The best husband

I've been meaning to post something else today but at the special request of regular reader Hanitha, here's another interlude (credit to kyra_ayu @ cari.com.my).

Suami Terbaik

Sekumpulan lelaki berada di bilik persalinan di salah sebuah kelab eklusif lagi mewah di pusat bandar, setelah keluar dari gym. Tiba-tiba kedengaran deringan handphone di penjuru bilik tersebut. Seorang lelaki menjawap panggilan itu dan terjadilah perbualan seperti berikut :

"Hello?"
"Abang, nie sayang nie."
"Emmm... "
"Abang masih ada di kelab lagi ke?"
"Iya."
“Sayang sekarang nie berada di shopping complex dua block dari kelab abang tu. Sayang ada nampak kain sutera terbaru. Cantik bang. Boleh ke sayang beli?"
"Berapa harganya?"
"Cuma RM1,500.00 aje.."
"Okay, belilah kalau memang awak dah suka sangat."
"Ahhh thanks bang. Dan tadi sebelum datang sini sayang ada singgah di Cycle & Carriage dan tengok Mercedes model terbaru 2008. Sayang suka kat satu model tu. Dan sayang dah bincang dengan jurujualnya dan dia setuju nak bagi good price . . lagipun elok juga kita tukarkan dengan BMW yang kita beli tahun lepas tu. "
"Berapa harga yang dia bagi?"
"Cuma RM280,000 ..."
"Okay, tapi pastikan harga tu dah on the road."
"Great! Before we hang up, ada satu perkara lagi..."
"Apa?"
"Abang jangan terkejut pulak, sayang dah semak akaun bank abang dan.... pagi tadi sayang singgah di pejabat ejen hartanah dan sayang dapat tau rumah yang kita tengok tahun lepas tu... sekarang nie untuk dijual. Abang ingat tak? Rumah yang ada swimming pool bentuk love tu, ada taman orkid kat belakang, berhadapan dengan pantai tu. . cantik kan bang. . "
"Berapa harga yang mereka minta?"
"Cuma RM740,000... Okay kan bang? Sayang tengok dalam akaun kita, boleh cover harga tu. . ."
"Eloklah kalau macam tu, confirm cepat sebelum orang lain beli, tapi cuba dapatkan harga RM700,000. Okay?"
"Okay, abang sayang, terima kasih bang, kita jumpa malam nanti ye!! I love you !!!"
"Bye... I love you too..."

Lelaki itu berhenti bercakap, menutup flap handphone . . sambil mengangkat tangan yang memegang handphone tu dan bertanya pada yang ada dalam bilik tersebut :

"ADA SESIAPA TAHU KE HANDPHONE NIE SIAPA PUNYA? "

Hitting the century mark

This is my 100th post! For today, I thought I'd just spend some time looking back at how this blog has come along. A nice way to spend a lazy Sunday afternoon...

I'm borrowing some ideas from blogger-friend Versedanggerik in this write-up. Boleh kan Verse?

Actually, my first foray in blogging started much earlier, some time around 2001. But it was short-lived... in fact, it had a single opening post (me ranting about my job, the typical overwork and underpaid stuff). The weblog didn't survive because the laptop I was using had to be returned when I left the company. Blogging at home was out of the question because broadband connection for the general public was non-existent back then. Accessing the Internet on a dial-up connection is a real test of patience.

This particular blog came to existence in April this year. The first post was made on 8 April 2008. Seven months down the line, we reach the 100th mark. That works out to an average of just over 14 posts per month. Kira okay la tu...

While it has never been about quantity, I was nonetheless concerned about actually having worthwhile things to write about and share with other citizens of blogosphere. So far, the ideas have been coming in quite regularly... it's always the effort of typing it all out on the laptop that's holding things back. No doubt, some of my posts are just fillers or what I call `interludes' but generally, what I've written are from my own personal experience.

Anyway, here are some highlights :

First commenter - Saudara Mutalib Saifudin on 1st May 2008.
First blogroll link-back - The fiesty Fie The Elf.
First blogging award received - The talented Emila Yusof.
First Facebook friend also on Blogger - Nurie, living life in Riyadh.
First award citation - On 08.09.08 by Patricia, who lives in an English Cottage.
First fellow blogger I met in person - Versedanggerik, in Kuantan on 14 August 2008.

My most sincere apologies to other regular friends and occasional visitors whom I've failed to mention. There are so many of you... I am so honoured by the visits, comments and link-backs.

