Category: Personal

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[2938] From political to personal

Favored mindless slogan among Pas, Bersatu and Umno members and supporters early during the incompetent handling of the pandemic had something to do with politics. Despite the deeply political nature of the whole situation, they would say “jangan berpolitik.” That roughly translates into “don’t politicize the issue.” Do not politicize Covid-19. Do not politicize the handling.

They repeat the phrase while politicking, and eventually causing the state-wide Sabah by-election. Coupled with uneven enforcement of physical distancing, we are here today: a nearly collapsed healthcare system and continuing rising number of infection cases.

Failures in managing the case, and actions worsening the situation persisted, amid the mindless slogan: don’t politicize the issue.

Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved

My grandmother died in her bed six days ago, a day before Eid. Initially, everybody thought she died of old age. She died in her sleep. Her death was shocking, but she was old. And she had a good life.

Post-mortem at the hospital revealed she had Covid-19.

She was unvaccinated. I am unsure why. I am just angry.

I could not go to her burial. I have not met her for nearly two years. No, too late. I had not met her.

Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved

Five days after her death, I received by second Covid-19 vaccine jab. A slot I had to fight for. Such an inequity, created by an unscientific hunch.

Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved

I am sure my experience is not unique. With nearly 8,000 deaths and counting, everybody must have known somebody who has died.
I wonder how they feel. Do they feel all those incompetence, mismanagement and failures political? Is 3-day quarantine political?

Is death of a family member political? Or is it personal, meant to be grieved privately?

Are these killings political, or are they a private matter?

Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved

It must be politicized. It is the only way to make irresponsible, incompetent and unaccountable men and women of this government accountable.

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Personal

[2935] From BCG to Covid-19 vaccine

It is hard to remember it after all these years. I vaguely recall lining up along one of the corridors of my primary school building. The school had a mid-20th century architecture, with the present classrooms opened in 1964 in Kuala Lumpur. It had two symmetrical yellowish cream-colored long buildings running parallel and facing each other, with an open grass compound in the middle where little students would chase each other whenever the tropical sun was kind.

It was late morning I think, just after the 10AM recess. I may have made that up. But let us just say it was a bright sunny day because I do not remember it rained.

The school must have had 300-500 pupils aged from 7 to 12 years old. I do not know how old I was, but about a hundred were queuing up that day. My cohort was there to get our vaccination and health check-up. Was it BCG? I am unsure. Maybe.

What I remember best was the feeling I had while waiting. This line had no queue-jumper: everybody was scared. Some cried their hearts out and had to be consoled with an ice-cream cone or some candy. I did not cry despite my heart pounding, and I did not flee despite wanting to.

It did not help that the government of the day was running an anti-drugs campaign. The now-demolished old Pudu Jail had a long mural, purportedly the longest in the world along its walls for any would-be offender to see. The wall had images for drug abuses and its consequences painted in dark colors. Coloring contests were held about the evils of najis dadah. TV was telling us drugs were bad. Jangan hisap dadah. I want to hear that in Samy Vellu’s voice.

All that had the needle as a symbol of drug abuse and that symbol was strongly etched into my young mind.

On that day, I was confused. Why does my school want use a needle on me?

I was scared.

The queue had to end somewhere. It was not a wait forever. I did not look at it when the needle pierced through my skin, with a chemical concoction injected on my left arm. People told me it was like an ant bite. Either they were lying, or their ant was a huge killer-insect.

That is my memory when it come to injection. I may have grown up, but every time I have to face the needle for whatever reason, a little part of me shrinks in fear. “Please doctor, please, not the needle,” my little inner voice would shriek silently.

In this mismanaged pandemic, Malaysia is beginning to vaccinate our population seriously after a slow start. I had my first dose a week ago, and the line was a long one. My mind hovered around my old memory of vaccination and wondered if it still hurt while I was lining up.

I had several injections since that BCG vaccination. Funnily enough, I cannot recall any of them. My mind must have blotted them out. It must be traumatic.

As the line snaked into the main vaccination hall, I thought to myself, “antivax people are really antivax because they have a horrible injection experience. They have never grown out of it. ‘Never again,’ they said!”

