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Books & printed materials Personal

[2978] Shall we read The End of the Nineteen-Nineties?

It has been a long journey but after seven or eight years of writing it, I am pleased to share that The End of the Nineteen-Nineties, published by Matahari Books, is finally out in the market.[1]

Cover for the The End of the Nineteen-Nineties

The synopsis on the back cover does a good job describing what the book is all about. Still, I feel I should explain it further and the best way to do so is to discuss the title of the book.

The obvious interpretation of the title is that the book is about the nineteen-nineties in Malaysia. The decade is the subject because, as I explained in the book, the period is special in several important aspects. To understand its specialness, I look back far into history to explain certain trends, and then rationalize the decades after through the lens of the 1990s.

One reason the 1990s is special is what I consider the end (as in the purpose) of the decade. That end is the creation of a larger civic nationalism that we commonly call Bangsa Malaysia. That wider nationalism beyond ethnicities was not conceived in the 1990s. It has a long history, but the specialness of the decade created space which civic nationalism could grow and prosper, unlike previous (and latter) attempts that failed.

The 1990s ended in a spectacular fashion with a political upheaval and an economic crisis. One of many victims of the end of the nineteen-nineties was Bangsa Malaysia.

The book is a broad sweep of Malaysian history. It is a bit of retelling by a person who grew up during the decade. It is written by a person who loved the country, fell out of love, and then ends up in a situationship.

Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved

[1] — The book is slowly making its way to various physical stores. But online purchase is likely the best for most people. Here are several places where you could buy it online:

Finally, there will be several events linked to the book set in February 2024. I hope to see you there.

Categories
Books & printed materials Fiction

[2977] How I learned to stop worrying and love Salman Rushdie’s Victory City

Reading Victory City, I found myself figuring out whether the places and persons mentioned in the book were real. It is like reading Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code: fiction is weaved through real history and that blurs the line separating the two.

But Victory City is worse than that. It is fashioned as a casual modern translation of a supposedly ancient text detailing the rise and fall of the Bisnaga Empire, which is a reference to a real entity that was the Vijayanagar Empire that covered much of southern India.

My knowledge of the Indian subcontinent history is not as good as that of other areas. That shows when I know of Vijayanagar largely from playing Europa Universalis IV.

Already having a superficial understanding of southern Indian history, the novel did not help. Is Victory City, actually based on something like Sejarah Melayu, an actual document however fanciful the details are? At the back of the novel, the author Salman Rushdie, lists sources he referred to, giving an aura of seriousness (aura of non-fiction?) to his work of fiction. He was painting a picture of 14th-15th-16th century southern India on an un-blanked canvas belonging to another painting. I was worried that would give me the wrong impression of Vijayanagar.

So worried was I, that I tried ascertaining the real history behind names and places in the book. Google. Wikipedia. The usual places for a quick lookup. But that worked up as a distraction, slowing my reading pace and disrupting the rhythm set by the book. Reading became a chore by too much.

Realizing that, I stopped my side quests, and enjoyed the book as it is, tracking the fictional life of the founder of Bisnaga, the fantastical almost immortal sage Pampa Kampana, born just before the empire was founded, and died as the empire collapsed more than two hundred years later.

Categories
Economics WDYT

[2976] Guess the 2Q23 Malaysian GDP growth

The second quarter GDP for Malaysia will be published tomorrow, at noon Malaysian time.

As a reminder, the first quarter economy grew by 5.6% year-on-year. That was a surprisingly resilient quarter, despite deceleration in growth.

How fast do you think did the Malaysian economy expand in 2Q23 from a year ago?

  • 2% or slower (8%, 1 Votes)
  • 2.1%-3.0% (38%, 5 Votes)
  • 3.1%-4.0% (23%, 3 Votes)
  • 4.1%-5.0% (23%, 3 Votes)
  • 5.1%-6.0% (8%, 1 Votes)
  • Faster than 6.0% (0%, 0 Votes)

Total Voters: 13

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All available statistics point towards a second quarter slowdown. Export numbers during the quarter have been horrible, and the country’s industrial output, given how Malaysia is an small, open economy, has not been doing well either.

Part of the reason why the decline in exports and industrial output is due to the extraordinary post-lockdown growth, amid severe supply chain complications: that created an extremely high base effect and that effect will likely persist until the third quarter.

But that should distract us from the ongoing global growth slowdown. Europe is in recession and China is in trouble. The only real bright spot is the US, which is surprising because much, much earlier, many had expected the country to go into a recession.

But the US strength itself is causing troubles elsewhere in the form of capital outflows and foreign exchange volatility, since it gives more room for the Fed to raise rates. The end of the hike cycle keeps getting delayed.

The good news is that the domestic labor market remains solid, and there has been a little bit more medium-term direction given out by this government. The political heat has come down a bit after the recent state elections, which hopefully, will convince the government to shift more attention towards the economy, and other nation-building exercise.

And challenges in the next several quarters will not be small. Next in the list is a strong El Nino phenomenon, resulting, very likely, the hottest season we will go through yet. That will require a little bit of preparation: water supply, electricity transmission, manufacturing inputs, health services, firefighting services, etc.

