A Rational Christianity

This was an essay I wrote for a class I took this semester. Posted here for posterity.

Case Study: Is It Possible To Reconcile Faith and Rationality?

I am a Christian, and that makes me weird.

My circle of friends consists primarily of rationalists. I am the only one amongst them who believes in any sort of God, and amongst them I am also the only one who is religious. Religion is not particularly fashionable amongst rational people.

If I claim to be a rational person (which is how I found myself
with this group of friends in the first place), then how am I to justify my
belief in the God of my religion?

This essay attempts to use some of the tools taught over the course of this semester, in GEM1902G, to answer this question.

Proof and God

Let's tackle the first problem with any rational approach to theism: i.e. the fact that — despite the best attempts of many of my fellow Christians — the existence of God is not a falsifiable hypothesis. Since God is supposed to exist outside of nature (and its trappings of space and time), one cannot prove the existence or non-existence of God using methods known to science.

That is not to say that there haven't been such attempts. Historically, Christians have deployed all sorts of arguments for the existence of God. Take creation, for example. Christians have argued for centuries that the complexity of life justifies the existence of an intelligent designer. This was all well and good until Darwin came along and demonstrated that the explanation for this complexity was a lot simpler: that evolution, as a biological mechanism, enabled life to evolve incrementally towards what the biologist Richard Dawkins calls 'adaptive perfection'^[1]. Dawkins and his ilk thus argue that Christians have no claim to the idea that God exists.

But there is a problem with this train of thought. It is not true that the complexity of life justifies the existence of God, as the Christians have argued. Conversely, the existence of evolution does not, as Dawkins would argue, preclude the existence of God. It strikes me that the debate surrounding evolution is only strong enough to deal with the mechanics of creation, not on the presence of creation itself.

What do I mean by this? Well, if science says that evolution was the mechanism with which we came to be, who, then, can stop us from arguing that God used evolution to create life? And if science says that the universe was created via the Big Bang, then what is to stop the Christians from saying that God created the universe via that exact phenomenon?

Science is silent on things that exist outside of nature. It is muted when dealing with non-observable, non-falsifiable hypotheses. Because the existence of God is not falsifiable, science is of no help to us here. It cannot say anything strong on the existence of God.

God and Correspondence

The correspondence theory of truth is thus of limited value when it comes to God. Even if we do attribute certain phenomena to him, we can never really know for sure.

This attribution problem plagues all the other arguments that may fall into the correspondence theory of truth. For instance, some theists argue that our sense of right and wrong comes from God. (This is known as the moral argument for God.) This, too, is subject to the attribution problem — even if a scientific explanation is found for our moral senses (and there is good reason to believe that one will eventually be found — see recent advances in evolutionary psychology), theists may still attribute this mechanism to God.

This problem of attribution is applicable to any discovery in science. So we're left with where we began: if attribution is a problem, how else might we be able to reason about God?

God and Coherence

The coherence theory of truth gives us a possible alternative: we might reason about God by treating the belief in God as an axiom. When seen in this light, it becomes possible for us to build an internally-consistent system of beliefs that include the existence of God.

A friend of mine, an agnostic, told me that she grew to understand her religious friends as people who started with a different set of base beliefs. This finally gave her the ability to understand where they were coming from (and, though this was left unsaid, in turn saved them from being seen by her as completely irrational creatures).

Perhaps this is a good rationalist justification for God. If science is silent on God, then one way of reconciling God with reason is to say that you simply choose to believe in Him. After accepting the axiom of God into your system of rationality, you may then proceed to weed out beliefs that are inconsistent with both belief in God and belief in Science. This makes things simpler for the thinking Christian.

God and Consensus

If enough people believed in these axioms, we might perhaps reach a consensus that God exists, and that it is not an intellectual 'crime' to believe in His existence.

I, am, of course, being glib. Consensus is a very shallow way of validating the belief in God — just because everyone believes in something does not necessarily mean that the thing is true.

But the consensus theory of truth leads us to an interesting idea: if people all across the world, for most of history have agreed to cling to God, then perhaps we should not discount it so quickly in pursuit of pure rationality.

There are two ways of looking at the prevalence of religion: the first is that men are largely irrational creatures. This is — unkind as it is — probably true. The second way of looking at this is to conclude that there must be something to religiousity that appeals to basic human nature.

There is some evidence to support this claim. Anthropologist Richard Sosis, for instance, examined the history of 200 communes in the United States in the 19th century^[2] and found that just 6 percent of secular communes were still functioning 20 years after their funding, as opposed to 39 percent of the religious communes.

The difference? Religious communes could demand more sacrifice from its members. The number of sacrifices demanded, such as giving up alcohol, or fasting, or cutting ties from outsiders, was linearly correlated with how long the communes lasted. But for secular communes, Sosis found that there was no relationship between sacrifice and longevity. Most of them failed within eight years.

Sosis then argued that the rituals and laws necessary for the health of a group work best when they are sacratized. Irrational beliefs can sometimes help the group function more rationally, especially if this sacredness binds people together. But secular settings fail to mask the arbitrariness of social conventions, making it harder for the group to cohere.

Interestingly enough, anthropologists Scott Atran and Joe Henrich showed in a 2010 paper^[3] that the development of religion has been driven largely by competition amongst groups. They argued that groups that managed to put their gods to good use had an advantage over groups that didn't, and the groups that didn't soon began to adapt these religious ideas for their own use.

This is in line with Sosis's findings. If gods help groups outcompete other groups, then it makes sense for competing groups to adapt these ideas
for the benefit of their own group. Gods can be helpful as a form of social glue.

The idea that consensus on a religion is beneficial for the group is not without merit.

God and Pragmatism

But if there is a rational argument for God at the group level, then what of the individual? Perhaps the most rational, personal argument for God is that of pragmatism: it benefits me, therefore it is good enough for me that God is real.

Religion does have its benefits, after all. For all the claimed injustices and horrors that intellectuals have attributed to religion, religion on a personal level is a pretty useful thing to have.

Christianity, for instance, has provided me with a clear moral code. It has also provided me with a social support system — that at its best is tolerant, and kind, and accepting (although it is very often not). Most importantly, however, Christianity gives me a mental framework with which to make sense of the world. It compels me to forgive those who have done nasty things to me, because of the belief that I am no better a person, at my core, than those who have wronged me. (The Christian terminology for this being 'everyone is a sinner, but God loves you anyway').

If Christianity makes it easier for me to be a better person, who can fault me for my belief in it?

The problem with rationality

There is one problem with this entire essay, though.

In his 2012 book, The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt talks of a study he conducted in 1993^[4], where he examined the moral judgments that people make when exposed to a series of moral conundrums.

A family's dog was killed by a car in front of their house. They had heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog's body and cooked it and ate it for dinner. Nobody saw them do this.

A man goes to the supermarket once a week and buys a chicken. But before cooking the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it. Then he cooks it and eats it.

Julie and Mark are brother and sister. They are traveling together in France on summer vacation from college. One night they are staying alone in a cabin near the beach. They decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. At the very least, it would be a new experience for each of them. Julie was already taking birth control pills, but Mark uses a condom too, just to be safe. They both enjoy making love, but they decide not to do it again. They keep that night as a special secret, which makes them feel even closer to each other. What do you think about that? Was it okay for them to make love?

Under interrogation, most subjects in the experiment agree that these things are wrong. But, with no demonstrable harm in these situations, they found it difficult to explain why.

Haidt argues that this difficulty did not stem from a lack of reasoning. He argues that people do reason. But like psychologist Daniel Kahneman^[5], Haidt argues that human reason works like a 'press secretary': justifying our acts and snap judgments to others. (He calls this 'post-hoc rationalizations'). In the example of the incest question, for instance, subjects relentlessly marshal arguments against the act, no matter how thoroughly an interrogator demolishes their arguments, simply because they believe it to be wrong.

