….Happy New Year.
Should I edit out the hand and the phone? I kind of like it though.
Below is another among my favorites.
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Author: Hafiz Noor Shams
For more about me, please read this.
It was an email produced after a sequence ”guided by pure randomness.” He said he might need a place to stay for a day or two, or maybe more in Australia. I think I just woke up from a nap because I found myself unclear when he planned to come exactly . Apparently, he must have slept through writing the email as well. He wrote ”[s]o I booked really cheap tickets to Melbourne and will be there at and occasionally in between 19 June and 12 July 2009.” But it was already August. In the following email, he wrote, ”2010, rather.”
I thought to myself, and later wrote back telling him to email me again next year because with a commitment so far away into the future, anything could happen. I keep a conservative outlook with odds. I was thinking of myself because there were a number of uncertainties that I needed to negotiate throughout the year.
Little did I realize that anything also included death.
Friend Rajan Rishyakaran died earlier today in a road crash. I do not know the details, and I do not want to know the details. But I knew something else about him. Something that gives his existence a huge significance to me.
I knew Rajan first by reputation before becoming a friend of his. I think, many of those early bloggers, especially those whom used to patronize Project Petaling Street portal in its heydays knew him by his frequent saber rattling with another blogger over religion. I followed the argument between the two with interest, even if it was for pleasure. I later fought the same battle he had fought. Rajan was a libertarian. It was not a surprise that we disagreed (I still disagree) deeply with that blogger whom clearly despised the liberties libertarians cherish.
We take the defense of liberty seriously. It is no hobby.
He was, in fact, one of two early self-proclaimed libertarians in Malaysia that I know. It is for this reason that I appreciate his friendship. Weirdly enough, with the three of us, there was a Malay, a Chinese and an Indian libertarians. It is a coincidence resulting in a tiresome cliché.
For the life of me, I cannot remember when I first personally met him. I do however know that I only met him in person years after we knew each other online. The last time I met him was at a crazy summer party in Petaling Jaya with a bunch of other new friends that colored my dull life.
When we first knew each other, I was in the United States and he was preparing for his STPM, a Malaysian version of A-Level. He went on to do economics in Singapore.
Death comes to us all, but somehow, there is a painful sense of injustice here. He was too young to go. He had so many to offer to the libertarian movement in Malaysia, especially with his interest in debating and developing knowledge in economics. Many times when he wrote at his blog, I found myself in agreement with him. The loss of him is a loss to Malaysian libertarian movement. His death is a loss to me because I now have one less libertarian perspective to listen to, amid limited libertarian circle that exists at the moment in Malaysia.
But that makes him as if he was a tool for some political development. He was not. A man is the end, and not a mere mean.
Alas, he is no more.
His family is having a service for him tomorrow in Shah Alam. I wish I could be there. I really do. The suddenness of this all left me with little option but to give my last respect from here in Sydney.
Goodbye, dear friend.
p/s — I shall post links of other obituary that I found over the blogosphere here:
- For Rajan Risyakaran, an obituary. Yvonne Foong. December 30 2009.
- How do you know… Like a magpie, I live for glitter. December 30 2009.
- Chapter 22-08: Cherish Life. Fern Yit. December 30 2009.
- In memoriam. December 30 2009.
- Remembering Rajan Rishyakaran. John Lee. December 30 2009.
- Rest in Peace, Rajan Rishyakaran. Nathaniel Tan. December 31 2009.
- Conversations with Rajan Rishyakaran (1986 — 2009). Zareth Lim. January 1 2010.
pp/s — for those interested, there is service for Rajan on December 31 in Shah Alam. Kindly refer to this particular forum post at usj.com.my.
The dawn of the 21st century disappoints the part of me growing up reading works of science fiction. Here we are living in a much too glorified new century and there are still no flying cars crisscrossing the sky, no aliens from outer space walking our streets and no human bases across the solar system. We did send a roti canai to space but many things remain out of this world. Underneath this childish disappointment is another part of me who is impressed at humanity’s pace of technological progress.
The thought came to me last October when I was frantically downloading every single file I had stored on Geocities. Yahoo! shut Geocities down later that month after more than ten years of existence.
There was a time when the internet was effectively Geocities. Almost everything imaginable was available on Geocities alone. Cheats for Diablo? Latest news on Star Wars? History of the Malay Peninsula?