And I pray there will be no forest fire and haze this time around.

Categories
Politics & government Society

[2975] Do not blame Muda by too much

Ralph Nader was a popular figure in some of the progressive parts of America. He gave speeches in Ann Arbor several times when I lived there, and once ahead of the 2004 presidential election, he had to defend himself from vote-splitting accusation. In 2000, Al Gore lost the presidential election to George Bush with the narrowest of margin, with the Naders’ Greens won substantial votes as the third party candidate. Given that Nader and the Democrats’ bases overlapped, it was easy for bitter Democrats to claim that Nader took votes away from Al Gore, and paved the way for Bush’s presidency. Nader defended himself by saying that if he did not put himself on the ballot, those who had voted him would likely have not gone out to vote anyway.

I see Pakatan Harapan supporters blaming Muda for vote-splitting, and for easing Perikatan Nasional’s advances in Selangor. For a number of seats PH lost, the loss margin was smaller than the votes Muda won, even as Muda lost all of their deposits.

And it is easy to dislike Muda this time around. The episode in Bukit Gasing was Muda’s act of self-sabotage. Their asset declaration exercise was less than truthful, and so, to me, insulting. More than several candidates were nothing more than rich kids with little understanding of society or policy. Their campaign messages were jumbled up badly, confusing local, state and national policies all at once. I came out of the 2 weeks campaigning period from a position of neutral-to-mild skepticism near the beginning, to that of a dismissal by voting day. The latest set of candidates undid some good work earlier ones like Lim Wei Jiet have done.

Yes, it is easy to dislike Muda but Nader’s defense applies here.

The low turnout suggests PH bases were uninspired this time around. PH’s pandering to the deep conservatives on the far side is one possible reason for these people not to go out and vote. And there are people, who voted for PH the last round, openly said their would vote for a third choice as a sign of protest.

So, if there was no Muda, it is hard to say whether those Muda votes would have gone to PH or BN.

But more than that, for every vote Muda got, there were more PH voters who did not go out and vote. Blaming Muda is an excuse to ignore the much bigger point: PH base is dissatisfied. PH is committing the same mistake PH 2018-2020 did: trying to get the votes they could never get on the far side of the spectrum, at the expense of the middle voters and PH bases. And these voters protested and did not bother to go out.

This dissatisfaction has to be addressed.

Categories
Pop culture

[2974] Watching Oppenheimer

During my graduate years, I was surrounded by friends having extensive knowledge of films. Inside their mind stored what seemed to be a thick encyclopedia, with complete entries of titles, dates of release, actors and actresses, directors, languages, plots and every tiny things of interest. While I tried to keep up during our conversations over meals, or just lazing over grass during bright summer days, my less than broad education meant I regularly found listening instead of contributing. It was my luck these friends were kind and happy to entertain quizzical looks from me, and what might have seemed like noobish questions.

I have since developed a little more interest in moving pictures. Parts of that education have allowed me to name every Christopher Nolan’s movie now. Though I cannot say I have watched all of them, the ones I have watched impressed me at a very deep level. Nolan’s The Dark Knight Trilogy redefined Batman into a serious superhero movie, that could spark serious discussion of watch-ifs, and the motives of each character. In The Dark Knight, the second installment of the trilogy, there is an application of game theory. His doing of Superman through Man of Steel raised the prestige of the superhero, after years of being dragged through the ditch on television. Inception is mind blowing, playing with my understanding of reality. I remember watching Momento when I was young, and did not understand it (due for a rewatch). Interstellar is amazing, and it redefined the appearance of black hole in the popular mind, and made everybody a modern lay physicist. The Prestige, I just love it, and the movie probably convinced Hugh Jackman that he could be more than just Wolverine (or Van Helsing). I thought Jackman grew after, in Les Misérables, in The Greatest Showman, and in Logan. As for Tenet, let us ignore it here.

Together with Dunkirk, I think his latest, Oppenheimer, are probably the least cerebral among the whole collection. The storyline is direct, and there is not much of a twist. That does not make both of them any less amazing.

But I think, what makes Oppenheimer stands out out of the two is its sheer noisiness. I may suffer from incomplete recollection to make a complete comparison, but I would venture to claim his latest does not give my ears a rest from the very beginning, right up to the successful test of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos in the middle of the movie. For a movie that runs for three (freaking) hours, that is quite a long exposure. Not one second is there a pause. There is always background music, or it might better be described as loud pounding foreboding ambience music.

Combined with a fast paced story, and a dialogue that keeps going, it feels like watching a race car movie! When I was in the cinema watching it, my heart was beating faster than usual trying to match the tempo of the ambience music. It is a confusing feeling, given that Oppenheimer is a very talky movie that shows off its nerdiness by citing Einstein, Bohr, Teller, Feynman and several other big names, with the only big visual spectacle is the atomic bomb test explosion.

When the silence came, it came as a relief. But of course, seconds later, an even louder shockwave came afterwards.

And I watched Barbie afterwards. You should too. Your ears need that rest with happy songs.