strike a pose

Nobody loves you more

Than baby cousins in white dresses with yellow ribbons

(especially if you've got a bowl of succulent sweet kulfi in your hands)

Fun-da-Mental

Aki Nawaz is determined to release what is, by anyone's standards, a phenomenally angry album. He says he fully expects a knock on the door from MI5. As the main component of the band Fun-da-Mental, Nawaz has been producing politically challenging music since 1991 but accepts he is pushing those boundaries further.

Read the full article

The Guardian article is quite skewed, so go to Fun-da-Mental's website. They have free previews to every song on the new album and loads of other stuff.

recap of the week's festivities

+ citylink mall has been so nice and quiet for the last week cos everyone's avoiding it during the imf/world bank meet that i was able to comfortably buy a book (SQ21) and a cd (the new Roots) without having to jostle past a single person
- the singapore government has shown the world how proud it is of its authoritarianism
+/- irony of ironies: even a war-mongering right-wing conservative sexist poor-bashing anti-democratic former White House big-wig can call the singapore government "authoritarian" with a straight face
- the imf/world bank has exposed their backsides once again by simultaneously telling the world that they are committed to good governance and then revealing that the next overseas meet will be in turkey, which i would hardly call a good government. i think it's a ploy - hold the overseas meet in, say, asia or the middle east in order to maintain a facade of engaging the global South, but conveniently hold it in a Southern country that's totally repressive so that the troublemakers (i.e. the people on the other side of the class line and willing to fight) are kept at bay. i dare you to hold your next meeting in india, fuckwads. you'd be shitting bricks and ducking molotov cocktails faster than you can say 'capitalism'.
- the singapore media has either distorted, marginalized or simply not reported on incidents of repression of resistance to the imf/world bank by singaporeans in singapore
- so has the international media. apparently it's outrageous that a very small group of pre-approved protestors (who, in my humble opinion, are mostly NGO hacks unworthy of being called activists) were prevented from entering the country, but it's not even worth a sidebar report that 3 singaporeans who simply wanted to hand out leaflets at city hall mrt (which, by the way, is not illegal, contrary to what the pigs might tell you) were arrested before they could even utter the words "want one?".
- i dunno about those PETA activists, man. i mean, i think it sucks that they got deported without even having done anything against the law yet and all (woh, that is sooo right out of the movie 'minority report'). but the fact that their (symbolic) animal rights protests generally feature white, usually blonde, women in bikinis or less alluding to themselves as chicks is just so damn sexist. hey dudes, could you at least try and get your message across without perpetuating the objectification of women, please?
And the biggest and most important minus of this week: i think all the other women in my bellydance class hate me. every lesson the teacher calls me forward to show everyone else how it's done. and i'm not even good at it. but i can't help it if ma punjabi flava hips have had years of wedding dance practice for them belly/hip moves (it's kinda cool the similarities between dance styles). yeah, i sure have got my priorities straight, eh?

McDonalds wins lawsuit over small Malaysian restaurant

‘Mc’ belongs to McDonald’s
08 Sep 2006
New Straits Times



Following the decision, McCurry Restaurant located at Jalan Ipoh, would not be allowed to use the prefix "Mc" in their signage and company.

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Jaswant Singh Khalra

August 30, 2006

Khalra's last international speech highlights mass crimes of KPS Gill

Eleven years ago, on September 6, 1995, the Punjab police abducted, tortured, and murdered human rights defender Jaswant Singh Khalra because he exposed the disappearances and killings of thousands of Sikhs by the Punjab police. In his last speech made to a Canadian audience, released today with subtitles by Ensaaf at: http://www.ensaaf.org/Khalravideo.html, Jaswant Singh Khalra discusses his investigations into the disappearances and his readiness to die to expose the truth about these crimes. This video includes clips from his speech made at Dixie Gurdwara (Sikh house of worship) in Toronto, Canada in April 1995, at a conference organized by the radio station Ankhila Punjab.

Click here to view the video and for more information

Do you ever?

Do you ever feel like walking on the beach, trudging through the sand with the wind creeping in your hair, whispering to you the secrets of the sea?

Do you ever feel like looking every person you meet in the eye, holding their gaze, really getting to know them?

Do you ever feeling like breaking into a dance, flailing your hands in the air, moving your hips to the rhythm of that person-in-the-train’s ringtone, snapping everyone out of their early morning not-enough-coffee-yet-and-standing-too-close-for-comfort stupor?

Do you ever feel like facing everyone who hurt you, hit you or abused you, hitting them back with the anger and the pain, making them feel some of the anguish they caused you?

Do you ever wish you could go back and tell everyone you’ve loved how much they meant to you, before it was too late?

Do you ever wish you were bolder, smarter, more beautiful, braver than you really are?

Do you ever want to go running through the streets screaming “The world is a fucked-up place people; get up and fight for something, dammit”

Do you ever feel so crazy that you think, for the sake of humanity, it would be best if you never left the house again?

Do you ever feel like asking god: are you really there or are you just something we made up to cushion the blow?

Do you ever feel like taking it one day at a time, not because you had to but because you wanted to make every moment count?

Do you ever feel that way?
Do you?