So The First Semester's Over

I'm not particularly sure where I'm going with this, because the last time I really (and I mean really, really kinda really) wrote in this blog was when I did this carefully-constructed essay, written over the space of two weeks, and I'm not sure I want to do something like that ever again. (The drafts I wrote and discarded, for that essay, are still floating about somewhere in the bowels of my hard disc, in the form of an overstuffed Scrivener project.) But anyway. Digressing. Here goes.

The first sem's over, my holidays are halfway done, and my results are ... well my results aren't that bad, to be honest. But I'll get to my results in a bit; got a few other things to talk about first.

I'd like to talk a bit about Singapore. I think most of us know, by now, that different cities tell us different things. This is particularly clear when you've lived for sometime in one city, and then you move - rather abruptly - to live in another. Take New York, for instance. New York tells you that you should be wealthier; that you should have better class; better taste. Compare this to Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley tells you that you should have more influence. That's not to say that people in the valley aren't impressed by wealth; they're rather more impressed if you're in charge of digital operations in Google, say, than by the fact that you're rich. Apply this to other cities and you'll have variations on the same theme: Cambridge, Massachusetts tells you that you should be smarter; Los Angeles tells you that you should be more famous.

Singapore, if anything, tells you that you should work harder.

This isn't particularly surprising, not if we take into account the fact that Singapore is one of the most meritocratic countries on the planet. But it does take some getting used to, and it does bear some thinking about. I now know why even Singapore - glorious, bright, beautiful Singapore - has its own brain-drain: people just can't stand the crazy lifestyle.

I'm bringing this up because I'm back in Kuching now, and Kuching is worlds apart from the pressure-cooker environment of the city-state. Kuching tells you to take things slow. To relax a little. To drive, and drink teh-c-special, and go to church with friends. (Okay, so maybe I'm not the best person to talk about Kuching, which is at best sleepy and at worse ... corrupted, but you get the idea).

I love Kuching. I love the fact that the city doesn't tell you how to live your life, and you're free to go about doing things the way you want to do things, and that you can go out for lunch with friends, safe in the knowledge that there's always a bowl of laksa out there with your name on it. Always.

Ain't that just cool?

I spent the first half of my holiday going out with friends. And now - in the second half - I'm forcing myself to stay indoors to do some serious web development (which is failing, of course, because I can barely sit in one place without writing or reading or doing some meddlesome Internet thing. Like blogging. Which is what I'm doing now. Very quaint, yes.)

And what of my results? I got a 3.83 (out of 5.00) for my first sem, which is okay, considering I entered university feeling absolutely distraught over my academic ability. The strangest thing about my results was that I got 2As for two arts modules; which isn't particularly encouraging, since I didn't spend much time studying for either.

I also got a C+ for Discrete Math, which was a real disappointment. Math takes a lot of work and so in retrospect I guess I should've stuck with it, hard, for the first three weeks, instead of falling behind on the logic chapters. There were some cool topics in the module though; I particularly enjoyed graph theory and induction. I just couldn't keep up with the rest, and so am starting to worry if I have what it takes to do a degree in Computer Science.

So what have I learnt this first semester in NUS?

I've learnt programming, which was really, really fun. And I know that Java isn't a really good language to start your programming career with, but boy oh boy was it easy to learn, and cool, and so very satisfying. Java reminded me of playing with lego, and what geek can say no to lego? And the strange thing is that I've been reading articles out there, about how Java's bad for new students (because it doesn't teach this multiple-level-of-abstraction style of thinking that Scheme/Lisp supposedly does), but no matter. The way I see it is that there's no point worrying about a talent I may or may not have, and since I'm pretty dead-set on this programming thing, I'm sure that I'll figure out if I have it sooner or later.

What else have I learnt? I took a year-3 theatre module and got an A for it, without too much effort, and from that I've learnt to read literary novels. I read Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials shortly after I took the module, and I must say that I was taken by surprise by how easy it now was to get, really get, what he was trying to say. So that was one module that was certainly worth it, in a no-relevance-to-my-career kinda way.

And there's also this thing I've learnt about arts programs, particularly at University level, which is really weird, but I'm going to save that for another day. Forgive me if I'm not making sense - posts like this tend to happen once every year, right after my exams. More coherent thoughts coming in a bit.

The Fear

So here's the thing. I have only one exam left, and it's still bad. I've figured out by now that I'm scared of exams. As in, phobic. As in psychologically-scarred-when-young-because-cat-bites-you-and-you-now-no-like-cats kinda scared. It's probably the STPM speaking again. Can't shake it off. And so but yeah, I got into university because I did a few really cool things. So what? I know you're going to tell me that academics don't matter, but fact remains, when you're in school and you're studying because it costs so damn much per semester, comments like that don't seem real. No kidding, you say. But academics do matter, especially when you're talking about an exam-oriented society like ours. (Yes - if it makes you feel better it's the same thing in Singapore). And so it's rather anal - you're studying programming, say - which is the most practical thing you'll study in my course - and then you meet people who're all about "How many marks did you get?" and "I thought they might ask this in the exam, so I worked on it!" and "Ah I didn't get full marks for that lab" and the focus suddenly becomes scoring As, instead of learning the tools for the sake of learning the tools, and/or you do things because you want to beat all the other people so you can win that scholarship/bursary/summa cum laude.

I know this is unfair of me, especially since we don't really have any alternative to exams, and marks, and bell-curves. But it's produced really strange behaviour, all around us. Like, for instance, you're discussing the application of ethics on computing in the real world, and the discussion suddenly turns into a 'how to answer this for the exam?' smooge fest. Have you had an experience like that? Have you thought it strange? I have! I find it very strange! I couldn't get my head around it! Why on earth would you talk exams, if ethical conundrums and technological paradoxes really might happen to you in your professional life, later on? Has this no relevance to your life, beyond the testpaper?

But even as I'm saying these things, a small voice at the back of my head tells me that I have no right to talk. Who am I, after all? I have no good reason to strut into classrooms, looking like I understand the technicalities of everything being taught before me; nor do I have the confidence borne from a long history of academic excellence. I am a scraper. I am a weird hodgepodge of talents that don't count in any academic assessment. I am a square peg in a round hole (or was it the other way around?) And no, I am not very useful in an exam ... in everything else, yes; in the real world, maybe - but in an exam it feels, at times, like I am a sneak. I know I should stop ranting. But it's frightening to pause and think of all the exams ahead of me in the next four years, and all the other academicos that I have to compete with. Fours years. Rather long time. Frightening indeed.

Vignettes

It is 2am and I'm filling my bottles with hot water, from the shared dispenser in Block 4. I meet Kris, who's in Comp Engineering, and there's this other guy with him. They're both buying food from the junk-food vendor.

"Wow, up late." I say, stirring my noodles.

"Yah, going back now."

"And you?"

The other guy gets his packet of chips. He pauses and looks up at us. Grins. "Oh, just got back from practice."

"At 2am?!" I say; "From where?" Kris says.

"School of music; I'm a music student."

We stare at him, blankly.

"Woww ..."

"Yes -"

"What instrument?"

"Oh, piano - "

"And the school of music is open till this hour?!"

"Oh yes," he says, "We got about 40 practice rooms in the conservatory. All grand pianos."

"Grand pianos?!" Kris and I say, together.

"Yes." He laughs.

"Is it hard? I mean - the course, is it hard?"

"Oh yes. Very. I mean - I practice until 2, right?"

We talk about a few other things, and then I gather my bottles and my mug full of noodles, and gesture towards my block. "Got to go now."

"Okay," Kris says, and then - as an afterthought: "You going to sleep?"

I don't pause: "No," I say.

"I thought so."

Kris nods, the music guy smiles understandably, and I return to my room.

1AM Run

It is a habit of mine to immediately follow long, crazy-assed posts with extremely short ones, so here be a picture of me after a 1am run:

Note(!): the mushroom cloud of doom that is my hair! I originally planned to have it cut right before the finals, 3 weeks from now, and that plan was all fine and dandy until a Vietnamese friend looked me in the eye and said "In my country, cutting hair before exams is bad luck."

Err ... ouch. Goodbye barber, hello uncomfortable sideburns.

