Test Case or Court Case is the Answer

Often when we get frustrated about the state of affairs where Malaysian disabled people are facing discrimination on all fronts, may it be employment, education, transportation or housing, we need to learn from other countries and how they do it.

A recent test case proved to be a very good example of how the Disability Rights Commission (DRC) supported a British woman who is a carer to her son by ing her case to Europe and getting the European Court of Justice to judge her case.

It looks like a really long road for Malaysians to achieve similar goals as even the basic discriminatory practices cannot be solved, so how do we intend to solve cases like this, involving carers to disabled people. Research into disability issues are very limited on many aspects of disability.

At least we can learn from this test case and what Europe and Britain are doing in this respect.

Landmark test case could benefit millions of Britain’s carers
05/01/2007

A British woman received the green light to take her employment case to Europe later this year in a case that will have major implications for millions of Britain’s unpaid carers.
In a case jointly supported by the Disability Rights Commission (DRC) and Bates, Wells & Braithwaite solicitors, Sharon Coleman won the right for an unfair treatment claim against her employer - due to the primary caring role she has for her disabled son - to proceed before the European Court of Justice later this year.
The decision of the Employment Appeals Tribunal has been hailed by Equal Opportunities Commission and carers’ groups.
The case revolves around the interpretation of the EU’s equal treatment directive and its impact on UK disability discrimination legislation. The directive deals with equal treatment in employment and occupations and aims to combat discrimination on the grounds of religion, belief, disability, age or sexual orientation. Although she is not disabled, Ms Coleman’s lawyers contend that the directive protects her from unfair treatment which comes from her association with a disabled person. Associated discrimination is agreed by lawyers to be operative in cases of race and sexual orientation and the European Court of Justice’s decision would be the first time that disability discrimination will be considered to apply in these circumstances.
The DRC has argued strongly that associated discrimination should be an explicit feature of UK legislation.
Ms Coleman, who worked as a legal secretary for London solicitors Attridge Law, claims she was subjected to unfair treatment by her employers. In particular she claims:• she was criticised and described as ‘lazy’ when she wanted to take time off to care for her child;• on occasions when she was late for work because of problems with care for her child she was told that she would be sacked;• comments were made by her manager that her “f****** child” was “always f****** sick” and that she was using her child to manipulate her work conditions;• she was not allowed to work from home but other employees experienced no obstacles when wanting to care for their non-disabled children;• she was placed in a pool of staff selected for redundancy after she said that she wanted to make a formal request for flexible working to care for her child.
Ms Coleman claims that these actions created a hostile atmosphere which forced her to resign in March 2005. Speaking after the appeal decision she said:
“I was upset and shocked at the attitude of my former employers. They knew about my son's problems because I took him into the office, but they wouldn't allow me to work flexibly to make it easier to look after him. Other members of staff were taking time off for hospital appointments or worked from home but my requests were always turned down.
“When they heard that my son Oliver had a serious illness, they didn't expect me to return to work."
Currently 6 million people provide unpaid care in Britain, most of them women. Over a third of carers who provide 50 hours support or more per week have never worked or are currently unemployed.
Commenting on the decision of the employment appeal tribunal, Agnes Fletcher, Assistant Director of Communications at the DRC said:
“This case could have a major impact on the employment prospects of the 6 million people who provide unpaid care. Many of them have never been able to work. Others have struggled to balance work and caring responsibilities to the detriment of family life. Without providing protection from discrimination for carers and without family and employment policies that enable flexible working, many more British families will reach breaking point. The British economy needs those who provide care for disabled people to work, so that they can provide a decent income for their families and make provision for their pensions. Fairness at work for all employees benefits all of us.”
“Solving the problems faced by Ms Coleman and many thousands like her is the acid test for both Labour and the Conservatives’ family policies."
The case comes in advance of keynote policy announcements expected from Local Government and Communities Minister Ruth Kelly and Conservative Leader David Cameron in the New Year. These announcements are the result of increasing pressure from the DRC, EOC and carers’ groups to respond to Britain’s ‘care crisis’ and to put support to families at the top of the political agenda.
ENDS
Further information from the Disability Rights Commission Press Office on 0207 543 7099 or out of hours on 07813 060063.

