burgers and durians

on ancestors

2007-11-13T22:42:00.000+08:00

"Do you think when a tree dies all its work is finished? Of course not. It then has the work of decomposing, of becoming soil in which other trees grow. It is very careful to do this, left to itself, and not hauled off to a lumberyard. If it is hauled off to a lumberyard and if nothing is left to decompose and nurture the young trees coming up...Disaster!"

Alice Walker
in Now is the Time to Open Your Heart

Go sign the petition

2007-10-04T21:45:00.000+08:00

On whose backs our wealth?
In whose name those bullets?
Whither our conscience?

The number of signatures reached above 1000 tonight. That's 1000 people who were willing to brave police intimidation, walk up to the building and sign their name to a petition calling for peace and freedom in Myanmar.

Will you join them?

Myanmar Embassy, St Martin's Drive (opposite Tanglin Mall)

Baa Baa Black Sheep in Raag

2007-09-29T17:28:00.001+08:00

Happy 100th Birthday, Shaheed Bhagat Singh!

2007-09-28T19:17:00.000+08:00

Revolution is an inalienable right of mankind.

Freedom is an imperishable birth right of all.

- Bhagat Singh

Asian Dub Foundation @ WOMAD 24 Aug 2007

2007-08-25T15:56:00.000+08:00

Update 29/8: This review is now also available at Readings From A Political Duo-ble.

They came, they sang, they played, they fucking rocked! After years of relying on their music as an outlet for anger against oppression and as inspiration to work for social change, it was the most wonderful experience to finally see them perform live. Their 1 hour 20 minute set consisted of some new tracks from their upcoming album as well as a good mix of songs from their previous albums. My favourite was Fortress Europe – that song just lends itself so well to a live performance. It was angsty, angry and resistance-fuelled. My least favourite was the Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan track. It was cool that they wanted to pay tribute to him; after all, it’s his 10th year death anniversary. But to be honest, the performance straddled the line between music and noise a bit too closely for me. I think the recorded track works well because you can clearly hear the beautiful fusion of qawwali, rock, punk, etc, whereas there was too much feedback and audience cheering in the live session to get a full sense of the composition.

I liked that they picked a lot of songs with socio-political messages to perform last night – besides Fortress Europe, they also sang Rise to the Challenge, Kill Racism and a new track about those getting left behind and trampled on in India’s impending rise to superpower status, before ending the night with Rebel Warrior. Musically, I realized that it’s really in the live performance that their unique and label-defying style comes through. Simply seeing the DJ booth, tabla, electric guitar and dhol on one stage complemented by smooth vocals with a dose of hardhitting lyrics was a phenomenon in itself. Without having to deconstruct their sound, listening to their performance of Riddim I Like proved their musical credentials like nothing else could.

Even while ADF’s musical style is a constant reminder that South Asians don’t all play the sitar and sing in ululating aahs (and smell like curry and live in ashrams and…), they continue to push the envelope all on musical fronts in their explorations of hybridity. I particularly enjoyed the way in which the tabla and dhol were pretty much the percussionist backbones of their music. Having now taken a few dhol classes myself, it was exciting to see how the traditional beats blended with the other instruments and how new beats were created to work in the context of their sound.

Throughout the concert they kept up a lively engagement of the audience. During portions of songs where the music stopped to allow for Hindu spiritual incantations, they would raise their arms into the air, point their faces to the sky and assume a position of spiritual reverence, encouraging the audience to do the same. It was funny because I think it was meant to be at least partly in jest – a subtle parody of religious dogma and unthinking compliance, but I’m not sure if most of the audience ‘got’ that.

In fact, I’m not sure if most of the audience ‘got’ ADF at all. This is the only thing that tempered the experience of the performance for me. As with other such music festivals, the crowd was made up mostly (and this is of course a gross assumption based on physical appearance, accents, snatches of overheard conversations, my limited social network and the steep $58 ticket price alone) of Western expatriates, kids of Western expatriates, university students and middle class 20/30/40somethings. Since I currently fit into the last category, I implicate myself and interrogate my own social position in my critique of the audience as well.

The beauty of music, and of all art for that matter, is in its ability to elicit enjoyment at many different levels and from many different perspectives. There are no laws against enjoying music on a purely superficial level. Political music, however, wants to do more than simply elicit pleasure. It wants to ask questions, raise awareness, it wants to criticize, educate, surface alternatives and explore other possibilities, and it wants to move people and inspire them to action. The depressing thing is I’m not sure if ADF accomplished that last night. It was clear that most of the people around me did not know ADF’s music – most didn’t seem to recognize the song titles when they were announced and weren’t mouthing the songs lyrics. Worse, there was an obvious disconnect between what the band what trying to say and what the audience understood. For instance, when a band member said “We want something from you… We want your oil! Sound familiar?”, I turned and saw “huh?” looks on the faces of the group of people standing next to me. And when introducing the song about India’s poor, they started talking about how some people are saying that India is going to be the next world superpower, and people actually starting cheering. The band looked disgusted and one band member groaned, “No, no, no. That’s not necessarily a good thing. We want equal power for everyone!” Towards the end when they were about to start singing Fortress Europe and said, “This song is for all immigrants, refugees and asylum-seekers everywhere”, the cynic in me began to wonder how many of the people who cheered were really Singaporeans who mutter under their breath about losing jobs to foreign talent and who chose to blind themselves to the Bangladeshi workers shuttled in on lorries at the end of the night for clean-up.

All in all, though, it was a good evening and I’m glad I finally got to see ADF live. One can only hope that for the members of the audience last night who had never before been exposed to ADF’s music, that their ADF concert experience would at least propel them to dig deeper into and find out more about the band and hopefully, their broader political message. In the meantime, watching the Asian Dub Foundation perform might just have restored a little bit of my own commitment to fighting injustice and reinvigorated the spirit of resistance that I thought I was coming close to losing.

Magic

2007-05-25T10:50:00.000+08:00

Sometimes democracy works like magic!
Party in power can tally election results to victory!
Judges can stop vote counts making election mockery!
Citizen’s welfare takes back sit for Military priority!
Truth becomes powerless conspiracy!
Conspirators run Government with legitimacy!
Mighty power invades foreign countries for democracy!
Installs dictatorships as convenient allies!
Revolution against occupation becomes insurgency!
Protests for democracy are silenced as militancy!

by Deepak Sarkar
www.kolki.com

Exactly.

2007-05-08T23:48:00.000+08:00

"I am SICK of lame reasoning, faulty logic and threats that my country is going to collapse under the Muslim threat, the Opposition Party threat, the poverty threat and the Inefficiency threat. How about the threat from ineffectual, self-interesed, and not very bright politicians who do not show tangible results in spite of being lauded as the best damn brains our paltry population has to offer?"

From: The Art of Dumbspeak

Oh great

2007-05-08T23:24:00.000+08:00

I changed my template and lost all my links. Lovely.

And only realize it 15 hours later cos I did the template-change on the sly at work. And was blogging on the sly at work cos the home computer is the most popular piece of technology in the house with up to 5 people vying for it at one time. I think it's about time to get my own piece of metal.

Links will be back up soon. She says, mostly to herself and a host of random people who've googled 'bimbo' and found her thanks to one regretful post.

2007-05-08T09:25:00.001+08:00

Welcome to the club, France.

are missiles bad for your health?

2007-03-26T22:51:00.000+08:00

Doctors attack Lancet owner's arms fair links
Polly Curtis, health correspondent
Friday March 23, 2007
The Guardian

The publishers of The Lancet are under fire from leading doctors who are complaining about their escalating involvement in arms fairs. Across three pages of today's edition the medical journal publishes letters from top doctors, led by the Royal College of Physicians, who say that Reed Elsevier's commercial interest in the arms trade undermines the journal's efforts to improve health worldwide.

The editors of the journal also call on their proprietor to drop its work with the defence industry, claiming that the association is damaging The Lancet's reputation. The Lancet's international advisory board is now considering an "organised campaign" against its own publisher.

More

***

I work for doctors, and most of the time, it makes one bitter and cynical to be constantly reminded that most people become doctors not out of some humanistic impulse to heal, but because they can make a lot of money. So when this kind of thing happens, it warms my soul to know that sometimes, even doctors have principles and are willing to stand up for them. But here, some words of wisdom from one great doctor:

"In moments of great peril it is easy to muster a powerful response to moral stimuli; but for them to retain their effect requires the development of a consciousness in which there is a new priority of values."
- Che Guevara

snooping ladies

2007-03-26T20:39:00.000+08:00

I read on the funky ghetto hijabi's blog that there’s this list of Africa’s 100 Best Books of the 20th century. It was cool to check it out and find that my taste in literature can’t be all bad if most of the African writers I’ve read (although not a lot) are actually on there.

It’s interesting to come across this now, though, cos I’m currently reading The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith. It’s pretty light reading, with fairly simple language and a narrative that’s paced like linked short stories, which is great for a tired mind on the train ride home. But it’s becoming a rather problematic read.

The basic premise, easily guessed from the title, is that this is the story of Precious Ramotswe, a woman in Botswana who decides to open up her own detective agency – the first of its kind in the country. This seemed interesting enough to me, and I’d glanced over a Sunday Times interview with the author who was recently in town to promote his new book, so picked it up when I saw it going for $4.50 at a garage sale a few weekends ago.

One of the problems I am having is that the language just seems a little too simplistic. It’s obvious the guy can write, but his writing style makes it seem as if he is trying to “dumb down” his language. This may be because the book is meant to be ‘young adult fiction’, but a quick Internet search tells me that it’s not marketed to that specific reader demographic. Is he trying to mimic the way people in Botswana talk, if they even speak to one another in English? I say mimic because, in case it wasn’t already obvious, Alexander McCall Smith is a white guy – an older, Scottish medical law and ethics academic who was born and grew up in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe to be exact.

And therein lies my other major discomfort with the book. What is it about white guys writing colonized women? (Think Memoirs of a Geisha.)

Smith’s heart seems to be in the right place – he says he wants to write positive stories about Africa, he wants Africa to be known not just for AIDS and poverty and blood diamonds, he wants to tell feel-good stories because isn’t the world full of so many terribly depressing things already that we need some happy thoughts in our lives. His well-meaning intentions just aren’t enough though. Wasn’t the entire European colonial project propped up by an ideology of well-meaning intentions?

Where is Smith’s cultural knowledge of the ‘good side of Africa’ coming from? His portrayal of middle class, working class and peasant Africans will necessarily be a portrayal as seen through the eyes of an upper class English-educated white man living in Zimbabwe. He cannot simply erase his identity and ignore his position in the race-class-gender hierarchy in Southern Africa. For instance, I remember reading in the Sunday Times interview that Smith chose to set the story in Botswana rather than his home of Zimbabwe because Botswana is an economically stable country with decent infrastructure and no military conflict. As an upper class descendant of colonizers, I am sure Smith would much prefer if the locals did not fight for autonomy and simply integrated quietly into the global capitalist economy. Funny how Smith never mentions that the single largest foreign contributor to the Botswana army is the United States, or that HIV/AIDS is a major healthcare crisis in Botswana, and although he describes the difficulties of working in a diamond mine (Precious Ramotswe’s father worked as a diamond miner), he never takes the mining companies to task for the exploitation of their workers and the land.

It just seems as if it’s a lot easier to look at the good in the world when you’re not intimately affected by the bad. The book’s attempt at humanizing Southern Africans only results in objectifying them further, in this cynic’s view.

Flee!

2007-03-20T14:19:00.000+08:00

SGSELLTRADE FLEE! Market #7

Date: Saturday, 24 Mar 2007

Time: 12-6pm

Location: Gashaus, 114 Middle Road

Sis has a stall. Will be there helping her. Come say hi and buy cheap stuff!

my letter on barking women

2007-03-14T11:01:00.001+08:00

On Sunday I sent the below letter to Today newspaper. They didn't publish it.

***
I refer to the article by Nazry Bahrawi “Woman barks up the right channel to find lost pooch” (Mar 9). I am deeply disappointed that Today has allowed such callous reporting to make it to print. Even if the pun was intended, the headline is extremely offensive to women by referring to them as dogs. The story about one woman’s attempt at finding her missing dog is unfortunately tainted by irresponsible reportage that is disrespectful and objectifying to all women, and whose logic continues to fuel greater injustices that include harassment, abuse and violence against women. The fact that this comes just one day after International Womens’ Day is even more tragic. The media plays a large role not just in reflecting, but also in shaping, the ways that Singapore society treats women. I hope that in the future, Today will consider with more gravity the ways in which its headlines and framing of articles shape and affect the way we perceive women.

a friendly IWD reminder

2007-03-08T22:01:00.000+08:00

"We should look to the confrontational style of previous feminist movements and actions for inspiration. We should once again make the personal political and look at the ways in which our individual experiences with sexism are part of a larger system of domination. In other words, as women continue to lose rights won for us by previous generations of feminists, young feminists need to once again make feminism dangerous. We need to stop worrying about being nice and pretty and start to challenge not only the misogyny and sexism deeply ingrained in our society but also the racism and class bigotry. We need to reframe feminism as a movement that is deeply political and that courageously challenges all forms of oppression."

The ageing population

2007-03-07T23:12:00.000+08:00

I don’t understand the underlying logic. Currently we are having this problem called ‘an ageing population’, which essentially means that in a couple of decades or so, there are going to be many more old people than there should be in society (according to some human geographical theorists) and not enough people to look after them. Plus, the fact that the population will be made up of more old people than it does now means that there will be less young people, which means that there will be less workers, which is – roll the drums – “bad for the economy”. I suppose this is because when there are less workers around to push the paper, press the buttons, insert the microchips, clean the hotels and serve the coffee, there will be less profit, and we know how much dem bosses wan dey profit.

But this is the part that I don’t get. If there are going to be more old people, and if the solution is to make sure that there are even more young people, then doesn’t that mean that in another few decades those more young people will become more old people that need even more young people to replace them with? You follow? The way the wind is blowing, if you think catching a cab at 5:45 on a Friday evening is tough now, just wait another 50 years…

I thought the world is already overpopulated (and I’m not even gonna go into an existentialist diatribe about whether life is so great that we need to bring even more poor souls into it, or a feminist rant about how population planning is oppressive to women, or a tirade about how immigration regulations discriminate between different classes of immigrants and create a destructive antagonistic nationalistic environment of foreign versus local). I thought that Singapore has already almost reached its peak population density (although some people seem to think we can squeeze another 2 million people in here – obviously they’ve never tried getting on the MRT at Simei at 8 in the morning).

I just wanna know – if we think we got problems now, aren’t the solutions the government is proposing just gonna make things worse in another 20, 30 years?

A call for a global justice response to the threat of pandemic flu

2007-02-08T21:58:00.001+08:00

Today humanity faces a massive global threat from avian influenza ('bird flu'). Leading researchers believe a human pandemic is not only inevitable but overdue.