{Essay} In Defense of Christian Logic

When a young man who has been going to church in a routine way honestly realises that he does not believe in Christianity and stops going—provided he does it for honesty's sake and not just to annoy his parents—the spirit of Christ is probably nearer to him then than it ever was before. - C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

1.
The Bright Church is an impressive church; among the more impressive ones I have seen in my short time in Singapore. It is located in a converted community auditorium: plush, immovable cinema-seats for the congregation and hard acoustics up-front, soft carpeting as you’re making your way to your spot and lots of warm yellow lights all over the hall. There’s an iMac at the back, in the tech booth, controlling the duo visual-projectors on both sides of the auditorium, and as you enter from the left entrance during service you’ll see the screen’s soft purple glow spilling over the acoustic controls and reflected off the glasses of the resident tech. The Bright Church is dedicated to quality, is dedicated to showmanship, and all this work and money shows in their weekly service.

The Bright Church is, of course, not this church’s real name. The church itself does exist, and it does indeed do good work for the community in which it serves. But because I do not have very nice things to say about it in this essay I am keeping its name a secret: and just as well, for the Bright Church represents all that is shiny and loud in today’s Christianity. It represents the modern church, home to the young and impressionable; modern in the sense that is the kind of church where you get rock music and Tongues and lessons on the Supernatural. You will find this church wherever you are, in any denomination, in any city in the world, if you’re willing to look hard enough. The Bright Church is popular and pervasive because it is a hip version of the church designed to net and save the modern Christian. And it is fairly successful at doing just this.

The sermon this evening is by one Pastor Mark. He is a youth pastor, and this is a youth service on a Saturday night. He goes on stage to talk about healing. He shows us a scene from Finding Nemo, where Dory and Marlin are diving into a trench to find a pair of goggles they had lost. The water slowly turns dark around them, and soon we can only hear their voices on a black screen.

“Ever tried going into the unknown?” Pastor says. “It is scary, like swimming into the dark.” He then tells us that he is going to talk about healing, and how much it was like going into unknown territory for him, because he did not believe in it.

The Bright Church is pretty big on healing. They believe that if you pray to God, God would ‘surely heal you’. The only thing that will prevent healing from happening, they say, are the negative thoughts that the Devil plants in your head, and so they preface each healing session with prayers to God, asking Him to remove all the doubts from the prayed-for Christian’s brain.

Pastor Mark tells us that he had struggled with the idea when it was first introduced to him, in the Bright Church. "Doubt," he said, "is very dangerous. It is usually the result of logic." He goes on to say that he was later convinced of God’s supernatural healing, and that he told the Lord: "I told God, I'm not satisfied. I want to see at least one amazing healing, a healing that is impossible. I am still waiting, but I am sure God will let me see it. If God is a healer then definitely He will heal!" He ends his sermon with: "I want you to know that our God is not a God of just logic, he is a God of miracles and signs. And we should believe in a God like this. Do not use logic, for logic brings doubt; instead - believe in Him, and He will let you see amazing things."

I want to talk about that last sentence, that conclusion Pastor Mark makes about the Christian faith. All around me are accepting young faces nodding in the soft yellow down-lights of the Bright Church’s auditorium, and I worry for them. I am not concerned with whether or not you believe in Christian healing. I am concerned only with what you think of logic, and by extension doubt, and why the former no longer seems present in the Bright Churches of today. This is important to me because as I am sitting here, in this plush auditorium seat, listening to Pastor Mark and making notes in the margins of my notebook, I find myself looking back on my Christian life and finding in it - every last part of it - a direct contradiction to the good Pastor’s blind, illogical faith. It may be important to you because too little Christians are using their brains lately, and too little Churches encourage it. More and more of us are practicing a form of Christianity with much zeal and little knowledge, and while this doesn’t seem like much of a problem, so long as you are saved, the idea that Christianity is good like this begins to crack and fissure when you look at the Bright Churches of today, the generation of young Christians they are creating between them, and the way these Christians are living their lives in a world that watches them closely.

Let me begin with an anecdote.

2.
A classmate of mine, a non-believer, wrote recently of one such Christian experience. She was at a Christmas party with her boyfriend, who was a member of the church, when a Christian couple approached them. “I hated the feeling of being singled out,” she said, “let them say what they have to say and maybe they’ll let me go unscathed.”

The guy opened by asking her if she knew the bible well. Thinking that he meant every verse of the bible, my classmate said that she did not. How offensive is it if a non-christian like me claimed to know the bible well anyway? she thought. And so the guy began on a long-winded story of what the Bible said, beginning with the creation of the world and ending with a short illustration of how Christians go to Heaven and attain eternal life, and how everyone else (her especially) would eventually go to Hell.

“So do you believe in Jesus Christ?” he asked.

“No.” My classmate said, annoyed that he was shoving Hell in her face.

The guy was stunned. And it was then that he decided to try a different approach, one that was both at once more horrible and very frightening, and typified this zeal and little knowledge so encouraged by the Bright Churches of the world:

… basically, he wanted a friend to come to the Good Friday party but his friend's travel plans clashed with the party so he couldn't come. So he prayed that his friend's travel plans would change. And it did! Their friend got a severe asthma attack and had to terminate his vacation early, and hence was able to make it for the party.

I was honestly traumatized by this story. The fact that this twisted story was supposed to convince me to believe in their all-loving God was especially chilling.

But his wife explains "We're sad that he got sick, but to us it further reaffirms our beliefs that our God is real and is a God who answers our prayers."

Things pretty much went downhill from there. It is a given that this was the wrong thing to say to anyone - regardless of whether it’s a believer you’re talking to, or a non-believer. But it’s the replies to the other elements of Christianity that I find most revealing:

“I have a question”, my friend said, “How is it fair that Christians get to go to Heaven whilst everyone else goes to Hell? What about those people who never got to know about God at all? Do they deserve to go to Hell for something they never had a choice in?”

His wife replied for him: “If so, God will judge accordingly to what the person has done in their lifetime. So possibly people who have not known God but has done good in their lifetime will go to some place in between.”

“But they will never get to go Heaven right? How is this fair since they never had a chance to?”

“Oh,” She replied, “Judgement Day will only come when the Bible has spread worldwide.”

This believer's well-intentioned words reflect a Christianity that has no thought to it, a Christianity that is simple, and easy. (Christianity is neither). There is very little that is biblical to the answers that my classmate received, and for good reason: their words are the result of a modern Christian trend to disregard logic (simply because 'logic leads to doubt'); a Christian trend that is more than happy to feed congregations on diets of healing and loud songs and charismata, and very little reasoned Christian theology. As one character in Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood says, mockingly: "If you want to get anywheres in religion, you got to keep it sweet" and sweet is precisely what this trend seeks to do. Why get bogged down in deep-thinking about the Word, in learning about faith, when you can have the sweet fulfillment of emotion in the mountain-top experience?

The answer today is that you don’t have to. The historian Mark Noll concluded, in his Scandal of the Evangelical Mind: "The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind." And this is true. There is little reason in the Bright Churches of today. We do not encourage it. This makes sense, somewhat: it is not attractive to do so. The Bright Churches teach of validation by Spirit (or validation by experience) on the one hand - which is exciting - and watered-down theology on the other. You may have heard people sharing all kinds of things from the Book, often by using stories with absolutely no relation to the message at hand; I once sat through a sermon where the preacher talked about Moses and the burning bush, and how the burning bush represented the fire that should be burning within all Christians; how God wants us to burn like that.

3.
I am a Christian - an Anglican - and I have been one for my entire life. In the period that I have been Christian, I have doubted my faith more times than I care to admit, or even to count. All Christians doubt their faith. It is how you deal with that doubt that matters.

When I was 14 I discovered the Charismatic movement. I was invited to a rally organized by a church of the denomination, and I fell head over heels for it. It was amazing. At that age, when I had first begun to doubt my faith, I found solace in the 'Spirit' - in the mountain-top experiences, the emotional highs (induced by music); in the camps and the churches where the worship was better and the rallies more exhilarating and the selection of young Christians infinitely more fun and vivacious than in my own church. It was an emotional experience, and I thought that feeling those feelings meant that I was growing closer to God. And for a while, all was good.