If the internet was the successor of the Great Library of Alexandria, then Geocities was its precious scrolls. This was back in the mid to the late 1990s. It was a time when surfing speed was incredibly slow that made today’s speed as served by TMNet god sent. It was a time when modems make noise much to the delight of a geeky kid.
It was on Geocities where I learned the hypertext markup language in effort to prove to my friends that I could do it too. With my mastery of HTML, I created my first website.
Updating it was a tough act. If I wanted to change certain details of the website, I had to go back to my text editor application and change it there. It was a big hassle but it was fun. The introduction of WYSIWYG kept me sane for some time.
The emergence of content management system as well as wide access to cheaper storage and greater bandwidth probably ended Geocities. Frustrated as the amount of time I needed to spend to update my website on Geocities, I became an early adopter of Blogger.
The generosity of my alma mater in Ann Arbor with respect to storage further reduced my need of Geocities. Since migrating to Blogger and ultimately WordPress several years later, never once I returned to Geocities, until last October. It was time to say the final goodbye. This is my requiem for it, and for everything that is beautifully obsolete.
My experience with Geocities and the internet by no mean affected me alone. Back in the late 1990s, the latest unsanctioned information was directly available only to the political fringe.
A decade later, the introduction of content management system that makes the proliferation of blogs possible democratised the internet. It is probably not too demanding to assert that this evolution brought political evolution — some would say revolution — in Malaysia. It took years, but it happened.
The return to Geocities was a walk down memory lane for me. Old photos stashed there brought me back to a more innocent age. A folder contained photos taken in Chicago. Another in New York. Another still contained countless of other places. These pictures were scanned from actual hardcopy photographs. Yes, there was a time when film was a crucial component of a camera. The film needed to be processed first before one could enjoy one’s effort. That typically took a week. Not anymore. All those processing are done with a snap of a finger. At a far, better a resolution too. Never mind all those snazzy features a digital SLR has.
I saved all of my life’s work, including my scanned photographs, in 3½-inch diskettes around the same period. One day after spending a summer away from classes, I found my spirit renewed. I was yet again prepared to take up relentless challenges thrown by a cruel Michigan. Before that however, I just needed to transfer some of my files on that 3½-inch diskette to a computer in a laboratory on campus. Amid 50-odd computers, not one of them had a diskette driver on them.
The same situation was true over all computer laboratories on campus. In its place was a weird thing called USB drive. Life was just too hard.
Just less than four months earlier, I would happily hop from computer to computer with my diskettes. On that particular day when I found out about the end of diskette drive, a child of the information revolution felt obsolete.
The world suddenly leapt by me, catching me off-guard. I adapted — I had too — but that taste of obsoleteness still lingers with me, forever a reminder that nothing lasts forever. The only thing one can do is to prepare oneself for the eventuality.
These continuous creative destructions ensure that. It also says that it is likely that tomorrow is going to be a better day. I am willing to bet on that because all these small changes, and more, have more than compensates my childish disappointment. Under its belt is a reputation enough to earn confidence from a mere mortal.
First published in The Malaysian Insider on December 17 2009.
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[2139] Of fish inside… duh!
Oh, sardines!
I wonder what is inside. A nuclear device? A grey goo? A really small man?
It contains fish! Hooray!
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[2138] Of it is Metatron!
Up north at the end of Glebe Point Road is a park and Rozelle Bay sits in front of it. From there, one gets a full view of the sleek Anzac Bridge with its two concrete towers. Just slightly farther towards the sea, the undoubtedly more famous Harbour Bridge crosses the Sydney Harbour.
This picture looks west and clearly, taken at dusk.
I really like how the clouds hid the sun. It somehow reminds me of Metatron in Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Something ominous lurks behind the clouds.
I did some processing here to saturate the color. I typically frown at those that do some processing because I feel it a kind of cheating, especially so if they do not disclose that fact. Most of the times, processed pictures would become better but what I object about it is that without disclosure of processing, it deceives others. And then there is also something called over-processing.
But I just could not resist playing with the colors here. So, I guess that makes me a hypocrite.
In the spirit of full transparency that the Malaysian government notoriously lacks, here is the original photograph, taken purely based on, if I may say so, my non-existence photography skills.
The sky was much brighter in reality. I set my shutter speed quite fast to capture the cloud pattern. Much slower speed would have turned the picture whitish. I also tweaked my camera’s white balance so that, as an auto setting would always do I think, the photograph would not appear bluish.
And oh, it is time for me to get a new lens.