In December 2006, the Lancet medical journal estimated that a global H5N1 influenza pandemic could kill over 60 million people - 96% of them in the Global South.

In 1918, an influenza virus killed more people in 24 weeks than AIDS has killed in 24 years. Overwhelmingly, these deaths took place in the Global South. People with HIV and AIDS will be particularly vulnerable to a new influenza pandemic, along with those affected by malnutrition and war.

The world needs:

* an end to corporate patents that restrict access to critical medicines
* urgent funding by the rich world to boost health and surveillance systems in countries most at risk in Asia and Africa
* the elimination of large-scale intensive livestock farming, which is accelerating the development of new pandemic viruses.

Corporate greed and Western self-interest are blocking these urgently-needed actions.

The Global Justice Movement can and must take action now.

Signed by:
Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Walden Bello, Mike Davis (author of 'The Monster At Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu'), Michael Greger MD (author 'Bird Flu: A virus of our own hatching'), Caroline Lucas (Green MEP, UK), John Pilger, Jonathan Stevenson (Pandemic Action), Kathy Kelly (Voices for Creative Nonviolence), Michael Albert (ZNet), Mairead Corrigan Maguire (Nobel Peace Prize Winner), Hans von Sponeck (former UN Assistant Secretary-General), Denis Halliday (former UN Assistant Secretary-General) and others.

*****

Pandemic Action is a new group based in the UK provoked into action by the book 'The Monster At Our Door' by US professor Mike Davis. Members include Gabriel Carlyle (Voices in the Wilderness UK), Jonathan Stevenson (Jubilee Debt Campaign), Milan Rai (Justice Not Vengeance), Patrick Nicholson (Scientists for Global Responsibility), and Martin Hearson (British Overseas NGOs for Development) (all in personal capacities).

Dear tonsils,

2007-02-03T15:41:00.000+08:00

You must be enjoying this. Most of the time, I don’t even know you guys are there, I don’t pay you any attention. You’re just, you know, there, doing your thing, guarding the gates to the rest of my body, doing your job, keeping out the riff raff.

Then once in a while, you get fed up and need to make your presence felt. But do you really need to swell up to twice your size to be heard? Do you really need to grow specks of pus all over yourselves, putting me at risk of strep throat, just to remind me that you’re there? Do you really need to set me back $40 in doctor’s fees for that?

I’m not angry, really. It’s actually nice to have the day off work, even if I spend most of it trying to sleep over the sound of the phone ringing and the sms beeping. It’s just, why do you have to make it so painful? If I’m not wincing from swallowing the gross-tasting Campbell’s Minestrone Soup-in-a-can, then I’m walking around in a drugged up stupor not even properly able to comprehend why Grisam is looking extra-serious in the CSI episode I’m watching. Next time you feel under-appreciated, couldn’t you just, like, wave or something? Or just get something stuck between you guys so that I need to cough for awhile and then be thankful that you’re around to protect me. No? Aw, come on…

Anyway, in order to avoid any future misunderstandings, let’s clear the air once and for all. I appreciate you. I would never get rid of you, never. You’re my first line of defence and I will continue to invest in you until the day I die. If it helps, from now on, I promise to drink more lemon-honey-barley drink from the Chinese herbal medicine shop and put less chilli sauce on my Boon Tong Kee chicken rice. Anything else you need from me, I’m there. I hope that we can agree to deal with any future differences in a more amicable and less painful manner than the current situation permits.

Yours Sincerely,
burgersandurians

This Friday, a man will be killed, for no good reason

2007-01-24T16:30:00.000+08:00

Press message from the Singapore Anti Death Penalty Committee
Yawning Bread article on Tochi's case
Amnesty International appeal
Nigerian government to apply diplomatic pressure

Take Action

III

2007-01-17T21:43:00.000+08:00

Tell me, is the rose naked
or is that her only dress?

Why do trees conceal
the splendor of their roots?

Who hears the regrets
of the thieving automobile?

Is there anything in the world sadder
than a tree standing in the rain?

-Pablo Neruda
The Book of Questions

2006 Lists and New year's crises

2007-01-15T21:22:00.000+08:00

Um, yeah, kinda late. But what the hey.
In no particular order:

My 2006 Shit List

1. Moving away from my ‘self-created community’ in Vancouver
2. Moving back in with my parents
3. Having my 9-year-old laptop konk out
4. Peeing in a cup for Canada Immigration
5. Moving from full-time community organizing/activism to becoming a 8:30 to 6 zombie worker
6. Voting for the first time in my life, and having it feel so completely disempowering
7. Lebanon
8. My trip to Aceh (Christians are mind-boggling, NGOization is a fucked up process, government inaction is infuriating)
9. Being single all year…burn

My 2006 Hit List

1. Being around lots of family again
2. Not spending ¾ of the year with my hands in my pockets and shuddering with cold every time I get on a toilet seat
3. Char kway teow, and lots of it
4. Having a stable income every month that is enough for food, shelter, clothing, a few extras, and some savings to boot
5. My trip to Aceh (viva the kampong life, yo)
6. Finally reading Life isn’t all Ha Ha Hee Hee by Meera Syal and loving it
7. Improving my Punjabi (sorta, I mean, thora jia)
8. Having a dog again
9. Beginning to blog (Even though I post so rarely, and most of the time they’re cheating-posts and even though no one really reads it anymore – which might actually be a good thing – it’s done wonders to help me chip away at a writer’s block that’s been a perpetual problem since my mother found my diary in my teenagehood.)

In the wee hours of 2007, after ushering in the new year in a Kejang in the middle of the craziest traffic jam ever in downtown Jakarta (any thoughts of making our 10:30pm dinner appointment long ago abandoned), after learning a harsh lesson about never leaving home without a swiss army knife (it’s the new year’s countdown, you’re stuck in traffic, you’ve got an enticing bottle of wine, and you can’t friggin get to it, man!), after finally finding a place to eat at 1:30 in the morning, after getting sufficiently buzzed to pay your respects to the year past and the one now open like an unwritten book before us, I make myself a New Years’ Resolution. I am embarrassed to admit it, but here it is: at 3:30am on January 1st 2007, I resolved to become a bimbo. I figured, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. If it’s been so hard for me to find people I can connect with politically, socially, intellectually, if I’ve had such a hard time breaking out of my inherited community in Singapore now that I’ve lost touch with so many of my non-Punjabi friends from before, if the only way I won’t go crazy is to keep spending time with my cousins and friends who love shopping, watching movies, chasing celebrities, gossiping, and not much else, then it’s time for me to get wid the program. Get Wid The Program.

So I spent the first 12 days of January shopping, reading only fashion magazines (no non-fiction allowed, exception: celebrity gossip columns), watching only mindless tv (no documentaries allowed), gossiping about other peoples’ problems, talking about my hair and allowing political positions I disagree with to fly over my head.

But then, on the morning of the 13th of January, I woke up, opened the front door, and felt a flap of sheets brush past my ankle and land on my feet. I jumped with a start, thinking I’d stepped on the dog’s feet again, and rushing to get away from her angry bite. Feeling no needle-jab of a pain in my foot, I looked down, and there it lay, in all its glory, tempting me with its in-depth analysis of current events and interesting tidbits about the latest in the arts scene: the Saturday newspaper.

Keeping my cool, I repeated my routine practice of picking it up off the floor, placing it on the dining table, and heading off into the kitchen to make myself a cup of coffee. Once coffee was ready, though, I began to panic. I’d finished reading the only fashion magazine I had left, and I couldn’t check my email because the computer remained beyond my grasp in that space behind the firmly-shut door from which emitted the low, rumbling sounds of, no not Miffy, but of my brother enjoying his weekend away from the army and in his own comfy bed.

And then my curiosity started to get the better of me. Had they found the rest of that missing Adam Air flight? Somehow having ridden the same airline to and from Jakarta during the new year’s break made me feel some strange sense of camaraderie with those missing (and probably unfortunately dead by now) people. It could’ve been me, so the least I could do is find out if there was any news. What about Iraq? What was the joker in the White House gonna do now? What kinds of white-man-imperialist excuses was he gonna give this time? And what new propagandist rhetoric was the Singapore government trying to feed its population this new year? I had to know, I just had to know.

And so, with my head bent low and bits of coffee bouncing onto my hand as my fingers dug deep into each other around the mug with anticipation, I did it. I read the Saturday newspaper. And that, as they say, was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I can talk about my hair for maybe 20 minutes and then probably won’t wanna revisit that conversation for another 3 months. I can look at the pretty (yeah, pretty sexist!) pictures in Female for awhile, but then need to get back to finishing Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth because it just seems so much more important to understand the psychology of the colonized than it is to understand the physiology of peep-toed shoes (yikes, I know what they’re called now!). I can let one comment about freeloading immigrants go, but anything more and I will defend to the death the principle of open borders for labour.

And I am no longer ashamed to admit this one fact. I am, like, sooo not a bimbo. I am a nerd. I am a geek. And I’m sorry if it makes you feel uncomfortable that I challenge you. I’m sorry if you’re bored that I can’t give you the latest gossip about which marriage announcement is gonna top the one nobody thought could be topped at the beginning of the year. I’m sorry I’ll never dress as well as you, never bother with as much make-up or as many accessories, never keep up with the latest cellphone design. But I’m not sorry for who I am. So there.

I feel I have come out of this experience with more of an understanding of those who are labeled ‘bimbo’ (actually a somewhat offensive term, I think. I wish people didn’t use it so carelessly so often). I really don’t mean to sound like I’m belittling people who are into the kind of stuff I tried. In fact, I must say I’ve gained a lot more respect for people who take the trouble to look their best all the time. It’s just, well, it’s just not what I’m into, most of the time.

Now I’ll just head back to my blissful, guilt-free reading of hard-hitting political analyses on the Internet. Ahhh, that invigorating whiff of critique, dissent, debate, commentary, it comes a’calling…

2006-12-28T16:56:00.000+08:00

There's an earthquake in Taiwan,
2 people are dead, many injured
most of the Asia Pacific is left with no Internet access

but wait...oh, thank god! The stock markets are okay!

All that matters is capitalism.

shaking hands with totalitarianism

2006-12-09T09:39:00.000+08:00

India-Singaporean consortium signs oil, gas deal with Myanmar
The Associated Press
Published: December 8, 2006

YANGON, Myanmar: An Indian and Singaporean consortium has signed a deal with the military junta in Myanmar to jointly drill for oil and gas off the country's west coast, state-run media reported Friday.

The contract signed Wednesday between the consortium of Gail India Ltd. and Silver Wave Energy of Singapore and the state-owned Myanma Oil and Gas Enterprise calls for the companies to jointly explore, drill and produce oil and gas in offshore Block A-7 off Myanmar's western Rakhine coast, the Kyemon daily reported.

Financial details of the contract were unavailable.

More details about Singapore's happy connections with the Burmese elite available here

2006-12-04T23:10:00.000+08:00

12 Days of Christmas

I can't decide if I find this hilarious or offensive.

Stan Goff talks some serious shit about marxism, feminism and the united states left

2006-12-03T17:00:00.000+08:00

"With some sadness and with not the least desire to devalue the experiences I have had with comrades, nor to minimize the hard work, nor the consciousness and concience, nor the friendship of many comrades, I am herein announcing and explaining my definitive rejection of Marxism in its current organizational forms, be they called Marxist-Leninist or Trotskyist or Maoist.

This decision comes after months of intense reflection. I will not attempt to separate the personal from the political reasons. My personal life, as a spouse, father, grandfather, friend, and member of local and poltical communities, is my most direct window on the world, and the experience against which I have to measure any political belief or organizational theory. Even moreso, as I now find myself indefinitely caring again for an infant; and thereby bound to the house in the same way as many women, constantly being confronted with the most immediate and practical necessities. The kind of politics that does not take these constraints as the starting point of all politics is what I am now taking under long review.

One of my primary disappointments has been what I consider the failure to take seriously the struggle against patriarchy, and to give it the same weight in our organizing as we do class and national oppression. There have been only token efforts in this regard, and no serious initiative that I have seen to go outside the canon to understand this system. Worse, there has been a reactive embrace of liberal-libertarian “feminism” by many comrades… which I consider to be a sly academic reassertion of male power in the consumer-choice package of “freedom,” undermining the whole analysis of gender as a system. But this is not the crux of the issue for me. Feminism was the gateway to a number of other interrogations of the assumptions of organized Marxism."

Read the whole thing (long and very very chewable) here

Ke Kiri Pusing: How mandatory National Service perpetuates the patriarchy in Singapore

2006-11-22T22:41:00.000+08:00

This is something I have been thinking about a lot over the past many months. These are some random thoughts about the issue…been meaning to write them out more coherently but I realize that may never happen due to limited time and energy (how come it’s so much easier to come up with a spiffy title than to actually write out the contents of what you’re trying to say coherently?). So I figured I’d just post this now and if anyone has other ideas or feedback, they can tell me.

Also, this is not to say that there are no other problems with NS; ofcourse there are tons. And this is also not to suggest that men do not suffer under a mandatory NS system; ofcourse they do, in terrible ways. This is just one aspect of the issue that I don't think has been explored enough.

My random thoughts:
- Entrenches military masculine culture in every single male citizen
- Entrenches the idea of men as protectors and defenders – of women, family, nation and conversely entrenches the idea of women as weak, vulnerable, in need of protection
- The shared experience of NS creates an exclusionary militaristic culture in which women are generally marginalized: they are simply the “to be protected”, the “good fuck”, or the “dutiful girlfriend/wife/lover”
- Provides opportunities for networking; expanding social networks that may and often do prove useful economically, socially and politically
- Opportunities for upward mobility – SAF scholarships, training for job opportunities for a military career
- Economic advantages: higher civil service pay, club membership SAFRA
- War, and by extension politics and public life, as male-centred space
- The male citizen as the most deserving citizen
- A hyper-masculine environment also perpetuates homophobia
- Mandatory NS provides an opportunity for young men from all socioeconomic status, ethnicity groups, sexual orientations and abilities to meet and work together (although the last 2 in limited ways). Women remain cloistered within their class/race/sexual orientation social spheres.
- NS as a marker of nationalism and citizenship rights. Citizenship is only the privilege of those men who fight for the agenda of the gov't.

individual trails

2006-11-16T20:44:00.000+08:00

This was inspired by a spam email i got from “Tony” with the following subject heading: “You’re an individual trails, sifting and said, in hostage”.