I reproduce here, part of what I posted previously as a response to the nomination from Pat :

I created this blog primarily as an avenue to sharpen my writing and story-telling skills. It's a very modest journal on personal experiences mostly. It also gives me the chance to meet other writers in blogosphere. Along the way, I get to be friends with readers, commenters and other fellow bloggers... and this is a good thing. Thanks to all of you for dropping by and having something to say about what I write. Most appreciated. I truly hope that we'll be able to meet in real life, one day.

I'll end this post with something that I hope would make you smile today. Remember last week when it was announced that a fatwa was going to be issued about yoga? Well... this one is about a fatwa too.

HARAM MENIKAHI GADIS SATU KAMPUNG

BERITA GEMPAR!!!!! HARAP-HARAP TENANGKAN PERASAAN SEBELUM MEMBACA LAPORAN INI, BAGI YANG TELAH TERLANJUR... APA NAK BUAT!!!!

Haram menikahi gadis satu kampung. JAKIM telah mengeluarkan fatwa baru. Setelah diadakan perbincangan dan diskusi di antara para pemimpin, JAKIM dan ahli ulama' memberikan fatwa pada tanggal 3 Oktober tahun 2008 :

"HARAM HUKUMNYA BAGI SEORANG MUSLIM LAKI-LAKI UNTUK MENIKAH DENGAN GADIS SEKAMPUNG"

Fatwa JAKIM ini telah menimbulkan perdebatan dan bantahan yang sangat sengit antara yang pro dan kontra. Bahkan banyak pihak yang menyatakan bahawa JAKIM telah mengambil keputusan yang tidak munasabah dan terburu-buru. Wartawan Berita Harian telah meminta pegawai kanan JAKIM untuk memberi ulasan yang mendalam sebab-sebab JAKIM mengeluarkan fatwa sedemikian. Inilah isi wawancara tersebut:

Wartawan: Bagaimana JAKIM boleh mengeluarkan fatwa haram untuk menikahi gadis sekampung?

Pegawai Kanan : Bagaimana tidak haram, sedangkan menikahi empat orang wanita sahaja sudah berat, apalagi satu kampung... ... ... .!!!

Hehehehehe... jgn marah ah... nanti kena jual, saya gurau je ... :-)

Have a good week everybody!

Interlude

Congratulations to Barack Obama on being elected as the 44th President of the United States of America. It took more than 200 years for Americans to effect a seemingly impossible change, but change they did. I hope that we Malaysians need not wait that long.

In the meantime, I leave you with this bit of trivia about Americans that would probably apply to us too...

Sporting Preference of the Workforce

In the United States, research was carried out to determine the sporting preferences of the workforce.

The sport of choice of the general workers and unskilled employees is basketball. The sport of choice of the technicians and supervisors is bowling. The professionals and executives prefer baseball.

The sport of choice of the top managers and CEOs is, of course, golf.

The conclusion of the research is :

The higher you are in the management hierarchy, the smaller your balls.

Image borrowed from Titleist website

Update 16 March 2022 : Removed the link in original golf ball pic.

School hours in Malaysia

Just a short post on serious stuff for today.

My youngest son is in the first year of secondary school. He's in the afternoon session. Occasionally, when it is convenient, I would pick him up from school on the way back from work.

Last week, while waiting for my son outside the school gates, I overheard a conversation between a parent and a school bus driver, lamenting about how late school ends. The afternoon session finishes at 6.45pm and given the early sunset time these days, most kids get home after dark. For schoolchildren taking public transport or the schoolbuses, they reach home at around 8pm to 9pm. Ideally, I heard the parent say, kids should be safe at home by sundown. As it is now, this is not quite possible for those in the afternoon session. If you consider our children in Sabah, where the sun sets earlier than in Peninsular, they are even more unfortunate.

I tend to agree with this comment. Schools should finish at around 5 or 5.30pm for the day, so that the children don't have to spend the maghrib hours still on the buses. For this to happen, Malaysia needs to implement a single-session system. To achieve this means building more schools.

If I were the Minister of Education, this is something I would aim to do, apart from making teaching an attractive profession by improving the incentives and benefits. Don't tell me our country doesn't have the money. Just today, the government announced an RM7 billion economic stimulus package.

It's never too expensive to invest in our young and future generation.

Update 16 March 2022 : No online links in this post so only minor changes done to correct some errors.

The Streets of London

As some of you may have noticed, I've recently updated my blogroll to include newly found friends in blogosphere. One of these is Kak Teh, whose Choc-a-Bloc Blog, has a large and loyal following. I'm one of those who regularly visit her blog but have never left any comment until last week.