By 16 I believed that I needed to attend church camp at least twice a year, for my 'spiritual growth'. I literally needed it. I did not know what spiritual growth meant, I vaguely connected it to that feeling I got when I attended church events. This began to be a problem, because I soon realized that no matter how many highs I got from concerts and camps, no matter how many soul-touching, skin tingling ‘spirit encounters’ I had, the emotional conviction I had to ‘change my life’ usually wore off before the next week had gone by.

At age 17 I was a liberal thinker, a Christian in name but not in thought, a believer that did not in any way subscribe to the Christian worldview of things, but paid lip-service to it. Christianity to me was a loose set of moral codes, designed to keep me in line, and while I obeyed them casually I didn’t pay much attention to it: I just did enough to make me feel good about myself. And this was, to me, perfectly logical: it seemed that Christianity as a way of life was disgustingly close-minded, especially when put side-by-side to the liberating open-mindedness of the modern world. Why should I insist that my God is right, and your God isn't, when we can all just get along without stepping on each others' toes?

Time passed, and I turned 18, and then something changed the way I thought about Christianity. At age 18 I found the answer to that particular question. At 18 - 18 years after I first became Christian - I discovered the answer to everything I had possibly thought to ask of Christianity, and I found it in a book - a book! - of all things. I cannot today say that I do not believe in the acts of the Holy Spirit, for I discovered this answer through a curious series of events that led both me and Paul, one of my closest friends - to the heart of our faith. But here is the thing: I didn’t discover this answer through just believing. Christianity, at its core, is built around an incredible, radical idea - an idea that either has to be the absolute truth, the only truth; or a lie created by a person of terrifying intelligence - the devil, perhaps. All of Christianity that we know: our understanding of God; Christian morality; lessons on heaven and hell; the nature of man, is built around this singular, wonderful idea. Christianity is no different from any other religion on the planet if it is taken without it. And this idea is not a simple one. You cannot just fall onto it, with blind belief. You can be led to it, by the Holy Spirit; you can discover it, through a period of searching ... but you cannot, under any circumstance, get Christianity without first using your brain somewhere along the way.

4.
And here we find ourselves with several objections. Two spring to mind immediately. First, you may disagree with me that Christianity is neither simple, nor easy. Simple is beautiful. Shouldn’t the truth be simple?

I do suppose that it's reasonable to say that the best truths are simple, and that simplicity is elegance, etc. It is the mathematicians after all who say that "the math is beautiful!" when they have a simple solution in front of them. But let us not indulge in such idealistic notions: the world is not simple. It never has been. Mathematics is an abstraction of a complex world, and when a mathematician says something is beautiful what he really means is that he has found some elegant logic in his abstraction of the universe. Real things are more often than not unsimple and complicated: the model of an atom, for instance, is nothing at all like the diagrams you see in school textbooks and the like. It can only be truly expressed as a mathematical equation. But there is more to it than that. Reality is often not just unsimple, it is also weird. Could any of us, when we were younger, have discovered the human mechanism for creating a new human being on our own, without being told? I believe in Christianity partly because it has just that scent of strangeness about it, one that makes it feel real - like something that no man could've come up on his own had you given him enough time to think about it. And this is precisely why it takes a certain amount of thinking to Christianity (or rather, Christianity will demand a certain amount of thinking from you), because it is a nuanced, wonderful, real thing, one that does not bear watering-down in any way.

The second objection you may have with me is this: what need is there for Theology? Why should you complicate matters and say that Christians today must learn to think, must allow their religion to teach them to think? Is a blind faith not better?

Now I must concede that in the past a blind faith was very much possible, because people led simple lives. But a blind faith today holds no ground. Not in a thinking, educated world. I have just shown you one example of what happens when a non-thinking Christian attempts to explain Christianity (itself a nuanced, complicated thing) to a thinking non-believer. And that is one problem. But here is another, and this is the bigger one: if you do not hold to Christian theology (the study and understanding of our faith), then you would most certainly have gotten hold of some theology or another. A simple way to test it is this: if someone comes up to you, and says that Christianity is a close-minded mistake, and then tells you that pluralism is so much better (why insist one religion is correct, when you can have many all teaching good things?) and you cannot give a satisfactory answer ... then you may have to do some thinking about your faith. There is a veritable marketplace of ideas out there today and if you cannot understand where your worldview stands in that marketplace, how it holds up, against the other ideas ... then you are in for a rather large spot of trouble. You cannot not think today, and you will always hold some kind of standard to which you live your life to. If it is not Christianity, then it would almost certainly be something else. Sometimes that 'something else' is compatible with the faith. Other times it feels right but it isn't; theology is how you tell the difference.

This is related somewhat to false teachings and mistaken churches: we all know that there are many of them out there. There always has been, even in the time of the apostles. Most of them, I have found, are so subtle, are so nuanced, that the problems with their doctrines aren’t obvious to even the mature Christian. Take the prosperity gospel, for instance: how are you to argue against the overabundant love of God? How are you to argue against the compelling ‘grace message’ (as if grace has not been a part of the Christian message since the Apostles), that leaves out certain subtle nuances of grace that are important to the understanding of other, less-exciting parts of Christian belief - Christian morality, for instance. I am not interested in calling out these teachings one by one - there are many others who are more experienced and more driven than I am. I am merely asking for Christians to start using their heads. Their faith would be a better thing for it.

5.
But perhaps I have not been convincing enough. How is an unthinking faith bad, really? To understand this, you would first need to understand that there is, in Christianity as in life, more than just simple good and bad. C.S. Lewis describes it like this: "… so many people cannot be brought to realise that when B is better than C, A may be even better than B. They like thinking in terms of good and bad, not of good, better, and best, or bad, worse and worst. They want to know whether you think patriotism a good thing: if you reply that it is, of course, far better than individual selfishness, but that it is inferior to universal charity and should always give way to universal charity when the two conflict, they think you are being evasive."

(This is also, by the way, why Christians believe that sex before marriage is bad: what they really mean is that sex is good, but the exclusivity of sex with your spouse is infinitely more beautiful and sacred and secure and is therefore better. And it is because casual sex would deny you this experience that Christianity teaches to only have sex within marriage. A more plebeian explanation is that when you have sex with someone, you are giving a precious part of yourself away. Like pasting a piece of paper to another piece of paper. If you do not do this within the Christian covenant of marriage (where the assumption is that you will not separate); when you break up, you would have to tear these two pieces of paper apart, and in so doing leave a part of yourself with the other person - a person whom you do not love nor would care for in the grand scale of things. In this way, you are hurting yourself over and over, in ways that you won't begin to understand.)

But enough with the digression. Why is a blind faith bad? An unthinking faith - in today's sense of the word - is not bad because it is unChristian. Faith - any faith, is certainly better than none. But a faith that is centered on a rich understanding of God, a faith that is moved not by 'pastor told me so' or by 'we do this because we should do this' but instead through the daily miracle of grace, through this nuanced, complicated idea at the heart of Christianity, is infinitely better than an unthinking, non-understanding faith. And that is why the blind faith is bad. It is bad because a faith like this robs people of something much, much better; something that God intended all Christians to have: a more complete vision of God in the Christian life.

Another way to think of it is like this: the more you look at Christianity the more you will find that all of Christian action (and thought) is fueled by gratitude. Not by a fear of Hell, nor by some surface feeling of love, but by gratitude to Christ. And this is strange. It is perfectly possible to fear without reason. It is also possible for two people to fall in love without any idea about why they are attracted to each other. But it is simply impossible for a man to have gratitude to another man without first understanding what that other man has done for him. And so it is with Christianity. If you do not understand what God has done, in all its nuances, then you are not expressing your faith in a way that it was meant to be expressed.

Do not mistake this for an argument for mere intellectualism. It is not one. It is instead an argument for using your head in Christ, as with other things. Do not settle for just the loud music, for just the Tongues and the visualising exercises the modern church so loves to use. Christianity is more than that. Learn to find it.

6.
There is one last point that I would like to make on logic, if only for the sake of completeness. It is about this idea that it is dangerous to approach God with logic, that it is dangerous to mix belief and thought together. One of the reasons, I think, that Pastor Mark came up and warned against reason and doubt in Christianity was due to this belief that it is dangerous to bring logic into the Christian picture. It is as if, upon approaching the Christian religion with some thought, the whole edifice would crumble and collapse upon itself.