Haidt then explains this phenomenon in terms of evolution. Reason, he posits, evolved to help us exert influence over others, not to help us find truth. Or, as he puts it eloquently, 'reason evolved to help us spin, not learn'. People make judgments first, then come up with rational arguments to support their views.

Similarly, this entire essay can be seen as my attempt to do a post-hoc rationalization of my belief in Christianity. I believe Christianity to be true, and I believe, as a rational person, that there are rational reasons for thinking so. Naturally, I attempt to justify my beliefs.

Perhaps, then, the logical conclusion here is to say that reason is not the perfect ideal that my friends and I make it out to be. In this cynical view, what GEM1902G has provided me is simply a set of tools that — if I am so willing — I may employ to justify myself.

I have shown here the existence of a rational, truth-based argument for God. But I have also, you might say, engaged in an indulgent post-hoc rationalization of my Christianess.

I am slightly troubled by this. But as I have (rather competently) demonstrated rational reasons for believing in God, I think my irrational use of rationality can be set aside for the purpose of this essay, to be picked up on and brooded upon at a latter date. I am, after all, only human.

References

[1] - Time: God vs Science
[2] - Sosis, R., & Bressler, E. R. (2003). Cooperation and commune longevity: A test of the costly signaling theory of religion. Cross-Cultural Research, 37(2), 211-239.
[3] - Atran, S., & Henrich, J. (2010). The evolution of religion: How cognitive by-products, adaptive learning heuristics, ritual displays, and group competition generate deep commitments to prosocial religions. Biological Theory, 5(1), 18-30.
[4] - Haidt, J., Koller, S. H., & Dias, M. G. (1993). Affect, culture, and morality, or is it wrong to eat your dog?. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology; Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65(4), 613.
[5] - Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

A Letter I Wish I'd Sent

Dear Diana,

I've always struggled to put the (often dark) joy of reading your books into words. You aren't as easy to describe as some of the other authors: "Do you read Diana Wynn Jones?" I'd ask my friends, in my childhood, and they'd shake their heads. "Well go read her. Go read the Chrestomanci series." But they wouldn't.

Your books, I realize, aren't the teenage wildfires that the Hunger Games or the Twilight books are. They're ... different. Darker. Witty. More realistic, I feel. More difficult, too.

Tor.com had a call for letters late last year, when the editors found out that you stopped chemo. I considered sending a letter. I never did, and I regret that now.

I realize - in the wake of your passing - that I loved your books more fiercely than I did any other writer; if Stephanie Mayer or Rowling died I wouldn't have felt as terrible as when Gaiman reported your death.

I found my first Chrestomanci book when I was 11; in the children's section of the Sarawak Club library. It was on a bottom shelf by the large picture-windows facing the hallway, all of them HarperCollins reprints of your catalog. I didn't borrow any other writer for quite a bit after my discovery. My sister and I fought over the only copy of Howl's Moving Castle.

When the Sarawak Club burned down my mind leapt, almost immediately, to their collection of your books.

In my first semester in NUS, shortly after finishing Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, I took a chance and searched for your name in the NUS library's cataloging system. There were only three books of yours in the catalog that I'd not read. I finished all three in three days, during the reading week, procrastinating when I should've been studying for my theatre exam.

I gave my youngest sister a copy of Wilkin's Tooth as a 12th birthday present. It's lost now, and I feel a little bad about that.

I don't really know how to talk about your writing. I suppose I should, but I can't. Too many layers. Cruel protagonists and unbelieving parents. Sulky dragons and self-absorbed enchanters. Broken marriages and young, vain lovers. I feel a bit better knowing that bits of you live on in writers like Neil Gaiman (whom you dedicated Hexwood to, how dare he!), John Scalzi, and Rowling (though she has not admitted it!).

I miss you already.

Rest in peace, Diana Wynn Jones. I promise you - when I have kids, your books will be amongst the first they read. Thank you for such a wonderful childhood.

Diana Wynn Jones, 19 August 1934 - 26 March 2011

PS: More tributes here, here and here. In particular, I loved this bit by Emma Bull:

She was passionate about what children want and deserve from their literature. Adults would approach her at signings, wanting to know why she wrote such difficult books. In one case, when a woman protested, the woman’s young son spoke up and assured Diana, “Don’t worry. I understood it.”

She had such faith in us.

Insert Angsty Post Title Here

I'm sitting at the science canteen, where I'm supposed to be making notes for my biology lecture. Red plastic tabletops, brick walls, F*CK NUS graffiti scrawled in tiny handwriting on the pillar to my right. There's a grey sky overhead, and a cold wind playing about my ankles. Really rare, in humid Singapore.

I'm running on two hours of sleep and a can of coffee. Completed a whole chapter of differentiation last night. Sheer willpower. And I've done most of my schedule for today.

I suppose I should lie here and say that I'm going to blog soon. But that's not true. I've lost the ability to sit down and think thoughts about life, about the world, about my inner universe. And what a rich universe that is! There's this long backlog of ideas, stretching out into the past, and beyond a certain point there's this darkness where I can't remember. I've lost count of the number of times I've told myself: 'oh you've got to blog that', or 'that's an interesting thought, what might that mean? - perhaps write an essay to think about it?' and I never do, and so life goes on, dragging the darkness behind me. Soon I'll have thoughts and I rush to class and the darkness is but a couple hours behind, and all the interesting ideas I have for the day are lost in that fog, forever.

There's this primary school girl now, in her dark blue pinafore walking past. What she's doing in NUS is beyond me. And I wonder at how similar it is to the Malaysian primary school pinafore - and yet how different her life is, for the Singaporean education system is the most bizarre meritocratic system you've ever set your eyes on, with streaming exercises all the way down in primary 4, and your future mapped out for you based on your grades when you're 10 years old.

There you go - that's an interesting thought, all on its own. I wonder if there's anything interesting in there.

*pause*

I better get back to work.

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.

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.

{Essay} The Problem With Earth Hour

1.

Earth Hour will happen today, at 8:30 pm in the dark houses and candle-lit shops of urban Malaysia. Back when the first Earth Hour launched in Sydney, in 2007, I remember arguing with a bunch of 9rules friends that Earth Hour was a good idea, if more of an awareness campaign than anything else. Things have changed, since then: over the last few days I've been bombarded by radio shoutouts and print-ads and beautiful, well-crafted video spots, all in the name of saving the earth. I now no longer support Earth Hour.

The facts are these: Earth Hour is a global campaign to turn off your lights for 60 minutes, between 8:30 and 9:30pm, in the pretense of saving the world. The remarkably snazzy Malaysian EH website frames switching off your lights as a vote for candidate A: Capt' Planet, over candidate B: Global Warming, making this more of figurative, symbolic movement, as opposed to a pragmatically useful one. But back in 2007 the original Earth Hour campaign was about turning off non-essential electronic equipment, and it required the businesses that participated to pledge cutting off 5% of emissions in the space of five years. That pledge no longer exists, and businesses and corporate sponsors, and celebrities, and radio-show hosts are now all declaring their support for a campaign that doesn't require anything particularly painful of them. And that is good, in a way, if you give only sparse thought to it, but if you do begin to examine EH, you'll find that it brings to mind certain uncomfortable, highly cynical questions about the motivations powering such overused tripes, i.e.: saving the planet; going green.

Let's indulge ourselves in a cost/benefit analysis of taking part in the Earth Hour campaign. If you're an individual, and you're participating in EH tonight, what would be the cost vs the benefit? The cost to yourself would be this: an hour of fun in total shadow, in which you can choose - like some of my friends - to make out in the dark with your significant other, or to go out for a long walk in the neighbourhood pointing and laughing at certain non-participating neighbours. The value in such an act would be that you save yourself a small amount of electricity, and you walk away with the smug knowledge that you - yes, you - chipped in to save the planet. You can now return to your daily life feeling superior over those who did not participate, and gloat.

