Saturday, June 28, 2008

 

man as god

i was in singapore -that most boring country in the world - several months ago and i was walking around a particularly bad part of this city state when i came across an interesting site. among the rows of old two storey houses in geylang area there is a small chinese temple. or what looks like it. i hardly know anything about chinese religion so to call this a temple is probabaly not correct because it doesn't look like a normal temple so it is probably just a big size shrine to chinese dieties.

there are the usual chinese gods with long flowing black beards glowering in the thick joss stick smoke but what makes this shrine particularly interesting is that the most prominent part of the place is taken up by what looked like a small model of a mosque with the onion shaped dome and two small minarets. inside this little mosque is a statue of a turbaned old man. his name is written in arabic scripts . and he is a haji. in front of this statue are the usual chinese offerings to ancestors , joss sticks, oranges and apples, a pack of cigarettes.

i've been told that this is not that unusual. what it means is that the haji who once lived here is now recognized as a revered 'dato' and the penunggu of the place and as chinese is wont to do, they pay homage to good ancestors - especially if he occasionaly gives the right four digit numbers and so forth. the short of it is that if this statue keeps on giving good numbers or babies to barren women who come to pray to him, he'll be on the way to probably be promoted to a demi god status (if he's not one already) like those nine old warriors who saved china in ancient time and now highly revered as demi gods and reside way up there in the big dippers.

to elevate a muslim as some sort of a god is ironical to say the least. it is in fact completely offensive because the one thing that the muslims are most strict about is shirk or syirik which means ascribing partners to the one and only god. but of course there's no stopping non muslims elevating anyone including muslims to god status if they so desire.

and that's one of the main reasons why muslims and christians are at each other's throat since day one. and in fact the main reason why the religion of islam exist at all is to 'straighten' this little detail. muslims don't like en. esa bin yusuf otherwise known as jesus to be revered as god. part time or other wise.

but all this is quite understandable. humankind has this innate desire to worship things. can be women, money, frogs, elephants , fellow humans, stones. jimi hendrix. all kind of things. when we get something ,we have this virtue of wanting to give thanks in return.

by the way, if you happen to be in bangkok , there is a very nice puppet show theatre near suan lum night market and recently they have this impressive puppet show about the birth of ganesha, the elephant headed hindu goddess. 'the first organ transplant in the world' quipped one of my hindu friends from india who watched this show with me.

and i was with one chinese friend visiting pura besakih in bali several years ago when on the way down he noticed one statue that he claimed to be a chinese deity in one of those little structures they put dieties and offerings in. and he started explaining to me why chinese do ancestor worships. which is all very fine.

but since we are doing all this worshipping things, i guess it's only logical if we update the list of gods to suit our time and our modern lives and needs. and i was watching an excellent interview of bill gates by tom brokow just now and i most definitely think that if there's any human to be worshipped, it has to be him. (it'd be a good idea to include the guy that invent you tube and napster to be added as minor gods).

i particularly like bill gates not only because he's such a big philanthropist and a genius but i think he's the single most important person that change our lives in the modern age. i really like the description of him in an earlier interview here . he's described as part thomas edison, part henry ford and part holden caulfield of catcher in the rye.


and i love holden caulfield. i wished somebody tell him where all those geese fly to in winter.

Sunday, June 22, 2008

 

gimpel the fool

I am Gimpel the fool. I don't think myself a fool. On the contrary. But that's what folks call me. They gave me the name while I was still in school. I had seven names in all: imbecile, donkey, flax-head, dope, flump, ninny, and fool. The last name stuck. What did my foolishness consist of? I was easy to take in.

That is how isaac bashevis singer's famous short story Gimpel the fool begins. i don't remotely resemble gimpel in anyway but i very much get affected by this story when i was quite young- in my late teen age years - and this story ( and nikolai gogol's 'the overcoat') is one of the reasons why i get hooked on reading for pleasure (and along the way perhaps learn a thing or two about human nature). both stories are not dissimilar in the sense that both are darkly funny but shows how unfair life can be.

I was easy to take in. isn't that our human problem in a crux. easily fooled. and it gets us into all sorts of problems and unhappiness.