This is simply ridiculous.

I would like to make it a point of contention here that it is safe, no - in fact it is ideal, to approach our God with logic. The Bible tells us that it is so; it even shows us in nearly half of the New Testament … all the letters in the Epistles are, after all, well-constructed arguments for Christ. But if the simple fact that the apostles themselves approached their God with logic and reason does not convince you, then perhaps this will:

Scripture tells us that we were all created in God’s image, and it bears to reason that our faculties for logic and thought ultimately come from Him as well. Man’s intelligence is a mere drop in the ocean of God’s logic, and it is simply ridiculous to think that we can out-argue God himself. C.S. Lewis provides us with a useful illustration: we cannot possibly attack God and succeed, because it would be as if we were sawing off the branch on which we were seated on. If, we do attack God and we do win, then it would mean that the very logic which we used against Him would unravel - like string on a fly-rod - because our tools for reason come from Him which we attack.

This leads me to a second point: that doubt is good for the Christian believer. I opened this essay with a quote from C.S.Lewis, one which illustrated just this truth, but I should stop here to note that I am talking about a very specific kind of doubt. There are two kinds. The first is the kind where, when you are given all the evidence for God, you still reject it outright - in this manner you are doubting Him, and the Bible condemns this kind of doubt. The other kind is much like what a scientist feels when he is performing an experiment. He does not doubt his results, but he questions how they came to be, and this causes him to begin searching for the correct answer. It is this second doubt that I am talking about when I say that doubt is good for the Christian believer, because it is the kind of doubt that would lead to thinking about the Christian faith. As theologian Clark Pinnock writes: ‘It strives at laying the evidence for the Christian gospel before men in an intelligent fashion, so that they can make a meaningful commitment under the convicting power of the Holy Spirit. The heart cannot delight in what the mind rejects as false’ (emphasis added). And this is true: until you find something your mind accepts as wonderful and real, your faith cannot fully grasp the realities of the Christian religion.

Practically, this means that you should ask all the difficult questions that the Bright Church doesn’t want you to ask. Do not expect them to have the answers. Do not expect me to. But if you ask enough, and you pray enough, I am convinced that the spirit of God will lead you to the right places, to find those answers that matter most to you. Do not think that this means easy deliveries, passed down from heaven and into your head. You may find it in weird places - in a sermon you chanced across, in a book you find lying on your aunt’s shelf. Not everything has to be flashy to be considered an act of God. And I am convinced that this will be true for you as it is for me, for it has worked for me, unfailingly so far, and I am certain that it would continue to do so.

I would like to close by pointing out to you that all the great Christian thinkers in the history of the faith have always been non-Christians to begin with. They doubted more than I have ever doubted, and this strove them to find truths I have yet to discover. The Apostle Paul was a brilliant Pharisee before his conversion, Saint Augustine was a pagan intellectual, C.S. Lewis a convicted atheist who argued most aggressively against all faiths, before he finally gave in into becoming what he calls ‘the most dejected and reluctant convert in All-England’. For it is true what he says: look for truth and you may find comfort; look for comfort and it is certain that you would not find both.

Things I Have Learnt In University (So Far)

1. Writing is important. No, make that ... very important. This may be less true in other universities (ones where you're not required to take arts electives) but for NUS, and for other module-based unis, good writing is a skill you'll have to learn. I've lost count of the number of academic papers we've been asked to write, as freshmen. And it turns out that for certain degrees, the ones with accreditation (Computer Science, say), you'll be forced to take arts modules in order to meet the course's accreditation standards. So learn to write, and learn to write well. You'll have far less problems that way.

2. In lecture theatres, learn to sit in front. It's easier to ask questions from the first four rows. And you're not likely to drift off and dream when the lecturer is up-close and personal, and near enough to pick on you. I wish I'd figured this out earlier.

3. Check for announcements early and always. In NUS we use something called IVLE, an online module-notification system. Some universities use email, others use noticeboards. I've learned to check those, for fear of forgetting deadlines and loosing digital files. And those things do happen. So I check early now. And I do it every single day.

4. Eat fruit. This should be self-explanatory.

5. Don't chuck underwear into the washer and expect 'em to come out clean. Again, this should be self-explanatory. And no, don't ask.

6. The university library is your best friend. Especially if aforementioned library is one of the biggest in Asia. Make use of it. Search for books: online, on shelves, whatever. You'll never know what you might find.

7. Find good team-mates. I haven't yet been in a team I wanted to get out of, but having good team-mates is a must. (This is, mind you, second hand experience). You make better friends when you're working together and producing good work. I like all my team-mates so far. I hope to find good ones next semester. Oh, and if you're wondering? Control freaks ... skip 'em.

8. Run. You know the Freshman 15? You've heard of it? Good. It means that freshmen get fatter in their first year of school. You don't want that to happen. So run. Either that or pull all-nighters for multiple nights, which leads me to ...

9. All-nighters are normal. I've had 7 so far. Some of them were for stupid things I could've just left till morning. But most of them were necessary. I don't like all-nighters. But if you must -

10. Don't take naps at 3am. Trust me, you won't get up.

Ghosts

When I go out at night to Clementi for dinner - sporadically, not often - I make it a point to look into the store-fronts and the back-counters of the shops I walk by. I look past the Filipino workers, the internationals with weird accents (probably from China, I can never tell), past the locals flipping burgers and lazing at the back of clothes boutiques, past the ones cooking in the hawker centres. I look for the old people. The grey-hairs, the men and women who should be retired now, with grandchildren to care for, and grown-up kids they can give old recipes to. But they're not.

Most of them you see in common places. Cleaners: with mops in their hands and cloths for our tables, invisible most of the time because you can't be bothered to think about them while you rush for food. Electricians: slightly better off, but with rheumy wrists and milky eyes, and age spots on their arms. I know one who checks the electrical risers every morning, at my block - he changed my lightbulbs for me once. Small sized, soft-spoken man. I like him.

But the others aren't so common, and they can be heartbreaking. When Tay and I last went to Clementi for dinner, on Friday, we decided to explore the area around the HDB flats - under the badly-lit alleyways and the aging, caked walls, to see what else the place might have to offer. One such alleyway: dark, wooden construction barrier on the left; yellow, ugly lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling. And then a sudden white glow - a 7-11 on the right, we walk past and I look in and there's this ahpek sitting behind the counter. It's 10pm. The alleyway is quiet. He's reading a newspaper and there's nobody in the store. We continue walking.

Singapore is the 11th most expensive city to live in in the world. It's second in Asia only to Hong Kong. And that's perfectly fine, I suppose, when you're working and you're in the rat race and your mind is constantly somewhere else while you're rushing for food; but quite another when you've retired and you're alone in your HDB flat, and still the bills keep pouring in. You can't burden your kids. They're working for their own bills. And so you don't retire. You take a job. There's not much to it: the Singaporean government, being ever practical, once suggesting nursing homes in Johor to solve this problem ('the workers can visit their parents fortnightly') nobody really liked the idea, however, and so it was dropped.

But the Singaporeans themselves don't think about this while they go about their daily lives. Their eyes gloss over and the ears close in on themselves. I've watched this curious event repeat itself, all the time, while waiting for a friend in an MRT station: they look at their watches as they rush to work; from work, their faces curiously blank as they pass over these people, not willing to imagine that perhaps one day - a long time away - these ghosts that they aren't seeing might be one of them.

But here's what took me by the hand and hurt me, that night - we are eating at Mos Burger, a fast food chain, and there's this old woman behind the counter pressing salads onto burgers. She's got this bandanna tied over her greying hair, her face pleasant and her skin already spotted with old-lady-spots. She's round and she looks like my grandmother. She's also in a Mos Burger uniform. I keep shooting looks at her while I'm ordering, from where she is behind the outlet manager, and I realize something terrible and immediately it feels like my heart's being squeezed. The people working in the outlet - everyone else? They're young and they're moving so quick, so fast. But this woman, she's moving slow, ever so slow, like she's scared she might miss a step and the burger she'd been working on be incomplete, because her mind can't keep up. She takes small handfuls of salad and pats them down on the bread. It looks like she'd doing it lovingly. Like how she might make lunches for her grand-kids. And it's at this point that I look at my watch and pay my money and leave, because even I can't stand to watch.