Transportation Issues

Public transportation for disabled people probably has a long way to go in Penang. Forget the low floor buses or the ramped kerbs, clearly now we have a diabolical situation. (See article below. ) The man on the street (minus the arthritis) is feeling so much pain of having to use a poor public transportation system in Penang, that it becomes a matter of survival to get from one place to another.

It is not often that we hear of people suing the government in Malaysia over the public transportation system, but when that happens, it is really a serious matter.

In fact, I am waiting for someone to do so, to see how this will turn out to be.

New Straits Times CVLB may face legal action for the poor public transport system in Penang By Audrey Dermawan 27 November, 2006

Legal action maybe taken against the Commercial Vehicle Licensing Board for failing to provide an efficient public transportation system in the State.

The Citizens for Public Transport (Cepat) is contemplating such a move. Its coordinator, Dr Choong Sim Poey, said today they will consult their legal advisors before initiating any action. Dr Choong said the thousands of commuters who are dependent on the daily bus services have had enough of the empty promises made by CVLB over the past eight months.

"It is not fair for the commuters to end up suffering as a result of the board's incompetency in handling the matter. "In fact, Cepat had on numerous occasions arranged for a meeting with CVLB chairman Markiman Kobiran to address the issue but to no avail. "If he or CVLB officials continue to shun us, then it is best we see one another in court," he told a Press conference today.

Cepat, a non-governmental coalition comprising 24 civil society groups in Penang, has been in the forefront in championing for better bus services since the revamped of the public transportation system on April 1. Under the Specific Relief Act, citizens have the right to sue a statutary body, in this case CVLB, if it fails to perform the duty entrusted to it.

CVLB is entrusted with the responsibility of regulating public transport. Dr Choong said Cepat had wanted to file legal action against CVLB much earlier but had to put the plan on hold following repeated appeals by the State Government. "It seems to me that the state authority is not of any help at all... the bus services have gotten from bad to worse. And the people are really unhappy," he said, adding Cepat would give CVLB until Dec 15 to meet and "talk things out" or be prepared to face the consequences. The State Local Government and Traffic Management committee chairman Datuk Dr Teng Hock Nan and CVLB northern region chairman Shah Headan Ayoob Shah could not be reached for comment.

(Penang Watch Link)

Perbuatan mengetepikan orang kurang upaya dari masyarakat

(Marginalisation of disabled people from society)

Orang kurang upaya di Malaysia masih diketepikan oleh masyarakat. Walaupun kesedaran yang situasi ini masih berlaku tetapi usaha untuk memperbaiki keadaan adalah kurang memuaskan dan lambat diimplementasikan. Ini disebabkan pendekatan yang tidak merujuk kepada punca sebenar masalah yang dihadapi oleh orang kurang upaya.

Kita imbas semula kepada situasi yang sama tetapi berlaku di tahun-tahun 1970an di United Kingdom. Pada masa itu, orang kurang upaya telah bergiat untuk cuba mempengaruhi kerajaan UK supaya menukarkan polisi dan pendekatan yang berdasarkan Model Perubatan Kitidakupayaan atau Medical Model of Disability.

Pemahaman ini adalah berdasarkan orang kurang upaya sebagai punca masalah. Orang kurang upaya perlu menyesuaikan diri mereka dalam masyarakat, dan jikalau mereka tidak dapat berbuat demikian, mereka harus ditempatkan di institusi khas yang dibina untuk mereka atau tinggal di rumah sahaja.

