I do not remember the name of this mountain. It could be Prapat Agung but looking at the map, the twin (even three?) peaks might suggest it is not.

When I first read of Prambanan, in my mind there was an amazing structure that overwhelmed everything. But my expectation of it proved too much. I felt too many words had romanticized blocks of big ancient rocks.

Please do not get me wrong. Prambanan, from afar, looks amazing, mysterious. It imposes itself on its surroundings.

It is just that the experience of actually being there erodes the very air that makes it out of this world. It likes being awed by a rainbow but once you have learned that it is merely an interaction between light and water vapor, it ceases to be mysterious. It becomes just physics. And here was Prambanan representing the gods of Hindu built by the Sanjayas, once rival to the mighty Sailendras and Srivijaya: a pile of ancient rocks.

It does not help that I have been to Siem Reap. There, reality was grander than anything I had imagined. Rightly or wrongly, experience informs expectation and Angkor pushed my expectation of everything else that came from that particular era of Southeast Asian history even higher. Whatever expectation I had of Pagan, Borobodur and Prambanan got pushed up no thanks to the Angkor temples.

My expectation was Icarus. Reality was the sun. Prambanan is not as impressive as I had first imagined.

But I am glad that I visited Prambanan anyway. As always, it is always good having something concrete to back up the stuff I read in books to reaffirm that things out there are not just some fancy imagination concocted by the human mind. They are real and once upon a time, they were the centers of the world.

Still, I have lots to say but just not enough time to write. I partly blame Twitter for that, which allows me to blow some steam off so that none accumulates to make me really wants to write anything in full. It is surprising how 140 characters can do wonders sometimes.

The fact that I have stopped writing for The Sun and Selangor Times after the May 5 election does not help in pushing me to write more.

But there is stuff in the pipeline and I want to warm up before things get too fast on that front. So, blogging is a good way to give me a giddy-up moment.

Also, one thing with me is that I feel ashamed if I see somebody works harder than me. And here is a self guilt-tripping for me:

He is a farmer somewhere in Ubud, Bali, Indonesia, some time late in the morning. And he works way harder than me.

This was pretty far off from the main road. I was on a bicycle, exploring the place and took a nap somewhere under a coconut tree. It was an awesome in-between jobs vacation.

Okay. I want to take more holiday. Crap.

While that is so, nothing guarantees that wisdom will last for too long.

The generational divergence Malaysia is witnessing now has a lot to do with the political turmoil of the late 1990s. The sacking of Anwar Ibrahim as the deputy prime minister and the subsequent events that followed made a lasting impression on the minds of these young Malaysians who then were still in school, in university or new to the labor market. Whether it was about Anwar or about a larger sense of justice — that something was extremely wrong — they were moved by the event.

These Malaysians are also the largest age cohorts that Malaysia has ever seen yet. It is not merely a coincident that BN comes under intense political pressure exactly when these generations are maturing and exercising their political muscles.

Each generation has an episode which defines their political belief and partly, their worldview. Those above 50 years old now remember the old Umno and hold dearly onto those nostalgias. Future young Malaysians, those in their teenage years and even younger, will no doubt have their very own episode.

Unlike the others however, these new young Malaysians have their book wide opened and its pages unwritten yet. There has not been any big wake-me-up moment for them so far.

One thing is certain though. Time has the power to make society forget the past. The old old generation will disappear into the background, hopefully bringing with them the ghost of May 13, among others. The old new generation — the young adults of today — will have their political views at the new bedrock of Malaysian society. The new new generations will challenge the prevailing views, as youth always do all around the world.

These new young Malaysians will not remember the events of 1998 because they will never experience it. It is much like how young adults today do not remember the events of 1988 when the old Umno was disbanded and the judiciary came under assault by the Mahathir administration. It is the exact reason why many young Malaysians today are not swayed by May 13 and scaremongering opportunists who fuel their sad career on racist politics.

History books alone are insufficient to influence a whole generation so comprehensively. No matter how moving words in the archives can be, reading them in a dark library room up in the stacks or deep in the basement is a passive, cold action. Words of history may work for a minority with true appreciation of history who read heavily but for the majority, they have to be in the dizzying mist of action before the essence of the era seeps into his or her being.