I don't want to retire in Singapore. Remind me when I'm at the age.

Hyperfunction Air And Sleep

I am at the School of Computing. Four macbooks including mine, one vaio, a lego-bot and the hushed sounds of people looking over each other's shoulders, at laptop screens. The soft tapping of keyboards. Half the people here have IDEs open and code on-screen. There are full ceiling-to-floor windows at this part of SoC. It's bright. The windows overlook Research Drive. I can see the Synchotron Light Source from where I'm sitting - it's this circular red-stone building that houses a compact superconducting storage ring. I do not know what that means. There is a soft buzzing in my ears. The light is bright and a little overwhelming and there's this tightness in my chest where my heart is, like a hand's holding it, and it's gripping ever so slightly. It's still buzzing. Or maybe it's the sound of the water pumps spraying the wooden deck outside? A woman walks past, her heels clacking on tile and I swallow. Too loud. I am hyperalert. Colours are bright, a little too saturated. I have finished my tutorial assignment, the code is good and it works. I know. I checked it at 4 this morning. I stood at my windows at 6 and stared at the sunrise. I slept at 7. Passed up assignment at 9. I am running on two hours of sleep. It's funny. I don't feel tired. I'm waiting for a friend to come out of a lecture so we can discuss our NM1101E assignment. It has to be done by Wednesday. But we're only free on the weekend. I may have to go to church later. Youth. Or maybe not. I promised. I don't know. I might be asleep by then. University is a very free place. I should be sleeping now. Maybe I will.

A Sunday In The Life

I wake up at 8.30am and swear at my alarm clock. I lie in bed. Church starts at 9. I briefly consider going back to sleep and skipping church but I kill that thought immediately, out of reflex. I go to the common bathroom to brush my teeth. It’s raining outside. I consider going back to sleep again – the skies are grey and the weather is cold and the thought of chasing down buses and huddling under bus-stops isn’t an appealing one. I kill that thought a second time. I don’t know why I do so. I’m probably going to be late anyway.

The walk to the bus stop is nasty. I make the mistake of wearing new sneakers (bought for running, and white) because right away I am presented with the basketball court: a no-man’s-land of little rivulets and sploshy yellow puddles. It’s still raining. I hop from one dry spot to another, clutching at my umbrella like a grandma, and then I reach the gravel path, which is dryer, but slippery. I slow down. The rain is doing that funny thing it does when there’s lots of wind and you’re walking exposed and your umbrella is too small: your head and shoulders remain dry but everything below your waist is obliterated. I feel water trickling down my feet and into my socks. I try not to think about my white shoes.

The bus arrives at the stop a few seconds after I do and I get in – possibly the only good thing to have happened so far – and I sit under the air-conditioning with the vain hopes of getting dry. There are no old people in the bus. Thank God. On normal Sundays there are so many old people entering and leaving I cannot sit for fear of offending them. But then I reconsider: nobody in their right mind would take my seat anyway - I’m wet, and my seat’s probably damp if and when I leave it.

I get off the bus at the Clementi MRT station and board a train. The wait is 2 minutes. I take out my earbuds and listen to Grizzly Bear. The train arrives and we hop in. I like the sound of the doors opening: it’s like the pneumatic hiss one’d imagine on space shuttles and the like, spoilt only by the annoying female voice telling us to ‘please mind the platform gap!’ in an equally annoying angmoh accent. There are four people reading bibles on the train: three Christian and one Stockmarket. The aunty nearest to me (Christian) has her bible up and directly in front of her face, and her lips are moving soundlessly as she reads. She looks funny, but not as funny as the uncle opposite and a little further away: he’s sleeping head bowed, body slouched, with the bible open on his chest. You’ve got to wonder what he’ll do at the sermon later.

I see nobody my age, and proceed to stare out the window.

I arrive at City Hall MRT station 10 stops later and enter St Andrew’s Cathedral via the underground exit. The praise and worship session is over. I am, however, in time for the sermon … which starts a few minutes after I sit down and turns out – 10 minutes in – to be about death.
I sigh and try not to think about the trip back.

After service (there is no communion) I eat a couple of miniscule burgers at the church Welcome Centre and I head for Suntec City Mall. There is an Epicentre store there and I need to buy an Apple keyboard. (I spent the whole of yesterday programming, and decided then and there that my aunt was right – 4 hours of being hunched over the laptop = not good for neck and back). I make my way via the City Link underpass (which is in reality yet another mall) and I spend the next 20 minutes or so navigating the mass of shops in Suntec. The bottom floor is uninteresting: Topshop and Rubi Shoes^[1] and New Urban Male^[2], and finally I find the store and I go in and I ask for the keyboard and I make my purchase.

I eat my lunch at Food Republic. They have Lui Cha, and I miss Lui Cha like I miss Kuching. Food Republic calls it Thunder Tea Rice, though, and I find this so funny that I have to stop to take a picture with my phone and I think of other funny and suspiciously lame jokes on the naming of food before I queue and order a bowl. S$4.00. The soup is very green and not very bitter. Kuching’s is infinitely better. Oh well.

I make my way back via City Link, because the sky is still grey and unhappy and the puddles don’t look very agreeable to me and my shoes. There are many skinny girls with DSLRs wrapped around their bony arms.^[3] Two Singaporean kids press their faces at a glass display, and two white kids stare back from the other side, their parents busy in conversation with the sales assistant. HMV is playing Zee Avi's Kantoi. One store, selling slippers and big furry plushies, have their SAs lined up and they're all hugging one plushie each, for God knows what reason. There are no customers in that store.

I finally arrive at the City Hall MRT station and I take a train back to HarbourFront and another bus back to campus and I hop through the basketball courts again and into my room and I study mathematics and now I am typing.

Hello. Hello. Goodbye.



^1. Slogan: ‘Shoes make me happy. I’m superficial. Whatever.’ ↩

^2. NUM’s logo is a swimming sperm, and their HIRING/SALES-ASSISTANT-WANTED ads ask potential employees: SHOULD COWS WEAR BRAS???? Their bags are printed with the NUM logo, sperm-head upwards, and are rather funny: if you are female and you hold the bag between your legs (which girls occasionally do, in trains) you look like you have a sperm swimming up your - nevermind. ↩

^3. Their not-so-skinny boyfriends are the ones carrying the bulky and rather unhip camera bag for them. Poor things. ↩

Thoughts on NUS

As of press time I have one major math chapter to revise (being already lost, despite it being only the 3rd week of school) and a programming assignment to complete, and so I really shouldn't be sitting down with my mind switched on write and my browser opened to Blogger. But no matter. I'm setting aside Friday nights as writing time, and the weather is cool and the skies are grey this evening (plus there's the small matter of having just woken from a fantastic 1 hour nap) and so write I shall. The following are a collection of my thoughts on NUS.

The National University of Singapore, placed 30th in the world and home to a combined student population of about 29,305 (with the international student body at 34%, or 9880) is old and new and beautiful and scattered atop what feels like the hilliest bloody place on the whole island-nation of Singapore.^[1] The Engineering faculty, for instance, is built on a slope, and apart from the rising greens and the shady trees that lead up to its buildings (of which that green rise is admittedly beautiful and possibly the only good thing about aforementioned slope) suffers from the chronic idiosyncrasy of having different floors on different blocks that are linked to each other via suspended walkways, and so - as Tay describes it: ".. bloody confusing wan! When you call somebody and they say they're on the seventh floor, you have to ask them which block they're in, because the sixth floor on some block is the seventh floor on another block ..." and so when people from other faculties so dare to venture into the engineering department they very often get lost.



But NUS is itself old, and the buildings themselves come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. I would be hard-pressed to find a unifying word to describe the whole of campus: Hodgepodge, perhaps. Or Stoned. The newer buildings are fantastic glass and steel structures of modern design and build (i.e: the University Hall, the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music), but the older ones look like a slightly brighter more academic version of Civic Centre/Hopoh (read: nostalgic, or old or, less kind, this: ugly), with small, glazed-white tiles on the walls and brown slats underfoot and dusty metal-framed picture windows that you see only in half-empty barbershops in Old Kuching. The gardens are beautiful. The sculptures are breathtaking and clever and mostly relevant to whichever faculty or portion of campus you find them in ^[2], and the trees are large and shady and inviting, like you have to sit under them and read a book, or have a picnic, or something.