You’re an individual trails
sifting and said
in hostage

You’re one of a kind
making your mark
clearing your path
doing what’s right
for you
individually
your individual trail

Your own way in life
your life, your property
your decisions, your consequences
even if you have nothing else
like nina
ain’t got no…, but ah got life

You could be a princepauperartistsnobconsumercapitalistracistsexisthomophobicageistableistfathatingethnicdesiapnabitchcuntmissuslildarlinmamaselloutliberalsilentradicalrevolutionary
every trail don’t start
at the same time and space
every trail don’t end
in the same location
you could be fallenpickedupviolentlovingfree
this is
your individual trail

You make your way
with sickle, with fire
with bare hands, with stomping feet
running, crawling, on a horse, in a 1980s Volkswagen convertible
doesn’t matter, it’s yours
this individual trail

Then sometimes you go back
change your mind, find new paths
change direction
make new ones
your individual trails

You are a grain of sand
sifting through time
saying your piece
voicing your hopesfearsdreamsdilemmasworriesfrustrationslovesdespairslaughtergoodbyes
and maybe someone will notice
you
and your trails

But your trails
they hold you hostage
they give you memory
past
pain

You are beholden
to them
forever

You are an individual trails, sifting and said, in hostage.

Shameless Advertisement: Upping The Anti Volume 3

2006-11-14T22:37:00.000+08:00

Okay, boys and girls. It's time to put on those party shoes and thinking hats. The latest issue of UTA is out and there's launch parties in TO and Van to go to.

If you don't already know what UTA is, it's this really awesome journal that publishes analyses, critiques and viewpoints about social movements in Canada and that tries its darnest to be from, by and about on-the-ground activists themselves rather than ivory-tower academic polemic-ing. You can find out more about it and read the first 2 issues here. (Read the Intro to UTA 3 here.)

Confession: Okay, so I'm on the Advisory Board and this may cause me to have a biased opinion about the journal. For the record, I have not contributed at all to the 3rd issue, mainly because of geographical and Internet accessibility challenges. So I am shamelessly advertising the launches here to try and make up for it. There's still a whole bunch of folks who read my blog from BC and Ontario, so if you haven't already heard, GO PICK UP YOUR COPY OF UTA 3 TODAY!!

If you are in Singapore, I'm afraid you'll have to wait till the articles are put online. I still have a couple of hard copies of UTA 2, though, so contact me if you want one!

Upping the Anti Launch Party - VANCOUVER
Join us for the launch of the third issue!
Thursday Nov 23rd 7-10pm
Rhizome Cafe
317 East Broadway (one block East of Kingsway)
sliding scale: $5-10 includes a copy of the journal
Featuring: DJ She and Su Commandante

Toronto launch party (see awesome-looking poster below)
on Thursday November 168:00PM
Smiling Buddah Bar
961 College Street (west of Dovercourt)
Admission: $5 with journal (includes journal)
With DJing from DJ Miss Ruckus and Dj Saira Chhibber!

a call from oaxaca, mexico

2006-11-11T01:11:00.000+08:00

TO ALL INTERNATIONAL NETWORKS; POLITICAL, SOCIAL, UNION, INDIGENOUS, HUMAN RIGHTS AND OTHER CIVIL SOCIETY ORGANIZATIONS, AND ALL PEOPLES OF THE WORLD
The individuals and organizations listed below, make this URGENT call for solidarity with the people of Oaxaca.

On 29 October 2006, by decision of Mexican President Vicente Fox, in concurrence with his successor, Felipe Calderón and the Governor of the State of Oaxaca, Ulises Ruiz, implemented a police-military operation to seize the City of Oaxaca. Approximately 4,000 police troops from the Federal Preventative Police (PFP), acting as occupation army, entered Oaxaca city with helicopters and tanks, violently removing and evicting the barricades and sit-ins of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO).
The balance reported so far from this State operation includes: The deaths of two persons from teargas projectiles fired by the PFP; according to information from a report of the Oaxaca Human Rights Network, 32 persons reported disappeared at various police checkpoints, and a total of 41 persons detained without arrest warrants during the police operation and over the following days. Some of those detained have reportedly been transferred to the 28th military zone while others are being held in unofficial "safe houses." Private homes in Oaxaca are also being unlawfully searched without search or arrest warrants.
Persons identified by the communications media as public functionaries, with the support of paramilitary troops at the service of the governor, have murdered several persons, including an independent reporter from the U.S., Bradley Will.
Public transportation into the city is currently suspended, and all entry into the city is strictly controlled by PFP checkpoints.

The root of the conflict is the struggle carried out for more than five months by the population of Oaxaca, organized within APPO, to demand the departure of the repressive and murderous governor, Ulises Ruiz. An alliance of the parties of the right (PRI and PAN) in the national Senate has impeded that the governor be obligated to resign through institutional procedures permitted by the Mexican Constitution.

It is currently feared that the police-military operation may escalade into repressive actions such as apprehension of APPO leaders, and that the police-military presence may be extended to other areas of the state of Oaxaca.

In light of the above, we request your support for the actions of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO), through the following:
1. Protests and pressure against Mexican Embassies and Consulates in your respective countries.
2. Letters (faxes, e-mails, etc.) directed to the Mexican President and to mass-circulation communications media in both Mexico and your respective countries, requesting the following:
a. The immediate departure of Mr. ULISES RUIZ from the governorship of the state of Oaxaca, whose authoritarian regime originated the conflict, and whose permanence as governor is an obstacle to peaceful resolution of the conflict.
b. Immediate withdrawal of PFP police forces from Oaxaca
c. An end to the repression, the safe return of all persons disappeared in the conflict, and an end to the illegal detentions and searches. Also, full respect for the human rights and integrity of all persons, in particular the members of APPO.
d. We demand punishment of the intellectual and material authors of the murders carried out by State paramilitary and parapolice groups.
We hold the Federal and state governments responsible for the repressive policy against the population and organizations of Oaxaca. We join the voices of those who demand a peaceful and political resolution to the conflict.

Please send your communications to the following:
President Vicente Fox Quesada, Fax: +52 (55) 5516 9537 / 5573 2126,
E-mail : radio@presidencia.gob.mx. webadmon@appresidencia.gob.mx
Carlos Abascal Carranza, Interior Minister,
Fax: +52 (55) 5093 3414. cabascal@segob.gob.mx
Nationally-circulated newspapers:
www.jornada.unam.mx
www.eluniversal.com.mx
www.Milenio.com/mexico

WE THANK YOU FOR YOUR SOLIDARITY AND SUPPORT.
THE CAUSE OF OAXACA IS THAT OF ALL THE PEOPLES OF THE WORLD.

Gilberto López y Rivas-Paz con Democracia. Alicia Castellanos-Paz con Democracia. Ana Esther Ceceña-Paz con Democracia. Paulina Fernández Christlieb-Paz con Democracia. Ricardo Loewe-Colectivo Contra la Tortura Integral. Laura Becerra Pozos-Equipo Pueblo. Erendira Cruz Villegas-Incide Social. José Guadalupe Sánchez Suárez-Observatorio Eclesial. Jaime Laines Potisek-Centro Antonio Montesinos. Brisa Maya Solís-Centro Nacional de Comunicación Social. María Luisa Montalvo-Comisión Intercongregacional de Justicia, Paz y Vida. María Guerra Tejada-UNAM. Olinca Marino-La Neta. María Luisa Moncayo-Grupo Lago Mayor. Álvaro Salgado Ramírez-Centro Nacional de Ayuda a las Misiones Indígenas. Ma. de Jesus Luis Juan de la Cruz-Centro Antonio Montesinos. Alejandro y Francisco Cerezo-Comité Cerezo México. Leiticia Rentería-Comisión Intercongregacional de Justicia Paz y Vida. Lorena Peralta R.-Centro de Derechos Humanos Fray Francisco de Vitoria. Sylvia Aguilera García-Centro de Colaboración Cívica. Mara Hernández-Centro de Colaboración Cívica. Julián Portilla-Centro de Colaboración Cívica. María Atilano-Red Mexicana de Acción Frente al Libre Comercio, Centro de Promoción y Educación profesional "Vasco de Quiroga". Acela Vázquez Martínez-Alianza Cívica. Norma Moreno González-Centro de Estudios Ecuménicos. Héctor de la Cueva-Centro de Investigación Laboral y Asesoría Sindical. Dionisio B Córdova-Centro de Servicios Municipales Heriberto Jara. Socorro Martínez-Comunidades Eclesiales de Base. Higinio Muñoz-Comité Estudiantil Metropolitano. Rocío Eslava-Red Mexicana de Constructores de Paz D.F. María Elena González Camacho-Unión Popular Popular Revolucionaria Emiliano Zapata. María Guadalupe Blanco Méndez y Melquiades Rosas-Radio Nandia. Edgar Cortés-Red de Derechos Humanos "Todos los Derechos para Todos". David Sánchez Silva-Red Solidaria Década Contra la Impunidad. Laura Salas-Asociación Mundial de Radios Comunitarias- México. Martín Velázquez-Asamblea Mexicana por la Autodeterminación de los Pueblos. Fabíán Sánchez-Comisión Mexicana de Defensa y Promoción de los Derechos Humanos. Ana Luisa Nerio-Centro de Derechos Humanos Fray Francisco de Vitoria-Programa de Derechos Humanos, Academia del Posgrado de Ciencias Sociales-Programa de Autogestión Coperatica, Coordinación de los proyectos de enlace comunitario Todos de la Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México. Ivan Gómez Cesar. Manuel Aguilar Mora. Raul Villegas Dávalos. Tzitzi Santillán Hernández. Álvaro Urrieta. Antonio García S. Ana Colchero. General Francisco Gallardo. Enrique González Ruiz. Claudio Albertani, Enrique Ortis, Coalición Internacional para el Hábitat (HIC). Oficina de Coordinación Regional de la Coalición Internacional para el Hábitat (HIC-AL).

***
burgersandurians The website of the Mexican Embassy in Singapore lists its contact information as follows:
Embassy of Mexico in Singapore
152 Beach Road #06-07/08 Gateway East Tower, Singapore 189721
Tel: +65 6298-2678 Fax: +65 6293-3484
E-Mail: embamexsing@embamexsing.org.sg

2006-11-07T21:31:00.000+08:00

Our Denial

liberation theology parable

2006-11-07T17:54:00.000+08:00

Somebody sent me this in an email.

A holy man was having a conversation with the Lord one day and said, "Lord, I would like to know what Heaven and Hell are like."

The Lord led the holy man to two doors. He opened one of the doors and the holy man looked in.

In the middle of the room was a large round table. In the middle of the table was a large pot of stew, which smelled delicious and made the holy man's mouth water. The people sitting around the table were thin and sickly. They appeared to be famished. They were holding spoons with very long handles that were taped to their arms and each found it possible to reach into the pot of stew and take a spoonful, but because the handle was longer than their arms, they could not get the spoons back into their mouths.

The holy man shuddered at the sight of their misery and suffering.

The Lord said, "You have seen Hell." They went to the next room and opened the door. It was exactly the same as the first one. There was the large round table with the large pot of stew, which made the holy man's mouth water. The people were equipped with the same long-handled spoons, but here the people were well nourished and plump, laughing and talking. The holy man said, "I don't understand."

"It is simple," said the Lord, "it requires but one skill. You see, they have learned to feed each other, while the greedy think only of themselves."

my diwali mehndi

2006-10-21T18:39:00.000+08:00

The Charade of Meritocracy

2006-10-14T17:34:00.000+08:00

by Michael D. Barr
published in the Far Eastern Economic Review
October 2006

"In fact, Singapore’s system of promotion disguises and even facilitates tremendous biases against women, the poor and non-Chinese. Singapore’s administrative and its political elites—especially the younger ones who have come through school in the last 20 or so years—are not the cream of Singapore’s talent as they claim, but are merely a dominant social class, resting on systemic biases to perpetuate regime regeneration based on gender, class and race."

Read the full article here

the inheritance of talent

2006-10-12T22:16:00.000+08:00

So Kiran Desai won the Booker. Been meaning to read the book, and now I definitely will. It's kinda sad though...I think Anita Desai is quite possibly one of the best contemporary writers in English around, yet she's never won and now her daughter has. I know, I know, it's not fair, i'm pre-judging her (Kiran, i mean), but how do you step out from the shadow of the simplest yet most intricately woven, profound writing around? Guess i'll have to read the book to find out.

Already everybody's doing the "joining the ranks of Rushdie/Naipaul" shpeel. Well frankly if that's the case, i really hope that beyond ethnicity, she doesn't share their racist postcolonial upper-class chest-thumping. Ahh, Rushdie...I learnt so much from you, I really did. You gave me a true-blue half-decent desi anti/postcolonial education (all those As on my English papers really helped push my GPA up) and it was fun while it lasted, but I am so over you. And thank you for supporting Jack Straw on the whole "veils suck" thing; now I fully comprehend what Fanon meant about the native bourgeousie sucking up to the colonizer.

Anyway, I'm getting suspicious about the calibre of the judges of this Oscars-of-literature contest. Here's a direct quote from Hermione Lee, chairman of the judges:

"The remarkable thing about Kiran Desai is that she is aware of her Anglo-Indian inheritance - of V S Naipaul and R K Narayan and Salman Rushdie - but she does some pioneering."

Apparently the judges can't even tell the difference between an Anglo-Indian and Indo-Anglian writer. Bring on the mangoes, mehndi, masala, I say.

The fog of government rhetoric and corporate environmental shenanigans

2006-10-10T22:47:00.000+08:00

This probably goes without saying, but the haze sucks. On Saturday, I swear I could smell the fires of Sumatra burning. People have to live their lives, and so I was out and about all weekend when the haze was really bad, and now have been on sick leave for 2 days with tonsillitis. (great excuse to watch half the first season of Desperate Housewives in one sitting, I know, but that’s besides the point.)

Anyway, it’s getting a bit old to keep hearing the Indonesian government make the same lame excuses for why the haze keeps coming back year after year. They keep blaming “farmers and plantation owners” without ever giving specifics. These are not just anonymous little guys going around doing their nomadic agricultural stuff. It’s gotta take a whole lot more slashing-and-burning to cause the kind of environmental phenomenon we are seeing now. A 1998 International Development Research Centre (IDRC) report estimated that at that time (when the haze was the worst it’s ever been in Southeast Asia), “about 80% of the burning in 1997 was caused by large firms and 20% by traditional slash-and-burn farmers”.

I doubt the situation has changed much in the last 9 years. In fact, on October 5, 2006, Greenpeace Southeast Asia activists protested in front of Jakarta’s Ministry of Forestry and revealed that “During our investigations last month, we discovered that big industrial concessionaires, more than small farmers, were responsible for these forest fires”.

And therein lies the explanation for why the haze problem is not going to go away anytime soon. Agricultural practices are difficult to regulate, evidence of large companies engaging in these illegal practices is almost impossible to collect much less ensure their admissibility in court, and corporations can simply get around the law by hiring others to do the burning for them in order to escape persecution.

To this day, not a single individual or corporation has been charged with illegal forest burning in Indonesia. I believe there is no political will on the part of the Indonesian government to do this, because it could signal a potential fall-out in Indonesia’s desirability to large corporations as an agricultural hub (read: cheap land and labour, big profits) in a region ripe with competition.

