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Books, essays and others History & heritage Travels

[3033] That’s quite a strong chai at Cinnamon Gardens

Whenever I visit a place, I try to read up about it. But some places are visited so often that this no longer cuts it. In that case, I would pick up a piece of local literature, and I did just that when I found myself in Sydney yet again late last year. Walking down a familiar but changed Newtown, I dropped by a few bookstores and ended up picking up Chai Time at Cinnamon Garden by Shankari Chandran.

The novel took me on a journey well beyond Sydney. Set in a fictional Sydney suburb, it is a story of Sri Lankan immigrants who fled a country engulfed in a civil war between the Sinhala majority and the Tamil minority that lasted for more than 25 years before ending in 2009. The narrative jumps back and forth between Sydney and Jaffna (and occasionally Colombo), which was a treat because I had visited both Sri Lankan cities just seven years after the war ended. In Jaffna then, I appeared to be the only foreigner around, and many buildings still had walls pockmarked by bullets. Jaffna felt morose and reconstruction was barely noticeable. This was unlike in Colombo where there was a construction boom thanks to Chinese investment. My travels in Sri Lanka and my time in Australia gave me a richer context for the novel than I would otherwise have had.

I did not know about the novel’s expansive geographical and temporal reach when I bought it, and its early chapters started warmly enough that it seemed like a breezy read about friends, community, and multiculturalism. Oh, was I wrong about the book being a heartwarming, easygoing one.

The novel gets dark quickly by its midpoint. What the book is really about is the difficulty of living in a multicultural society. The author tackles racism in Australia, but even more so the trauma that the Tamil people suffered during the Sri Lankan civil war. The war ended bloodily with the defeat of Tamil fighters. There are scenes of torture and death in Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens.

The pages describing the 1981 burning of the Jaffna Public Library are probably the ones I will remember best from this novel. The library was the most important institution preserving Tamil history and literature in the country. It was targeted as a symbol of Tamil cultural identity and nationalism in Sri Lanka. I visited the rebuilt library while I was in Jaffna and did not find it impressive at all then. Had I known about its history and its burning, I might have been more sympathetic and in greater awe.

After this, I think I will boot up the portable drives where I stored the thousands of photographs I snapped while in Sri Lanka and look more closely at the pictures of the library.

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Society

[3032] Kampung Dato Abu Bakar Baginda’s set of pressing problems do not include the Rohingyas

Those who frequent Putrajaya would likely have come across Kampung Dato Abu Bakar Baginda. Although it is a largely Malay settlement first opened by Javanese migrants about 100 years ago, “kampung” is not really an apt description of the place. It is not quite an urban kampung such as Kampung Bahru or Kampung Datuk Keramat in Kuala Lumpur. Yet it does not have a rural feel at all. With Putrajaya, Bangi and Kajang just 5-15 minutes away (in fact Putrajaya is next door), it is a semi-urban area with modern facilities including well-equipped hospitals and the top universities just nearby. Petronas has an advanced training facility here too, where the current Cabinet sometimes holds retreats.

I came to know the place when I first worked in Putrajaya back in 2018. Coming from Kuala Lumpur on the way to Putrajaya, any commuter would pass it as they negotiate an underinvested junction into the Malaysia’s administrative capital. When the high-speed rail between KL and Singapore was under consideration, there was a plan to pave through the kampung, which drew local protests against the project.

As with many other places, Kampung Dato Abu Bakar Baginda and the whole area of Sungai Merab (which it was once part of and remains connected to) have their problems.

Traffic congestion is one big challenge, given how the place sits at the junction between Kuala Lumpur, Putrajaya, Bangi and Kajang. The road that stretches from the base of the Besraya Highway all the way to Bangi is simply not designed for heavy traffic. The main road is much too narrow, with restaurants and illegal parking encroaching onto it.

But the narrowness of the road is coupled with relative straightness. Many, frustrated by the congestion at the junction, would immediately drive aggressively by cutting queues and speeding down the road. There must have been some accidents before, given that speed bumps have been added in front of the kampung’s school and surau that hug the road to Bangi.

