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Lost identity. Part 1
Bitched on: Saturday, January 31, 2009
Time: 1/31/2009 11:55:00 PM
I am frustrated. Time: 1/31/2009 11:55:00 PM
Yesterday I tagged along with this particular someone to this excursion around Kampung Gelam. It was interesting how I felt like a tourist even though it was the second time I went for that particular excursion and it was like my millionth time in that area. Guess all that traveling I did last year made me crave for that experience again - snapping pictures, admiring the architecture and 'feel', exploring the history, culture and such, you know... going all tourist-y.
So after that interesting walkabout, we had lunch with our tutor and a couple of other heritage enthusiasts and we began talking about (how do I put this all in a word?)... generally about 'us', the concept of Asian-ness, not the race per se, but about everything, about our identity. How there is no clear definition, how the idea of race is more intangible than tangible as we chose to believe. It is overwhelmingly mind-bending to delve into that concept of identity. And how ignorant we can get, and not forgetting complacent too about where we came from, how we came about, and eventually what we actually are.
Are we really what we are according to what is written on our identification cards?
Why have we allowed ourselves to be governed into being categorised strictly under Indian, Chinese, Malay or others (don't even get me started on that concept of 'others'). Some might argue that the idea of identifying racial groups are redundant to begin with and on the other end others would argue that we need this racial profiling because it gives us the identity. But to the latter, have you ever wondered that if you really need to be 'bestowed' this individual racial awareness and 'identity', why are the categories not further elaborated into sub-categories?
What makes an Indian man Indian? Is it because of the fact that his ancestors were from India? If that is so, would that make south Indians and north Indians the same? It is known for a fact that genetically the north Indians are much more similar to the Europeans than those in the south. So why would a Singh and a Tamil be classified the same - an Indian? I began to ponder on this after I saw on the bus a beautifully sari-dressed Sikh girl with jasmine flowers in her hair; she was presumably on her way back from the Chingay parade and she probably participated in the 'Indian' dance section of the the parade. Do you see where I'm getting at?
This is the thing about Singapore, how easily we allow ourselves to be instituted into 'our' conventional culture, race and religion; how clear the lines are drawn for us. Even in religion it is never clear, Taoism and Buddhism are always a mishmash for some Chinese here. Yet for indentity sake, they are forced to 'pick a side'.
The homogenized Chinese culture and the liquidation of dialect identity in Singapore are much credited to the government's 'Speak Mandarin' campaign decades ago. Though initial intentions were notable, basically to create a sense of unity and common communication medium amongst the Chinese here, it has since brought an undesirable lost of identity (especially for the youth). Any local youngster here can speak in their own dialect - be it Hokkien, Hakka or Cantonese (vulgarities do not count)? Few, maybe even none.
It is disheartening to know that a vast majority of the Chinese here have unwittingly embraced the delusion of their identity as that of Han-Chinese when the majority of them are in fact south Chinese. Which again, genetically the Chinese scattered across China from Tibet to Taipei, Inner Mongolia to Hainan, are as diverse as it can be.
Even the traditions of Chinese New Year celebrations across the regions in China are as diverse. I am very surprised that a vast majority of local Chinese here thinks that the staple new year's dish, yusheng (or lo hei) and the whole ritual of tossing the ingredients is a very 'China-Chinese' thing-to-do, when actual fact, most mainland Chinese have no clue what it is about. Started from humble beginnings in colonial Malaya, the modern version of yusheng was invented by a shrewd restaurant owner in Singapore back in the 1960s!
Continued to Part 2
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First Black Prez...
Time: 1/31/2009 01:15:00 AM
Click here if you can't view.
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新年快乐, Happy 'Niu' Year!
Bitched on: Friday, January 23, 2009
Time: 1/23/2009 11:15:00 PM
Time: 1/23/2009 11:15:00 PM
Happy Year of the OX!
Have a laugh this Lunar New Year.
TRADITIONAL CORPORATION
You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull. Your herd multiplies and the economy grows. You sell them and retire on the income.
AN AMERICAN CORPORATION
You have two cows. You sell one and force the other to produce the milk of four cows. You are surprised when the cow drops dead.
A FRENCH CORPORATION
You have two cows. You go on strike because you want three cows.