Keadaan di United Kingdom pada tahun 1970an menggambarkan secara dekat apa yang berlaku di Malaysia sekarang, di mana orang kurang upaya bergantung sepenuhnya dengan orang lain iaitu dependent dan juga mengalami diskriminasi. Orang kurang upaya diberikan jenis belas kasihan yang tidak menolong dan secara luaran sahaja, tetapi sebenarnya mereka perlukan pertolongan untuk berdikari dan memajukan diri sendiri. Perbualan dengan orang lain selalunya memfokuskan kepada kecacatan seseorang itu dan negativity dan bukan perkara-perkara yang boleh mendorong mereka untuk mencapai cita-cita.

Orang kurang upaya terpaksa menghadapi sikap yang ""patronizing" daripada orang lain, dan ini boleh dilihat dari masalah persekitaran dan sikap yang banyak halangan dan tidak memberikan peluang sama-rata kepada mereka. Masalah untuk menggunakan sistem pengangkutan awam, untuk melanjutkan pelajaran, perumahan yang tidak boleh capai dan guna adalah di antara isu-isu yang menyekat pergerakan orang kurang upaya untuk memajukan diri.

Pendekata, sikap orang lain terhadap orang kurang upaya adalah punca masalah yang dialami oleh mereka.

Seperti yang dikatakan tadi, Malaysia masih mengamalkan Model Perubatan Ketidakupayaan.
Saya akan menceritakan apa yang berlaku beberapa tahun yang lalu, di mana seorang pelajar yang kurang upaya fizikalnya telah mendapat peluang untuk melanjutkan pelajaran di Fakulti Perubatan, Universiti Malaya. Beliau telah mencuba sedaya upaya untuk menghadiri kuliah dan menyiapkan tugasan tetapi keadaan alam bina yang banyak halangan serta persekitaran yang tidak membantu telah menghampakannya. Beliau terpaksa mengambil kursus di Fakulti Sains pula tetapi masalah yang sama menyekat kemajuannya. Akhir sekali beliau terpaksa mendapat sijil dari institusi pengajian swasta dalam jurusan Teknologi Maklumat.

Adakah beliau telah gagal atau pihak universiti telah gagal membantu beliau?

Kalau dilihat dari perspektif Model Perubatan Ketidakupayaan, tentu sekali pelajar tersebut adalah punca masalah, di mana beliau tidak dapat sesuaikan dirinya dengan alam sekitar. Tetapi bila dilihat pada keseluruhannya, masalah ketidakbolehcapaian ini adalah tanggungjawab institusi yang mengambil keputusan di peringkat perancangan dan rekabentuk bangunan, atau di peringkat pengurusan pelajar.

Kita perlu menyesuaikan Model Sosial Ketidakupayaan yang menekankan punca masalah iaitu diskriminasi "institutional" wujud di dalam masyarakat itu sendiri. Jadi seperti yang diamalkan di UK, polisi, perancangan awal dan reka bentuk serta pengurusan alam bina dan pengangkutan awam dirombak semula dengan menggunakan Model Sosial Ketidakupayaan yang mengutamakan kebolehcapaian dan alam bina bebas halangan.

Pada kesimpulan, kita perlu menuju kepada arah yang sama untuk membina masyarakat yang lebih berperihatin supaya semua ahli masyarakat, tidak kira siapa, dapat berdikari dan bebas halangan untuk memajukan diri mereka.

Bibik Hitam - Heritage in Penang

This article was taken from STAR online:

The Star Online > North
Tuesday July 18, 2006
A glimpse into Peranakan past
IN her baju panjang (long blouse) and the inevitable pinned hanky, Bibik Hitam was the epitome of a 19th century Nyonya matriarch.
Never mind that 'she' was really 62-year-old Mohd Bah-roodin Ahmad, better known as Cikgu Bahroodin or Cikgu Baha, who won a Living Heritage Treasures of Penang Award 2005.
Bibik Hitam – An Intimate Tour of a Nyonya House is the latest inception in the Le- buh Acheh – Lebuh Armenian (LALA) heritage area.
It offers visitors a 'live' glim-pse into the everyday life of the Peranakan people through the tales of the sprightly Bibik.
Sauntering in where visi- tors were sitting expectantly around a tok panjang (banquet table) in her Straits Chinese 'home' at 120, Armenian Street, Bibik was heralded by the rhy-thmic beat of a kompang, transporting everyone back a hundred years.