Commercial open burning is another problem. A kampung gives the idea that the air is clean but the reality is, most residential areas in Petaling Jaya enjoy cleaner air due to tighter environmental regulations. Even at the height of the recent haze, open burning continued, even though Putrajaya, home to the headquarters of the relevant environmental authority, is next door.

Illegal dumpsites are here and there, some being the source of the open burning. These sites exist because rubbish collection service is uneven. Residents businesses have had to find their own solutions where the local government fails. These places are usually hidden away the main road and the only real way to discover them is to drive along the small roads or fly drones.

Suspicious workshops are scattered around and I cannot help but wonder, if the sale and purchase of contraband metals take place here as train commuters suffer from service disruption.

Motorcycle racing happens almost every week. Very late at night, sitting at roadside restaurants, one would almost always hear a roar of motorcycle engines rising to the air and then going away, demonstrating the Doppler effect in the most socially disruptive way. This is potentially the reason behind frequent congestion-inducing police roadblocks near the entrance to Putrajaya. Drug use is another concern, although it is unclear whether it is worse here than elsewhere or whether it also contributes to the roadblocks.

Uncontrolled development and land clearing are other issues plain to observe, partly the result of unsophisticated local government and its underfunding amid a growing population. The place is a cheap location alternative to Bangi or Putrajaya. The result is erosion and mud floods in some places. The same uncontrolled clearing is forcing wildlife—long-tailed macaques, which are a threatened species but also wild boars—to frequent nearby residential areas and rummage through rubbish bins. Some monkeys have become road kills as cars zoom away, criminally unconcerned.

But if does not know the inner workings of Kampung Dato Abu Bakar Baginda but merely content to pass by on the way to Putrajaya, one would think the non-rural kampung’s biggest problem is the Rohingya refugees.

Large banners bearing inane slogans something like ‘Merdekakah kita daripada Rohingya?’ (are we free from the Rohingyas?) are hung over two underused pedestrian bridges. These banners, which have been up for months now, suggest that Rohingya refugees are flooding the kampung. To be sure, there are foreign workers from South Asia living in and around the kampung, working at various restaurants, workshops and construction sites. Are they Rohingyas? am not sure, but the difficulty of telling them apart from other foreigners means generalization going unchecked.

Whether or not one agrees with the message—I clearly do not, and the authorities appear to be turning a blind eye (it is hard to think otherwise, given that the road is used by civil servants, ministers and their officers)—a banner of such a racist nature should not be allowed to hang near schools for young children. These bridges primarily serve those schools and their pupils, and the banners expose the children to values we should not condone.

The presence of Rohingya refugees in the country deserves discussion and local concerns should be addressed within reason. But let us not pass the toxicity to the children.

The banners should be taken down, and the more pressing problems addressed rather than continually overlooked.

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Books, essays and others

[3031] Context-making and context-stealing while reading Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions

One of the benefits of reading books with related themes back-to-back (or at least within a certain duration where the read is fresh) is that the reader can contextualize the content of latter more deeply than he or she otherwise could. I remember being in awe of the Syed Hussein Al-Alatas’s The Myth of the Lazy Native within the context of Edward Said’s Orientalism. The theses in both work in my head feed on each other and make both of them even more profound. When I read Karen Armstrong’s A History of God, I immediately followed up with Gerard Russell’s Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms. While Armstrong explained the origin and evolution of Abrahamic monotheism through the lens Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Russell explored the minor offshoots of these three big religions by tracing how that divergence could have occurred. And every time Russell described some of the minor cults, I found myself understanding exactly how that cults’ belief evolved, thanks to material from Armstrong’s book.

I recently finished another of Karen Armstrong’s book—The Bible: The Biography and the next read was something related: the translation of Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions. Any person with a passing interest in philosophy would have heard of Augustine, who lived in the 4th and the 5th century during the common era. He is perhaps better known to most as a major Christian theologian who rationalized certain foundational concepts in Christianity. Without him, Christianity or maybe more precisely Catholicism would have been a very different religion than what it is today.