A JAPANESE CORPORATION
You have two cows. You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk. You then create clever cow cartoon images called 'Cowkimon' and market them World-Wide.
A GERMAN CORPORATION
You have two cows. You re-engineer them so they live for 100 years, eat once a month, and milk themselves.
A BRITISH CORPORATION
You have two cows. Both are mad.
AN ITALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows, but you don't know where they are. You break for lunch..
A SWISS CORPORATION
You have 5,000 cows and none of which belong to you. You charge others for storing them.
A CHINESE CORPORATION
ou have two cows. You have 300 people milking them.. You claim full employment and high bovine productivity. You have the newsman who reported on the numbers arrested.
AN INDIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows. You worship them.
A MALAYSIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows. You signed a 40-year contract to supply milk at RM0.06 per litre. Then midway through, you raised the price to RM0.60 or you cut the supply. When the buyer agrees to the new price, you change your mind again and now want RM1.20. The buyer decided you can keep the milk and they go look for milk that comes from recycled cows or the cow urine instead. Your two cows retire together with the Prime Minister.
And last but not least,
A SINGAPOREAN CORPORATION
You have two cows. One cow-peh and one cow-bu.
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'My daughters, they killed them': Doctor shows Israelis horror of war.
Bitched on: Monday, January 19, 2009
Time: 1/19/2009 11:32:00 PM
By Ben Lynfield in Tel Hashomer, IsraelTime: 1/19/2009 11:32:00 PM
Monday, 19 January 2009
Like the shellings of UN-run schools and a major hospital in Gaza City, the Israeli public might have regarded the deaths of his three daughters as just more collateral damage in an ugly but justified war, if they noticed it at all. But Dr Izz el-Deen Aboul Aish is a gynaecologist at Israel's Shiba Hospital near Tel Aviv, and is well known among Israeli medical colleagues and journalists.
During the 22 days of Israel's military onslaught on Gaza, the Palestinian doctor and peace advocate who speaks Hebrew fluently had helped the Israeli media cover the war by giving phone interviews from inside Gaza.
But on Friday night, Dr Aboul Aish's scheduled live interview with Israeli Channel 10 television was conducted minutes after three of his daughters were killed by an Israeli shell. His raw anguish forced Israelis to take their first real glimpse of the suffering and death caused to Palestinian civilians.
Shlomi Eldar, the Channel 10 correspondent, his own voice choking with emotion, repeatedly noted Dr Aboul Aish's connection to Shiba Hospital as he held out his mobile phone, allowing viewers to hear the physician cry and sob: "My daughters, they killed them, Oh lord, God, God, God."
"I want to save them but they are dead," Dr Aboul Aish said. In a video of the interview, available on YouTube, the physician can be heard imploring for help while a shaken Mr Eldar pleads on air for anyone in the army who might be viewing to let ambulances reach the Aboul Aish home in the Jebalya refugee camp. "Maybe something can still be saved," he said.
Because of the publicity, another of his daughters and a brother were evacuated quickly to Israel for treatment. Other Palestinian civilians have gone without medical care for days.
But it was not just the death of his three daughters, Bisan, Mayar and Aya, 20, 15 and 12 respectively, that left Dr Aboul Aish in anguish yesterday. It was the feeling among some Israelis that he, like many other Gazans who have suffered in the violence, is being blamed for his own tragedy. At Shiba Hospital near Tel Aviv, where a surviving daughter, Sheda, 17, is being treated for shrapnel in the eye, the doctor repeated yesterday that there were no Hamas gunmen firing from his house, as the army suggested yesterday, when two shells hit a bedroom. The army is also saying the UN compound and the hospital were used by gunmen or they were nearby.
"I had left the room seconds earlier. How would gunmen have reached the roof? From where would they have entered?" he asked. The physician, who did his residency at Soroka Hospital in the Israeli city of Beersheba, was adamant he had not allowed his house to be a Hamas firing position. "I have never done anything wrong in my life. If you don't believe Palestinians, ask Israelis who doctor Aboul Aish is. They should just admit they made a mistake. There is no shame in making a mistake, but don't deceive the nation," he said in Hebrew.
An Israeli colleague, Carmi Z Margolis, director of the medical school for international medicine at Ben Gurion University, said: "This is a man known as a man of peace for many years. It's a terrible tragedy. I don't know if there was a sniper but I know the man. It needs to be investigated why they shelled the home of a man of peace in Gaza."
