be targets for these goals:

1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
2. Achieve universal primary education
3. Promote gender equality and empower women
4. Reduce child mortality
5. Improve maternal health
6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases
7. Ensure environmental sustainability
8. Develop a global partnership for development

To make these goals a reality, it is the responsibility of the nations who pledged their commitment to these goals to make good their promises.

Yet in the current economic climate, the poor are suffering more than ever and governments are ever more reluctant to commit their resources to MDG. In these times of trial, it is even more crucial that the poor, the disenfranchised, the disadvantaged are given the attention and assistance they need.

But in all the sorrow, the injustice and evil in the world right now, it is easy to say: “What can one person do?”

It takes just one voice per citizen, as a collective, to remind and urge world leaders to honour their commitment to MDG.

So today, I’m blogging for poverty and the MDG. What about you?

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Waiting for God to answer

What do you say when someone tells you she has left her faith, because she had called upon God and He did not answer?

(To said friend who somehow always ends up the subject of my blogposts, I apologise and hope you don’t think I’m ‘attacking’ you in any way)

Theologically, whatever I am going to say will not make sense to either logic or theology. It’s probably closer to New Age than I’d like and hopefully, God will not have me skewered in hell for heresy. But here it is:

I believe that faith is its own gift, its own reward, and sometimes its own curse.

If God and all that He stands for is a lie, then I will say that it is a lie I will cling to.

Which goes against my own position on Truth – that truth is absolute and there is no ‘my truth’ or ‘your truth’.

The problem with faith, is that it cannot hang on proofs or signs. You believe in what is unseen, in what cannot be proven and what goes against all tenets of logic.

My friend’s atheist friend, whose discourse I find rather distasteful, is now being as intense as an overzealous missionary but on a different path – trying to convert her to absolute atheism.

To said friend: I care for you, and I care enough to say that your choices must be your own and your decisions on faith must be yours. It is not my business to attempt to ‘save’ you or move you to one path or another.

Proselytisers annoy me, no matter what faith they profess, because I believe in the concept of Grace. Whatever you say to sway me, will not influence my faith. Faith is something I either have, or don’t.

Faith in the unseen is the cornerstone of who I am. Perhaps it borders on the mystical, even. but though I may be sceptical about many things, I believe there is a God. A God who I know is there because I know He is, though I cannot prove that He is there. It is the way a child would know that he has parents, because they are there. That there is wind, because it blows on his face. I will not argue for or against it, I will not think or be objective on this one single point. I believe there is a God, and I will always believe that.

Yet faith is often tested, and sometimes it passes…and sometimes it doesn’t. I have seen people walk away from faith, or return to it because of calamities in their lives.

But I say this – to show grief, to petition God in times of trouble, to ask that question “My God, why have you forsaken me (when I need you the most) is human. It is our nature to doubt, to question, to ask God to show us He’s there.

And I think for many of us, there will come a time when we will ask, dear God, why? Why? And no one can give us a satisfactory answer.

In the end, it’s a choice. Do we still choose to believe, despite the absence of proofs? Or will we just stop believing?

“Oh My God”:
Oh my God, look around this place,
Your fingers reach around the bone,
you set the break and set the tone
For flights of grace, and future falls
In present pain all fools say, "Oh my God."

Oh my God, why are we so afraid?
we make it worse when we don’t bleed,
there is no cure for our disease.
Turn a phrase and rise again,
or fake your death and only tell your closest friends,
Oh My God.

Oh my God, can I complain?
You take away my firm belief and graft my soul upon your grief.
Weddings, boats, and alibis,
All drift away, and a mother cries…

Liars and fools, sons and failures, thieves will always say..
Lost and found, ailing wanderers, healers always say..
Whores and angels, men with problems, leavers always say..
Broken hearted, separated, orphans always say..
War creators, racial haters, preachers always say..
Distant fathers, fallen warriors, givers always say..
Pilgrim saints, lonely widows, users always say..
Fearful mothers, watchful doubters, Saviors always say..