The second cost/benefit analysis that we should do when we're talking about Earth Hour is to imagine things from the perspective of a corporation  - and here the cynicism takes a turn for the worst. Let's use Ikea as an example. In conjunction with EH, Ikea Malaysia has been offering special deals for the past two days, and also the opportunity to have a candle-lit 'special combo' dinner from 6.00 to 10.30 at night. Then you'll get Serena C and the Mix.fm crew entertaining you from 7.30 onwards, with 'many games and prizes to be won' and this'll be followed up by a performance from the KL Stompers (in the dark, perhaps?).

So what is the cost to Ikea? Ikea probably has to donate a significant amount of money to the Earth Hour cause, and it has to spend some for the candles, the Mix FM crew attendance, the KL Stompers performance, the event management and - of course - the promotion for this one-night-only affair. The value? Ikea gets sales, attracts people to the store on an otherwise normal night, receives publicity and earns goodwill by posing with an inherently 'feel-good' movement - the same way certain socialites may camwhore with notable stars to bump their own prestige and attractiveness. In the meantime, however, people hop into their petrol-burning cars to attend a darkened Ikea, eat their dinners with CO2-producing candles on the table, wait for the lights to pop back on and carry on to a central area to watch live performances by otherwise unknown celebrities. Everyone has a good night out, and people go back home to the ever-common Malaysian habit of throwing out their garbage in multiple plastic bags.

2.

The most memorable video ad for Earth Hour I've seen is one of Reshmonu and Pete Teo, and it opens up with an affable Pete speaking in Mandarin, hands graceful against the black background behind them. Resh stands rather awkwardly by Pete's side - not knowing exactly where to look - and he pretends to be solemn ... although it's pretty hard to be solemn when you sport a fantastic corn-row haircut. Then he cracks up, and the ad blacks out to the chirp of crickets and the WWF logo.

The star support for this year's Malaysian Earth Hour has been nothing short of amazing. In Youtube alone I spot Maya Karin and Yasmin Ahmad; Sheikh Mustaphar and Alex Yoong. The former is hilarious, the latter a fantastic example of male posturing and phallic comparison (honestly, a Malaysian astronaut comparing equipment speeds with a race car driver - anyone rolling their eyes yet?) What this underscores is the hype surrounding EH this year - someone has put in a lot of time, money, and effort to make sure that 2009's Earth Hour goes out with a bang.

That bang is part of an overall 'feel good' element of the Earth Hour event - something the organizers are quick to point out as a good thing. Their argument is that teens, young people and the disenfranchised Malaysian would be more interested in saving the planet if they see it as a cool thing to do. But really, is cool the best angle to use on a save the world campaign? When you're over-hyping, over-commercializing, and over-selling the coolness of an event, you tend to lose track of the underlying message: that Earth Hour isn't really about one hour of darkness - it's about day-to-day, often boring habits that will collectively result in a greener, happier planet. 

In some ways, however, you cannot blame the Earth Hour organizers - EH is but one slice of the global obsession with going green - an obsession that sometimes borders on the point of stupidity. And here lies the danger of the sudden fad: when you've got a cause that's been sold - and not taught -to a majority, there's a big risk you'll get people who follow blindly out of the cool factor, or simply because everyone around them is doing it. And then what happens is you'll get cases like the Walmart plastic bag fiasco, where the world's biggest retailer announced a switch to paper bags over plastic, and instantly entire forests got chopped down to cater for the millions of sales Walmart makes per year.

3.

In 1976, popular science writer Lowell Ponte published a book about climate change. He said of it, and I quote: "(climate change) ... has already killed hundreds of thousands of people in poor nations... If it continues, and no strong measures are taken to deal with it ... will cause world famine, world chaos, and probably world war."

The back cover of the book featured an endorsement from Stanford University climatologist Stephen Schneider, which read: The dramatic importance of climate changes to the worlds future has been dangerously underestimated by many, often because we have been lulled by modern technology into thinking we have conquered nature. But this well-written book points out in clear language that the climatic threat could be as awesome as any we might face, and that massive world-wide actions to hedge against that threat deserve immediate consideration. At a minimum, public awareness of the possibilities must commence, and Lowell Ponte's provocative work is a good place to start.

It was a good recommendation, but a regrettable one in the long run. You see, Ponte wrote the book just over 30 years ago, in the hopes of promoting further awareness on the subject. In his time even the National Academy of Sciences issued a list of recommendations, amongst them: "to establish a Climatic data analysis program, and new facilities, and studies of impact of climate on man; to develop a Climatic index monitoring program ... and to develop an International Palaeoclimatic data network." 

It was very unfortunate then, that the book was about Global Cooling.^[1] 

One question that nobody seems to bring up anymore is to ask if global warming really is as preventable as everyone says it is. From 1940 to 1980 temperatures across the globe fell, for no understandable reason at all. Global cooling became a scientific 'consensus', leading Ponte to announce that 'we will be in an Ice Age 10,000 years from now', and that '(world famine, world chaos and world war) would all come by the year 2000'.  Now if we accept that in 1976 the leading scientific authorities of the day thought an Ice Age to be imminent, then what have we to convince us that Global Warming is any more human-based than Global Cooling? What proof have we, apart from political momentum and partisan opinion, that Global Warming is preventable and not part of the Earth's natural climate cycle?

The real answer to both questions is that we don't. Take rising sea levels, for instance. It's accepted dogma that global warming causes sea levels to rise, and that sooner or later we'll all drown in a layer of salt water. And that is true - if we summon up the data, we'll see an obvious trend in sea level rise (though sea levels have been dropping the past 2 years). But take another look, this time at the bigger picture, and you'll realize that sea levels have been rising for the past 10,000 years, ever since (and this is an estimate) the end of the Ice Age. So then the right question to ask is: has human activity affected the rate of rise? And the answer to that is that no, it hasn't. According to Simon Holgate of the Proudman Oceanic Laboratory, the rate of sea rise hasn't much changed over the past few decades, given a reasonable margin of error. So the upshot of all that data is that sea levels have been rising for a very long time, and there's not much any of us can do about it - mainly because we don't understand what's going on.

It's that last bit there that the people behind events like Earth Hour want to cover up. Scientific opposition to the global warming theory has slowly been disappearing, pushed out by a loud chorus of eco-activists who insist that the scientific world is in consensus about the threats of climate change. The problem with the green movement today is that their foremost exponents are calling out anyone who even dares to oppose the conventional wisdom. This simply doesn't make for good science - particularly not if the general reaction to global warming opposition is derision and personal attack, not to mention political animosity. These 'green scientists' are underscored by more cautious voices: in 2001, for example, Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT, testified to the Senate Commerce Committee about the inability of computer simulations to deliver results that resemble reality, even in the cases where good measurements were available. Almost nobody has heard of him today, and what he has said about global warming: 'there is widespread agreement [among climate scientists] ... that large computer climate models are unable to even simulate major features of past climate such as the 100 thousand year cycles of ice ages that have dominated climate for the past 700 thousand years, and the very warm climates of the Miocene [23 to 5 million years ago], Eocene [57 to 35 million years ago], and Cretaceous [146 to 65 million years ago]. Neither do they do well at accounting for shorter period and less dramatic phenomena like El Ninos, quasi-biennial oscillations, or intraseasonal oscillations - all of which are well documented in the data, and important contributors to natural variability.'