On a side note, the Singapore government has been offering to help by providing cloud-seeding technology, which expands already-existing clouds in order to increase the probability of rain. Which makes me wonder about the unseasonably rainy weather we had during the IMF/World Bank meetings. Conspiracy theory? Perhaps. But never underestimate the power of a paranoid government with vested interests.

2006-10-09T21:56:00.000+08:00

The Singapura Song

Anwar Ibrahim's reply to LKY's recent statements

2006-10-02T23:03:00.000+08:00

Clearly Lee Kuan Yew is still trapped by his outdated thinking. His argument exposes the element of racism which has been suppressed for so long. Therefore he recognises the problems of Chinese overseas but not the anxiety of the neglected Singaporean Malays. Furthermore, what is regretted is the fact that he does not show any concern to the plight of other marginalised races in Malaysia or Indonesia, whether the bumiputra or Indians. In fact in Indonesia, the latest statistics reveal nearly 40 million people trapped by poverty.

Lee Kuan Yew should look at racial and development issues from the basis of justice for all races. Clearly he should understand the fact that when the New Economic Policy was initiated in 1970, the stake of the Malays and bumiputra in the economy was a mere 1.8 percent. The success of the NEP in education, producing a critical mass of professionals and providing business opportunities should be acknowledged. However the policy has been hijacked, leading to corruption and cronyism, enriching the few and marginalising the majority of the bumiputra. The fruits of the NEP are also shared by a few Chinese and Indian corporations selected to receive contracts for mega projects, independent power production and the gaming sector.

Full press statement here

strike a pose

2006-09-30T14:31:00.000+08:00

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

2006-09-27T23:42:00.000+08:00

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

2006-09-20T23:57:00.000+08:00

+ 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

2006-09-09T11:26:00.000+08:00

‘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.

More

Jaswant Singh Khalra

2006-09-04T23:04:00.000+08:00

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?

2006-09-03T12:00:00.000+08:00

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?

2006-08-22T21:34:00.000+08:00

George Galloway Interview - Sky News.

Now here's a guy who knows how to give an interview to a corporate TV station. Go George Galloway!

My Aceh Diary part 1

2006-08-05T10:27:00.000+08:00

About 3 weeks ago, A. and I went on a trip to Aceh with 4 of the Sher~E~Punjab (SPB) crew. We went there as part of a church-affiliated charitable organization that works with all sorts of marginalized groups of people locally, like prisoners and poor people, and that also does relief work in Indonesia, India and other parts of Asia. This organization has been in Aceh since the December 26 2004 tsunami which devastated communities all around the Indian Ocean. Our team was lead by a member of the organization who has been part of the Aceh relief project since the beginning - Pastor D, who we began to endearingly call Pak D after a couple of days there.

The majority of the housing reconstruction efforts in the area we visited have been completed by now, with the help of countless NGOs from around the world. We were there mostly to perform (SPB took care of that nicely) and play with the kids.

We started off early on Monday morning from Changi Airport, with a long afternoon stopover in Medan, the biggest city in Sumatra. Medan has all the atmosphere of a mini-Jakarta – crazy traffic, big shopping centres, people everywhere, large advertising signboards, big mansions and dilapidated housing blocks. It was funny though; there were so many run-down looking apartment buildings with weeds growing on the walls and a big satellite dish on top. While walking in one of the smaller residential roads, we passed by a house, saw an orange flag waving outside it, and realized it was a Gurdwara. There was a two-storey square-shaped building next to it with an open space in the middle which looked like a school. A guy saw us staring as we walked past and shouted to us in greeting. It’s too bad we only managed a quick sat sri akaal and didn’t have time to go in to check out the place; it would’ve been cool to see what it was all about.

Later we went back to the airport for our flight to Banda Aceh, the capital city of the province of Aceh. We arrived at the tiny airport around 5 in the evening, and the landscape immediately told us we were no longer in a big city – no tall buildings, only lush greenery as far as the eye could see.

Aceh is mostly rural. Inland there are a lot of farms in the valleys between mountains, and in the outlying areas are fishing villages. The inland wasn’t really affected by the tsunami, but many of the coastal areas were very badly hit. The village that we were going to be staying in for the next 4 nights is about a 45-minute drive from Banda Aceh on the northeastern coast. To get there, we took a labi-labi, a kind of lorry/taxi/bus service that can seat up to 10 people in the back. Here’s a picture of our labi-labi driver at the airport putting our bags in a safe spot:

On this ride, I sat at the edge, next to the back door, which was left open for air circulation. A bit scary but it was a great viewing spot.

As we moved further away from the inland, the shadow of the tsunami started appearing. 1½ years later, we could still see its effects on the coastline. Houses destroyed; overturned fishing boats; the only people we saw in these parts were passing through on the road on a motorbike or in a labi-labi. The ocean looked eerily calm, so serene yet so threatening at the same time. The evidence of destruction surrounding the ocean was a stark reminder of its potential to destroy.

It was getting dark by the time we got to the village. As soon as our labi-labi pulled into the village, scores of kids came running from all across the village to welcome us. They were so excited; they kept pointing to the poster of our performance schedule asking where this and that person was. They were looking for all the guys in turbans but we only had one on this trip, so I think they were a little disappointed.

For the most part, there is no running water in the village, although some people have installed pipes leading from wells to their homes. Even then, they have to be careful about not using up the well water. Most people shower at the community wells and collect water for everything from drinking to flushing the toilet. We didn’t drink the water, only bottled water, but after a couple of days got braver and had Coke with ice in it a few times. Nobody got food poisoning or anything so that was great. Most people now have electricity, but it needs to be used sparingly. We tripped the power one evening when one of us turned on a hair dryer.

We were fed really well on the trip, mostly by one very warm and friendly family. A typical meal looked like this (see picture on the left).

Oh yeah, see that dish next to the kettle that looks like brown mush with fangs coming out of it? That’s crabs, caught just that afternoon. Here’s Mr. Crab pre-cooked:

The woman in the picture is the biggest crab expert in the village, and graciously gave us some of her catch for the day.

[I've spent the last 4 evenings and this morning struggling with the formatting of the pictures and text on blogger, and i've finally got it looking decent. So i'll stop here for now. I'll post more on my thoughts about the trip in another entry...]

solidarity with lebanese people

2006-07-30T10:54:00.000+08:00

If you are looking for ways to help or just do something, please consider the following.

1) There is an international petition to Save the Lebanese Civilians at http://epetitions.net/julywar/index.php that will be sent to representatives of many countries. (This website sometimes has trouble with its server, so be patient when trying to access it.) There are already over 200,000 signatures.

2) Please consider making a donation to the Sanayeh Relief Centre. I know there are many relief organizations out there and most people just give to the Red Cross or whatever, but these aren't necessarily the best organizations to give the money to. Sanayeh is a grassroots organization that is posting regular updates on its blog about the work it is doing. Perhaps more importantly, it's strongly connected to peoples' movements on the ground (unlike big-time NGOs like the Red Cross and Doctors without Borders) and is very clear about its analysis and position on the situation (again, unlike other NGOs which profess to be neutral and non-political - is that ever even possible?). For specific info on how to help, read this particular post.

out-of-bound markers

2006-07-18T22:50:00.000+08:00

By my sketchpad

another tsunami. um..this is kinda creepy

2006-07-18T07:31:00.000+08:00

Last night i dreamt that i was walking along a beach and was swept to sea by a gigantonormous wave.

This morning i find out:
Tsunami on Indonesia's Java coast kills 80 people
(The death toll is rising.)

stunned by Israel

2006-07-16T22:59:00.000+08:00

Just got back from a 5-day trip to the Indonesian province of Aceh, as part of a small tsunami relief project. I have so many thoughts on the trip, but will save them for another post or two. For now, i am still reeling from what is going on in the Middle East.

Sitting on the plane on Friday evening, starved for knowledge of the world's goings-on in the last week, i was visibly grateful to the NGO doctor from Bangalore sitting next to me for sharing his copy of the Jakarta Post with me. There, splashed across the front page, was the news that Israel had attacked Lebanon.

A few pages later, still stunned, i read this excellent piece by the guy who runs the StopTheWall website, including the following lines:

The global community pleads for the release of one Israeli taken from a tank, stationed outside the Gaza ghetto, whilst Palestinians are taken from their beds and killed in the streets and half of their government and 1/3 of the Palestinian Legislative Council are taken hostage. They beg for his return whilst ignoring the 9000 Palestinians rotting in Israeli jails, over 400 of whom are children.

Global agencies confine their operations to fact-finding missions on the “Palestinian situation” speculating endlessly on humanitarian issues as if Palestine were in the throws of some natural disaster. Reeling off further UN humanitarian reports are not asked for. Palestinians don’t need to be told by the World Bank about their own poverty and they don’t need the hollow rhetorical support of governments which fail to follow up words with deeds. The facts on the ground in Palestine are there for all to see. We need action. We need political pressure on the Occupation. We need freedom.

And then this afternoon, while plugging through my 123 unread emails from the last week, i came across one that exposes a clear connection between the multi-billion dollar corporation that is Starbucks and the Zionist apartheid state that is Israel. Although the letter is a parody, it seems to be based on factual evidence that Starbucks does, in fact, help fund Israeli apartheid.

Anyway, this is totally just a rant about things most people who read my (very unimpressive and lately, much neglected) blog probably already know about, but i can't help feeling so angry and helpless about the kind of world we live in, where those who hold the reins of power can rule with an iron fist when they feel like, can bomb peoples' homes, kill innocent bodies, destroy peoples' lives, reap the benefits of war, and then get away with it.

2006-07-01T17:42:00.000+08:00

Singapore You Are Not My Country
(For Noora)

Singapore you are not my country.
Singapore you are not a country at all.
You are surprising Singapore, statistics-starved Singapore, soulful Singapore of tourist brochures in Japanese and hourglass kebayas.
You protest, but without picketing, without rioting, without Catherine Lim,
but through your loudspeaker media, through the hypnotic eyeballs of your newscasters,
and that weather woman who I swear is working voodoo on my teevee screen.
Singapore, what are these lawsuits in my mailbox?
There are so many sheaves, I should have tipped the postman.
Singapore, I assert, you are not a country at all.
Do not raise your voice against me, I am not afraid of your anthem although the lyrics are still bleeding from the bark of my sapless heart.
Not because I sang them pigtailed pinnafored breakfasted chalkshoed in school
But because I used to watch telly till they ran out of shows.
Do not invite me to the podium and tell me to address you properly.
I am allergic to microphones and men in egosuits and pubicwigs.
And I am not a political martyr, I am a patriot who has lost his country and virginity.
Do not wave a cane at me for vandalising your propaganda with technicolour harangues,
Red Nadim semen white Mahsuri menses the colourful language of my eloquent generation.
Your words are like walls on which truth is graffiti.
This has become an island of walls.
Asylum walls, factory walls, school walls, the walls of the midnight Istana.
If I am paranoid I have learnt it from you, O my delicate orchid stalk Singapore,
Always thirsty for water, spooked by armed archipelagoes, always gasping for airspace, always running to keep ahead, running away from yourself.
Singapore why do you wail that way, demanding my IC?
Singapore stop yelling and calling me names.
How dare you call me a chauvinist, an opposition party, a liar,
a traitor, a mendicant professor, a Marxist homosexual communist
pornography banned literature chewing gum liberty smuggler?
How can you say I do not believe in
The Free Press autopsies flogging mudslinging bankruptcy
which are the five pillars of Justice?
And how can you call yourself a country, you terrible hallucination
of highways and cranes and condominiums ten minutes drive from the MRT?

Tell that to the battered housewife who thinks happiness lies at the end of a Toto Queue.
Tell that to the tourist guide whose fillings are pewter whose feelings are iron
whose courtesy is gold whose speech is silver whose handshake is a lethal yank at the jackpot machine.
Tell that to my imam who thinks we are all going to hell.
Tell that to the chao ah beng who has seven stitches a broken collarbone and three dead comradesbut who will not hesitate from thrusting his tiger ribcage into another fight
because the lanterns of his lungs have caught their own fire and there is no turning back.
Tell that to the yuppie who sits in meat-markets disguised as pubs, listening to Kenny G disguised as jazz on handphone disguised as conversation and loneliness disguised as a jukebox.
Tell that to all those exiles whose names are forgotten but who leave behind a bad taste in the thoughtful mouth, reminding us that the flapping sunned linen shelters a whiff of chloroform.
Tell that to Town Council men who feed pigeons with crumbs of arsenic.
Tell that to Maria Hertogh a.k.a Nadra who proved to us that blood spilled was thicker than water shed as she was caught pining under a stone angel in the nunnery for her husband.
Tell that to Ah Meng, who bore six hairy bastards for our nation.
Tell that to Lee Kuan Yew's squint.
Tell that to Josef Ng, who shaves my infant head amidst a shower of one-cent coins, and both of us are pure again.
Tell that to my Warrant Officer who knew I was faking.
Tell that to the unemployed man who drinks cigarettes smokes tattoos watches peanuts
unself-conscious of his gut belch debts and wife having an affair with the Salesman of Nervous Breakdowns.
Tell that to our Maya Angelou's who are screeching like witches United Nations-style poems populated by Cheena Babi Bayee Tonchet Melayu Malas Keling Geragok Mat Salleh.
Tell that to the fakirs of civil obedience, whose headphones are pounding the hooving basslines of Damyata Damyata Damyata.
Tell that to the statue of Li Po at Marina Park.
Tell that to the performance artists who need licences like drivers and doctors and dogs
when all they really need is just three percent of your love.
Tell that to the innocent faggot looking for kicks on a Sunday evening to end up sucking the bit-hard pistol-muzzle of the CID, ensnared no less by his weakness for pretty boys naked out of uniform.
Tell that to the caretaker of the grave of Radin Mas.
Tell that to Chee Soon Juan's smirk.
Tell that to the pawns of The Upgrading Empire who penetrate their phalluses into heartlands to plant Lego cineplexes Tupperware playgrounds suicidal balconies carnal parks of cardboard and condoms and before we know it we are a colony once again.
Tell that to Malaysia whose Desaru is our spittoon whose TV2 is our amusement whose Bumiputras are our threat whose outrage is our greater outrage whose turtles are weeping blind in the roaring daylight of our cameras.
Tell that to the old poets who have seen this piece of land slip their metaphors each passing year from bumboats to debris to sanitation projects to drowning attempts to barbed neon water weeds on a river with no reflections a long way off from the sea.
O Singapore your fair shores your garlands your GNP.
You are not a country you are a construction from spare parts.
You are not a campaign you are last year's posters.
You are not culture you are poems on the MRT.
You are not a song you are part swear word part lullaby.
You are not Paradise you are an island with pythons.