I tried getting my mind off it by reading a book. But Hussin Mutalib’s Islam and Ethnicity in Malay Politics is not a titillating read. Interesting, but it is an academic work. Besides, it was hard to concentrate in the hall. Workers and volunteers were shouting out instruction, and people were talking to each other.

Eventually I found myself in a carrel where the vaccine would be administered. The vaccinator showed me the vaccine. There was a minor controversy just a day earlier where a person proved that he got less vaccine than he should. It should have been 0.5ml and no less.

The rumor machine went on an overdrive, suggesting somebody was purposefully giving less either to profit off it, or that supply was running out. Either way, for a program bedeviled by problems, the episode widened the trust deficit this government suffered, and this government suffers a deficit much bigger than the Najib administration.

I appreciated that the vaccinator showed me the volume, and I knew I should watch the whole procedure to ensure I got the whole 0.5ml.

But I did not.

I shut my eyes, trying not to think my BCG experience 20-30 years ago.

“All done. You’re good to go,” she said.

“Oh?”

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Personal Photography Society Travels

[2914] Madness in a holy shrine

I have an English translation of the Masnavi at home. It has been on my shelves for years but I have never read it full, much like my collection of Kafka’s, or writings of Robert Nozick and Bertrand Russell, or even the Koran.

The Masnavi feels like a reference material. You do not read it whole. You open the pages once in a while and read a verse or two or three now and then.

There is criticism that most established English translations have stripped the Islamic religion out of Rumi’s poems. That have made the Masnavi secular for a wider audience outside of the Muslim world; Rumi has been removed from his Islamic context. Meanings have been corrupted from its original intention.

My miseducation had misdirected my expectations when I was in Konya visiting Rumi’s tomb. He died here in the 13th century when this part of Turkey was ruled by the Seljuks. The tomb is officially called the Mevlana Museum. Rumi, or in full Jalal Ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, was a teacher, a master, a Maulana. But the tomb was no museum. It is a major shrine. And the population of Konya, I was told, is deeply religious but in a different way.

Growing up as a Muslim in Malaysia with religious education pummeled into me early on with questions discouraged, I had come to think of shrines as something absolutely unorthodox, bordering cultish. The religious authority in Malaysia strongly discourages worshipping at shrines fearing it could lead to effective apostasy at worst. In Keramat in Kuala Lumpur, a Muslim shrine was removed by the government to prevent the Malays from visiting it. By a long shot, Malaysia is not Saudi Arabia. But some aspects of it could be felt.

Rumi's tomb

And so it was a sight to see people coming in droves into the large shrine praying in front of Rumi’s large heavy sarcophagus.

The stone coffin, itself under a massive tall green dome, is lifted off the ground by a set of four legs. I, a person whose understanding of Rumi had been divorced from the Islamic context and understanding of Islam must have had approached puritanism from the perspective of these devotees in this shrine, was dumbstruck by the religiousness surrounding me. I did not expect to be in a pilgrimage, but I found myself stuck inside one.

It was all around me. Old women in black dressing covered from head to toes without a veil prayed toward Rumi’s remains while tearing up. There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger… and Rumi the teacher. It was as if Rumi was a prophet himself. The Masnawi after all was nicknamed the Persian Koran. I was unprepared for this. Their devotion was true.

Many were determined to make their way to the front, pushing those in the way out harshly. A majority of them were Turks, but I spotted some Iranians too and other foreigners by listening to the language they spoke. They must have seen me as a nuisance, a foreigner standing in the way, not praying as they did.

As I observed, I came to disapprove what I saw. It was not so much due to my religious education, but rather due to the situation at hand. I can understand how holy the experience could be, but in the believers’ eagerness to reach for the scared, they pushed and shoved others in their way with a greediness and disrespect that should have no place in a holy place. The madness was understandable but disagreeable. It felt too worldly to deserve a place in this tomb beside the maulana.

I frowned each time I was pushed aside.

I felt angry but relented. If I needed to be patient, perhaps here inside the tomb was a place to practice patience. After all, I came with a secularized understanding of Rumi. I had no rights to judge them.