Sunday, June 15, 2008

 

wild sex

someone ,( a lady actually ) sent me a text message on my mobile a few weeks back which took me by surprise. it reads something like this: u r a level headed guy, tell me, y do men alws think abt sex?.

this surprises me for two reasons. one; to be called a level headed person. well, i'm not used to that description. truth be told i feel really fucked in my head. i think this world is a very complicated place. i don't understand anything at all. the more i try to understand the world and my fellow human beings the more i get confused. i guess i'm a very stupid guy but it must be said that sometimes i feel quite a few others are a lot stupider than me...

and the second surprise is the question itself. i thought the answer is too self evident. i would never think of such a question because isn't it obvious that EVERYBODY always think about sex? apparently not. and that surprises me to no end and it gets me thinking . and after a lot of thinking i sent the obvious and truthful answer . i replied; 4 the same reason y women alws think abt shoes and handbags...i should've added...it's all evolutionary innit?

as much as (some) women can not understand why men always think about sex , i also find it a big mystery why nature makes women to be so obsessed with hand bags and shoes. i'm a scientist, had a masters degree in biological science from a very good university (one of the colleges in university of london) and i think i know a thing or two about evolution but for the life of me i can not find any logical explanation what possible evolutionary advantages women get from getting obsessed about handbags. but that is women for you. a mystery. a very lovable mystery i might add. give them a fake gucci handbag and you're on your way to solving your sexual obsession .

but although my answer is absolutely correct that's not much of an answer, so to give due respect to the lady in question and do justice to the question i decided to put my scientific thinking cap and answer it as objectively and scientifically possible. and to put myself in the right frame of mind i downloaded cheb mami rai music into winamp and with the energetic arabic rai music of this algerian singer blaring i'm writing this treatise on why men are obsessed about sex.

but before that. a little aside. i love arabian music and i don't choose cheb mami's rai music lightly as background music while i'm writing this deeply thoughtful little essay on why men is obsessed about sex (while waiting for the euro 2008 turkey vs czech rep game to start - which i hope turkey will win). as you may probably know cheb mami is an arab. and arabs are a very sensual people. they love sex inordinately. which reminds me. i was told that one of the few ways the arabs get back at the israelis is by banging jewish girls. the arabs as we know are hopeless in war and can never beat the jewish people but they sure as hell can beat the jews when it come to fucking. and by some account jewish girls like arab boys very much (not for their brain power but their sexual prowess and big dicks).

and that reminds me of another thing. i'm currently reading maximum City :Bombay lost and Found. a hell of a book by Sekutu Mehta. in the chapter (pleasure) he mentioned about arabs who come to bombay to shower money and have sex with dancing bar girls and spent lakhs of rupees to deflower under aged girls. and perhaps quite appropriately the biggest whorehouse area is just in front of the congress party headquarters where among all the rest of sexual going ons , it includes politicians coming to pick young underaged girls from the orphanage there to have sex with. an interesting side activity that sometimes the bar girls and their customers do is to have private parties. one type is called congress party where you can only watch (and shower money on the dancers) but no touching. the other is janata party , where everything goes. you can read a very good review of the book from harper's magazine here.

that gives me an idea, we should have pas party and umno party here. in the former probably we pick up young nashid girls and have them sing nasyid songs and dance fully clothed with tudungs and all and later we haggle and bid to get them to be our second or third or fourth wives. for umno party, well we just get whores from bukit bintang and we do anything we like with them. anything goes. afterall, umno people are just assholes anyway.

and after that long digression which i hope isn't too far off the topic, i'll now come back to the original question. why men are obsessed with sex. but even from the above you must already have some understanding why. but to be really scientific you must go to biology 101. and what better way these days than to refer to national geographic! to understand human behaviour one must look back at our relatives, distant and close, after all scientifically we are nothing but another animal species and national geographic has a very good documentary called 'wild sex' that explains a lot about us animal family -when it comes to sex. you'll get to learn some very interesting trivia (examples; elephants have a 3 feet penis that weighs about 25 kg and curved like it's tusk, hyenas have clitoris 6 inches or longer - arguably longer than an average asian penis etc). but more importantly you'll see the evolutionary trends of sex from the most primitive to the most advanced animal species. and i can report ladies that it doesn't look good for women. it's all men's world!

lets look at one of the lowest species first. sand wasps. one species of sand wasp was shown to have a very naughty behaviour. this insect lives in little holes. the thing is, when the female lay eggs in these holes, the males hatch first. there would be a dozen or so randy males coming out of the hole and waiting around the hole for their sisters to emerge. and when the little sister emerge from the hole these twelve or so brothers of hers will start crowding and fighting to copulate with her and the upshot of it all is that they basically have a gang bag with their sister.