The student body in NUS is diverse, and I have met more people from more places around the world in the past one month then I have in all my life in Kuching. We have Mauritians and Indians, Koreans and PRC Chinese, the Vietnamese and the Burmese and Scottish and German and Dutch, and they all mostly stick to their own skin profiles i.e.: the Whites stick together and go out clubbing on weekends, the Indians move around in groups (always in groups) and the PRC Chinese walk around in twos and threes, like they're sick of close-proximity groupthink or something. And so it's quite weird to see a Chinese boy sitting with a group of Indians during dinner - which is what I do, and they all bombard me with questions like "what is the meaning of la?" and share with me their stories of home - "the place where I'm from in India is known for two things: tea and terrorists" - and we share with each other the best places to go for Indian food and whether it's authentic or not and how the briyani here is nothing like as compared to back home in wherever.

I've come to realize, though, that friendship in University isn't so much built around your class or where you sit in class as it is around what co-curricular activities you do, or what modules you take for a particular semester. I don't have a close circle of friends; what I do have at the moment more resembles a network than anything else: Hoang, who is a Vietnamese and explains to me complex math concepts in CS1231; Valentino, who is Indonesian and loves lit and sits with me in theatre; Keng Wee and Woong Yong, who are Singaporeans and fellow orientation-group members in 0-week and who now only see each other (and me) on Friday, for 1105, and Shiv and Shailendra and Sudanshu and Chinab and Godham and Sriharsha and countless others who are Indians and are friends because we all love to talk.^[3]

Then there are the friends that I feel most comfortable with, like curling up with a loved book by the fire, and these are mostly the ones I've met in Kuching during sec school. There's Tay and Joash, and Ameline and Val, and Zakil ... and it's meeting Zakil on campus that I find most amazing and cool and compelling a story to relate to you here: It was in the afternoon. I was tired. I was on the NUS internal shuttle bus, and I had my face against the cold relief of the glass windows, eyes shut, when I heard Zakil's voice. Now I've known Zakil since Form 2 - we went to tuition together - and the imagined reality of hearing an old friend's voice while on the bus back to my room in NUS is like finding a snowflake in Indonesia while on the way to milk your cows. Zakil is here for Medicine, and we've explored vast portions of NUS together already ... finding - amongst other things - military labs and aquariums filled with exotic fish and viral research centres tucked away deep in the bowels of the university campus.



Studying in NUS is again quite different from what you'd expect it to be. Disregard the top-30 world ranking and understand that NUS is a research hub ... and academicians actually flock here for the funding and support provided by the Singaporean government. The one condition that they have is that they are forced to teach. This means that while you have access to what are arguably the top minds in this part of the world (and beyond, even), you more often than not have men and women who are better suited for research than they are for teaching. I can't confirm this: all my teachers this first semester are wonderful. My seniors in the School of Computing, however, complain that their modules are dry and boring, and that - while professionally excellent - their professors are far from the ideal teachers they might've asked for. This is a small issue: save America and Oxbridge, I don't think teaching excellence and world class research can be found in that many universities in this part of the world, though not for reasons that I pretend to understand. ^[4]

But it's a curious fact that rankings and meta-critical thought about rankings disappear when you're finally here and attending lectures in the university itself: nobody really cares what NUS is ranked as on the world stage, and Singaporeans never really pay lip-service to this fact. To the average Singaporean, NUS is where you go to if you're bright but you can't afford Oxford/Cambridge/Harvard/MIT, and the well-to-do Singaporean's attitude towards local universities bear a certain shadowy resemblance to the way upper-middle-class Malaysians treat our own local public universities. I can only guess at this: I suppose when you take for granted what is readily available to you, you begin to look at bigger things at the expense of local education: like Cambridge Massachusetts, for instance. But I shall not pretend to understand everything about this.

One other thing that I won't pretend to care about: to tell you that all this argument and thought about university ranking actually matters to me, because it does not: university life is oddly fulfilling and challenging and tough, but unlike anything else I've ever experienced before. A bunch of us were lounging around in the cluster corridor a couple of hours ago and the one thing we agreed upon - definitively, that is - was that Form 6 is nothing compared to the first sem of university - or, at least, the first sem of university in NUS. The myth that it is is just that - a myth.

More on that some other day.



^1. An Indian friend of mine, in Engineering, tells me that NUS is aptly named: the National University of Stairs. He isn't kidding. ↩

^2. Except one outside the School of Design and Environment, which looks like a collection of stony spires set out on a small patch of lawn, some of which are collapsed and sad-looking and lying like dead logs on the grass. ↩

^3. Shiv I met in debate, and he's on scholarship in Engineering and very bright and a real pleasure to debate with. ↩

^4. Take all this with a pinch of salt: I don't believe university rankings are the be-all and the end-all of tertiary education, and I don't recommend you do too. For instance, an education in a unranked liberal-arts college in America followed by a professional postgraduate degree is still arguably better than professional training in the best ranked university in Asia. ↩

The First Week Review

I am sitting here at the desk in my room, dressed in the sweatiest clothes I have had in half a year. Two library books - a collection of essays by David Foster Wallace and a primer on theater critique - lie untouched in my bag, which is, in turn, flung at a corner under the table by my feet. My bed is clean, but is currently a yellow sprawl of plastic bags and wallet and soiled clothes and other little things like earbuds and cup holders (cup-holders!?) that I must've left while on the way out to do the dishes.

My dishes, sorry. I have to take care of them. They belong to me. Only me. No one else.

God, university life is different.

I know I should have written about Singapore and NUS and life here long ago, but a lot of things have happened in the past 3 weeks, things that I want to talk to you about, but don't know where to start. And I suppose the other partial reason is this little thing called writer's block, in which I want to produce the most wonderful, word-perfect essay on the first week of University anyone's ever produced, and this - naturally - prevents me from sitting down and organizing my thoughts, and letting them flow from head to hand.

So yes, I know, I'm a perfectionist idiot. Which is why I'm writing this now - exhausted and hot and sweaty I am - because that part of my brain that screams INFERIOR SENTENCE DELETE DELETE DELETE is woozy and sweat-drunk and I can write whatever I want without it spontaneously combusting into tiny little shrapnel chips that ricochet around in my head and leave little trails of grey mush. Which isn't a very good sentence. But just - you know - just testing.

(And also - my judogi is in the middle of a wash cycle now, so I have to wait for that to finish before I can go to sleep. And I haven't bathed. And my clothes stink to the high heavens. Didn't I tell you that University life is different?)

It's different in other surreal little ways too, like this one night morning I was walking around, 3 am, to pick up an indemnity form from Val - who printed it for me - and it was dark and quiet and there were no people around, and then I walked past this project room and through a tiny sliver between the curtains I saw a group of 8 boys clustered around a table playing DOTA. No sound at all. Just the occasional swear-word, and even then only audible right outside the window. Eight frowning faces, eight flashing computer screens, and the velvet dark of an early morning.

But anyway. I'm getting ahead of myself. I'm not going to talk about Singapore - or about NUS, for that matter - not in this post. I'll save that for another day. What I do want to talk about, however, is the first week of lecture, and my thoughts on the classes I'm taking this semester. That first week just finished today, in the sense that last Monday was a public holiday, and so I only sat for those missed lectures this afternoon.

Now all NUS students have to take five modules (or subjects) per sem, and we have to bid for them through a pretty complicated auction system called CORS, which works somewhat like the system Google designed for Adwords - but with protection, appeals, and an idiosyncratic currency system. But it's not necessary to explain that for this post. I'm taking five modules this semester, and being in the School of Computing means that I only have to bid for two, seeing as three are given to me by the faculty at the start of term. So, here they are, with my thoughts, in order:

CS1101 Programming Methodology is this heavy module that works as an introduction to programming. The lectures are all small sectional classes, conducted in little groups in computer labs, and my teacher is this guy called Tan Tiow Seng, who did a hilarious introductory talk at the beginning of our orientation week about Alumni and the School of Computing (in which he called everyone in the faculty crazy horses). I like him, and I think the module's going to be an interesting one, even if it is a little tough.