Singapore I am on trial.
These are the whites of my eyes and the reds of my wrists.
These are the deranged stars of my schizophrenia.
This is the milk latex gummy moon of my sedated smile.
I have lost a country to images, it is as simple as that.
Singapore you have a name on a map but no maps to your name.
This will not do; we must stand aside and let the Lion
crash through a madness of cymbals back to that dark jungle heart
when eyes were still embers waiting for a crownless Prince of Palembang.

Alfian Sa'at
One Fierce Hour
(available at MPH Bookstore)

tsunami voyeurism

2006-07-01T17:37:00.000+08:00

Thai survivors and relief workers say they were most angered that the crew chose to re-enact the disaster _complete with dead bodies and overturned cars_ on the main road through Khao Lak that was devastated by the giant waves.

Others were upset the crew chose to put up flyers throughout the tsunami-hit region, saying victims were needed as extras.

"It was pretty tasteless. People are not happy," said Robert Reynolds, an American charity director whose Srithong Thukaoluan Foundation is supporting more than 100 children affected by the tsunami.

Finola Dwyer, the drama's producer, said she regretted the wording in the flyer. But she defended the decision to shoot in areas hit by the tsunami.

"Why not? It did happen. It's not a piece of fiction," Dwyer said.

Full story

?

2006-06-29T23:20:00.000+08:00

So let me see if i can get this right.

A government bureaucracy that's just tripping over itself in red tape just happens to "mistakenly" seal voter name lists into top-secret ballot boxes that now have to be reopened because of some supposedly innocent careless act. And what's more, it just happens to be a coincidence that the ballot boxes that are being reopened are from Aljunied GRC - the most hotly-contested ward in the General Election 2006 and the one that almost saw the PAP lose 6 candidates to the Workers Party.

Right.

I am very very very very very very very suspicious.

frankenstein mangoes

2006-06-26T22:05:00.000+08:00

These mangoes were huge! They're Taiwanese apparently, $4 each at the market, and tasted pretty sweet.

2006-06-15T20:33:00.000+08:00

"We should have the maturity to realize that everyone- not just us- deserves to be safe from terrorism. We should understand that our proclaimed innocence is offensive if we do not recognize that most of humanity- including those within our borders- live with this tireless source of pain and anxiety everyday. We should develop the capacity to imagine what this world must feel like for individuals, communities, entire cultures who witness our apathy and our complicity. And we should fight with the millions of people across the world who deserve justice."

- Harsha Walia
Responding to the Toronto Terror Arrests

another political act by Aamir Khan

2006-06-07T21:52:00.000+08:00

IT is Aamir Khan's turn to be Gujarat's enemy number one. The Bollywood star follows a long list of illustrious people - Mallika Sarabhai, Medha Patkar and M.F. Husain among others who have been targeted by the Bharatiya Janata Party mobs.

The BJP's youth wing called for a ban on his new Hindi film Fanaa in Gujarat. His crime: He wanted those displaced by the Narmada dam to be rehabilitated. His earlier movie, Rang De Basanti, was pulled out of Gujarat's theatres in April after they were attacked.

He supported the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), a group seeking proper rehabilitation of oustees.

"Aamir Khan has insulted Gujarat by sitting with Medha Patkar on her hunger strike in Delhi last month," said Amit Thaker, president of the BJP Yuva Morcha. "Medha Patkar is Gujarat's enemy number one, by being with her, Aamir Khan is also an enemy of Gujarat. He should apologise or he will have to face the anger of Gujarat. We will not allow any of his films in Gujarat and will also ban the products he endorses - Titan, Toyota, Coke." In the wake of the protests, Toyota pulled out advertisements of its product endorsed by Aamir Khan.

Full Frontline article here

In case you don't already know, the BJP is a powerful political party that is reflective of the rise of Hindu fundamentalism/fascism in India over the last 20 or so years.

The Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada Movement) is a huge peoples' movement in India against the construction of large-scale dams, that are displacing thousands of adivasis, farmers, tribal and low caste people, sucking the water resources away from communities and redirecting it towards middle and upper class people in urban areas who can afford to pay for essential resources like water and electricity. It's the movement that Arundhati Roy donated all the proceeds of her Booker prize-winning novel, The God of Small Things, to.

For more on the NBA, go to the Friends of River Narmada website.

For more on AR's writing, including on big dams in India (read The Greater Common Good), go to this site.

filmmaking 101

2006-06-01T21:25:00.000+08:00

burgersandurians Frankly, i'm more than a bit suspicious of a media project claiming to advance "social causes" that is funded by the MDA, but i suppose it could be a good opportunity to develop film skills. And heck, in the spirit of Fred Hampton - you can censor a revolutionary, but you can't censor a revolution.

Reel Revolution

The Substation Moving Images is proud to present Reel Revolution, a new six week programme to challenge young people to bring issues up for discussion through the platform of video.

For more info, go to http://revolution.youth.sg/

Indentured in Singapore's Little India

2006-05-30T23:05:00.000+08:00

The insecurity of life as an R Pass holder in Singapore is pretty much how life is on the other side of any guest worker program. For the host country, a guest worker program is a good deal: a wealthy country gets sufficient supplies of cheap labor to do all the jobs no one else wants to do, without having to invest anything in the welfare of that labor force. For the worker, it is a period of hard (oftentimes demeaning or dangerous) labor with the ability to occasionally remit money back home, a constant sense of alienation and isolation heightened by an enforced separation from home and family and no legal rights to speak of.

- Rupali Ghosh
in Samar: South Asian Magazine for Action and Reflection

Full article

police logic

2006-05-30T09:07:00.000+08:00

$18m anti-riot boost
Police gear up ahead of IMF-World Bank summit
by Loh Chee Kong
in Today

"The police must ensure that while legitimate and peaceful activity, whether by local or foreign groups, can proceed in accordance with our laws, those who choose to breach our laws must be dealt with firmly."

Full article

baaa

2006-05-29T22:19:00.000+08:00

Tonight on my way home from work, there was a kid at the back of the bus who would just not stop singing nursery rhymes at the top of his voice.

For once, I actually had a seat and didn’t have to occupy my mind with discovering the very limited permutations and combinations of ways in which I could arrange my body so that it wasn’t uncomfortably crammed up next to the 5 people standing around me trying to claim some space of their own.

So I got to thinking about nursery rhymes. And why the hell every single Singaporean kid knows Baa Baa Black Sheep even if they will probably never have the opportunity to witness the phenomenon of a sheep, much less a black one, in their entire lives. Plus how many of us will ever have the need for wool on our backs, anyway?

I suppose I’ll just have to take comfort in the fact that this nursery rhyme imparts life’s true lessons to those not yet in the know about the ways of the world – always succumb to authority (Yes sir, Yes sir, Three bags full), serve those who rule over you (One for my master, One for my dame), and then if you have anything left after that, show some charity (One for the little boy who lives down the lane).

Here’s to the kid on the bus tonight, and to every kid who’s ever sung Baa Baa Black Sheep the way it should be…incomprehensibly.

Baa Baa Black Sheep
Ay-me Nay-mee Noo

Suu Kyi remains under house arrest

2006-05-28T11:15:00.000+08:00

Burma's military junta imposed another year of house arrest on opposition leader and Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi on Saturday despite stiff international pressure for her release, a government source said.

More

Deconstructing fundamentalism: a response to Yawning Bread

2006-05-25T19:48:00.000+08:00

Prefatory note: I generally really enjoy reading Yawning Bread’s writing. I think he writes well and has good analyses of much that is going on in Singapore and in the world, which does not necessarily mean that I agree with everything he says, ofcourse. As such, I offer this critique not as a vengeful attack but as an alternative viewpoint in the spirit of an exchange of ideas.

In the essay ‘Indonesia: fundamentalism on the march’, Yawning Bread offers an analysis on the history of religion and the rise of religious militancy and fundamentalism, using the specific case of Islam.

I believe his analysis is flawed in several ways.

For one thing, the history that he maps out is an extremely Eurocentric version. Charting out the history of the development of scientific thought in Western Europe doesn’t shed any light on the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. Scientific thought developed in its own unique way in Islamic societies; in fact, scientific pursuit and empirical experimentation were cornerstones in many Islamic societies of the past. The many scientific discoveries which are now popularly credited to Western Europe were actually built on the foundations of scientific thought in Islamic societies, most notably in the time of the Ottoman Empire. So right there, his main thesis that the tension between the mythos-logos dichotomy has caused a rise in Islamic fundamentalism falls apart.

Later, he goes on to say that the development of rational thought led to the development of questioning the dominant social ethos, particularly based on questions of unequal treatment (let’s call that discrimination) based on gender, ‘race’, sexual orientation, and so on. Again, I believe this is false. As long as there have been slaves there have been slave rebellions. As long as there has been patriarchy there have been women rising up against it. Resistance to oppression and exploitation precedes the Western European Enlightenment, it precedes the language of ‘equality’ and ‘human rights’ that we use today, and it will continue whether or not these ideas and this language remains a part of dominant discourse.

This is why I think the word “traditional” (as opposed to “modern”) is not the correct language to describe what we are talking about here. “Traditional” implies a harking back to a past way of doing things that is usually either romanticized or demonized. The “traditional social order” sounds like there was a time when things were peaceful, all was well, or at least calm, and no one was questioning anything, which I find very hard to believe. Perhaps ‘conservative’ is a more appropriate term to describe an ideology that is hierarchical and committed to ‘conserving’ the status quo.

In this sense, too, I find the term “religious fundamentalism” problematic and prefer the term ‘religious conservative’ to describe the phenomenon. A Muslim activist acquaintance I know in Canada has really challenged me to think about the connotations of using that term “fundamentalist”. As Yawning Bread himself has noted in the comment thread for this essay in his newly-created blog that supports his website, the term “fundamentalism” implies a return to the fundamentals, or basics, of a religion. However, the people we are referring to are not actually doing that. Usually they are advocating a highly skewed perspective on the religion. This is also a tricky thing because it’s difficult, if not impossible, to separate religion from culture, politics, economics, social roles and life on the ground in general. Is there really such a thing as ‘pure religion’? And if so whose interpretation is right, and why?

So how then to understand the rise of Islamic religious conservatism? Any attempt at analysis must take into account the world geo-political situation, the simultaneous (and arguably more powerful) rise of Christian religious conservatism, the economics of who controls the world’s resources, and the nuances of power dynamics created by the increased demonization of Muslims throughout the world but particularly in the so-called ‘First World’ as well as in Muslim-minority countries like India.

The protest against the Indonesian government’s rejection of the ‘anti-pornography bill’ (which Yawning Bread rightly points out is less about abolishing pornography and more about restricting sexual behaviour), is one indication that Islamic religious conservatism, like all religious conservatism, quite often chooses women’s bodies as its battleground. And again, women are speaking out against this. But in a world where they who have the most power have the most airtime, the question then becomes, who is listening?

Endnote: I use the term ‘Islamic societies’ with much caution, without trying to homogenize groups of people who are connected by a particular identity and in recognition that the term tends to invisibilize minorities within these societies.

civil liberties? what civil liberties?

2006-05-22T21:31:00.000+08:00

Hundreds more cameras on streets to bolster security
By Goh Chin Lian
The Straits Times
May 22 2006

HUNDREDS of new electronic eyes will be watching the streets of Singapore, under three new police and transport authority projects to be completed by next year.

The Land Transport Authority will install closed circuit TV (CCTV) cameras to monitor 67 traffic junctions and the Singapore Police Force will put up another 91 in the Raffles City area, where the International Monetary Fund and World Bank conferences will be held in September.

***

Whenever you're ready, i'll be waiting for you to shove that CCTV camera up my ass so you can monitor the 'terrorist cells' growing up there.

As if Singaporeans aren't monitored enough already, this new move can only add to the climate of fear that's already so pervasive as well as further threaten anyone who's even thinking about making any kind of public statement at the IMF/World Bank meetings.

And this paragraph in the article just made me wanna scream:
"Buses and trains here could be next to have electronic eyes, going by the experience of several major cities like London, where the network of 500,000 cameras helped track down perpetrators of the terror attacks."

Helluuu...you mean the cameras that made London police chase a suspect down London's streets just cos he was wearing a backpack and was brown, which apparently was close enough to what they saw on their highly fuzzy and blurred cameras on buses and which ended up leading to the STATE-SANCTIONED KILLING OF AN INNOCENT MAN IN BROAD DAYLIGHT? Those cameras?

The good news: This story was front page news today in Singapore's widest circulating English newspaper.

The bad news: There probably won't be so much as a peep of protest about this new development in repressive culture, except maybe on a few other blogs. C'mon, my fellow countrypeople, surprise me.

silent conversion?

2006-05-19T20:58:00.000+08:00

This seems most appropriate to Singapore
From the Sir! No Sir! galleries

war resisters

2006-05-19T20:30:00.000+08:00

via missruckus

There's a film out about American troops organizing against the Vietnam war. It's called 'Sir! No Sir!' Looks pretty awesome. You can watch the trailer, find info about the Vietnam war resisters movement and check out drawings, photographs, underground newspapers at the film's website.

Also, you should really watch this music video slash movie thingy at notyoursoldier.org, which is a website to aid the counter-recruitment movement that is gaining momentum in the United States right now against the Iraq war. The music features The Coup, who's album Party Music is my favourite CD in the world for 3 years running. And they have a new album out, which i can't buy because it's probably banned in Singapore and i don't have a credit card.

But really. Watch the music video slash movie thingy. It's really well-done.

No War On Iran!

2006-05-17T22:22:00.000+08:00

A statement by the S.T.A.T.U.S. coalition, which brings together community-based organizations in the Vancouver area belonging to movements and struggles of the people of the Global South (Asia, Africa, Central and South America, Middle East,the Caribbean region) and the struggles of such migrant communities in Canada.

Today it is our duty to speak out against any potential foreign invasionof Iran. The justification for such an intervention is given as the threat of the Iranian nuclear program. These reports recall the "Weapons of Mass Destruction" hysteria leading up to the invasion of Iraq. Just as in the case of Iraq, none of the claims made by the U.S. government about Iran stand up to scrutiny. Iran has submitted to the most intrusive and humiliating inspections, beyond what is required by the Nuclear Weapons Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). None of the inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency have found any evidence that Iran is developing a nuclear weapons program. In fact, according to the CIA, Iran is at least 10 years away from developing a nuclear bomb, which itself falsifies US accusations. Israel is the only nuclear power in the Middle East and the real nuclear threat to global society is the United States-the only government that has used nuclear weapons against civilian populations and has the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction on the planet.