So the new new generation will forget. Society will forget. Slowly but surely, the what-we-call Reformasi era will take a bow, come down off the stage and be relegated to the pages of history.

That may be a comfort to BN. It is a second chance for them in what seems to be a contest between BN the rock and PR the water.

Nevertheless, BN will have to suffer the demographics and the momentum of time for now.

  

Right from the desert, a tower rises to more or less twice the height of the Petronas Twin Towers. It soars high into the sky so audaciously that it is as if Burj Khalifa were a middle finger meant for the god who confounded the builders of the Tower of Babel. If god had tried to stop the new tower with a financial crisis, this time, he had clearly failed. “Here god for what you did to the parents of our great-grandfather’s father”, I heard a little voice inside my head as I looked up to the new Tower of Babel. More than that, this is the new Mount Olympus, where the all-human, moneyed gods dwell.

But ancient stories and the god reference are truly out of place. They do not belong in the new Dubai. Here stands a triumph of engineering against the old world.

But the victory appears excessive, fueled too much by oil and gas and not much by anything else.

Dubai to me appears not much more than a collection of new tall buildings with highways criss-crossing a city that was effectively built within the last two decades or so. Some of these new buildings are the icons of the 21st century. Burj Khalifa and Burj al-Arab are easily as recognizable as the Empire State Building. But a city is always more than its landmarks and Dubai is turning into a city of only landmarks and nothing else. It is a soulless city in the middle of the desert. Dubai seeks to transform the desert into something more but I feel it is trading its sands for plastics.

The new metro, the new x-lane highways, the new towers and the new malls made me frown after the initial sense of wonder wore off. I began by praising human ingenuity but ended up wishing some gods had confounded the Emiratis just as the Babylonian god had confounded the Babylonians.

The financial district along with Burj Khalifa and its mall, to me, feels like La Défense in Paris. No, it is worse than that. It is the Asian fascination with malls gone mad. With its slope peppered with artificial snow in the Mall of the Emirates and its (admittedly impressive whatever the criticism is) large aquarium full of fishes, stingrays and sharks in the middle of Dubai Mall, it is the land of the absurd. It is sad plastic show of civilization.

Just as I prefer Haussmann’s Paris to the modern La Défense, I prefer the old Bur Dubai to the ultra-modern Burj Khalifa. But even in the old Dubai, old quarters have been refurbished for touristic consumption. It feels like having the authority builds a big bad hotel by a pristine beach. Just as the hotel kills the beach, the refurbishment killed the feeling of being lost in some Arab city with its narrow alleys and grand bazaars. I felt so bad watching it all that I thought I would feel I was in a more Arab city while playing the De Dust map in Counterstrike than I would walking the streets of the old Bur Dubai. All the plastics killed the sense of adventure.

The old Dubai is not completely lost fortunately. The victory of the plastics is not complete, yet.

I enjoyed walking the old markets. The souks raised my spirit after the plastics beat me down. The spices, the people and even the Muslim calls to prayer, which at home in Kuala Lumpur I found too much of a nuisance, were delightful. A natural waterway cutting through the old Dubai is many times more charming that the petty ponds underneath Burj Khalifa could ever be.

In the narrow alleys with the singing of Allahuakbar in the air, this was what I sought. An escape for the banal modern life and the crass politics full of nonsensical rhetoric the uneducated barbarians shout with their hoarse voice back at home. I wanted to be transported in time and to another place far away from home. I did not want to be transported to another place more plastic than home. Maybe, I needed a time machine, not a flying gargantuan iron bird.

I did not walk the old Dubai as much as I should. So, my condemnation may originate from imperfect information and excessively unfair.

Nevertheless, on the flight back to the tropical Kuala Lumpur, I thought, if I wanted to experience the Arab world, Dubai was not the place to be.

But I am glad to have been to Dubai and explore a bit of it. After all, Dubai is a stuff of legend, albeit one that is made out of plastics. It is a wonder of the modern world. Herodotus would not have disapproved of that, however plastic the modern world is. Judge an era on its own terms, I would suppose.

“The gross domestic product (GDP) growth for the first quarter was a bit slow, but that’s reflective of the economic activities which are typically slower (in this period),” Wahid said. [Liz Lee. Wahid: M’sia growth prospects still bright, will be driven by Govt identified projects. The Star. May 21 2013]

That is untrue. He has very likely confused his base.