Categories
Personal Photography Travels

[2900] Shoot it, or not

The digital life is oppressive sometimes. Because we are now able to record every single second of our life, some of us are in constant fear leaving any moment left unrecorded. So much so that we have become slaves to our digital memory, and failed to enjoy the moment itself without any assistance lfrom our digital devices. I am hardly different, though I would like to think I try to fight off such urge.

To get to Antalya on the Turkish Mediterranean from Konya deep within Turkey, the bus I was on needed to pass through the Taurus Mountains. I have read about the Taurus Mountains as a child, just as I have read about the Urals, the Himalayas, the Andes and the Rockies. To be there in the Turkish plains seeing the mountain range with my own eyes was somewhat unbelievable upon reflection. The ten years old me whom had read about it in encyclopedia and on maps would have never imagined he would one day see it for himself.

Konya, as I learned latter, Iconium during the Roman days, is located at the foot of grand mountain ranges, with mountain peaks of names I do not know off without further research. As I spotted the various peaks from my hotel window, I told myself I wanted to know their names. I quickly abandoned the exercise for fear I would be prioritizing the wrong thing: I am here in Konya, and I should be experiencing it rather than researching about mountains on the horizon. It did not help that Wikipedia was banned in Turkey.

Looking north from my bed, I remember three peaks the most. The highest had its top covered with snow. It was December after all. The other two peaks were much shorter but located nearer to me, with cup-like shape turned upside down. All were barren, with earth exposed with rocks littered its cliff, at least as far as I could tell peeking through my camera’s viewfinder equipped with a small zoom lens, pretending I was some kind of explorers, readying for the mountains.

Looking north of Konya

Konya felt like it was on the edge of a desert, with a more mundane landscape compared to Goreme in Cappadocia with its deeply Christian history that reaches to more than 900 years back into history.

But the view from Konya was nothing compared to the view from the road towards Antalya to the southwest.

The journey began tamely. The road ran on flat land southward before swerving eastward into the Taurus. Taurus means the Bull in Latin, and the Bull is the symbol of the Storm God. The mountains were named so because the ancients believed the rains brought by the Storm God created the Tigris and the Euphrates, which originated from these mountains.

The approach towards the Taurus from Konya was not as dramatic as the one I experienced in Laos. Back there, the flat land would suddenly be confronted by the mighty Himalayas. Back in Vang Vieng in Laos, a wall of one, two, three or even four kilometer high would stare you down, enquiring the puny you of your rights to be there. Here at the foot of the Taurus, the ascend was gradual and it betrayed little early on. Maybe because, I was already within the mountain complex, except I did not realize it.

So I had my camera switched off, and kept tightly inside my bag as the bus began to work its way to the Mediterranean. As the bus climbed up gently, my view was kept in check by the hills on my sides. Except quite quickly, those hills on my sides soared up into the sky, suddenly transforming into mountains with snow caps. Shallow valleys became chasms, slopes became cliffs, and daytime turned dark as the mountains blocked the sun.

I knew my camera was in my bag. I wanted to take them out. I really did. But in my mind, if I did so, I would miss something with my own eyes. And each corner revealed even more dramatic view, and even higher mountains out in the distance, and they would vanish within seconds as the trees and the rocks and the hills moved around, blocking my lines of sight. I dared not spend a minute taking my camera out. I could not take it.

And… I took my camera out and began shooting from my seat.

The pictures turned out crappy. But the memory in my head turned out just fine. Maybe for the next 30 or 50 years. We will see.

Categories
Personal Society

[2852] Two policemen and a migrant worker

Some time back in 2015, I walked down to the train station after having a late meal in Bangsar. It was almost an hour to midnight and I did not want to miss the last train home. It usually takes about 15 to 20 minutes to get to the Bangsar train station from Jalan Telawi by foot, and the train stops running close to midnight.

I remember jaywalking across Jalan Maarof and then strolling down to near the bottom of the street, before turning into the slip road into a smaller and less busy Lorong Maarof.

It was there where I saw two officers, one standing and another sitting on his motorcycle, interrogating what seemed to be a migrant worker by the road. The worker was of South Asian origin, I think.