The history of US involvement in Iran and in other countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Columbia, Panama, Vietnam demonstrates that the United States has always supported the most dictatorial and repressive forces in its self-serving covert and overt operations. For over half a century, the US has intervened and sabotaged all progressive movements within Iran in the process of securing its own economic and political interests. For example, Iran suffered greatly when the U.S overthrew the government in1953 and returned Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (“the Shah”) in what was considered the CIA's first successful overthrow of a foreign government. For 25 years the Shah ruled Iran with an iron fist for the benefit of U.S. oil corporations.

Furthermore, contrary to the argument put forward by the U.S in order to legitimize its illegal actions, US military action against Iran will not liberate the Iranian people from the current regime or improve the situation for human rights. Only an uprising of the Iranian people can produce genuine democracy within Iran. The recent efforts and protests of the Vahed Bus Company drivers and workers, which saw over 800 union activists arrested and/or laid-off, was an inspirational moment for workers around the world. The Iranian people have a rich and long historyof struggling for democracy and independence since the early 20th century.These relentless struggles have taken place in the face of British colonial interests, US imperialism, and oppressive internal regimes. Aside from all the bloodshed and devastation of an imperialist war, a US invasion would give the Iranian dictatorship, against which the Iranian people have struggled for decades, an excuse to repress and imprison political dissidents in Iran.

The crimes of the current regime in its 27 years of existence include executions, stonings, flogging, throwing dissidents to jail, torture, stripping people of their rights, and violence against women. However, the main reason for the opposition of the governments of the West towards Iran has never been the atrocities of this regime against the people of Iran; in fact the US government has actively suppressed leftist forces in Iran. The alignment of the US with the Iranian clerical regime in order to combat leftist revolutionary forces was revealed in the Tower Commission, according to which "in 1983, the United States helped bring to the attention of Teheran the threat inherent in the extensive infiltration ofthe government by the communist Tudeh Party and Soviet or pro-Soviet cadres in the country. Using this information, the Khomeini government took measures, including mass executions, that virtually eliminated the pro-Soviet infrastructure in Iran." It is also imperative to recall that in a complicated swap deal in the 1980’s, Israel and other intermediaries sold US-origin TOW and Hawk missiles to the Iranian regime in return for cash and for the release of hostages in the Lebanese hostage crisis. The money was used by the US to finance their covert operations against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua, until the Iran-Contra affair were publicly exposed at the end of 1986.

The racism so deeply entrenched against Arabs and those constructed to be Muslims replicates itself in the West including Canada, where hundreds of Iranian refugees, readily deemed ‘terrorists’ or ‘fanatics’, are increasingly facing deportation. Our struggle against deportations of Iranian refugees continues within the context of a larger movement of immigrants and refugees throughout Canada, who are standing up to the exclusionary policies of Citizenship and Immigration Canada. We call upon all peace-loving people opposing war, militarization and racism to stand up for the rights of Iranian people in Iran and in Canada. We demand an end to deportations and detentions of Iranian refugees from Canada and regularization of status for all Iranian refugees. We also stand in support of the Iranian people who continue to fight for genuine democracy and self-determination for all Iranian people.

mmm...

2006-05-15T21:44:00.000+08:00

The elections are over, and I am too pissed off and irritated at all that’s happened to do a meaningful postmortem (but if you want something to chew on try Dansong or Yawning Bread). So I guess I can go back to blogging about more important things.

Like chocolate-coated sunflower seeds.

Much more important.

Once upon a time, I had time to kill in my lunch hour, so I decided to wander aimlessly down the supermarket aisles for about 15 minutes. As I rounded the bend between soft cushy-looking diapers that made me feel guilty for not immediately wanting to have kids and cans of soup that reaffirmed once again that I never want to go back to my first year of university, something caught my eye. Small brightly-coloured packets sparkled enticingly as the light reflected off them. I bent down for a closer look, and there they were, chocolate-coated sunflower seeds. But ofcourse, I thought. Why hadn’t I thought of that before? I hurriedly paid for my booty and ripped the packet open even before I was out the supermarket doors. Inside were dozens of tiny pebble-like tear drops, each a different colour. When I popped the first few in my mouth, I tingled with delight – crunchy seed surrounded by chocolaty goodness. Yum Yum. I think I’ll be 70 cents poorer again tomorrow…

the haves and the have-nots

2006-05-11T08:56:00.000+08:00

Kudos to Today for publishing this piece

Lessons Learnt from May Day
by Irfan Husain

"One problem is that while the haves want market forces to operate freely, they are not prepared to follow the logic of this system. According to classical economic theory, goods, labour and capital should be able to move freely wherever they are most efficiently utilized and where the returns are highest.

But modern champions of the free market are not willing to allow labour to move without tight controls, while they insist on the free movement of goods and capital.

Where does this leave the have-nots?"

Full article

thoughts before Polling Day

2006-05-04T23:58:00.000+08:00

Only a day left before all Singaporeans, or at least all Singaporeans living in a contested ward, get to exercise their democratic right to vote. Oops, I mean democratic duty. Now there’s an oxymoron for ya. Voting is compulsory in Singapore, which, to me, is not very democratic. Doesn’t having the right to vote also mean that you should have the right to not vote?

The last 9 days of campaigning have been extremely frustrating.

The Peoples’ Action Party (PAP) has spent the entire campaign period refusing to discuss real issues and simply engaging in the “politics of distraction”, as James Gomez so succinctly put it. From suing the SDP for defamation to boasting about ‘First World’ politics to the James Gomez-minority certificate saga, the PAP has spent the last 9 days bashing the Opposition political parties and playing up their own ‘accomplishments’ as the ruling party of Singapore since Independence. They’ve continued to claim responsibility for the rags-to-riches story of postcolonial Singapore (but whose rags? Whose riches?) and continued to dangle sweet crunchy carrots (lift upgrading) and wave threatening sticks (electing Opposition equals chaos and Singapore’s ‘successes’ going down the drain) to try and get re-elected.

Meanwhile, the Workers’ Party (WP) has begun to prove itself as a formidable Oppositional force, gaining popularity (have you not seen the pictures of the turn-outs at WP rallies?) and spending a lot of time talking about things that affect peoples’ lives. They haven’t really said much about their position on international and foreign policy issues like Free Trade Agreements, American imperialism and resource wars, but I’ll consider forgiving them for that considering that Singapore’s geographical small-ness makes for a General Election where all local, national and international issues are compressed together, which means that people will be more likely to focus on stuff that they are closest to on the ground. I’m particularly impressed with the fact that the WP has challenged the incestuous relationship between the trade union bureaucracy and the government. As far as I know, Singapore is the only country in the world where the trade unions support a right-wing conservative, pro-business, anti-worker political party. I’m not saying trade unions elsewhere aren’t full of screwed up politics, but usually if they support a political party it’s a social democratic one that at least claims to want some reformist policies that benefit workers. Maybe this is where the Singapore Tourism Board got its inspiration for its slogan – ‘Uniquely Singapore’.

In another corner of the ring is the Singapore Democratic Party, which may not have done a good job of garnering support from many voters, but has continued to push the envelope on exposing the excesses the ruling party and the rest of the ruling class by refusing to back down on engaging in non-violent civil disobedience, even at great cost to its members.

Finally, there is the Singapore Democratic Alliance (SDA). In my mind, this is the weakest political party we have. Aside from the enigma surrounding Mr Chiam See Tong for being one of only 2 Opposition candidates currently in office, no other SDA candidate has made any lasting impact and they don’t really have a firm platform on anything.

This is where I believe the WP slogan ‘You Have A Choice’ fails. In a context where one political party has ruled the country for years without strong contest, simply posing an alternative to it is very meaningful, certainly I would agree with that. But we also have to ask what kind of alternative? Cos there never is just one. There are many other ways the country could be governed. There are many other ways we could live together in this society.

And that’s another thing about this General Election, and also the political environment in Singapore generally – people rarely mention anything about ideology. We don’t hear the political parties being classified as left-wing or right-wing or centrist very often; in fact I’ve never heard it done in the mainstream media. I find that bizarre, although not altogether surprising, since when you mask your ideology you mask your intent, and if your intent is to stay in a position of power then you’re not going to be too popular with the masses.

So anyway, I still can’t decide how I’m going to vote on Saturday. It’s funny cos I’ve never really taken any meaningful interest in electoral politics before, partly because I’ve never had the opportunity to vote, partly because I’ve never really seen what difference my one vote would make, and partly because I believe democracy is about a lot more than simply voting for someone to ‘represent’ you (as far as anyone can represent any group of people – which is not very far) once in a while.

The ‘choice’ in my constituency is between the PAP and the SDA. Like I said before, I don’t think the SDA is much of an alternative to the PAP other than in name. However, I do see the value of voting Opposition as a way to send a message to the ruling party that it doesn’t have complete and total support.

I’ve also thought about spoiling my ballot. There would be uncountable ways to do this – marking an X on both parties, not marking anything, marking a question mark, writing a message across the card, I don’t know, something like ‘This is not a choice’ or whatever. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some legal clause somewhere that says spoiling your ballot is illegal. I’m sure there are people who do it; I wonder how many. Cos ballot-spoiling can be a pretty cool mass action to point out the inadequacies of electoral politics.

Now there’s something meaningful to think about over the next 32 hours.

ps: It's way past my bedtime so my apologies for not adding any links. You're just gonna have to google it if you don't know what i'm referencing.

Pramoedya dies

2006-05-01T13:04:00.000+08:00

"Ya, Ma, kita sudah melawan, Ma, biarpun hanya dengan mulut."

["Yes, Ma, we fought back, Ma, even though only with our mouths."]
Anak Semua Bangsa - Pg. 353

Indonesian author, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, died yesterday.

News reports:

Sydney Morning Herald

BBC

Malaysia Star

Info:

Pram's Page

A pretty comprehensive Pram Resource page

chicken rice with a side order of PAP

2006-04-30T17:38:00.000+08:00

All we wanted was a nice Sunday family lunch. But we got a little more than that when we got to this Joo Chiat chicken rice stall (really yummy by the way...it's right next to the Esso/Mobil petrol station on the corner of East Coast Rd and Lorong Stangee, fyi).

The PAP team was doing their walk-about, garnering votes for the upcoming election.

They came to every table, shook our hands, gave us a flyer each, and said 'Remember to vote PAP'. That was it. No attempt to even engage us on their politics or anything. [Oh yeah, except for the fact that before handing me a flyer, the guy took one look at me and said that i looked like i was too young to vote, which i took as an insult, considering i am 27. He dutifully handed me a flyer after that.]

I wonder if all the politicians looking for votes go through this procedure in their walk-abouts. That would be too bad. You'd think these kinds of moments would be the best times to actually engage the electorate, talk to people about how they're feeling about the elections, what they think about the political party's platform, what they're happy with, what they're not happy with, etc. Especially since there are no other real opportunities during election time to do this. Election rallies are mostly a time for grand-standing, which is fine, i don't have a problem with that. A rally space lends itself more to masses of people listening to a few select speakers. It's not really an ideal space for public dialogue. And there are no public forums or election debate sessions, not even televised ones, where politicians can debate their platforms and where people can challenge politicians to state their position on specific issues.

This experience just felt like advertising. I couldn't get a closer shot, but in this picture on the right you'll be able to see that the walk-about-ers were accompanied by more folks dressed in the PAP's signature white clothing on a lorry with the easily-identifiable lightning bolt symbol. They chanted "PAP, PAP" with their fists raised as the lorry drove past. They were accompanied a little later by more PAP-ers on bicycles. All this man-on-the-street stuff is ofcourse quite deceiving - you need to put up quite a bit of money to be able to run in the elections in the first place, and we all know the gross disparity between Ministers' salaries and the salaries of the majority of the population.

In any case, chicken rice with a side order of PAP that you didn't ask for sure makes for interesting lunchtime conversation.

first world?

2006-04-27T23:04:00.000+08:00

The ‘Singapore as First World’ Election ‘Debate’

Let’s examine this term ‘First World’ for a minute or two. How do we actually define what is ‘First World’?

Wikipedia gives a pretty decent, brief political history of the term, and states that in its current usage, the term “has come to denote the 'developed' Industrialized-Capitalistic nations that in 2000 had a higher GDP per capita than $15,000, as stated by the World Bank. This would include the United States, Canada, Japan, the countries of the European Union (in 2000), Taiwan, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea. Additionally, Singapore and Hong Kong may be described in these terms but they are exceptions as these have particular characteristics not representative of a country. The World Bank also denotes these as "High Income Economies".”

Now I’m not gonna waste too many brain cells thinking about how useful GDP is as a measure of peoples’ economic conditions. Most of the time it’s just this number that’s thrown around in popular discourse that’s supposed to be some kind of marker of success – the bigger the number, the better you should feel about your country, apparently. But I think it’s safe to say that while GDP is a commonly-used indicator of the (capitalist) economic wheel-turning of countries, it doesn’t really say anything about how that economic wealth is distributed (i.e. unequally and unjustly). It doesn’t tell us much about where that wealth has come from. Quite convenient, considering most of the countries in that list of ‘First World’ were (England, Spain, Portugal, Holland, etc) and are (US, Canada, Israel) (neo)colonizers and imperialists - extracting wealth from the labour of the majority in the colonized world and through theft of land and natural resources (case in point: Operation Iraqi Liberation), and not to mention displacing hundreds of thousands of indigenous peoples especially in settler colonies (for info on one current struggle, see the Six Nations Standoff Resource Page). And GDP also doesn’t tell us how profit/wealth is generated.

So by extension, that makes the term ‘First World’ become this vague and almost meaningless thing, doesn’t it? Except for the fact that the term is constructed in such a way as to identify any nation associated with it as superior and somehow doing the right things compared to everybody else. A sense of superiority is something that I’m sure the PAP identifies with quite easily, but I’m kinda disappointed that some Opposition candidates have also fallen into using the same language in response, instead of critiquing it. These kinds of things just seem like a distraction from the things that should really matter in this election - growing income disparities, healthcare, education, the death penalty, democratic participation, a truly just justice system, government accountability and transparency, violence against women, etcetera etcetera.

I hope that, with Nomination Day now out of the way, the level of political debate will improve.

Nectarpool

2006-04-19T22:46:00.000+08:00

Click on image to enlarge

More info here and here

my Singapore Gaga review

2006-04-18T21:35:00.000+08:00

I finally went to watch Singapore Gaga last Wednesday night, and it sucked, big time.

It was a bit of an adventure even getting there. First, I couldn’t book tickets cos I don’t have a credit card, so had to keep reminding sis to do it. By the time she got around to it, it turned out the movie was so popular that we had to wait another 2 weeks to watch it. On the evening we had tickets, I called sis to meet up, turns out she was having a crazy day at work, and so was very late meeting me. With 5 minutes left before the movie started, we walked all the way to the Esplanade before we realized we were walking in the wrong direction, practical ran our way past the Padang and finally stumbled into the Arts House (which, by the way, is a pretty swank-lookin’ nicely-renovated colonial heritage building). We’d already missed 20 minutes of the 55-minute film, but insisted on going in since we couldn’t get our money back anyway. Now, trying to find 2 empty seats at a sold-out show in the dark is not as easy as you’d imagine, so we just sat on the floor and hurt our backs, necks, legs and bums for what was left of the show.