CENTRE OF ATTENTION:Bibik performing some dance steps at her Straits Chinese 'home'.

COFFEE BREAK:Visitors were served refreshments from old-fashioned ceramic cups and saucers.As her husband’s concubine, Bibik's secret to marital bliss was to jaga badan and jaga sua-mi (take care of her body and her husband),
Speaking in English, Malay and Baba Hokkien, Bibik told tales of her childhood. She spoke of the girls in her house who sat making beaded shoes and of her maidenly blush at a Chap Goh Meh orange throwing.
Weaved into her tales were bits and pieces of factual history, such as Chinese nationalist Dr Sun Yat-Sen (her 'son') useing that very house to hold his revolution meetings.
Bibik also showed a step or two of the 'laughing conga', 'samba' and 'ronggeng', authentic dance moves as Cikgu Bah-roodin has over 25 years of ex-perience in the Malay performing arts.
After the half-hour show, li-mited to 20 people each time, Bibik reappeared out of character to mingle with the guests and serve them nutmeg juice, coffee and Nyonya kuih.
The show will be held every Saturday at 9.30am and 11am until October. Admission of RM20 includes refreshments and bookings can be made through Adeline (012-3175 498/04-2620123).
© 1995-2005 Star Publications (Malaysia) Bhd (Co No 10894-D)

The Education of an Architect

I am involved in the Education of an Architect. What is meant by that? I work in a university and I was trained as an architect and now as a researcher. I picked up a lot of other skills and now I am faced with another journey in educating students who wants to be architects or who may not end up as architects as we have clearly know.

In a series of blog posts I wish to explore the idea of what constitutes the factors in educating an architect. I can pursue several approaches where, I only concentrate on providing the training necessary for the students to acquire skills pertaining to only being an architect at the end of the day, or provide a generic set of skills, or in way looking at providing the core skills and enhancing those skills further by providing depth to the skills. These are assertions that I wish to explore and try to rationalise the philosophy behind educating the students to be architects.

Since our school had been recognised by the RIBA we seek the definition explained by the RIBA. Book by the Cooper Union.

Other links are from the AIA, and interesting piece by a professor in Edinburgh.

The Work and Effort of Eddin Khoo & PUSAKA

This is an interesting article by Ms Jacqueline Ann Surin, focussing on the work and effort done by Mr Eddin Khoo, who initiated PUSAKA, to document the Malay Traditional Arts. I am always in favour of the gallant effort by people like Eddin who somehow managed to get direct support with the Ministry of Arts and Heritage to do this invaluable projects to document Malaysian Heritage.

Surin had asked him about the local universities and we can detect the "cynicism" by Khoo in which I can fully sympathise his sentiments in that matter entirely. This point also relates to how much NGOs get things done in Malaysia and how much the government depended on them.

This is a great article in terms of getting to know Khoo's efforts so I had included the article in its entirety here. It also illustrated the invaluable work of such NGOs.

Eddin Khoo's pic taken from article in theSun.

"...Theatre as ritual, theatre as collective need, theatre as individual yearning, theatre as a very complex construction of human understanding - understanding of the self, understanding of human psychology, understanding of the nature of illness - and I felt all of these things needed to be documented, they needed to be intellectualised and they needed to be collected so that we can prove to ourselves that we actually originate from a very long, elaborate and complex cultural self..." Eddin Khoo

This article below was from Welcome to Sun2Surf

---------------------------

Rooted in culture
By: Jacqueline Ann Surin (Thu, 11 May 2006)

Eddin Khoo began a relationship with the traditional art forms of Kelantan and Terengganu more than a decade ago as a journalist. Of Chinese-Indian parentage, 37-year-old Khoo has since dedicated his life to understanding, documenting and reviving the traditional forms of wayang kulit, mak yong, menora and main puteri. The poet, writer, and translator founded Pusaka four years ago to study and document these traditional forms. He is presently adapting, and will perform, for the shadow screen, Shakespeare's Macbeth in August. He speaks passionately to JACQUELINE ANN SURIN about the critical need for Malaysians to understand the cultural roots that shape our identity and sense of self as a people.


theSun: Tell us about Pusaka. Why was it set up? What does it do?