CS1231 Discrete Structures is a math course, and is intertwined with the programming things taught in CS1101. It's probably the hardest course I'm taking this semester. I am, apparently, really lucky this year, because I have a French lecturer called Stefane Bresson, and he's nothing short of brilliant. He actually makes math interesting, and as an added bonus he speaks in a funny French accent that's a breath of fresh air after all the Singlish you hear on a grating day-to-day basis.

CS1105 Computing and Society is to computing students what Pengajian Am was to Form 6. As in PA, we study all sorts of amazing, mindblowing things like ethics and computers and how computers have changed society and how Facebook really sucks because like so your boss can google you and find your Facebook profile and add you and then browse through all your drunk-like-siaw photos, and thus proceed to fire you after having weird gay dreams that somehow always involve you and a bottle of scotch.

SSA3201 Singapore English-Language Theatre is an SS (Singapore Studies) module, which is simply a category of modules that all NUS students are required to take. I think we have a Malaysian equivalent too, in our own universities, called - err - Malaysian Studies. But anyway. I chose this one because I figured that since I needed to complete an SS sooner or later, why not choose a module that was in a field that I liked? And I think I made the right choice - it's really challenging, in a way that Malaysian high school subjects aren't ... and that's probably because original thought and justified interpretation is the standard to which we are all supposed to work at. And our lecturer is a diva. A male diva. He rocks. I was late to his first lecture (alarm was set to 8.30 pm, woke up at 11.55, lecture started at 12; swore: shitshitshitshit ... and then I got lost) and he's really quite the personality. Term assignment? 10-50 page essay, on a past year exam question of my choice.

NM1101E Communications, New Media and Society was the lecture I took this afternoon, and boy, was it jam-packed. The student body spilled out of the chairs and onto the theatre stairs, and on the floor at the back of the hall. I took this subject out of interest, to see what other things I could learn about digital content, and now I'm beginning to wonder about that decision. The first lecture seemed too ... fun. The teacher in charge's American, and she's got this wicked sense of humour (she tells us that our finals will be laugh-out-load-Reader's-Digest-joke-section funny, because she wants us to laugh in the exam hall ... and anecdotal accounts on the web from last year actually confirm this), and she also believes in involving the whole audience in whatever session she's doing. We were promised documentary films, and student participation, and these things called Techno Breaks where we'd stop whatever we were doing and get up and do some fun activity - which, today, was a game designed to gauge our media consumption habits. It was crazy-assed fun. A little too fun. Like a party rather than a class. Which is frightening, to say the least.

And so but then I need to go check on my laundry now, but I'll write soon. About Singapore, about the University, and about the people I've met. Till then.

Departure iii

I'm leaving now. I'm leaving now. I love you all. Good bye.

Photography is Easy; Photography is Hard

Yesterday, Robin of Simply Robin posted an attack on my assertion that: 'photography is easy'. We've decided to agree to disagree, but I think an explanation on my end is in order, if merely in the interest of intellectual discourse. The truth about the matter is that I have been thinking a lot about the nature of the photographic medium, even before my dad bought a dSLR. Many of my friends are currently jumping onto the dSLR bandwagon; they are happy to shoot everything and anything that comes their way. I didn't like that. I wanted to be sure, that if I were to pick up a camera, and the skills that came with the photographic medium, I'd be doing it for a good reason. For a meaningful reason. I write because the act of writing soothes my mind, and helps me organize my ideas, and in an ideal scenario my writing is used to store feelings, and thoughts, and images attached to those thoughts that I want to remember. But what of photography? What can photography accomplish that writing cannot? I struggled for an answer, because I didn't want to shoot without a purpose. And I did find an answer, though I'll get back to that in a bit. Here, first of all, is my argument:

Photography is easy. It is. Let us consider the following scenario:

Kid takes camera. Kid shoots. Of those photos that he first shoots, it is likely that a handful would be good shots, though most would be bad.

Kid takes pen. Kid writes. Of those essays that he first writes, all would be lousy.

Kid takes paintbrush. Kid paints. Of those pictures that he first paints, all would be lousy.

Why?

The answer to that question lies in the limits of a medium, and the limits in photography are more solidly defined and more restricting than that in writing and painting, and film. Consider that writing and painting recreates what is obvious in front of us, in the sense that when you're drawing a bush you would have to recreate the leaves in that bush, the environment around it, and the way the light plays on the dappled shadows underneath the branches. But in photography you don't have to do all that: God has drawn the bush for you, God has given you light, you merely have to capture it. In writing, and in painting, you are the God of your work, and it is difficult to be a God, the same way it is difficult to be a 3D modeler of a virtual world than it is to be the gamer that screen-captures your work.

I struggled with this notion for some time, because after the control and the creative power of writing, photography seemed like a farce. Like riding a bike after touring Europe in a coupe. And it appears that I was not the only one with such views ... shortly before I wrote the original blog post, I chanced upon an interview with Henri Cartier Bresson on Google Video,
who said:

Teaching (photography) is how to use a little finger, that's all ... photography is just an instant drawing. BUT, for photography, you need one (finger) ... and in drawing you need three.

Henri Cartier Bresson, for those of you who don't know, was the greatest photographer of the 21st century, the inventor of modern photojournalism, the founder of the prestigious Magnum agency. Slightly more contemporary, however, is photographer Paul Graham's take on the medium, written for Yale University's MFA photography graduation book:

It’s so easy it's ridiculous. It’s so easy that I can’t even begin – I just don’t know where to start. After all, it’s just looking at things. We all do that. It’s simply a way of recording what you see – point the camera at it, and press a button. How hard is that? And what's more, in this digital age, its free - doesn't even cost you the price of film. It’s so simple and basic, it's ridiculous.

Robin points out in his post that his shots of water droplets on a pair of dragonfly eyes were impossibly difficult to achieve. But let us put that in perspective: if you were to give me one year's worth of practice, some macro gear, an umbrella, an insect and rain I would probably be able to capture something near Robin's level of quality, after maybe 10,000 shots or so. But give me a pencil, some paper, and paint ... and even after 5 years of constant practice I cannot guarantee you an image like that. The thing about photography is that you can capture multiple shots and pick the best; in art, and in writing: this is impossible. There is no 'pick the best'. The real reality of writer and the painter is this: 4 hours worth of work, and I throw it away because the anecdotal lede I used to introduce my article is bloated; 4 hours of work, and I throw it away because the nose on my portrait isn't just right.

It is an accepted truth of all these mediums - writing, photography, painting - that nobody sees the work that goes into the final product. A 15 page essay in the New Yorker is the result of 6 months worth of research, 3 discarded drafts and 1 week's worth of editing and fact-checking; nobody sees this. Michelangelo's murals on the churches of Rome take a year, at least, upside down and draped in sheets; nobody sees this. And there are more writers and painters who commit suicide and inflict self-damage in the pursuit of their chosen art - bereft of the commercial options available to photographers - nobody, too, sees this.

Robin is right: nobody sees the work that leads up to a taking of a photograph. But he is mistaken in the assumption that it is true only of photography - it is true of writing, and painting; and drawing, and film. He attempts to prove that photography is incessantly difficult, but he does so without the context of the other creative mediums available to man. Photography, writing, and art: do they not overlap in the expression of the human condition?

So ... what's so great about photography? Or - to put a twist on an aforementioned question: what's so difficult about it? One good answer would be to refer - again - to Paul Graham:

It’s so difficult because it’s everywhere, every place, all the time, even right now. It's the view of this pen in my hand as I write this, it's an image of your hands holding this book, Drift your consciousness up and out of this text and see: it's right there, across the room - there... and there. Then it’s gone. You didn’t photograph it, because you didn’t think it was worth it. And now it’s too late, that moment has evaporated. But another one has arrived, instantly. Now. Because life is flowing through and around us, rushing onwards and onwards, in every direction.

And also:

But if it's everywhere and all the time, and so easy to make, then what’s of value? which pictures matter? Is it the hard won photograph, knowing, controlled, previsualised? Yes. Or are those contrived, dry and belabored? Sometimes. Is it the offhand snapshot made on a whim. For sure. Or is that just a lucky observation, some random moment caught by chance? Maybe. Is it an intuitive expression of liquid intelligence? Exactly. Or the distillation of years of looking seeing thinking photography. Definitely.

