Gripevine

Sometimes I wonder if there are aliens amongst us. These aliens look normal enough, like everyday people they trudge about this busy city. They drive cars, lorries, trucks and motorcycles, they wait at bus-stops, they walk on the pavements, they use pedestrian bridges, well in short you see them almost everywhere and there is not a thing that distinguishes us from them, except of course for one characteristic that sets them apart from us normal people. They spit in public. It is a habit more than a need, and they have no qualms doing it literally in your face! I imagine they have bigger saliva glands than us. Nope in fact they have several of these glands that constantly emits a substantial portion of saliva that threatens to flood their mouth and choke them, which is why they constantly spit about. When your mouth is constantly flooding over with saliva all the time, you just don't have the liberty of waiting till you get to the washroom, the need to spurt that extra liquid ou...

For most singletons like me, living in apartments and condominiums is the ideal. You have more space then you would have renting a room, and you do not have to bother with tending to a garden and all the little extras' you would have to bother with if you live in a house. Besides apartments and condominiums are much more affordable as landed property becomes more expensive, especially the nearer it is to the city. So just like every other KLite, I wholeheartedly embraced the concept of apartment living. I almost bought the dream sold by property developers who produced enticing colourful brochures of gleaming high-rise facades, beautifully landscaped gardens, Olympic sized swimming pools and interiors that were designed to look like hotel suites. The message being that you could buy this dream for prices ranging from only RM145,000,/RM160,000/RM180,000/RM200,000. Which is quite affordable for a middle class Malaysian. What these developers failed to tell us is that upon buyin...

What does it mean to be a woman in Malaysia today? On the surface it all seems rosy doesn't it? We can earn degrees in whichever field we choose to, we can get good jobs, buy our own property, drive cool cars, wear nice clothes, dye our hair, hang out with friends at cool and funky restaurants and clubs, smoke like a chimney, drink like a fish and the list goes on. So does that make us a liberated lot? Do you think we are oh so lucky as compared to our sisters in other parts of the world? Luckier than the little girls in some African countries who have their breasts ironed when young so as not to appear an alluring target for would be rapist. So rife is rape in such societies, that desperate mothers resort to mutilating their daughters in such a manner as a means of protection. Luckier are we than the victims of female infanticide in rural India? Luckier than the women in Basra, Iraq, who get shot on the streets for not being 'appropriately clad'? I think not. On the su...

Writers in my opinion are one of the most misunderstood people around. I have come to this conclusion after spending a fair amount of time in this line of work. Eight years to be exact. After much exasperation and frustration thanks to my dealings with non-writers whom I had the misfortune of interacting with in the course of my work, I felt compelled to sit and write this post. My primary objective is to air my grief! The secondary objective being to put into perspective the general traits and characteristics shared by those that possess the soul and temperament of a writer. LANGUAGE To be a writer, one must have a deep and consuming love affair with the language one writes in. Language is the vehicle and the weapon of the writer. Not the quill, the pen, the typewriter or the computer keyboard. A good writer expertly uses language to engage and captivate an audience the same way lawyers use the law to convince the court of the merit of their case. Although a mastery of language...

"Better to Write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self." So said Cyril Connolly. That phrase aptly describes the irony of my whole writing career up to the present. I spent the first six years of my career as a newspaper journalist writing or more accurately reporting on anything and everything that hardly reflected my 'self' I was merely a hack that communicated what the government/judiciary/or so-called 'important people' (Those privileged enough to be given a say in the media) wished to say to the public. It was they who had the voice, not me. I merely made their fluff look intelligent, newsworthy, and easy to comprehend for the benefit of the masses. The writer in me lay dormant and silent. The hack/reporter had taken over. I spent a huge part of my thinking time compressing facts into neat paragraphs. Not more than four lines long. The challenge was to tell the whole story in ten paragraphs or more. The moment I ar...