BOOKED

many years ago i joined a group of people , a very small select group of young pondok students who were talibanistic in their outlook and thinking and in fact would certainly joined the taliban if they were in the taliban country of north western frontier of pakistan or afghanistan. these students were some of the most innocent and morally upright and idealistic young people i've ever met in my life. i did not know very much about any of these young boys except that they were sent by their parents to study in a pondok school far away from their birthplaces at very young age. cooped up all day long in small thatched roofed huts in a typical pondok school complex that you can still see scattered all over my home state(kelantan) and the southern thailand learning obscure and out of print religious tracts by rote . their religious leaders were the typical ultra fundamentalists completely removed from reality but fully satisfied with their own small world.

although i have no desire to live in this kind of cultish world it must be said that for some people this is a perfectly satisfactory life as it can be a self contained world where no modern life complexities intrude and creating havoc in mind and body. one good friend , a very modern man and a successful professional with a modern singaporean wife one day many years ago decided ok, that's it! sold everything, brought his whole family to one of these pondoks and spent their days learning obscure religious texts and praying most of the nights away. i used to visit him and asked why he did this. don't you find it boring to pray half the night away every night? and he simply answered, do you find it boring to breath every single minute of your life? and the argument stopped there. but quite recently i discovered that he has left the pondok after a big fall out with the amir . and not only that, he now explained that this amir is teaching ajaran sesat and he is determined to bring down this ustaz . so one day he went to discuss this with tuan guru nik aziz but within ten minutes was chased out by this venerable and astute pas politician . it turned out that this deviant amir is a staunch pas supporter and therefore could not be a deviant by definition...hmmmm.

and so, this ascetic friend who has not read newspapers or watched telivision for more than 15 years has now come back into the modern world with all its complexities again and discover the joys of internet and texting messages on the mobile . seems to enjoy it quite well. the last time i met him i was careful enough not to say that he has wasted his life and worse, his children and wife's but as they say, life moves on and on and on...

as for those young idealistic boys , i've not heard anything since those old and happy days except for two. one is now an imam somewhere and no doubt still living in his own small world. another seemed to come back to the real world and living quite a middle class life with a doctor wife somewhere in kl. how the hell he got hooked up with a doctor for a wife is a mystery to me. there's a lesson there somewhere as they say but i'm too stupid to discover what lessons can be learned from anything. but i try.

and so, as for lessons, that was precisely why i joined those boys in those days long ago. their amir , the leader is an interesting guy. a very bright young man who studied in a completely secular system in a university in the united kingdom and came back and worked as an engineer. but one day he basically threw his hands up and said oh fuck, this is not it...and moved somewhere to the middle east to study arabic and islamic studies. came back home, took his children out of public schools and self tought them himself and recruited some bright boys from nearby pondok to be his shall we say desciples. and so they learned all sort of obscure and esoteric things from him and this is the queer thing. one of the texts they studied was betrand russell's a history of western philosophy . and that was why i joined this group.

and so we had a very good time in our weekly study group arguing things like socrates and his disciples in the old greek days but we did not amount to anything at all. nobody went on to write anything or discover any new things or found any answers to anything from all those philosophers . we all get more confused by the complexities of life and the group gradually thinned out as people moved out and about and i too one day had to leave this innocent and probably demented group one day many years ago.

i have not met the amir since but on and off i got to hear news of him. soon after i left, the group kept on arguing the betrand russell's text for a while longer but one day the amir basically said oh fuck it...this isn't going to work out either , and came back to modern world again and joined a monster government linked company as one of the directors of something or other. worked here as a typical professional and one day basically exclaimed of fuck , this is not working either! and resigned and the last i heard of him is that he's frying noodles in a restaurant somewhere...

as for me, well i just mosey along as they say. i've long stopped to make sense of anything and just try to enjoy life as best as i can and like many of you that means sex sex and more sex, and craving for more and more money...and i can understand why some good people just throw their hands up in the air and say oh fuck...this is not it, i'm going to join the al qaeda ...

i deeply respect these people but i'm no hero! hell i'm a fucking coward. i'm just a flea in the scheme of things but funnily enough it feels quite good to be a flea...and so i try as best as i can to navigate my way in this difficult and complex world. i learned early that philosophy doesn't give satisfactory answers but i still feel we need some kind of metaphysical, philosophical and yes spiritual guidance in our moral and ethical lives. but one book is as good (or nonsensical) as another when it come to this kind of things and i've decided to give a try to follow the modern day philosopher and management guru, dilbert...and so i'm now reading dilbert future: thriving on stupidity in the 21st century...the world standard bible other wise known as wikipedia described the book like this:-

The Dilbert Future (1997) is a book published by Scott Adams as a satire of humanity that breaks the net motivations of humanity down into stupidity, selfishness, and "horniness", and presents various ideas for profiting from human nature.

and i think i'm getting some answers already and i don't like what i read. looks like in the future the world is getting into a lot worse condition than it is now.

page 107-108

PREDICTION 28
In the future, women will run the world in all democratic countries.