Sometimes I can not forgive
and these days mercy cuts so deep,
If the world was how it should be, maybe I could get some sleep.
While I lay, I’d dream we’re better, scales were gone and faces lighter,
When we wake we hate our brother, we still move to hurt each other,

Sometimes I can close my eyes and all the fear the keeps me silent,
Falls below my heavy breathing, what makes me so badly bent?
We all have a chance to murder, we all have the need for wonder.
We still want to be reminded that the pain is worth the plunder.
Sometimes when I lose my grip, I wonder what to make of heaven,
All the times I thought to reach up, all the times I had to give up.

Babies underneath their beds, in hospitals that cannot treat them.
All the wounds that money causes, all the comforts of cathedrals,
All the cries of thirsty children, this is our inheritance,
All the rage of watching mothers, this is our greatest offense
Oh my God, Oh my God, Oh my God.

The terrible price of wanting it cheap

Now we’re all caught up in the scare of tainted milk products from China.

Oh, we point at unscrupulous officials and go on about thinking of the children.

But honestly, it’s partly our faults too.

We always want it cheap. We always want discounts, everything at the lowest prices we can get.

Because we refuse to pay fair prices for goods of quality, we end up with these rubbish manufacturers like Sanlu who churn out lots of milk products at the lowest, bargain-bin prices.

You get what you pay for, really.

Your children get sub-standard milk, we live in sub-standard housing, we have sub-standard Internet. Because we’re so used to cutting corners, to make more profits because see, see, we have to sell cheap.

China’s manufacturers are going to continue to make sub-standard products because, we, stupid penny-pinching morons, buy them.

And it fucking serves us right when our children die because instead of giving them what they deserve, we cut corners. Karma’s a bitch, isn’t she?

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Stumbling on secrets

Traversing the Internet on a whim (I am awesome at creative procrastination), I decided to Google my father’s name. Well, I found a few blogs detailing my family tree.

The last thing i honestly care about is my genealogy. Seriously.

But I’m a compulsive Web digger. After all, I boasted in university that “if it’s on the Web, I can find it.” So far I’ve lived up to that idle boast but now it’s no longer an achievement. The question now isn’t what’s on the Net, but what’s not.

I peer, I hunt, I slip and slide with Google’s algorithms and I find a few scattered accounts on various sites, his IC number and finally the jackpot – his blog.

Yes, my father has a ‘secret’ blog. Well, dad, you really shouldn’t have linked to it on your social networking site profile. It’s anonymous and it has links to quite a few other blogs including our ex-PM’s. Ah, my father is still Tun M’s man after all these years.

He doesn’t blog anything personal – it’s all politics and current affairs. There’s the odd photo here and there, commentaries on religion and a few links.

But I read this one post where he waxed about books and mentioned one that left a lasting impression on him, to the point he remembers where and when he read it decades ago.

And it just happens to be my favourite book…which I never knew my father had read.

Well, I guess I really am my father’s daughter, after all. 

Dad’s articulate and he even talks about how much he loves prose. It’s also disturbing that we share the same opinion of Anwar. Won’t say the exact words because I know someone will bloody Google it and find his blog. But if someone does find the URL, it’s not going to be me who leads them to it, Dad.

We’re so alike in a lot of ways, but despite us both being somewhat proficient with the written word, we’re horrible at saying what we mean to the other person in real-life. There’s always this awkwardness, this odd discomfort and the long, stony silences when I’m with him.

Maybe, just maybe, it’s because talking to each other is too much like talking to one’s self. And despite our rather introverted natures, we both love to talk…to other people.

I love my father. He’s my personal yardstick for integrity, the gold standard for morals. He’s everything you wish a politician was, but honestly could never be. A truly good man could not survive politics and all its Machiavellian manoeuvrings. And I hope one day, that at least people know my father was a good man who raised a good woman.