In simple terms: there simply isn't much mankind understands about the Earth's climate. We don't know why the Ice Age happened, we don't know when the next Ice Age would occur, and we certainly don't know why the Earth cooled down between 1960-1980, and later heated up after 1990. Earth Hour ignores all that, and feeds into the general public assumption that global warming is a horrible, horrible disaster we should all avert, whatever the cost.

4.

Malaysian blogger Edrei Zahari - of Kamigoroshi.net - recently wrote a brilliant piece about why he's no longer participating in 2009's Earth Hour. He highlights a few pragmatic concerns that I didn't think about before - for instance, if everyone were to light up candles, how much fossil fuels would be burned in that one hour? And also - consider this: even if one million homes were to turn off their lights from 8:30 to 9:30, the powerplants that feed electricity to their homes would still be running on peak hour cycles, generating energy that will be wasted for an hour, never stored, and never to come back. Edrei points out that most people think the generators turn off the same time people do, but in reality they can't afford to do that - running the turbines from cold start would take several hours at least, forcing critical service grids like hospitals and railways to switch to private generators - wasting money, time, and increasing the probability of error.

The bottom line here is that Earth Hour is nothing more than a hyped-up global campaign, designed to waste resources in the hopes of creating some awareness in the thousands that participate. It is well-meaning - you don't have to believe in global warming to appreciate and practice responsible consumption - but by and large it does this in a frankly unresponsible way.

The Earth Hour website tells me now that I am 4 hours and 24 minutes away from switch time. I know what I'll be doing when that counter flicks down to zero: I won't be turning off my lights. Question is, would you?

^1. Ponte's reasoning for the phenomenon sounds eerily similar: he argued that sunshine was becoming weaker, and that aerosols in the Earth's atmosphere were reflecting rays back to space and preventing them from reaching the planet's surface. I know - try not to laugh. ↩

Hindsight

I finished watching Quantum of Solace a couple of nights back. And it was when James Bond finally caught the villain and said goodbye to the girl and the credits rolled up the screen that I realized that I could no longer avoid writing about the STPM. Things started two years ago had now come full circle with the movie. I couldn’t ignore those things, and I was by then sick of waking up from repeated nightmares of the STPM Math T paper. So here I sit: pen in mouth, screen on word processor, trying my best to relive - in paragraphs - a very personal hell that ended two or so weeks ago.

The story of a Malaysian public exam begins not with the first day you enter the exam hall, IC and exam slip and pencil-case clutched to your pounding chest; but in the moment you decide to sit for it. I can tell you that there are a hundred alternatives to taking one: some of my privileged friends jump ship (quite literally) onto the sandy beaches of Australia or New Zealand. Others run away to Singapore, that eternally kiasu land of the underperforming birth register. For the Form 6 student the decision to sit for the STPM is often a bitter one by the end of the year: all of us had had the opportunity to go somewhere – anywhere – and to carry on with our lives without ever sitting for another bloody Malaysian paper. But we made our choice and we picked that path. Or perhaps someone picked it for us.

A person wiser than I am pointed out to me a long time ago that certain individuals lived their entire lives in the shelter of one institution or another. These were the people who would grow up under the shelter of school and would later skitter, when it was time, under the open sky the same way a rabbit might cross a meadow: fearful of the hawk and the eagle; fearful of death from above. The shelters that would invariably follow would be predictable and safe: the University, the Company, eventually the Retirement Plan, sometimes the Hospice. Form 6 was a way to stretch the first shelter, and stretch it I did.




The STPM is tough. Some say that it is the third hardest pre-U examination on the planet, though I cannot find any evidence that actually proves this. (Most of it is I think nothing more than hearsay, passed on in kopitiams and Internet forums. There's a thread on a student forum somewhere that eventually spirals into a heated rhetorical discussion on why the education system sucks and why our keris-weilding education minister should be fired. Very Malaysian. Yes). But the STPM is hard, I'll grant it that. But it's also public, and it is free, and you cannot really argue with free.

There is something inexorably sad about a Malaysian public exam. Thousands of our students go through them every year, but very few talk about it in gatherings beyond the uncomfortable shrug and a singular wave of hand. Our newspapers are comfortable with writing about the success stories, the girls and the boys who achieve ever-escalating numbers of A1s and A+s. We are happy to indulge ourselves in newspaper ads advertising 'the secrets to success' for students, filled with glowing pictures of parent and child and some equally glowing statement (eg: Student Success Program has enabled my darling Tiffany to score straight As for her UPSR/PMR/SPM! Thank you so much Student Success Program!). We also have television ads selling us 'exam grade' stationary, acted out by bookish smart-looking students who jump in the air with pencils and erasers clutched in their hands, or who look up from an exam paper and flash us a megawatt smile and a thumbs-up. Which is really, totally, surreal.

But our society is a strange one, and we are used to keeping mum about the most obvious of things. Nobody - and this is also strange - has actually written about the experience of sitting for a major public exam. We regard our exams as a necessary rite of passage in our society - we treat it like puberty and sex: human experiences that everybody would go through sooner or later. So I suppose what happens after is perfectly natural: we get everything over and done with, and then we fast forward the next few months in the hopes of erasing all memory of what went on during the bloody thing.




A Malaysian public exam begins in the choice to sit for it, and in my case I chose Form 6. As a whole those two years taught me - more than anything - how to be lonely. My schedule for a good part of 2008 went something along the lines of Monday: Judo; Tuesday: Judo; Wednesday: Tuition; Thursday: Judo; Friday: Tuition; Saturday: Gym; Sunday: Judo/Stamina Training. I now have no idea how I survived all that, but three months ago my father attended an Old Thomian dinner and sat next to my Math teacher, who was a school mate from his era. They talked, and eventually he turned to my father and demanded to know why I was sleeping so much in class.

Other things changed. My friends eventually stopped asking me out for movies and drinks; I found that I could no longer identify with many them. Most were more interested for me to hear about their lives, rather than to listen to me talking about mine. I was also lonely because I was the only Form 6 student on the state team, and nobody else could identify with the academic and physical workload I was carrying for half the year. The pressure was intense. I looked for empathy, but it was very hard to find: very few people around me could understand the fatigue of what I was going through. I remember thinking once that I could share my problems with the Thomians on the state bowling team, but then I realized that most of them were staring whenever us Judo guys came to the gym. We screamed with our squats; they did dumbbell rolls.

Sitting here, writing this, I guess that maybe I tapped into mental reserves I never knew I had; but I believe I also got through because I learned to draw upon the strength of a few of my friends. Most didn't listen to me, or didn't want to - I often directed our conversations to their lives, their problems. And, yes, while it wasn't perfect it was very soothing: talking to them about inconsequential things reminded me that there was a world out there, and it wasn't all Judo and exams. The talking about myself I left to God - He was probably the only empathetic person who knew what I was going through, and I worked out most of my frustrations through Him. Form 6 was a year where I became Christian again, in an inward way, a quiet way.




There is a very specific kind of panic associated only with exams. It is a kind of guilty, flighty weight that drops onto your lap when you're not busy studying for one subject or other. Before a public exam any time not spent in front of a book is time wasted, and every Malaysian student knows this instinctively. But your panic only gets worse when when you cannot for the life of you bring yourself to start. Once you do start, however, a different kind of torture emerges.

I never did liked studying. When I was 9 or 10 I came up with the ingenious solution of putting a novel in the centre of an open Chinese textbook, and I lifted the book to my face so that anybody looking from afar would assume I was studying Chinese. I completed quite a few novels this way, including perhaps a quarter of the Hardy Boys series. I had a fantastic time, until my parents caught me.

Serious studying for a public examination differs from person to person. Some of my friends study best when in a group, and they stay back in the libraries of their respective schools, poring over books and memorizing equations into the wee hours of the night. I learned very quickly that two things were problems for me: 1) I was easily distracted, and 2) I wasn't a reader.