and from this lowly insect to our nearer cousins the monkeys, there are a huge amount of variety and madness in between when it comes to sex among the various species as the nature lovers among you surely know already. but the thing is, when it comes to our cousins we start to see the behaviour very much mirrors our human species. there is gay sex, there is masturbation and the males are polygamous and very jealous and the females are not allowed to be so and must remain faithful to the alpha male in the group. and they learn to become unfaithful . there was a very good program by david attenborough, arguably the finest living naturalist that we have about this unfaithful behaviour in macaque monkeys . he went something like this, in a hushed and calm voice of his ... now you see sarah is flirting with that young male on the branch there. she must be careful not to to let john the alpha male notice this. now the young male notices sarah and shows his interest by baring his mouth and look, sarah grins back. and now sarah pretends to go to that patch to gather some fruits and there, she must be quick! the young male darts quickly towards sarah behind the tree and now they have the opportunity. (and here the clip shows the male mounting sarah doggy fashion lustily but furtively)....and damn, if there's anybody , it's david attenborough that can give me a hard on just looking at monkeys fucking....

but there you are... females! there is no end to their slyness and faithlessness. it's the basis of some of the greatest literature.... tharese raquin, lady chatterly's lover, madame bovary, effi briest to name a few of my favorites...

but nothing mirrors our human behaviour closer than our closest relative the chimpanzees.. here we have the full range of sexual depravity, just very much like us humans. there are the normal sex, homosexuality, masturbation, incest, group sex, rapes, sex with mothers, with grand mothers with underaged babies, and probably their version of bestiality too, chimps screwing long tailed monkeys say,... but in all my viewing of animal planets and various natural history programmes of david attenborough, not once have i come across any reference to or animal versions of female obsession towards shoes and handbags....this is unique to female species of homo sapiens .


ps;

because you have read this far i will reward you with a bonus. a woodcut of a shunga (ukiyo-e, pictures from the floating world) by that famous shunga artist utamaro. (this is not pornography but a beautiful piece of erotic art, so i feel it is not out of place to post it here which is quite appropriate to the topic)....

Monday, June 09, 2008

 

rodox pt-2: no country for young babies

oh dear. what a time we live in. i've just been jabbering nonsense about some big guys screwing other big guys and singapore screwing malaysia...and what do you know. now we have been - to put it in a stark manner- fucked in the ass by abdullah badawi, arguably the worst ever pm malaysia has the misfortune to have. but as in other things in life we get what we deserve. and i think having an intellectually mediocre , boring and lacklustre pm is just about right for malaysia. we are a nation of intellectually mediocre, boring and lack lustre people.


i've stopped watching malaysian tvs and reading our local papers for fear of getting high blood pressure. whenever there are any big decisions ...like this huge petrol price hike recently the spin doctors work in overdrive giving us such asinine tripes to make the poor fuckers in the villages feel good that these (spins) almost become funny. my feeling is, in our dear country, the government can do anything and we'll swallow everything meekly for we are a very docile people. which is perhaps a very good thing. we rather run away than fight. it is always better to sleep it off rather than getting excited over things we have no control of right? may be we should trust our government that they are doing the best for the country. afterall singapore's petrol cost is a lot higher than us wohoo!... when it comes to petrol price we fuck singapore in the ass don't we?


that reminds me, i have just finished reading a good travel book in siberia by colin thubron. this is an excellent book and a good introduction to anyone fascinated with the stark and lonely beauty of siberia. but the description gets madder and madder as he travelled from west to east and by the end of the book you'll get to know about the two million or so prisoners (criminal and political) that perished during stalin days. well, aren't we better off then them! so why are we complaining? there was an old pensioner who had 6000 roubles in her saving and that used to be enough to buy a car but now that only gets a couple of loaves of bread. so why are we complaining about our measely 5% inflation rate?. (and we do believe our dear government figures of course). if only our spin doctors have read this travel book perhaps they may point out that we are a lot better off than russia (and so many other countries). that will make all the rubber tappers feel so mightily happy and will continue to vote for umno for ever and ever...


but for me, i have this nagging feeling that now is not quite the right time to bring babies into this world. (more excuse to fuck for pleasure!). to paraphrase that famous book and great movie (no country for old men) this is no country for young babies.....



***

updates. 16 06 08

well, whaddaya know... some people seems to have balls after all. yes, to quote monty python's life of brian... these people have ...spirit, bravado, derring do...

some people don't like to take things lying down... and i salute these people. on 13th June 2008, there was a sizable demo to protest the petrol price hike. led by the good people of PAS and PKR... starting from Masjid Kg Baru (after Friday prayer) and onward to Jln Tuku Ab Rahman and to Jalan Raja Laut. A short sit-in at the junction opposite Sogo where they had more slogan shouting and a few short speeches by the like of PAS Vice President Mat Sabu and PKR youth chief... and then marched on (and more slogan shouting) to PAS hq at Jalan TAR ....this is historic for one particular reason. there was no water canon blast, the procession was allowed to go ahead peacefully...no effort by police to stop the march...this is a very good thing and quite unexpected...you can see some of the videos that i took (very clunky digital cam vid) here and here and some pics below...


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