So granted, I already wasn’t in the best of moods. Still, I don’t believe I would’ve enjoyed the show much more than I did had I not already been through all that.

The film synopsis boasts that Singapore Gaga is about “the quirkiness of the Singaporean aural landscape”. I’d say that’s a bit of a stretch. The film is really a rojak mish-mash of mini-narratives about street performers and other little-known musicians who play instruments like the harmonica and the toy piano, with a few radio announcers and the voice of the MRT thrown in. A lot of the sequences were long, drawn-out and so boring I felt like screaming at some points. Film-makers are supposed to throw our lives back at us in a new light, or give us a fresh perspective on it, or give us something interesting to think about. Besides the little funny bit about the recorder, this film did none of that. If I see the woman selling tissue paper in Simei or the singing and dancing man in the red clogs at Tanjong Pagar MRT everyday, simply sticking a camera in their faces and putting that on a screen is not gonna do anything for me.

And you know, it really pisses me off when things that are passed off as markers of ‘Singaporean’ culture are really markers of ‘Chinese Singaporean’ culture, as in the case of this film. Throwing in one tokenistic interview with an Indian, one 2-minute segment of Malay kids singing in Arabic, and fixing your camera’s gaze on a few ethnic minority faces here and there doesn’t count much for representation.

The bits about radio announcers who speak in Chinese dialects and the way the filmmaker dealt with the subject of the loss of Chinese dialects in Singapore were good, but too fleeting and perfunctory to make any kind of lasting impact.

Meanwhile, there’s a portion of the film that’s either a dawn or dusk shot along Serangoon Road, at a field where hundreds of male Bangladeshi migrant workers are hanging out, some being herded onto buses. It’s interesting whose voices are privileged in those shots. Part of the segment is filmed following a woman with a megaphone, belting out to the workers through the din of chatter to wait while she tells them which one her bus is. The rest of the segment is filmed through the window of a cab, the sounds from outside buffered by the whirrings of the inside of a vehicle and the sound of a radio announcer speaking in a Chinese dialect. The migrant workers remain voiceless, seen but never really heard, simply another “quirky” addition to the sights and sounds of the Singaporean landscape. In keeping with the nationalist theme of the film, this depiction only serves to reinforce the exclusion of migrant workers from the national narrative, invisibilize their exploitation for the benefit of citizens, and downplay their role in keeping the Singapore economy going.

I’d say the best thing about Singapore Gaga was its marketing campaign. Quite frankly, for a film without any big studio backing, the filmmaker did a pretty good job of getting the word out there through its website, eye-catching poster and other grassroots marketing techniques. Tickets were selling out so fast that more show times were added on for the last few weeks of the film’s run time. And I didn’t read a single bad review of this film anywhere. Which is not necessarily a good thing. I agree that it’s important to support local, independent artists and all, but support and blind cheer-leading are not the same thing. Needless to say, I’ll be a lot more wary of what Singaporean reviewers say about Singaporean films from now on.

chavez comic

2006-04-12T17:13:00.000+08:00

20,000,000 Chávez Fans Can't Be Wrong
Joe Wezorek

banksy

2006-04-12T13:14:00.000+08:00

Bansky, via rabfish

A guide to cutting stencils
• Think from outside the box.
• Collapse the box and take a fucking sharp knife to it.
• Leave the house before you find something worth staying in for.
• It's easier to get forgiveness than permission.
• Spray the paint sparingly onto the stencil from a distance of 8 inches.
• Be aware that going on a major mission totally drunk out of your head will result in some truly spectacular artwork and at least one night in the cells.
• When explaining yourself to the Police its worth being as reasonable as possible. Graffiti writers are not real villains. I am always reminded of this by real villains who consider the idea of breaking in someplace, not stealing anything and then leaving behind a painting of your name in four foot high letters the most retarded thing they ever heard of.
• Remember crime against property is not real crime. People look at an oil painting and admire the use of brushstrokes to convey meaning. People look at a graffiti painting and admire the use of a drainpipe to gain access.
• The time of getting fame for your name on its own is over. Artwork that is only about wanting to be famous will never make you famous. Any fame is a by-product of making something that means something. You don't go to a restaurant and order a meal because you want to have a shit.

Indonesia won't scrap labour bill...for now

2006-04-09T12:08:00.000+08:00

Indonesia's labour bill needs fixing - president
Sat Apr 8, 2006 3:33 PM IST

JAKARTA (Reuters) - The Indonesian government will reformulate plans to revise a labour bill that has pitted employers against unions, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said on Saturday after protests across the country in recent days.

Employers have complained that Indonesia's 2003 labour bill gave workers so many benefits and so much freedom to organise and strike that it dealt a blow to the country's economic competitiveness and its attractiveness to investors.

The government and current parliament, elected in 2004, have plans to amend the bill to give employers more flexibility, curb strikes and soften regulations on severance payment for dismissed workers.

"We will not push forward the draft to revise (the bill) to the parliament. We will fix and reformulate it," Yudhoyono told reporters in a news conference, adding any revision would come from a forum of employers and unions.

"In the coming days and weeks, we will have intensive discussions...to formulate what is best for our country," said Indonesia's first popularly elected president, adding independent groups and universities should also be involved in the debate.

Tens of thousands of Indonesians rallied across the world's fourth most populous country on Wednesday to protest against revising the employment laws.

On Friday, Yudhoyono met union leaders who argue the revisions ignore the plight of workers and have vowed to keep protesting to ensure the law goes unchanged.

The 2003 bill was a product of the country's first democratic parliament after the 1998 fall of autocratic President Suharto, who had kept unions on a tight leash, but the business community says the new law went too far the other way.

60 signs you've been in Singapore too long

2006-04-08T14:36:00.000+08:00

via talkingcock.com

Some highlights:

4. You think there's nothing wrong with putting chili sauce on everything you eat.

11. You would buy a $20 product you don't need if it's on sale for $10 just to save the money.

13. You think it's okay to have only one meaningful choice on a ballot.

21. Most or all of these acronyms make sense to you: NUS; NTU; ERP; SDU; PAP; MRT; LKY; GCT; PRC; TIBS; SBS; SMS; JB; JBJ; AMK; AYE; PIE; ECP; ISD; ISA; 5 C's; CPF; CHIJMES; SPG; CWO.

23. You think that nothing makes a girl or guy more attractive than to dress exactly like hundreds of thousands of other girls and guys who all dress exactly like girls and guys in malls.

24. You think that $100,000 is a reasonable price for a Toyota Corolla and $1,000,000 is a reasonable price for a bungalow, but $5 for a plate of fried noodles is a barbarous outrage.

25. You believe that not being able to get decent roti prata outside Singapore is enough to keep the best and the brightest people from leaving.

28. You think everything should be "topped up".

29. You have a naive belief that the war against ants will somehow be won.

30. You don't think any dish of Western food is complete without baked beans.

31. You see nothing unusual about an organization of trade unions spending more time owning and operating supermarkets, drugstores, amusement parks, nightclubs, and financial services outlets than planning the next strike.

33. You wear winter clothes indoors and summer clothes outdoors.

34. Durian and belachan no longer stink to you.

38. In a country where people use smart cards for public transit, you have no problem with construction workers riding in the open backs of pickup trucks.

53. You're sure that the best way to change social behaviour is through consistent and comprehensive government-sponsored campaigns that permeate as many aspects of daily life as possible. And when they don't work, you never speak of them again.

54. You think chicken floss, corn, mayonnaise, and tandoori spices are proper pizza toppings.

55. You agree that what the government thinks of your personal habits and lifestyle should determine whether you get a condo and how much you pay for it.

57. You think a bus is incomplete without a TV.

Complete list

take that, american idol

2006-04-07T21:15:00.000+08:00

I started a post last night that was a bit of an American Idol rant. Okay, so all of it was an American idol rant. But I didn’t finish it cos I got distracted by mom’s display of shopping exploits from her recently-returned trip from India. (She bought me some pretty cool stuff too…yippee. It almost makes up for not having been able to go there myself.)

Suffice to say that I was pissed off that Mandisa was voted off, and I’ll probably never watch American Idol ever again. Guess America just can’t handle the idea of a big, beautiful, smart, sassy, self-assured Black woman who can sing better than most of the other contestants ‘making it’ in pop culture. Not a surprise, but still disappointing. I realize it’s a bit of a flaky thing to get upset about, but you gotta indulge yourself sometimes.

Meanwhile, I applied for my share of the ‘Progress Package’ last night (also known as the gentle-reminder-to-vote-for-the-‘right’-party-at-the-upcoming-General-Elections package). I mean seriously, does the government really think that folks who are on the fence about voting PAP at the GE are gonna be convinced by throwing some money at them? Cos frankly, I’m insulted. $600 is not enough to buy my vote. And I just thought it was kinda lame that they kept emphasizing that the Workfare Bonus is just a one-time handout and not a welfare policy. Welfare is such a dirty word to this government. They might as well just come out and say straight up, “Look, ya’ll can forget about us ever implementing any kind of policies that will structurally even out the wealth gap. We might hand you a few crumbs now and then, but don’t go getting any ideas about, (gasp), redistributing wealth towards the poor. Cause, ya know, they’re just not working hard enough.” As opposed to corporate CEOs and millionaire businessmen who sit in air-conditioned offices all day making big decisions and signing important papers. Oh, and playing golf. Playing a lot of golf. Boy that's hard work.

Then again, I’m reminded of the first 2 lines in one of my favourite Dead Prez songs (the secret track on the Let’s Get Free album):
You can’t fool all the people all of the time
But if you fool the right ones, then the rest will fall behind

Some might argue, however, that I have no reason to complain. I get 600 free dollars simply for being a Singaporean. Aah, membership sure has its privileges.

thaksin quits

2006-04-05T08:48:00.000+08:00

Caretaker Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra bowed out of the political battle last night, declaring in a nationwide telecast that he would not form the next government. ''I will not to accept the prime ministership when the new parliament convenes in 30 days,'' he said.

Read the rest of the article in the Bangkok Post.

Another article in the International Herald Tribune.

today in history

2006-04-04T21:35:00.000+08:00

April 4 1967
Martin Luther King, Jr. states that the US was in Vietnam "to occupy it as an American colony" and calls the US government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today".

April 4 1968
Martin Luther King, Jr. is assasinated.

April 4 1948
NATO is created.

April 4 1979
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto is executed.

April 4 1928
Maya Angelou is born.

film writer?!

2006-04-02T11:54:00.000+08:00

You Should Be a Film Writer

You don't just create compelling stories, you see them as clearly as a movie in your mind.
You have a knack for details and dialogue. You can really make a character come to life.
Chances are, you enjoy creating all types of stories. The joy is in the storytelling.
And nothing would please you more than millions of people seeing your story on the big screen!

What Type of Writer Should You Be?

Thanks for the link, warrior-lady. I refuse to re-take the Simpsons Personality Test. The last time I did it (5 years ago), I came up as Ned Flanders. Go figure. Plus I know the Simpsons too well so I know exactly which character each trait in the questions refers to.

Meanwhile, apparently I should go into film-writing. I suppose I can at least be assured that no script I write could ever be as bad as the movie I watched last night – Ultraviolet. So watch out folks, in about 10 years, there's gonna be an explosion of anti-racist queer-positive feminist social justice cinema. Just you wait and see.

my memory gets in the way of my...friendships

2006-03-30T21:22:00.000+08:00

I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to reconnect with folks I haven’t seen or talked to in five, six, seven, ten years. Am I just supposed to call them up and say, “hey, remember me? That nerdy girl with long braids and pink plastic glasses who didn’t get out much and never ever said anything of significance anyway? So how’s it going?”

I don’t know how to rekindle relationships that are so wrapped up in pain/anger/love/betrayal/confusion and linked to a childhood past so much of which I’d rather not remember.

My memory is like a cloud. Cumulo nimbus. Big fat dark mushroom. Parts of which i breeze through; clear, colourless haze, fluid and easy to navigate around, cushy even. Most of which I get lost in; full and heavy, strangely seductive yet simultaneously repulsive, threatening to break loose in a mad downpour of emotion at any second.

What’s so bad about denial and dissociation anyway? I say go ahead, block your memories out if you have to in order to get through the days. Sure is a lot easier than facing shit.

Oh well, there’s always small talk.

look pa, we can be imperialists too

2006-03-29T09:05:00.000+08:00

The StanChart springboard
Temasek's big buy fuels talk of global banking ambitions
Christie Loh
in Today

conformity

2006-03-26T14:53:00.000+08:00

'cost-effective' businesses

2006-03-22T16:50:00.000+08:00

Well doesn't this make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside now. The 2 countries that i've spent the most portions of my life in are tops in 'cost-competitiveness' for businesses, especially because they're so good at keeping 'labour costs' low. Translation: they pay their workers shit-ass wages and attract big businesses that extract the most profit from exploiting their workers. Ahhh, lovely.

Read the story here.

cuban health workers

2006-03-21T22:46:00.000+08:00

Funny how this didn't make front page news anywhere in the rest of the world. Betcha if it was any 'First World' country the horn-tootin' would have lasted weeks.

"One of the most horrendous tragedies of recent years was the earthquake in Pakistan last October. Besides the huge death toll, unknown numbers of survivors have to face brutal winter weather with little shelter, food or medical assistance.

"Cuba has provided the largest contingent of doctors and paramedics to Pakistan," paying all the costs (perhaps with Venezuelan funding), writes John Cherian in India's Frontline magazine, citing Dawn, a leading Pakistan daily.

President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan expressed his "deep gratitude" to Fidel Castro for the "spirit and compassion" of the Cuban medical teams - reported to comprise more than 1,000 trained personnel, 44% of them women, who remained to work in remote mountain villages, "living in tents in freezing weather and in an alien culture", after western aid teams had been withdrawn."

Noam Chomsky, in the Guardian

sikhi on my mind

2006-03-19T23:14:00.000+08:00

"Feminism gets bad press not because it's dead, but because it's dangerous."
- the Editorial Collective in this month's issue of Briarpatch

I’ve been thinking a lot about patriarchy lately, for various different reasons, not the least of which is my terribly depressing IWD blog entry. Have also been involved with collectively writing a sort of position paper on patriarchy with some folks as a report to an organization I work with where male domination has been a long-standing issue. We started writing the report after I came back to Singapore earlier this year, though, so I’ve been thinking a lot about the myriads of ways in which patriarchy manifests itself and how context changes everything about the struggle.