And so I keep hoping.

Sleep. I need it.

The day’s almost over, but I’ll still make mention of a certain person’s birthday: Suanie. Because she’s just awesome like that.

In other news, I borked my second blog and ended up sleeping at 2 a.m, fixing the bloody thing. But at least I slept through the night for a solid 5 hours…which really isn’t enough.

There are so many things I should be doing but God knows I just feel too godawfully tired to do any of them. Am attempting to do some schedule thingy to give my life more order, more direction, more stability…but my body isn’t co-operating.

Stomach: I’m hungry

Head: I hurt

Arms: Ow ow ow ow ow

Body as one: So this is how a corpse feels like.

Fatigue. I has it.

Different faces, different blogs

Mucked about a bit with GIMP, and thanks to this tutorial I have a fun sketch-copy of one of my photos. But I spent most of Saturday learning how widgets work in Movable Type and damn, if I wish there was better documentation. Poring through all the pages on MovableType.org just made my head hurt. I miss how easy it was to skin my pages with WordPress but I don’t miss the mountains of spam or how easy it was to bork something and lock myself out of my own WP install.

The rest of you WP users : be ye not so stupid as this one.

And the result of my figuring out where all my theme files and how widgets work? I now have a blogroll, some nifty badges as well as my Twitter feeds and Facebook profile.

Once I got my blog all shiny and pimped (as far as my mediocre web design skills allow), I felt there was still something left to do.

So I created another blog.

Another one, you say? But all the other ones died slow, painful deaths!

The rationale is that despite embracing my ‘finger in every pot’ personality, I think my blog’s nature is rather schizophrenic. I mean, everything’s here – the books I read, the movies I watch, my personal views, my political rants and all that rather drowns out everything else I’m into – like tech, gaming, machinima and other random pursuits of geekiness.

I guess I just feel frustrated that not everything I’m into gets enough airing in this blog so I decided to just move my geek rants over to geek.ernamahyuni.com. Since this experiment might just end up like my short-lived Aggromonkey,com, I decided not to get another URL as yet. So let’s see if I can keep maintaining two blogs (my LJ doesn’t count as that’s one’s hardly updated beyond the odd emo rant) as well as contributing to The Mag’s blog, and the Tech & iPhoneTouch sections at Blorge.com.

Not that I won’t geek out here on occasion. Like I might say something like this:

ZOMG Six Apart added me to their Twitter feed! O.O

True statement. But hey, not like that’s going to stop me from writing about MT. At this point, I think I’ve become quite the Movable Type evangelizer. I love their TypePad anti-spam plugin which makes Akismet look like a baby padlock next to a garrison of guns, make them BFGs who will smite all ye spammers…sorry, that was the caffeine talking.

Why bother with multiple blogs? Aren’t they a hassle?

I guess I just wanted to give all my sides a good airing. See, I took Irene with me to a buka puasa the other day (one of my colleagues couldn’t make it at the last minute) and she noted not once, but twice that she saw different sides of me.

First, she saw me playing all nice and diplomatic with the PR reps. “Ah, now I see your slick side.” I never realised I put on a different play-face for PR people. Is that true, David Lian?

Then she sat in on a rather involved discussion I was having with two MIMOS reps on the state of programming and IT education in the country. Irene never thought I was that informed and knowledgeable on IT syllabuses, joint programs between vendors and institutions of higher learning, market demand and the like. Which rather depressed me. Do most people assume I know little about the industry, how it works and what it needs?

Yeah, yeah, a pity party of one it turned out.

Rather than mope and carry on about people not knowing what I know or what I can do, why not just blog about what I care about? If I’ve passion enough to care, that should be plenty fuel for blog posts.

So off I go to post to my, you know, other blog.