The preponderance of civilian casualties among the more than 1,200 Palestinian dead is only now being gently questioned in the Israeli mainstream media, which has generally accepted at face value the army's explanation that Hamas uses civilians as human shields.
The general lack of interest in Palestinian civilian casualties stems from Hamas rocket attacks on southern Israel, says Yossi Sarid, former head of the liberal Meretz party. He believes public opinion is unlikely to change despite Dr Aboul Aish's tragedy.
"The window has been opened narrowly to the other side. But support for the war is overwhelming. People were tired of watching the towns in the south be shelled, so there has been almost no critical view of events."
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Gaza: Time for Peace.
Time: 1/19/2009 11:13:00 PM
Message from Avaaz.org:Gaza is dying -- the battle is moving into its cities, jam-packed with 1.5 million civilians lacking food, medicine or water. President Bush undermined Thursday's United Nations ceasefire resolution, and almost 1000 people are now dead. The borders remain closed -- journalists can't get in, and desperate civilians can't get out.
But the global movement to end this war is building -- our petition is at 430,000 signatures and rising, it has been delivered to top leaders at the EU, UN and Arab League, our US members are flooding their representatives with phone calls, and Avaaz members worldwide have donated over $120,000 to an ad campaign in key newspapers.
The pressure is working -- so we're ratcheting it up with hard-hitting US ads pressing Barack Obama personally for an immediate change of tack, face-to-face petition deliveries to European leaders this week to get them to act, and working with Palestinians and Israelis to plan bold actions on the ground. But every one of these actions becomes stronger as more of us join the campaign. We need to reach 1 million signatures this week -- sign the petition now and let's forward this email to all our friends and family:
http://www.avaaz.org/en/gaza_time_for_peace
Voices for a ceasefire are finally being heard in the Israeli cabinet
and media, Hamas is signalling it could accept a deal including Turkish forces and EU monitors, but the sides are too far apart to end this themselves.[3] That’s why action by world powers is critical to break the deadlock -- and global citizens’ voices can make all the difference if we raise an unstoppable voice calling on incoming President Obama, the EU and Arab and Muslim states to guarantee a fair and lasting ceasefire.
This week we are lobbying European and Muslim states for a more effective international initiative to end the violence, protect civilians on all sides and make normal life possible again in Gaza, while reaching out to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon who is in the Middle East working for a deal (we met him last year to deliver our food crisis campaign). Meanwhile we’re challenging contacts on both sides to think creatively and accept a fair, internationally-overseen agreement.
We've already run member-funded ads in the influential Washington Post and Roll Call, the US Congress newspaper -- on the day of his inauguration this coming Tuesday, we will press Barack Obama to abandon Bush’s failed policies and act immediately to end this war, using his own words alongside hard facts to make the case in ads, US media debates and directly lobbying his team.
It's amazing what we can do when hundreds of thousands of us come together arond the world -- and if we raise our efforts to another level this week, we could help to finally end the Gaza horror. Follow the link below to take the first step by signing the petition, then spread the word so others can do the same:
http://www.avaaz.org/en/gaza_time_for_peace
With hope and determination,
Paul, Graziela, Alice, Ricken, Luis,
Brett, Ben, Iain, Paula, Veronique, Milena and the whole Avaaz team
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Proportionality.
Time: 1/19/2009 10:46:00 PM
A rock. A missile. A person. A buildozer.
David. Goliath.
Are these the faces of terrorists?
Good God, what are we doing?
Why are we allowing this to still happen?
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I am anti-zionist. Not anti-semitist, there is a difference you know.
Bitched on: Thursday, January 08, 2009
Time: 1/08/2009 04:19:00 PM
I was doing the daily browsing on my Facebook homepage when I saw a couple of my friends joined a group called "Free Palestine! Stop all the senseless killings! Jews are terrorists!". I was about to join that group myself until I read the last sentence.Time: 1/08/2009 04:19:00 PM
A group that preaches an end to the violence but also hate? I see the irony in that.
Not all Jews are evil. The same as not all Muslims are terrorists (I remembered seeing 'Muslims are terrorists' vandalized onto the back door of some toilet cubicle; and I remembered how hurt and angry I was). People can be so ignorant and dumb. I am neither enlightened nor non-judgmental myself so I would spare you all the preaching. But let me share with you a little bit of what I came across.