I’ve spent most of my free time in the last week helping my mum out with preparing for a Sikh history and prayer competition that she’s organized with her friends for the gurdwara children and teenagers. Since my mum’s computer literacy is fairly low (although I’m really proud of her for having learnt how to check her email on the Internet), she asked me to help her with the Power Point slides (although, if you want my version of it, I was bullied and guilt-tripped into doing it.). So I spent all week looking at questions about the Sikh gurus, Sikh history and Sikh prayer. And I was reminded, once again, of why I am a feminist.

Ofcourse all religions are patriarchal. How can they not reflect the pervasive forces of oppression that already exist in the societies in which they function? The thing that always gets me about Sikhism, though, is its grand claims of ‘non-sexism’, of advocating for women’s rights, of putting women on an equal footing with men, at exactly the same time as it does the complete opposite. Never mind the fact that all the Sikh Gurus were men, and there is only one (yes, read 1) woman in popular Sikh history who is not a wife or mother or sister of a Guru. Her name is Mai Bhago, and she was strong and militant, but she is all we have, and that is not good enough for me.

Ideas about kirt karni (working hard to earn an honest living – doesn’t matter if you’re poor or oppressed, but if you’re a hard worker, you will be rewarded, maybe not in this life but definitely in one of your next lives, trust me), naam japna (meditation – oh, you mean to take time away from organizing for your rights and achieve ‘inner peace’ despite your oppressive material conditions instead?), and wand chakna (sharing with the needy – oh wait, unless of course you are the needy in which case you should be eternally grateful to an all-seeing intangible being for bestowing such good grace upon you and continue to naam japo and kirt karo so that you will receive more blessings. And if you do happen to have enough disposable income to do some charity, then you can go ahead and feel morally superior and rest assured that you will be rewarded, yes you guessed it, maybe not in this life but definitely in one of the next); all these ideas only serve to reinforce the status quo and create unquestioning, content-in-their-place people.

Adhering to these principles didn’t stop Balbir Singh Sodhi from being shot to death four days after 9/11 in an Arizona town by white racists who considered him just another ‘turbaned terrorist’. Adhering to these principles doesn’t stop men from beating their wives, doesn’t stop Sikhs from hating Muslims, and it certainly does not stop capitalism from functioning.

Much of the poetry in the Sri Guru Granth Sahib, written mostly by the Gurus and some other saintly men who were part of the Bhakti movement, uses imagery that positions the devotee as God’s bride – which already sets up a power dynamic that renders femininity inferior and subordinate.

The evolution of Sikhism into a Miri-Piri, warrior-saint, religious ideology has completely distorted what began as a peasant-based struggle for land into a misogynist focus on violence that has been easily co-opted by ruling forces to ease the way into successful recruitment of Sikh men as soldiers and pawns of the state and imperialism.

There are aspects of the ideology that I know I draw from constantly – standing up for social justice, not turning away from a struggle even if outnumbered, the struggle for truth, etc. But for the most part, I am cynical and bitter about this (my?) religion, and that scares me sometimes. In some ways I think it would be easier to believe in a ‘higher power’ who ensures that justice will prevail. Not believing this means facing the idea that justice is our fight, and humanity’s struggle alone.

latest on 'Singapore Rebel'

2006-03-17T11:16:00.002+08:00

"bowing my head and living with injustice is not what my conscience would allow me to"
- Dr Chee Soon Juan
Singapore opposition politican, now facing more jail time on charges of "contempt of court" for stating in court that the Singapore judiciary is biased and unfair to opposition politicians

"It is of course true that we have freedom of speech in Singapore. It is one of the most important rights. It is clear, however, that those rights are limited."
- Second Solicitor-General Lee Seiu Kin

More info here

watch this

2006-03-12T13:29:00.000+08:00

Check it: singaporegaga.com

neoliberalismo

2006-03-09T10:33:00.000+08:00

You know that neoliberalism has arrived when the United Nations is talking about contracting out jobs.

happy IWD?

2006-03-08T21:42:00.000+08:00

This is the first time in the last 5 years that i haven't been to an International Women's Day rally. It definitely feels like something's missing. I know that rallies and demonstrations simply aren't gonna be enough to change anything, but it sure as hell is a good start. There's just something about taking to the streets with tens/hundreds/thousands of people and being together to collectively give voice to our anger/hurt/pain/visions. The state represses peoples' ability to come together in collective struggle for good reason. Not being able to come together keeps our struggles individualized, keeps us feeling alone and isolated, demoralizes us.

It's demoralized me.

IWD came to me today in a wave of outrageous news bites (South Dakota is fucking banning abortion), pitiful images of poor oppressed brown and black women, celebration stories of women who've 'made it' despite the 'odds' (boo hoo..poor lil' woman CEO), and intense marketing campaigns to capitalize on this day to sell more patriarchal shit to women.

So fuck patriarchy, fuck state repression, and that is that.

All of ya'll who were on the streets today had better appreciate what you've got. This is the only catharsis i get.

migrant workers in Japan

2006-03-06T23:14:00.000+08:00

Hard Work, Furtive Living: Illegal Immigrants in Japan
Japan needs, but does not welcome, migrant help

Sharon Noguchi
YaleGlobal, 2 March 2006

As Japan confronts challenges of a low birth rate, an aging population, and a shrinking labor pool, Sharon Noguchi describes the country’s newfound reliance on illegal workers who are employed in low-wage jobs and unprotected from exploitation. Immigrants from China, Latin America and South Asia seek jobs with employers willing to risk legal punishments in order to hire workers at lower wages. Illegal workers are willing to accept bottom-rung pay, risking arrest and finding it difficult to claim all the wages they are owed. Some unions agree to represent illegal migrant workers, yet the country as a whole does little to welcome the laborers it desperately needs. Despite a lack of official policy, Japan continues to draw workers through unspoken promises of steady work and the hope of a better life. – YaleGlobal

quick updates

2006-02-26T23:41:00.000+08:00

1. My kids in the Storytelling class that i've been teaching had too much candy or something this Tuesday, cos they were being really cheeky and noisy, refusing to listen to anything that i was saying and as a result the class was really chaotic. I know it's partly cos i'm such a pushover when it comes to kids and am really bad at disciplining them, but that couldn't have just been it. It was so frustrating. Once again, my heart went out to all the teachers in Singapore. How do they do it? One teacher to a class of 40 kids with no teacher's assistant or any other kind of support.

2. Found out that i got a job working at a bookstore, but it only starts March 6.

3. Later that same day, found out that i got a job working for a medical journal. I started on Thursday. It involves some editing, but also a lot of data entry, photocopying and other such fun stuff.

4. I have the flu, again.

5. I spent 2 days at a new job doing a bad job of pretending not to be sick.

6. Went to a forum today (see previous post). It was awesome, depressing and exciting all at the same time. Singapore political prisoners shared stories about their lives and struggles in student politics, opposition party politics and as political prisoners. Michael Fernandez showed a notebook that he compiled of his writings in tiny tiny print on toilet paper...the only way he found to write cos writing implements were not provided (even though political prisoners are technically entitled to those privileges). He also demonstrated how he was force-fed while on a hunger strike. The discussion revealed simmering discontent among many. It felt like a slow rumble, very gradually gathering strength.

7. More filing tomorrow. Good night.

Free all Political Prisoners!

forum

2006-02-25T19:18:00.000+08:00

Detention - Writing - Healing
@ M1 Singapore Fringe Festival

26 February 06
3 - 5.30pm
Esplanade Recital Studio

Little is known about Singapore’s ex-political detainees – the events surrounding their detention, as well as their lives after detention. This forum is a landmark gathering of some of Singapore ex-political detainees, including Michael Fernandez, Said Zahari and Tan Jing Quee. All three will talk about their experiences, as well as share some of their writings. Joining them will be Robert Yeo, discussing his trilogy, Changi. Tan Chong Kee will be facilitating the discussion.

Michael Fernandez was a former trade unionist, activist and political detainee. The lead character in Robert Yeo's plays, The Singapore Trilogy, Reginald Fernandez, was loosely based on Mr Fernandez's life.

Said Zahari, a retired journalist, was one of the longest detained political prisoners in Singapore, having spent 17 years under detention without trial. His new book is entitled Seventeen Years in Changi.

Tan Jing Quee is the writer of a recently published collection of poems, Love's Travelogue. He is a lawyer and former political detainee, with a strong and abiding interest in politics, history and literature.

Robert Yeo is a playwright, whose works include Are You There, Singapore?, One Year Back Home and The Adventures of Holden Heng. He has also published a poetry collection entitled Leaving Home, Mother.

Founder and coordinator of Sintercom, as well as a founding member of The Working Committee, Tan Chong Kee has been actively involved in social activism in Singapore. He has edited various publications, including Ask Not: The Necessary Stage in Singapore Theatre, Building Social Space in Singapore, and Soc.Culture.Singapore: The Unauthorized Version.

For more info, visit www.singaporefringe.com

2006-02-18T21:26:00.000+08:00

"I could bang my head against this wall all my life and yet never make so much as a dent."

- Sirshendu Mukhopadhyay
Waiting fcr Rain: a novel
translated from the Bengali by Nilanjan Bhattacharya

what to say?

2006-02-18T16:47:00.000+08:00

Sometimes it seems so trivial to blog about my life when there is so much shit happening in the world. Is this it? Is the US gonna invade Iran, attack their nuclear facilities, and start a nuclear war or at least cause enough damage to the Middle East in a Hiroshima/Nagasaki sequel with 3 times the special effects and made for comfortable reality tv viewing pleasure?

I really need to stop reading the newspaper, or at least stop taking it so seriously. I don't know why i can now read the Canadian newspapers with such detachment, but still feel so invested in the alarmist language and skewed, mostly conservative, perspectives expressed in the Singapore papers.

Talking about which, i had a huge argument about politics with my dad this morning. We mostly ran words around in circles...how can he so strongly believe everything that the government and the newspaper tell him? Either that or he's simply defeatist about the possibility of change.

How can i be so patient and non-judgemental with other folks i don't agree with, questioning their ideas so calmly, but get so hysterically wrapped up in 16-year-old-style "you don't understand anything!" rebellion with family. How do we find the right ways to change the fucked-up-ness of the ways we are, the roles we take on and how we love and hate?

Rang De Basanti

2006-02-13T20:21:00.000+08:00

Wow. How did this movie get past the Indian censors?

The basic premise is that a white British woman, Sue, is inspired by her grandfather's diary from when he was a jailer in colonial India and came across important freedom-fighting political prisoners. She wants to make a movie about these freedom fighters so badly that her production company's budget cuts don't stop her from paying her own way to India to make the film. She finds the perfect group of young-ish folk to cast. They're outta college but still hanging around college, not ready to face the world types. Problem is, they don't relate to the history at all and just fool around most of the time. But when their lives become directly affected by the corruption and bureaucratic mess of the Indian government, they suddenly start to make the connections between past and present, history and today.

In some ways the film was so revolutionary. Right at the outset we are told that funding for Sue's film is cancelled because "Gandhi sells" and folks like Bhagat Singh don't. When the group of friends begins to get politicized, they hold a demonstration where they face severe police repression, which then compels them to put their lives at risk and take direct action. By the end of the film, the film-maker makes very explicit connections between past and present oppression. There's even a scene where an image of a white officer shouting orders to shoot at unarmed peaceful gatherers at Jallian Vala Bagh shifts into an image of an Indian officer shouting orders to shoot at unarmed peaceful gatherers. The message is very clear: the face may have changed, but most of us are still looking at the barrel of the same gun.

Ofcourse the revolutionary message gets diluted; this is no surprise. We are told that we all have the potential to make change, and the ways we could do it are to join the civil service, join politics, etc. Officially the movie posed very individualistic solutions like these that merely encourage folks wanting change to become part of the system ofcourse, but while that is the articulated message, it is not the route that the group of friends choose for themselves. The movie has an agitational ending...it feels like the actions of these few young, formerly directionless friends, are radicalizing youth all over India.

I'm not saying the film doesn't have problems.
I find it interesting that the company Sue works for is World Vision. The whole premise of the movie is rather white-man's-burden-ish in a way because it's not the youth of India who are interested in their revolutionary history, it's a white woman. The youth must be taught by the white woman to appreciate their history; they require politicization from an outsider. Not just any ol' outsider, mind you, but the descendant of a colonial enforcer and employee of a Christian saviour-mentality charitable organization.

And then there's my favourite topic - the sexism. In the demonstration scene, two of the Indian female leads hold their ground and continue to sit on the street in protest while the police enact their brutality on the protestors. They continue to sit when even they themselves begin to be beaten. Except it looks like they're cowering. I just kept thinking, "hit 'em back, hit 'em back". Their inaction reinforces the image of the sati-savitri (pure goddess) peaceful demure Indian woman, and i hate that. I mean c'mon, ever heard of self-defense? The worst part is it's not even true. There were and are women all over India ready to stand up and fight back. It's funny how no matter how progressive a movie can get, representations of militant Indian women are still just too radical for the mainstream audience.

In general, though, what i really like about 'Rang de Basanti' is that it speaks to students and youth and has the potential to fuel young people into political action for change.

skewed logic

2006-02-13T15:40:00.000+08:00

Can somebody please tell me what the hell is so great about having postage stamps that glow in the dark when 96% of your population supports the death penalty?

the danish cartoons

2006-02-09T15:07:00.000+08:00

The media is increasingly becoming an agent for the communication of societal values. Those who control media are powerful because they are able to control the construction of representations and hence, of what is real. In a world of media spin-doctors, our awkward embrace of an ideal of objectivity can make us passive recipients of the news rather than aggressive analyzers of the inherent biases within it. So let us be clear that the Western media has predominantly used this religious doctrinal explanation- that the Prophet is not supposed to be pictorially depicted- not in an effort to offer a respectful and educational explanation to non-believers; rather it is used to suggest the rigidity and intolerance of the Muslim community in what has been dubbed the “clash of values- freedom of religion versus freedom of expression.”

- Harsha Walia
The Row over the Danish Cartoons

cut, paste, add, remove

2006-02-06T13:02:00.000+08:00

I got a small contract to do some editing work this weekend. It's a shitty job. No, i mean, really. I'm editing a research report on sewage treatment methods. What a load of crap, eh?! Actually, it's not that bad. There's people doing all these different experiments to figure out which chemicals can best remove the sludge and grossness from sewage so that it can be recycled as industrial water and even possibly as drinking water (i know, sounds kinda ew). Water's pretty scarce in Singapore, especially considering the large population and small land mass, so this stuff is important in helping maintain at least some degree of self-sufficiency.

Editing is always harder work than i initially imagine it'll be. You'd think writing would be harder, cos you're actually creating something new, moulding language out of nothing (or at least out of the mess that's in your head). But rephrasing, cutting, reworking paragraphs can be hard work too, especially if the writing's bad (and with this report, the writing is real bad). Plus i'm always wary of editing too strongly. After all, it is someone else's voice you're changing.

Anyway, i should quit philosophizing and get back to work.