It is true on quarter-on-quarter basis that 1Q tends to grow slower than the other quarters but the 4.1% is not measured on quarter-on-quarter basis. Instead, it is measured on year-on-year basis which pretty much controls the seasonality that bedevils quarter-on-quarter measurement (by the way, seasonality makes unadjusted quarter-on-quarter measurement unhelpful in most cases).

If you take a look for the past 11 years or so, there is not enough evidence to show that it is typical for year-on-year growth of 1Q RGDP to be slower than other quarters. You can see it for yourself:

In fact, the more than 10% growth that some BN politicians liked to crow without contextual understanding happened in 1Q2010.

I hope whatever he said to the media was an honest slip of the tongue mistake. Otherwise, his term as a minister will be full of statistical controversies.

The latest quarter has no such anomaly and so, the headline number does a better job in describing the economy this time around. Just to give context how bad the number is, the market had expected growth to be above 5.0% year-on-year with the median as compiled by Bloomberg being 5.5% year-on-year. You can compare the latest growth rate to previous rates in the chart below; 1Q growth is the lowest since the fourth quarter of 2009 which was right at the tail end of the 2009 global financial crisis.

Just earlier, France officially went back into recession with Germany barely grew after having its economy contracted in the last quarter.

Indeed, the reason for the slow growth was net exports. It was down by 36.6% y-o-y in real terms:

Of course, this is not the first time net exports dropped like a rock from the 7th floor. With Europe and China in trouble, exports have trouble growing. If it was not for strong growing demand from Southeast Asia and the United States, it would have been far worse.

But there is some good news. Private consumption growth accelerated to 7.5% year-on-year from a low 6.2% year-on-year. Domestic consumption growth was very much supported by consumption growth; domestic consumption growth accelerated to 8.2% year-on-year from 7.8% year-on-year.

The fact that consumption has been strong is partly the reason why net exports dropped. Consumption growth means import growth and boy, did imports grow.

I am not sure why consumption grew as it had grown. The way I looked at it, imports of consumption goods and industrial production were bad. I had expected consumption to not perform as well as it had. What was it? Minimum wage? Cash transfer? I did see MIER’s consumer sentiment spiked up but that does not explain much. I hope somebody else would be able to enlighten me on this.

Another thing that came as a surprise to me is the practically non-growth of government expenditure. I had expected all those heavy electioneering to boost government spending but it did not. In fact, government spending dropped in nominal terms! It may appear that the government may be on target to reduce the deficit ratio after all. Hurrah!

It will be interesting to see the actual federal government expenditure number later on, which is different from the GDP component.

As for investment, it was high and that made it hard for it to grow any faster. There was a one-time jump and that was it:

That one time jumped led to the 26.6% year-on-year jump in 2Q2012. Investment growth has been stuck at that level ever since. The next quarter… or rather this quarter, faces the risk of investment contracting, unless there is something big coming in our way. I do not see anything big coming in the second quarter, yet.

So, after all that has been said and done, the 4.1% is bad, but it is not as bad as it looks.

I mean what is not to like?

Consumption grew well and government expenditure was stable. I like this 4.1% growth better than the “fake” 6.5% growth in 4Q2012.

  

I am unsure about the investment figures but those investment figures are already high, thus making faster growth unrealistic.

On the plus side, government expenditure was likely up due to electioneering. But that part of the economy is the smallest among all of the components.

Whatever it is, that quarter growth will be significantly slower than the surprising 6.4% y-o-y achieved in 4Q2012. Consensus has it at 5.4% y-o-y according to Bloomberg. I have a feeling it will be lower.

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The official GDP estimates will be released by the Department of Statistics on Wednesday’s evening.

Stark’s system of government was based on mistrust. He looked for laziness, insubordination, drunkenness, and strife; he pretended to suppress them, and only succeeded in creating the further vices of cunning, deceit, and ill-will. Too many laws and regulations stifle the sense of good and evil. No one looks beyond his own personal interest; and nothing matters except the evasion of punishment: The plantation was an overgoverned state, as are all the European States of today; and the men were an army of demoralised by discipline. Henri Fauconnier. The Soul of Malaya. Chapter 1. 1931]