(If you do want to join any 'hate' or liberation groups, boycott any products or join in mass protest somewhere, it doesn't hurt to learn a bit more about the history and such.)
From http://www.serendipity.li/zionism.htm:
Zionism represents itself as a political movement concerned principally with the establishment of a state in Palestine to be controlled by and for Jews. It began in the late 19th Century and attained its stated objective with the creation in 1948 of the state of Israel by the United Nations (at the insistence of the United States and without the agreement of existing Middle Eastern states). Subsequently Israel doubled the amount of territory it controlled by means of its illegal occupation of the West Bank in the 1967 and 1973 wars.
In its current form Zionism seeks to dominate all of Palestine and the Middle East by means of violence and the threat of violence (using weapons manufactured and purchased with billions of dollars of "aid" supplied by the United States at taxpayer expense) and to maximize its influence in world affairs and in world history, principally by means of control of the government of the USA (primarily by blackmailing its many corrupt politicians), at the expense of the social wellbeing not only of the Palestinians but of the peoples of all lands.
Zionists claim that Jews have the right to possess all land between the Nile and the Euphrates because (they say) this land was given to them by some entity they call "YHWH" as claimed in the Old Testament (Genesis 15:18). But this would not be the first time that documents written by humans were used to justify land grabs. (And this "YHWH" appears, from accounts in the Old Testament, to be a particularly repulsive entity, vain, jealous, given to fits of rage and directing his followers to massacre civilian populations — an entity who, if he existed, would be quite unworthy of the devotion of anyone with a sense of justice and morality.)
Zionists also lay claim to Palestine because this was territory controlled by two Jewish mini-states, Judah and Samaria, until their destruction by the Romans in the 1st C. CE. To which may be replied: If Zionist claims to a Jewish "homeland" in Palestine, based on Jewish occupation of that area 2000 years ago, are accepted as valid then the claims of North American Indians to their former homeland (all of the United States) and the claims of Australian Aborigines to their former homeland (all of Australia) should also be accepted as valid, and those homelands returned. Not to mention the descendants of the inhabitants of countless mini-states which have risen and fallen over the course of thousands of years of human history. Jews have no more rights than anyone else.
Zionists are not content with having acquired a state of their own in Palestine, they also want this state to be for-Jews-only, thus the desire and intention to expel from Israeli-controlled territory all the indigenous inhabitants (a practice sometimes known as ethnic cleansing, a concept derived from the Nazi practice of "cleansing" areas of all Jews so that those areas are then Judenrein).
The idea of transfer had accompanied the Zionist movement from its very beginnings, first appearing in Theodore Herzl's diary. In practice, the Zionists began executing a mini-transfer from the time they began purchasing the land and evacuating the Arab tenants.... "Disappearing" the Arabs lay at the heart of the Zionist dream, and was also a necessary condition of its existence.... With few exceptions, none of the Zionists disputed the desirability of forced transfer — or its morality. — Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete : Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate, quoted at http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_conc1.htmThe Palestinians, being Arabs, are Semites. By their open contempt for, and racist persecution of, the Palestinians the Israelis show that it is they who are the real anti-Semites, and their accusations of anti-Semitism (and the accusations of their American and European coreligionists) cast at all who criticise Jews or Israel amount to no more than blatant hypocrisy.
Xymphora has some revealing quotes from Zionists, including these:
We came here to a country that was populated by Arabs and we are building here a Hebrew, a Jewish state; instead of the Arab villages, Jewish villages were established. You even do not know the names of those villages, and I do not blame you because these villages no longer exist. There is not a single Jewish settlement that was not established in the place of a former Arab Village. — Moshe Dyan, 1969
Everybody has to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements because everything we take now will stay ours . . . Everything we don't grab will go to them. — Ariel Sharon, 1998
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The Princess turned one.
Bitched on: Wednesday, January 07, 2009
Time: 1/07/2009 01:15:00 PM
My baby girl has turned one now. Time: 1/07/2009 01:15:00 PM
Happy Birthday Orked Alesha.0 comments
2009.
Bitched on: Thursday, January 01, 2009
Time: 1/01/2009 12:11:00 AM
Happy 2009.Time: 1/01/2009 12:11:00 AM
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