The first I solved by downloading albums and listening to them on my iPod, playing them on constant loop until they blotted out the sentient sounds of any study area. There are now several albums I will never touch again, chief amongst them TV On The Radio's seminal Dear Science. The second problem I solved by doing exercises on sheaves of paper, crumpling them en masse at the end of the week and tossing them into my bedroom's wastepaper basket. My bedroom itself became a place I could barely recognize: I rarely did any studying there, chiefly because it was filled to the brim with distractions any geek would immediately love - novels and magazines and my writing notebooks, plus little puzzles and Pokemon figures that you couldn't help but mess with.

No, I did my studying at the dining table, under a freezing air conditioner. And later on, when my youngest sister finished with her PMR and began watching TV and generally started to have a good time I began to study at my aunt's place, at an uncomfortable dining table where I would occasionally set my head down against my textbooks, earbuds playing Radiohead, and sleep.

My study patterns changed because of one other thing. Some idiot at the top of St Thomas's administrative piramid thought it was a good idea to keep all the students in to the very last day of school. It was a logical failure on many fronts: most of the teachers had no idea what to do with us, and very few of the exercises they gave (save perhaps Chemistry) we finished. But the bigger problem with such policy was that each of us had different problems at that stage - some of us were weaker in Math, and some of us were weaker in Physics, and the only people who really did know and could affect change were ourselves. What we needed was the freedom to divide our time amongst the subjects according to our strengths and weaknesses, but what the school forced us to do was to sit and follow all the subjects, according to a rigid school timetable. I was beyond tired of arguing with the administrative office by then, so I changed my study patterns to suit my school days. Every night at about 11 I drank coffee, and turned in only around 2 or 3. I would then stumble through school and collapse at home in the afternoon, before beginning to study all over again at 7. It was a horrible study schedule, but it had to be done.




There is a very surreal quality to the opening minutes of your very first paper. It's a little like an out-of-body-experience: you open the question booklet and some part of you knows that these are the very questions coming generations will study and will attempt to trump. That same part of you can't believe you're actually sitting there, writing answers to questions that collectively, when finally marked, will determine you your future. But of course such thinking is counter-productive, and all of us learn to shut out that little voice very quickly in the opening minutes. The invigilators tell you the same things before each and every session: that cheating is not allowed, that you are only allowed to leave for toilets after the first 30 minutes and before the last 30. They don't talk about exits and life-jackets, but it's a close thing. Sometime during the Physics paper 2 I forget the toilet injunction, and I finish my last essay with my legs crossed so hard I had to take a couple of minutes to uncross them in a toilet cubicle later.

The STPM has papers divided over the space of three weeks, with two papers per week. I suppose this was to make sure you would go crazy long before the exams were over, and it was very effective in that regard. The second day was Math T, paper 1. I couldn't do half the questions, and I came home to a week of no-exams, half of which I spent staring at the ceiling, or the wall. I was depressed. I called my friends. Nick told me that it still wasn't over, that I shouldn't give myself room for regret. Horng Eng told me stories about her STPM, stories that both scared and provoked me. Paul told me to stop acting like an idiot.

My last paper was Physics paper 1. It was an objective paper, and it was a subject I sucked at. My friends were going to Richmond's Place later in the evening, they invited me but I could see they weren't convinced I would go. I didn't. I stood under the school hall, the sunlight gold and the shadows long, and I stared out at the empty carpark for a long time.




I enjoyed Quantum of Solace. Bond was still recovering from Vesper Lynd's death, and he had already turned into a man scarred by duty, one who never wanted to fall in love again. And at the end of the movie the beautiful Camille leans over to Bond and says to him: "I wish I could free you from your prison. But your prison is in there." And then she kisses him. I don't know what this says about me or pop culture, but I found myself identifying with it.

Two years ago when the SPM ended I shouted for joy. Garrick and Paul and I walked down McDougall road and made the crossing to the cinema. We were going to watch Casino Royale and we would be introduced to the world of Vesper Lynd and James Bond and the Aston Martin DBS for the very first time. The sunlight was gold and the shadows were long, and we were laughing and walking and talking and we had not a care in the world. It was a happy time, and why shouldn't it be? Our future was bright before us, like the evening sun that illuminated our faces; the same sun that lighted mine after the STPM, the sun that was the ending of a Malaysian public exam.

Writer's Note: This piece took an unbelievably long time to write, involving one draft and 5 unfinished ones, plus a semi-serious edit and polish. And I don't think it's very good. It seems that after every public exam I suffer a short period of writing depression, where I just can't seem to produce good stuff. Blasted exams. That being said, I hope to never revisit the months I spent doing the things I talked about above, so I beg your forgiveness if I leave this piece as it is. 

{Essay} We Catch Stars Before Dawn

We are often asked, when we are young, what we want to be when we grow up. A child's answer to this question is often a confident one: Astronaut! Scientist! Teacher! Mummy say doctor is good! And we repeat it - don't we? - whenever we are asked, all the way into primary school, because the very idea of being an astronautscientistteacherdoctor is exciting to our young minds. It's the same way a young professional may feel when he walks into a Saville Row store, credit card strapped tight in a back pocket, the idea of a credit rating alien in the afterglow of a first paycheck. He doesn't yet comprehend the work needed to compensate for his new suit, the same way we couldn't yet comprehend the cost/payout ratios of our childhood ambitions. This changes soon enough.

Ask a teenager now, anywhere on a street, what he wants to be when he grows up, and you'll more often than not get a blank stare in return. Something has changed in the years between the confident 'Astronaut!' and the evasive 'I don't know.' - and I can assure you that it isn't just the cost/payout ratio. A teenager is frightened by many things, some of them universal (the ridicule of peers, for instance) and some of them senseless. This fear of ambition is both universal and senseless, but it carries on in many of us, way into adulthood, because it is rarely (if ever) an outright threat. Most of us, in fact, learn to work around it; some of these may lead well-to-do, often happy lives. Others lead unexamined ones, and therefore do not care at all.

This essay is a thesis on growing up. It is written for the person I see whenever I look into the mirror, because that person is often terribly confused. The context is this: I am going to have to choose what I want to be when I grow up very, very soon. And I'm not very confident about it, because all around me are signs that this is one drawing that I'll have to do in a no-eraser zone. If you're in the same boat as I am, with sharpened pencils and blank canvasses, and the great fear of putting one to the other, then you're welcomed to join me. I promise not to waste your time.




Let us consider the life of a child. This child is born into a world where the major variables have already been decided for him: family, nationality, intelligence, socio-economic status. His parents decide which kindergarten he goes to, which schools he attends, and later on the subtle variables like which exams to take and which streams to go into. His parents are the Gods of his world, and he grows up in a life determined by them. He lives for them.

The child then enters a brief sanctuary, after high school, perhaps, or the period between starting college and entering a first job. These are the years where he can choose - he decides what to do with his life, who to allow in, where he is going to live. How he is going to live it. Then the rest of everything comes around knocking, and he has to think of other things. A wife. Children. A mortgage; car payments. He is working his butt off for these entities now - his children are the Gods of his life (how is he going to get them through college?) and he wakes up one day, middle-aged, kids gone off to school, and wonders: What have I done with myself? What happened to all the astronautscientistteacherdoctor? My dreams? Plans? Where did these all go to?

And the painful one: What could I do differently, if I were to live my life again?

This is a question worth asking now, all the teenagers stuck thinking about careers. If you lived your life for your parents, and then your college loan, and then your mortgage, and then your kids ... when are you going to live your life for yourself? If you're going to choose something to live for, what would it be?




The title of this essay is taken from a poem. It's called Song, written by John Donne, and the first stanza goes like this:

Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the Devil's foot;
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy's stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.