It was somewhat dark in the area. The road was lit with orange light, making the night felt quiet and lonely. There is something about orange light emitted from fluorescent lamp. It makes a street feels mysterious, if not sinister. The sound of cars zooming by, speeding beyond the speed limits, made the atmosphere all the more isolating. Nobody on the main road would care or notice anything if something happened.

I walked closer toward the three men while wishing I was already in my bed. I had to walk pass them to get to the train station. It was the shortest distance available to me.

I was tired, but my eyes were fixed on the three. But the fact that there were two police officers and a migrant worker there did not quite register in my mind. I observed with my senses, but my mind saw nothing. My mind was that absent security officer snoozing at night in front of the countless screens in the central CCTV room. The cameras were recording, but nobody was watching.

The officers did not notice me, until I was right next to them. They were startled by the sound of my footsteps. There was almost fear in their eyes, in contrast to the South Asian person’s blank expression.

I did not comprehend what was going on but I noticed an officer was forcing his hand into the Bangladeshi’s pants pocket, taking out a wallet. I had a sense that that was inappropriate.

I understand everything now in retrospection. If you asked me what was the expression on the Bangladeshi’s face, I now would be tempted to claim that it was an expression of resignation. It was an expression that said, tonight, I was being unlucky.

I looked at the officers, but I walked on as my mind slipped further into some of kind delirium. I was a zombie, for all I care. I was both aware and unaware at the same time.

That was until the bright white light at the train station jolted my mind out of its slumbering state. Already used to the low energy orange light, the eyes screamed in pain while adjusting to the high-frequency, high-energy LED white light. The announcement blaring through the PA system made a good alarm clock, even as apart of me felt that I wanted to disobey its instruction.

By the time I boarded the train and was zooming across Kuala Lumpur, I was fully awake. White light filled the largely empty two-car carriage. I wish they had dimmed the lights.

The train runs on a viaduct from Bangsar to just after the Central Market in downtown Kuala Lumpur. Then it dives into a long dark tunnel, making repetitive whooshing sound as the train compresses the air against the concrete wall of the tube. It was at that moment, as train rushed underneath the city that I began to consider things that I saw.

It did not take long for me to suspect that the two officers were extorting the migrant workers for money. I have no proof of it happening, except for my memory and suspicion.

I am telling this story today because yesterday, the Deputy Prime Minister, who is also the Home Minister in charge of the police, said that “Amalan mengutip ‘duit pau’ untuk perlindungan dalam kalangan agensi penguat kuasa sudah lama berlalu.” In Malay, in short, the police does not do extortion, anymore.[1]

Anymore, he said. Should I believe him?

Back in the train, I was filled with regrets, asking myself what if I had stopped and asked questions to the officers. I asked, if I had realized it earlier there and then, what would I do? Would I do what was right? I remember wondering, the degree of corruption in our society.

The train emerged from the tunnel just before the Ampang Park station. The swooshing sound was replaced with a cool humming.

It was dark outside. It was midnight, and I was leaving the last train.

Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reservedMohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reservedMohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved

[4] Amalan mengutip ‘duit pau’ atau habuan untuk perlindungan dalam kalangan agensi penguat kuasa sudah lama berlalu, kata Datuk Seri Dr Ahmad Zahid Hamidi. Bagaimanapun, Timbalan Perdana Menteri berkata, gejala rasuah itu masih menular kononnya menanggung perbelanjaan ‘meraikan’ pegawai atasan yang turun melawat anggota bawahan, khususnya di peringkat daerah. “Ini alasan tidak cerdik kerana bercanggah dengan pendirian anggota penguat kuasa yang diberi amanah untuk memikul tanggungjawab melindungi negara dan masyarakat. “Tindakan pegawai atasan membuli anggota bawahan juga perlu dihentikan kerana amalan ini menjurus kepada perlakuan menghalalkan rasuah dalam kalangan unit beruniform. [Mohd Iskandar Ibrahim. Farah Mashita Abdul Patah. Luqman Arif Abdul Karim. Ahmad Suhael Adnan. Era polis ‘pau’ duit perlindungan sudah berlalu – Zahid. Berita Harian. May 21 2017]