Technorati Tags: Movable Type,WordPress,multiple blogs

So many ways to Make You Feel My Love

I’m a little tired of thinking about politics. Instead I’ll dig up covers of my favourite Bob Dylan song and possibly my favourite love song, period: Make You Feel My Love.

My favourite version is Adele’s:

When the rain is blowing in your face
And the whole world is on your case
I could offer you a warm embrace
To make you feel my love

When the evening shadows and the stars appear
And there is no one there to dry your tears
I could hold you for a million years
To make you feel my love

I know you haven’t made your mind up yet
But I would never do you wrong
I’ve known it from the moment that we met
No doubt in my mind where you belong

I’d go hungry, I’d go black and blue
I’d go crawling down the avenue
No, there’s nothing that I wouldn’t do
To make you feel my love

The storms are raging down the rolling sea
And down the highway of regret
The winds of change are blowing wild and free
You ain’t seen nothing like me yet

I could make you happy, make your dreams come true
Nothing that I wouldn’t do
Go to the ends of the earth for you
To make you feel my love
To make you feel my love

Should we dare hope?

He has the numbers. That’s great, but does Anwar have the names? Yet despite my misgivings the Kelana Jaya PKR rally for Malaysia day gave me something I haven’t had for my country in a long time – hope.

I’d called up Lainie earlier and she told me Suan was interested in going to the rally. And so to the rally we went.

We’d got lost on the way but managed to finally get there and see a large throng of people gradually filling up the field. By the time Anwar arrived, there was hardly any green left to stand on.

What heartened me was that the crowd was made up of people I’d never expect to attend something like this. Which meant pretty much everyone. From young to old, middle class to working class, and people of every colour. This was Malaysia as we imagined it’d be – diverse yet integrated, different yet united.

I don’t know if the change in government is going to happen tomorrow and I’m still somewhat worried about the ethics involved in such a political coup. But what I’m certain of is that I’m not alone in wanting something better for the country. That I’m not the only one fed up with the corruption, injustice, racial and economic divides and the overall feeling of powerlessness to affect change.

So even if change doesn’t come by today, I want to remember last night as a peep into a future that could happen. That we still have reason to believe and hope for a better Malaysia, that we will finally embrace true tolerance.

Happy Birthday, Malaysia.

Life and How to Survive It

Got this from Dina Zaman (I agree to most points in the speech except where he tells you not to tell the truth. Trust a litigator to say something like that.

Yesterday at 8:36pm

Adrian Tan’s Speech at NTU Law

_____________________________

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 ?C 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 co
mmunication. 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 It is 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

You capture the General, not the Private

Sharon had a point in the recent arrest of Sin Chew reporter, Tan Hoon Cheng – why arrest the reporter instead of grilling her editor?

Editors take full responsibility over their staff’s actions. They’re not meant to just sit in their ivory towers and order hapless writers and subs about.

It’s their job to take the blame, to answer for any mistakes in their publications, and also to shield their writers from those who would prevent them from doing their jobs.

Which is why I don’t miss being the print editor of The Mag anymore. I’m content being web editor, thanks very much. I no longer have to be the dartboard for every failing of the magazine or for my staff’s slip-ups.

Pak Samad’s words come to mind – he said before that journalists now are too middle-class, too far removed from ordinary people’s plights.

But Tan was brave enough to do her duty. I hope that this will perhaps spur our local media to remember their roots – to report the truth and to be the people’s voices.

The Star never really recovered from the last Operasi Lalang, instead proving to become a commercially successful but morally bankrupt publication. But really, no major newspaper should be partly or wholly owned by a political party. Instead of being a respectable newspaper, it is the equivalent of the MCA newsletter…gone commercial.

Though I have many friends working in the line, I refuse to buy local newspapers and have boycotted The Star for years now. Though I do peep at it online, I refuse to buy the print version. Maybe soon there will come a time where I can finally buy newspapers again.

Else I’ll just have to learn to read Chinese and subscribe to the Sin Chew Jit Poh.