The lyrical structure of the rhyme probably means very little, but note well that stars do not appear in the day. It is for this reason that we can only catch stars before dawn, the same way we can only chase dreams in the chaotic period between childhood and adulthood. The years between leaving school and starting a first job is when we are singularly responsible for our futures. The years before belong to our parents, and the years after are increasingly difficult for us to change all that we've build up, regardless of whether it's any worth to us at all. There are, of course, cases of people defying conventions and doing what they want, right smack in middle age, but these people are the rare ones, with the courage of their convictions and the ability to scale the brick walls around them. The rest accept the compromises of middle life and downgrade their ambitions: some live vicariously through their children; others take pride in things they did not set out to be proud in - their orchids, for instance, or their local bookclub. Little joys, tiny beauties to get by with.

The sheer possibility in these few, pivotal years is one of the causes of the blank 'I don't know!'s you get the world over. Teenagers know, on some primal, subconscious level, that this is one of the few instances where a whole life hinges on a single decision. We understand that not making a choice is not an option at all - sometime sooner or later we'll have to choose, and it had better be a good one. Till then, however, we clam up, trapped in some kind of circuit overload, hoping to delay the time when we face the inevitable. We say - to ourselves, to everyone else - 'I don't know.'

There's also the tricky question of responsibility. Teenagers have never ever in their short lives had such power to choose what to do with it. It's like taking a monkey out of a zoo and supplanting it right smack in the tropical rainforest. The monkey has no clue to its newfound freedom, so it awaits dinner at the foot of a tree, and ends up being the meal of a Bengal tiger. These twin obstacles of possibility and sudden responsibility render most of us helpless, scared to our very core, despite being a fear that - when you really look at it (perhaps with the benefit of distance and hindsight) is senseless. But then again it is universal.

Or is it?

We often forget that the fear of ambitions is limited to a select, fortunate few. There are those, stuck in poverty, war or natural disaster, who do not have the liberty to ponder upon what they want to do with their lives. Everyday is a fight for survival: against disease, rape, fireball. And tragedy doesn't just strike the bowel nations of the earth: it can happen to you and me, any moment of any day. If we allow ourselves to be morbid, for an instance, imagine: what happens to your plans if a family member - a breadwinner - dies? Or if you have to enter the working world supporting a terminally ill relative? The sheer randomness of life - the cruelty of it, in fact - turns even the best laid plans into cosmic jokes.

Regardless, there are those who know exactly what they want to be when they grow up. From 6 to 60 their ambitions stays the same - and while the path changes their goal remains ever fixed in their heads. I envy these people. Their certainty comes from some God-hand, and we must seem like mindless plebeians running around in circles to them. I've a friend who has wanted to be a doctor since - well, since time immemorial, I suppose - and her choices in academia are simple and clear-cut. She has no idea how beautiful her gift is - the confidence to believe that it would somehow all come together in the end, sometime in the future; the certainty of it. What a wonderful thing to have.




College is a strange thing. Verily it is the gateway into the working world; the golden ticket to the chocolate factory of adulthood, but this wasn't always so. In the medieval ages teenagers were recruited into guilds and schooled in the secrets of their chosen trade, then sent off as apprentices to master their craft. Later on they become guildsmen; further down the road they become masters. The differences here being that their working educations started very young, and the opportunities available were limited by blood, influence, or luck. Career counseling was out of the question.

But the colleges of today fare no better in helping the average teenager manage the leap from student to working tradesman, in an age of unlimited opportunity. I can safely say, for instance, that the middle class can be whatever they want to be here and now in the modern world. But how many squander this opportunity? How many surrender the responsibility of choosing to their parents, school counselors, college entrance salesmen? How many believe in the lie of a career they do not love, when they see their fellow coursemates working their asses off to get a degree? These people, who do not bother to examine their lives, wake up one day in the light to find their sky void of the stars they had when they were younger. And they become bitter; or they learn to never, ever examine their lives when they have the time.

The other question about colleges is this: is it really necessary? The list of people making it big without ever finishing a college education is long and growing: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Madonna (this one is interesting: Madonna was a straight-A student who left University despite being on a dance scholarship); Richard Branson, Coco Chanel, Simon Cowell, Michael Dell. All their stories involve great personal courage and sacrifice, and they all involve people finding and doing what they love. In contrast, the list of people who graduate and go on to the glory of warming an office seat is long and endless; the people who graduate and never find what they love because of their degree ever-growing. Their reasoning is such: I've spent so much time and money to get a degree, to buy security, that I can't not do something connected to it.

This reasoning is fine and dandy, really, if that degree is an gateway to a career the person loves. But if it isn't - and here is the risk, for how do you know what you like when you're 19 and picking a course? - then the degree is not security, nor is it an enabler: it is a piece of paper costly of purchase and insignificant of build - nothing more than an extra brick wall in a life rapidly filling with them; walls that reach higher each year, every year, after dawn.




All essays must end with answers. Good ones, if the essay is worthy of a second read. I promised not to waste your time at the beginning of this essay, but now I must be frank: these are my answers. My dogma. Don't believe in them anymore than you should believe your parents, your career counselors, or those annoying salespeople you meet in booths at career fests. Your life is yours to examine, and the choices yours to make. Make them well.

That being said, let's examine the lives of all those who have succeeded in living their lives the way they wanted despite never graduating. What made them succeed? It surely wasn't college - they never completed it, did they? Nor was it money - these people came from different socio-economic backgrounds: Bill Gates was born rich, but Coco Chanel (she of Chanel No.5) started out as a seamstress. And these people are of every race and philosophy you can possibly imagine.

The best answers - or some of them - I have found are hinted at in a 2005 commencement speech by Steve Jobs.

... you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

All these people (and if you really think about it, even those who did complete college) had the courage to just go out and do things. They didn't fret, they didn't dally. Madonna quit University while on dance scholarship, Dell quit college to work on a small PC company, Branson dropped out at 16 to start a student newsletter. There was no way any of them could have known if this was the big thing, the job they'd be doing for the rest of their lives. They didn't play inside the box - they did crazy, they followed their hearts, and they had the courage to believe everything would all work out in the end. This is idealistic, this is, but it is also one of the strongest arguments for religion I can think of - who else can you expect would have the ability to connect everything so beautifully for you, at the end of the road? Science, while wonderful, isn't quite there yet.

The second thing Steve talks about is love. In his words (and probably because he is of greater wisdom than a teenager, ergo, me):

... that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

The difference here is not the college, the degree, or the socio-economic status. These people found what they loved, never settled, and always believed that God/karma/spongebob would somehow connect the dots for them in the end. And then, once they found what they were looking for, they worked hard. Very hard. It didn't matter if they started out poor, and it didn't matter if they had to overcome some significant challenges along the way. Oprah, for instance, got raped, but that didn't stop her now, did it?

The upshot of all this is that star-catching can happen no matter where you are. No matter what family you were born into. And it can happen at any time of day, provided you have the heart to do it. And for people like me - the star-catchers before dawn? We live in the sweet-spot, the perfect place to be if we just realize this truth and act on it.

I wish you all the best in catching that falling star.

Dreams

I am having my mock exams. The teacher passes down the Chemistry Paper 2 question papers and I ready my pencil. My watch is in front of me, my calculator is on the ready (that little underline thing blinking on off on off), my mind is set on Go.

"You may begin," she says, and I open the booklet.

The first question is about the periodic table - I see the familiar four-group diagram, and I am about to write when I realize that the question is in Chinese. I blink; and then I turn the pages, hurriedly now - and I discover that ALL THE QUESTIONS ARE IN CHINESE.