But Confessions is not primarily a philosophical or theological work. Instead, it is mostly an autobiography full of, well, confessions of the author’s sins. These confessions essentially retell his conversion over the years from Mandeanism (which incidentally the subject of the first chapter of Heirs to the Forgotten Kingdom) to Catholicism.

Karen Armstrong in all likelihood would have read Confessions and she wrote The Bible: The Biography close to 2,000 years later. I can see that some of the points in the latter are obviously influenced by the former. But I experienced these two in the reverse order. And so when I read Confessions, I see echoes of Armstrong’s points, which undoubtedly originated from Augustine. As Augustine wrote centuries ago:

For this reason, although I hear people say ‘Moses meant this’ or ‘Moses meant that’, I think it more truly religious to say ‘Why should he not have had both meanings in mind, if both are true? And if others see in the same words a third, or a fourth, or any number of true meanings, why should we not believe that Moses saw them all? There is only one God, who caused Moses to write the Holy Scriptures in the way best suited to the minds of great numbers of men who would all see truths in them, though not the same truths in each case!

For my part I declare resolutely and with all my heart that if I were called upon to write a book which was to be vested with the highest authority, I should prefer to write it in such a way that a reader could find re-echoed in my words whatever truths he was able to apprehend.

I would rather write in this way than impose a single true meaning so explicitly that it would exclude all others, even though they contained no falsehood that could give me offence. And if this is what I would choose for myself, I will not be so rash, my God, as to suppose that so great a man as Moses deserved a lesser gift from you. As he wrote those words, he was aware of all that they implied. He was conscious of every truth that we can deduce from them and of others besides that we cannot, or cannot yet, find in them but are nevertheless there to be found.

This echoes the point highlighted by Armstrong that I wrote earlier: scriptures and texts should be interpreted and reinterpreted to reveal multiple truths that might not necessarily be evident if we stick to just one interpretation.

But this brings me to a more meta-concern.

The book in my hand is a translated version of Confessions and that, it is not the full Confessions. I was deeply unhappy when I discovered my edition was merely an abridged work, which the publisher failed to make it clear without going through the fine prints. At the time of purchase, I was unaware of its abridged nature since there is no indication of it on the front or the back page. That information was written in the copyright page. I am absolutely livid of this and the publisher should have made the fact plainly at the front page stating it is an abridged translation.

A translated book means a certain kind of interpretation is already set in stone but since I do not read the original language Confessions was written in (which is Latin) and that I do not intend to read multiple different translations of the book, I am happy to accept this limitation.

The worst limitation by far are the cuts made to the book. I learned the from the internet that possibly half, or even two-thirds of the content, had been disposed of.

This had a negative effect on my reading experience. I for one found Augustine’s conversion to Catholicism as unconvincing and his confessions seem… truncated. I was left to wonder if there was more context to consider that could have been his confessions and conversion more satisfying.

The abridge edition also appears to present Augustine as a person with an anti-science bias, as if he was rebelling against his secular training. There are multiple instances in the version where he criticizes those with inclinations to the natural sciences but a little investigation online reveals otherwise, that he has a deep respect science and tries to incorporate rational thoughts into his religion.

So, while I did learn new things from reading this abridged edition, I keep on questioning whether my interpretation of Confessions from this particular edition is trustworthy. Maybe, I managed to gain something out of it, as Augustine would have wanted, as he had indicated in the quoted passages above.

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Books, essays and others Society

[3030] The idea of constant interpretation of holy text in Karen Armstrong’s The Bible: The Biography

Abrahamic religions are interesting in the sense that they share a common history. More specifically, there is a certain evolution of tenets that can be traced from Judaism all the way to Islam. Karen Armstrong’s 1993 A History of God explains this evolution and I remember being blown away by the book when I first read it in the 2000s. A History of God was once banned in Malaysia, and it was only unbanned in the most embarrassing manner for the Malaysian government. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs had invited Karen Armstrong to a panel in Kuala Lumpur, and during the Q&A session, somebody went up to the mic and told the panel that the book was banned.

Earlier this month, I finished another of Karen Armstrong’s book, The Bible: The Biography. It was first published in 2007.