Photography is valuable because it is a freeze frame of a moment in time, untouched by human hands and unvarnished by human opinion. No other medium can do this. Writing can capture a moment, yes, and in more depth - yes. But it cannot freeze that moment and leave it ambiguous, neutral, it cannot allow the viewer and the reader to impose their meaning on it, to give their own interpretations of the image the photographer so chooses to capture.

And in that ambiguity lies the real challenge in photography: not composition, not light, not subject - though all of those things do matter to the learning photographer. Those are merely the technicalities. The real challenge in photography is to capture the ambiguity of the real world, and to make that obvious to the people who are lucky enough to view your photographs. To capture what is real, and to also imply what is unreal, at all the places that are important to you. And that is not easy, nor is it quick; but most importantly it is not possible in any medium but this one.

Photography is easy; photography is hard. And in that sentence you have one of the truths of all the arts, and one of the great joys of life. Now let us stop bickering and go out, with our cameras - into the rain perhaps - to take more photographs.

Endnotes:
1, I owe a very special friend for the argument about painting, and the argument about the value of photography. I owe her many things, actually, and this endnote is just one way of thanking her.

2, N.B.: Various photographers have tried to work around the limitations of the medium, for instance: noted fashion photographer Rankin sees film-making as telling a story; photography as telling a joke.

Photolog: I See But I Don't See

This was shot last Friday, across the river and in the nooks and alleys of Carpenter Street. The full set can be found here; this photolog's just the black and whites - the street photographs, the captured stories.

Boat rides crossing the Sarawak River begin early and end late, and they never let up - we saw a woman hurrying down the jetty during lunch-time to give a boatman a pack of rice. 50 cents per ride and don't ask for the price - or the boatmen'll charge you 1 ringgit.

Shot just outside the Bishop's Gate. It's amazing, sometimes, what you can find in the deep pockets of the Waterfront.

Carpenter street. Back from lunch, and in from the heat of the afternoon.

A gardener over at the Old Courthouse is watering the plants as our group walks on by. I ask him to raise his hose and he obliges. "Terima kasih encik," I say, and he smiles back.

You are allowed a certain degree of fantasy when you're young, especially so if you live in a Kampung that's haphazardly built in the shadow of the new DUN complex - paths spindly and uneven, and running up and down and into unexpected places. Home is but one heartbeat away.

This group is a friendly bunch. I comment - later on and on the way back to the city - that it would be nice living here, growing up in such an environment. Then I see their siblings, the secondary school students: the ones who smoke and preen and hang out on motorbikes.
I stand corrected: will these kids turn out like that?

Here is the pilot and here is the sun.

One heartbeat. Away.

Hello there, welcome to the Malaysian education system.

Note the bunch of youths to her right - they're talking about motorbikes and decals and are tossing cigarette butts on the grass, without stamping on them.
And the girl ... the girl just waits.

I was never aware of this life, despite being Thomian for 6, 7 years: the boys who cross the river everyday for school, and who cross back again afterwards. How does it feel attending St Thom like this? Studying like this? And what does your father do, to be able to hold your hand and bring you back home, every afternoon, everyday? I see, but I don't see: I know that now.

Departure ii

It's become frightening, now that it's about a week away.

My Problem With Photography

My problem with photography is that it is a limited medium. In writing you are not constrained by what is in front of you; you can slow time, speed it up; you can give the gift of sight and sound; you're able to take a person into the zeitgeist - the mood of a moment, pointing to him the interesting, the beautiful - quickly skipping past the ugly and the mundane. You can grow whole forests at the speed of thought, feed your travellers exotic insects, send them on a tour of the royal gardens on the back of a bee. Writing is unrestricted, plugged directly into the imagination, and it changes the way you think simply because you can now capture thoughts - pluck them right out of the air, even, and store them in a format far more versatile than the printed image. Photography, however, is superficial. It is beautiful only in what you capture. Your style is the kind of things you shoot, as opposed to the kind of things you do to your subject. It is subtle, light. And it is inherently limited: even Henri Cartier-Bresson admits this - though he was talking about painting as a comparison, for he was himself a failed painter.

And yet ... photography is fun. It is a social activity, and it is a commercial one - you don't have such silly things as group outings in writing, for instance, because group writing produces some of the most horrible end-products known to man (i.e.: the Transformers 2 dialogue). Writing is also not commercial, for you do not see people arguing about the best brand of pen to use for their next novel; but it is lonely, and retentive, and often frustrating, and it is all those things in exchange for the creative control and power a writer wields over his work.

I'm going out for a photography outing tomorrow, and we're set to have a hell of a time (half of which would be commercial, materialistic comparison of gear). And the truth is that I am decidedly confused about photography, because for all the frustration I have with the limits of this medium ... photography is fun, and I have shot some pretty damned cool things in the short time I've been doing it. Like this, for instance:

... which is probably the one photograph I am most pleased with. And because I am a writer, I am a street photographer, because my storytelling habits have followed me off the page and onto the road, behind the lens and the mirror box. Photography is fun: it is accessible, easy. Sexy, even. And if photography has a place for me - the cynical, storytelling writer - then it has a place for everyone with the resources to get themselves a dSLR (and lens, and flash, and camera-bag, you get the idea ...)

If there is a art for the masses of the 21st century - mark my words, photography is it.

Photolog: Old Kuching

This was a photo-gathering taken a few weeks back - they've been 3 since, but I've only completed post-processing for this one. The idea for shooting in Old Kuching came about because I figured that I was going to be leaving soon (and yes, that I am) but at the same time I realized Kuching may be fundamentally different when I return. I have had friends who leave and come back to gross capitalism (i.e.: The Spring); what is to say that the Old Kuching I know and love will stay the same? The sampan rides, the uncomfortable coexistence of decay and tourism, smack side-by-side in crowded streets and wide boulevards, would they remain?

I am interested in stories, and in stories of my hometown; this photolog is my first attempt at keeping them.

That's us right there: Garrick, Joash, and Samantha. They were waiting for me to finish with a bunch of dumpsters clumped in an India Street back-alley. Those shot didn't make it past the post-processing stage.

This was taken in Elektra House, which was once the shopping mall in Kuching. I stood by the stairs and imagined a busier, happier time, one where couples sitting on steps actually mattered to the flow of traffic.

He was bored. This particular KFC outlet is from the old core of Kuching, and it stays mostly empty. The ceilings are mushy and aged, the seats tacky pink and green. And there are a lot of them. It isn't hard to imagine the store in better times.

"Uncle, smile!" I say, but he just looks at me, and then at my camera. He sits in that corner for hours - when we stop by for a drink at the open air market, at dusk, still he sits there, immutable, old. What were his dreams, when he was younger? Did he have any? How did he find this corner? These crates? I snap the picture, voice my thanks, but he only nods back at me.

Found in India street. What was it like for our parents, our grandparents? they had no labels, or brands, or ad campaigns to tell them what to buy.

Macaroni and chillis on Gambier Street. Ah, the sweet smell of globalization!

The old market smells of rats, and the ghost of crowds, and memories.

These two men started a conversation as soon as they pulled up to the Old Market jetty. Between them, the girl was texting someone else.

"Don't give it to them" Garrick told me.
"Why not?"
"They can find work on their own."
I looked at them, and then back at him. "They're BLIND, Garrick."

The crest at the top of the Old Post Office bears the legend Dum Spiro Spero: While I Live, I Hope. I was telling my aunt about it, and my grandfather overheard: "You know what it means?!" he interrupted.
"Yes." I said. "How do you know?"
My grandfather pauses, and smiles. "When I was in Primary 2, in St Thomas, they taught us what it meant."
Dammit, the colonialists had taste.

These men were kicking a ball and a bottle, amongst other things, outside this convenience shop. They looked happy enough.

This photolog was shot on Gawai, and the men you see here were longboating upriver. Twenty minutes later they left where they came from, but not after cleaning their boat and cooling themselves with the river water. Sam was horrified.

Kuching is a beautiful city. I will miss it.