I am horrified. I turn to the front page, where all the instructions are, and I realize that it says there, right in the first line: 'This paper is bilingual. Students are expected to answer in their mother tongue.' I look around at my classmates and I find that they are all scribbling away at their answer scripts: Teck Chaw is biting his pencil as he thinks, Tay is making clucking noises at the first question, and I realize that I am alone in this -

I wake up in cold sweat.

A few days later I receive my Macbook in the mail. I open it, remove the instruction manual, the Apple stickers, the adapters, and then I tear open the bubble wrapping of my new Mac. I am happy as it chimes on, I type my name into the necessary fields, and I marvel at the beauty of OSX.

Then I go downstairs.

I cannot stop myself. There is this magnetic compulsion to leave my mark on my new laptop - as strong as whatever drives dogs to pee around their property, so I go downstairs and enter the kitchen and take a knife. And then I return to my Mac and I take out the knife ... and I carve my name onto the soft white plastic, under the lacquer Apple logo. As the cover peels under my fingers I am silently screaming in my head, unable to stop myself, but the knife keeps going on and on at the C of my name, deeper into the laptop -

I wake up in cold sweat.

We are in school now! St Thomas's is under monster attack! A dragon-creature lands right smack outside our classroom, sends a couple of cars flying, and starts to blast fire at the nicest vehicles in the immediate vicinity. My classmates go crazy and begin running about, screaming, and quickly I am enveloped in a throng of scared, brainless plebeians who want to get as far away as possible from the monster. I stare at it, and as I am wondering how best to bring it down and kill it my friends start to point at something running helter-smelter right at the monster.

It is my Physics teacher Pn Loh. I am about to shout a warning at her when she stops and rummages in her handbag. The monster turns its fearsome head to look at her; I see its red pupils contract into angry maroon pinpricks. Then - and this is the most improbable thing ever but I swear to you I saw this happen - Pn Loh takes out a plastic star and puts it on her forehead.

And she turns into Ultraman.

I wake up in cold sweat. Exams are not a good time for me to dream in.

Commonwealth

Title: One And The Same
Topic Number: Class A: 3, Is The World Becoming Tribal Or Global?

Mr Brigham is slightly excited when the plane touches down. He has been promising himself a holiday for five years now, and this year he finally puts his foot down and shuts his wife up and packs his bags. By George he is going to have a holiday, he tells himself, he deserves it. And nevermind the mortgage for three days. Nevermind the travelling expenses. He needs a reprieve from the humdrum of daily life, so the month before he goes off to the travel agency and picks the most exotic location he has never heard of.

The brochure reads ‘Malaysia’. It has a picture of an Orangutan in the front, some leaves at the border, and a very fierce looking warrior-type man with a wooden shield. Mr Brigham likes it immediately. He signs up to stay with a local family, because he is a Smart Man. Smart Men do not fall for tribal wish-wash on travel brochures: they want the Real Thing, and living with a Malaysian family for three days is as close to the Real Thing as Mr Brigham can possibly get.

So here he sits, a cup of peanuts in hand and awaiting his first gasp of Malaysian air. The airport is all sleek steel and shiny metal, but Mr Brigham ignores this and looks beyond. He sees a highway full of rushing cars: Mitsubishis and BMWs and local Protons. Mr Brigham ignores this and looks beyond still: ah! Dense tropical foliage! They did not have this in Britain!

Mr Brigham snaps a picture through his airplane window and chuckles to himself. It was quite a pity Mrs Brigham hated travelling, or she, too, would be enjoying this beautiful first glimpse of Alien Country.

Mr Brigham gets out of the plane at last and takes a deep breath. He wants to savour local oxygen, but what he gets instead is a solid blast of cold, dry air conditioner. It is much like the sharp sting after a spell of English rain.

Mr Brigham doesn't mind: he is sure the air outside the airport is warm and humid and nothing like London's. So off he goes to collect his bags at the carousel, out the whoosh of the sliding glass doors, and he finds himself in the midst of a bustling multi-racial world.

Mr Brigham is suddenly very happy to see so many different faces. There are sharp-featured Indians, slant-eyed Chinese and a brown-skinned people he supposes are Malay. He feels like he is in Canada again, where he cannot tell who is what. He taps a porter curiously and asks: "Excuse me sir, are you Malay?"

The porter smiles back and says: "Hello sir I am Chinese!"

"Oh!" Mr Brigham exclaims. He looks around the arrivals lounge and recovers quickly: "And that fellow there - he is Chinese, I suppose?"

"Tunku," the porter's mouth twitches, "is a Malay."

"But you look so alike!"

The porter frowns for a moment. He does not look pleased. "All of us sir - including you - are quite alike."

But Mr Brigham sees his family now, waving his name, and he excuses himself. He is bouncing with his bags by the time he reaches them.

Hello! Hello! Hello! they say, and he loads his bags into Mr Goh’s car. As they drive down the highway Mr Brigham acquaints himself with the family: Mr Goh is an insurance salesman, Mrs Goh is a housewife, and Michael is a teenager, a whole career in itself. Mr Brigham is pleased with his family; he does not notice the huge roadside billboards advertising everything from plasma televisions to perfume.

When they arrive in Kuala Lumpur Mr Brigham wants to eat. He sees all these interesting little coffee shops, tucked away in corners and populated by the uncles and aunties of the country. He supposes this is where the beating heart of Malaysia lies: over kaya toast and teh tarik; however, he cannot be sure. The Gohs take a turn and the old shophouses disappear behind a curtain of flyovers, skyscrapers and monorail lines.

They take him to eat in a food court in Midvalley Megamall. The mall is obvious; the valley is not. As Mr Brigham eats his five ringgit nasi lemak he sees a funny looking stall. To his consternation it reads ‘authentic Scottish Western traditional fish’. He tells the Gohs no such thing exists. Michael tells him the food there is very nice.

The Gohs bring him back to their home, and Mr Brigham finds his room very tolerable. He is tired after a long flight, so after watching 30 minutes of a Lost rerun with the family he goes to bed. The Ikea comforters the Gohs use are so comfortable they’re almost like the ones back home. Mr Brigham sleeps well.

The next day the Gohs take him out to the National Zoo, where the orangutans and the elephants and the monkeys look exactly the same as the orangutans and the elephants and the monkeys back in Twycross. Nothing escapes import, Mr Brigham says, and he feigns interest in a sleeping Bengal tiger.

After the zoo they eat at this trendy haute cuisine place, only trendy is subjective to preference. The Gohs dig into their food with gusto, but Mr Brigham’s moustache droops at the thought of how unoriginal his foie gras is. He makes a note to remind the Gohs to bring him to a traditional Malaysian coffee shop (‘mamak’, the glossy in-flight magazine calls it) for a taste of true local fare. Then he eats his foie gras and finds the dish to be international standard. He can close his eyes and imagine for a moment – almost – that he is in New York.

When they reach home the Gohs spring a surpirse on him: the Durian. With the smell of hell and the taste of high heaven the Durian is the King of Malaysian fruits. The Gohs tell him there is no middle ground with this one: he will either love it or hate it. Mr Brigham takes one, finds it remarkably better than the sample his Indonesian clients once opened in his office, and then finishes six pieces. He keeps up the act of a naïve foreigner throughout (oh my God it stinks!) and the Gohs smile and laugh with him. “Nothing escapes import,” repeats Mr Brigham, just before he goes to sleep – some part of his brain tells him he has tried nothing very different in this country, but he is too tired and collapses snoring onto his Swedish covers.

Mr Brigham has always been good with young people, so he goes out the next day with Michael and his friends. They strike up a lively conversation about football on the LRT to the shopping centre. Mr Brigham supports Liverpool; but Michael and Eric argue vehemently for Manchester United, and Navi is a Chelsea supporter.

“I once read somewhere that soccer is responsible for something akin to culture genocide.” Navi says.

“Oh really? Why so?”