Armstrong is sympathetic to the idea of religion. So, she is no Richard Dawkins. From my readings, I understand that she tends to interpret religions, even the harshest parts of holy texts, through universal values. This is how The Bible: A Biography is written. Central to this idea is that literal interpretation of holy texts is a relatively recent phenomenon and the source of religious bigotry in our modern world. She describes how the Bible, and specifically the Jewish text Tanakh, is meant to be taken figuratively and interpreted again and again across time to fit contemporary needs. The fact that the Tanakh was originally something not primarily written down but instead remembered and recited made constant reinterpretations not only possible but necessary.

When the texts began to put down in written form, there were objections raised that the exercise would make these documents more concrete than they should be. But the objections could not stand in the way of the natural evolution of language. Written texts were inevitable even before widespread literacy and the printing press became facts.

While written texts sowed the seeds of literalism, the culture of constant reinterpretation within the Jewish and later Christian traditions continued to flourish. Several prominent groups across the centuries created a ‘canon within the canon’ to make their religion kinder and perhaps more consistent with universal values, or perhaps just the Golden Rule, which is to treat others the way you want to be treated.

But the coming of the scientific age had a corroding effect on the culture of figurative and constant interpretation. The exacting nature of science seeped into Judaism and Christianity (and dare I say Islam too), which gave literal interpretation a major boost. American Christian groups especially are guilty of literalism, which brings about an aggressive interpretation of Christianity (and Judaism too, which perhaps provided the religious foundation for the genocide in Gaza).

Literalism not only spreads harsher versions of the religions, but it also highlights inconsistencies within the Bible. Given the way the Bible was written by multiple prophets, sages, and preachers across hundreds—if not thousands—of years, contradictions are aplenty. The traditional ways of understanding the Bible through reinterpretation would easily navigate these contradictions. This can be understood through a Talmudic story: during the first century of the Common Era, the sage Hillel the Elder was challenged by a stranger who said he would convert to Judaism if Hillel could summarize the Torah while standing on one leg. Hillel said, “What is hateful to yourself, do not do to your fellow man. That is the whole of the Torah, and the remainder is but commentary. Go study it.”

Armstrong ends with a call for charity and kindness in reading and interpreting all holy texts including the Bible, the Koran, and others. Reading these texts through that lens would help moderate the excesses of religion. As she writes near the end, “What would it mean to interpret the whole of the Bible as ‘commentary’ on the Golden Rule? It would first demand an appreciation of other people’s scriptures. R. Meir said that any interpretation that spread hatred or denigrated other sages was illegitimate. Today these ‘other sages’ must include Muhammad, Buddha and the rishis of the Rig Veda.”

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Economics

[3029] Overemphasizing AI in explaining Malaysia’s second quarter 2026 growth

Malaysia’s strong GDP growth in recent quarters has been attributed to sectors relating to artificial intelligence build-up. More often than not, that means semiconductor-making/packaging/assembly and data center construction. This brings up the question of whether this growth is standing on one leg?

The rough answer I found is no.

One quick and dirty way to answer that question is to strip those sectors out of the whole equation and have an adjusted GDP consisting of the rest of the economy. If that adjusted GDP growth is weak relative to full GDP numbers, that may suggest other sectors are not doing well and perhaps evidence of a one-legged economy.

From the chart above that strips AI-related sectors, it shows the rest of the economy is doing well too since Malaysia’s adjusted GDP growth would still be above 5%.

The chart below shows the difference between the full and the adjusted GDP, which just reflects the earlier graph in a different way. Meaning, it presents more clearly how the AI-related sectors are becoming more and more important to overall growth, even as the overall economy has been expanding at a good rate.

It is possible to be more precise by using input-output table by taking into account things like water and electricity consumption specifically and more generally, all sectors affected by AI-related sectors (notwithstanding the latest official table is outdated by 5 years). But I would imagine as a back-of-the-envelope calculation, this method is good enough.

If you do not like the approach, there is an easier but messier way to show this: the distribution of growth across all sectors.

The big chart above can be summarized:

So in summary: yes, these AI sectors are positive for Malaysian growth but maybe we are are focused on the sexy parts of the economy while ignoring the robustness of a great many industries.