Kak Teh is considered a veteran blogger, having kept a weblog since December 2004. She resides in London and her posts about life in that city and the UK, in general, are very interesting.

I've stayed in London before, as a student of course, but only for a short period of six months. But what a memorable six months it was. It was supposed to be the first year of my A-levels but I practically didn't study anything during that period. Not a good example, you might say, but that's just me... no need to hide it.

I first arrived in London sometime in January of 1980. Bloody freezing cold. I was part of a large group of students sent to the UK before our MCE results were out. While most of the students were sent to established colleges all over the UK (where other Malaysian students have studied before), a group of 13 including yours truly, were enrolled at a private college in Greenwich, London for the first time. The Malaysian Students Department (MSD) was sort of testing to see if this college was up to the mark. As I mentioned earlier, there wasn't much studying done, and after a few months, we reported back to MSD and asked to be transferred to a better college for the next term.

Upon arriving in London, this group of 13 naive boys were first housed in an old boarding house called Blackheath Hall in the south-eastern suburb of the city. Although the hall had central heating, it was still drab and dreary. The walk from the hall to our college was about 20 minutes, past open public fields. The stay at Blackheath was temporary, only for about 2 weeks, if I recall correctly. In that period, we were tasked to find permanent accommodation on our own. Since there were no Malaysian seniors at the college, you can imagine how difficult it was because we had no-one we could refer to for advice. Nonetheless, we were told by other foreign students to search the advertisements in the evening papers.

After Blackheath, I stayed at two different places in an area called New Cross. It was a bit far from college but the rent was cheap and we had many other foreign students as neighbours. The daily journey from our rented flat to college was a single bus ride for about half-an-hour. While the particular college we went to was nothing to brag about, the sub-district of Greenwich is actually a beautiful and historical place. There are many places of interest within walking distance of each other but the most memorable one that I went to was the Royal Observatory. This is the origin of the Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) and the Prime Meridian or Zero Longitude that divides the globe into east and west.

Gabriel on the right is standing in the west, Khairul in the middle straddles
Zero Longitude while Silla is standing in the east.
Pic taken at Greenwich Royal Observatory in 1980.

The GMT has now been replaced by the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), but to me, Malaysia is and will always be +8 hours GMT.

The financial allowance that we got from MSD at that time was not particularly lavish, especially if you consider the relatively high cost of living in the city of London. Most weekends were therefore spent at home or at most, browsing around the shopping areas of south-eastern districts such as Lewisham and Brockley. Occasionally, we would take the bus or underground train to go to central London. The first stop would of course be the Malaysian Hall at Bryanston Square near Marble Arch for the subsidised lunch at only 50 pence. After lunch, we would walk the length of the famous shopping road of Oxford Street, not actually buying anything. Some years back, I read that Malaysian Hall was going to close down because the lease was up. I wonder if it's still there.

One evening, during early spring, my two friends and I, decided to explore the West End area of London. Although called `west', the area is actually located in central London and is famous for its many tourist attractions such as museums, theatres, cinemas, restaurants and nightclubs. In short, it's the entertainment centre of London. We spent the earlier part of the evening strolling the area of Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square, and later decided to catch a late-night movie at one of the cinemas. I can't recall the title of the movie but most probably it was one with an adult rating. After the movie, we walked around trying to find a place to buy fish and chips. It was after finishing the meal sitting on a park bench, that we realised that the buses and trains have stopped for the night. Crap! How were we going to get home? Taking a taxi would be too expensive and we weren't sure we had enough money left anyway.

The only other option was to walk back home. Since I was fairly confident of the route (as travelled by bus earlier in the day), we decided to take the walk although we were not sure how far we actually had to travel. And so that night, three young Malaysian chaps braved the unknown to walk from central London to the southeast district of New Cross. After all these years, I can still retrace the route that we took. From Leicester Square, we walked past The Strand, crossed the River Thames on Waterloo Bridge to get to South Bank, down Waterloo Road to The Elephant & Castle roundabout, down New Kent Road that led to Old Kent Road (also known as the A2), on to New Cross Road before finally turning to Pepys Road where our flat was located.

The route took us through tough working-class neighbourhoods. I re-traced the path we took using Google Earth and measured it at 8.3km. In hindsight, it was probably a crazy thing we did that night.

The path of a night stroll in London, re-traced on a Google Earth image

I haven't had the opportunity to visit London again since I finished university. Sure hope that someday I would be able to do so.

Update 16 March 2022 : The link to Kak Teh's blog has been removed although her blog still exists. Other online links were also removed to avoid possible error messages.