“It’s like a virus: it spreads all over the world and wipes out the traditional games it comes into contact with. You never wondered? Malaysia, for instance – football is pretty much a part of our everyday life.”

“Oh you play it?”

“Sometimes.” Eric answers. “We watch it more.”

Mr Brigham keeps quiet for awhile. “And Malaysian football?” he asks, “Do you watch that?”

All three boys burst into laughter. “No! Absolutely not!” Michael says, and Eric cuts in: “English football is the best.”

They head for Berjaya Times Square, and Mr Brigham wants to know what music they listen to. He is – by now – completely unsurprised when they squeal ‘My Chemical Romance!’ – his nephew back in London has the exact same taste. He enquires about local bands, and they take him to Borders and pop headphones on him and play OAG. Mr Brigham yelps and tears it off: his ears are attuned to The Beatles, so this music is horrible in comparison. On top of that they sound exactly like MCR.

They go off for lunch. Mr Brigham asks them to take him to a local mamak, but they laugh him off and bring him excitedly to a McDonalds. “Even if you have eaten in one before,” Navi says, “You’ll love the Ayam Goreng McD – they won’t have that in England now, would they?”

Mr Brigham goes home that day staring at every coffee shop passing him by. The Malaysian night air is warm and unhealthy – the city is big enough and modern enough to have its own air pollution index – but he takes a deep breath at every station, when the doors electronically open and a crush of new passengers enter. Mr Brigham is reminded of his hitchhiking days, when smells announced new places: sea-smell for Cornwall, bread-smell for Paris, the sharp bite of coffee-smell for Rome. Here the air is marked by heat and rain, and the barest hints of spicy cooking, but it is also interwoven with the smells of Big City. Smoke and dust and sweat are whisked in with the people, and Mr Brigham coughs.

He reaches home to (finally!) some authentic Malaysian cooking – Mrs Goh sets the table as Michael and him relate their day, and Mr Goh folds his newspaper and laughs at all the right places. Dinner is a few stir-fried vegetable dishes and chicken, which Mrs Goh has cooked with rice wine. Mr Brigham enjoys this meal tremendously. After dinner he discusses global affairs with Mr Goh: Iraq, Iran, the US presidential elections, before retiring to bed. He chuckles to himself while brushing his teeth: “Mr Obama is spiffy, don’t you think?” Mr Goh had said, “Far more exciting lah than any Malaysian politician you’ll ever see.”

The next day is Mr Brigham’s last, and they are off for a traditional dance and orchestral ensemble at Istana Budaya. Mr Brigham looks forward to this: he can barely sit still as the lights dim and the clash of gongs announce the dancers.

As Mr Brigham gets his taste of Malaysian culture we should consider, for a moment, what the show represents. Dance was once the communal draw in the fishing villages of the country, and people grew up breathing in its beat … forgetting the fish, the weather and the sea in the trance of the Gamelan or the Joget. Now it is a preserved commodity, its collection of liquid moves and music on a lifeline of audiences like Mr Brigham, trapped on stages playing to expensive seats, nothing more than a left-behind, a relic made obsolete by modern entertainment. Soccer wiped out stick games and Two-Old-Cat; videogames and television swallowed dance. The lucky become global and the tribal die, or it changes – until what you get is a heady mix of both; a hybrid in-between.

This diatribe plays somewhere at the back of Mr Brigham’s head, but the dance is short and sweet – a spike of instant gratification. Two hour shadow puppet epics must wait for another day; the Gohs now rush him back to pack up and strap on his travelling implements.

Mr Brigham presents the Gohs with a bottle of red wine. He tells them he has enjoyed his stay, and he can’t wait to come back for another round. The Gohs twitter in approval, they load his bags into their car and send him to the airport.

It is only in the plane that Mr Brigham reviews his holiday. Mrs Brigham will surely demand a comprehensive report upon his return, of which he would lie and assure her it was very enjoyable, thank you very much, he did many New Things. But the truth is less cheerful: Mr Brigham finds Malaysia too much like the world, he is sick of fast food and zoos and copy-culture. He leans back in his seat and closes his eyes for the whole of ten seconds. Then his hand reaches up into his breast pocket, and he retrieves what he has picked up on his way to the departure terminal.

It is a purple brochure. It has a picture of a temple in the front, some leaves at the border, and an Indian dancer with ruby marriage spot and golden trinkets. Mr Brigham likes it immediately. He loves the photos inside even more: there is no sign of a shopping mall anywhere and the people walking within are clad in sandals.

It might be three years or so before Mr Brigham can get away with another holiday. But he is a Smart Man, and Smart Men know what they want. This time he wants a tribal vacation, and – well now – India sounds like a good bet, doesn’t it? Mr Brigham closes his eyes once more. The plane shudders, it lifts him up into the air and past wispy clouds, back into the sky, where he really belongs.

*

When I was in Form Four I remember going through a strict submission process for the Commonwealth Essay competition in my school. The teacher in charge was a supposedly brilliant one, famous in 'the whole of Kuching' for teaching English and Literature. I did not like her. The first draft I submitted was entitiled 'The Experiment', and it involved God pressing the reset button on planet Earth.

The essay came back to me with a terse: "Typical cloak and dagger story with the Almighty at the end. Not original." Okay, I thought. I sat down and redid my essay, this time on another topic: "Tell us something you're good at, and what it means to you." I wrote about writing, because I loved it, was good at it, and had being doing it since I was seven. I got called to the staffroom.

The teacher sat me down at her table, took out my draft and looked me in the eye. "The judges," she said, "Are looking for something good. Something honest, maybe original. You should write about something you're really good at; something you can write honestly about. This topic you've chosen, about writing ... you're not very good at it."

Oh, I loved that. I remember thinking to myself: who are you to talk about writing? I left the staffroom, promptly quit the competition, and I didn't submit anything for the rest of my St Thom school life. St Thomas's won nothing that year, and had a draught for five.

Until now.

To that teacher, wherever you are (and God have mercy on your students): this essay is for you. People like you exist to make sure that not everyone becomes good in their respective fields: you are the shit filter and you ensure the weak never actualize their potential. You provide a necessary function in our society, much like the bottom feeder and the short trader, or perhaps the guy who boos at all the wrong moments in a football match.

God bless you.

I Heart The Time Traveler's Wife

1984 (Clare is 12, Henry is 36)

After an interval of tickling and trashing around we lie on the ground with our hands clasped across our middles and Clare asks, "Is your wife a time traveler too?"

"Nope. Thank God."

"Why 'thank God'? I think that would be fun. You could go places together."

"One time traveler per family is more than enough. It's dangerous, Clare."

"Does she ever worry about you?"

"Yes," I say softly. "She does." I wonder what Clare is doing now, in 1999. Maybe she's still asleep. Maybe she won't know I'm gone.

"Do you love her?"

"Very much." I whisper. We lie silently side by side, watching the swaying trees, the birds, the sky. I hear a muffled sniffling noise and glancing at Clare I am astonished to see that tears are streaming across her face toward her ears. I sit up and lean over her. "What's wrong, Clare?" She just shakes her head back and forth and presses her lips together. I smooth her hair, and pull her into a sitting position, wrap my arms around her. She's a child, and then again she isn't. "What's wrong?"

It comes out so quietly that I have to ask her to repeat it: "It's just that I thought maybe you were married to me."

Note: Yes, The Time Traveler's Wife is a novel. Nadia recommended it to me about two years ago, but I ignored her advice ("There's a lot of sex in it!"), until a lack of books in Penang's Popular forced me to purchase a copy. I love it. It is one of the most intelligent, heart-rending love stories I have ever read. I have since learnt my lesson: when Nadia recommends a book, BUY IT. Immediately.

Here are some more stills from the movie, slated for release later this year.