Pusaka was started in 2002. Formally registered (that year), but really it was a realisation of, by then, almost a decade-long journey or adventure into the heart of this Kelantan culture, (and the) religious, political issues which began during my time as a journalist with the Star .

The Star was bringing these issues out in the Sunday papers - I know much to the annoyance sometimes of some of our readers; 'week in week out this wayang kulit business' - when nobody really was willing to comment and make statements and deal with the issue in any way whatsoever because it was really settled or located in this strange Malay-Muslim contradiction that was really at the peak at that time.

At that time, the whole issue of Malay culture, Malay identity, Malay history, Malay politics was at its peak. And very few people, including the then Ministry of Culture, Arts and Tourism, were willing to deal with it.

And so, I ventured out there and began to do stories, and it just became a lifelong commitment. Because I think it's an issue that really goes to the heart of what we are as a people, what we are as a people who come with a certain history and a certain experience, and what our contemporary anxieties and contradictions and problems are, basically.

Um, so that was basically the impulse that led to the formation of Pusaka in 2002.

What does Pusaka do?

Well, we are Pusaka, Centre for the Study and Documentation of Traditional Performance in Malaysia which is basically (what we do).

What I feel is very important is that culture needs to have a strong intellectual dimension in this country. When you deal with things like mak yong, when you deal with things like wayang kulit, or traditional culture, there's been a tendency for us to be extremely sentimental. Extremely nostalgic about what our traditional heritage is.

As if we have already moved on and our nature is completely different these days.

Meaning that these things are of the past?

(Nods) Of the past, and don't necessarily say very much to us these days although we love them, and yes, it was very nice to sit in the padang (field) and look at the wayang kulit all those years ago, whenever it was.

Whereas what I actually experienced on the ground in Kelantan was actually very different. Theatre as ritual, theatre as collective need, theatre as individual yearning, theatre as a very complex construction of human understanding - understanding of the self, understanding of human psychology, understanding of the nature of illness - and I felt all of these things needed to be documented, they needed to be intellectualised and they needed to be collected so that we can prove to ourselves that we actually originate from a very long, elaborate and complex cultural self, you know. That is very complex philosophically.

It's also very complex historically in terms of the influences that have shaped it, and more importantly, how it has negotiated those influences to build a very distinctive and unique culture for itself, especially at a time in the 1990s and now, when there seems to be a great desire to culturally cleanse a lot of the collective self, and also kind of homogenise our culture through politics. And politics as pronounced and promulgated through a culture of sloganeering and a culture that really lacks any sense of introspection.

So, it's documentation through writing, through video...

Ya, through writing, through photographs, through film, and we also attempted, and continue to attempt without much success because we lack financial resources (chuckles), to get young people involved in these traditions.

We stage performances on a regular basis, every year seasonally for a period of six months or for as long as money allows us to, so that the local community continues to have access. And by extension then, continues to question the nature of what they have experienced, what they have seen performed within the context of the cultural politics of their time.

What happens to this documentation that Pusaka is putting together?

Well, we want to build a comprehensive archive, and we want to, for example, begin to distribute it to educational institutions not just in the country, but all around the world. Malaysia, and Southeast Asia by extension, is a region that is gaining a lot of attention worldwide.

People are very interested, not just in economic development and so on now, but in the very essence of our cultural character which is, pluralism. How, for example, does religion fit into a highly pluralistic society? How has that been negotiated through the past?

Yet, these things have not been collected. So, you go to universities around the world, for example, they have almost nothing on Malaysia.

I just came back from Japan, (where I gave) a workshop at the (National) Museum of Ethnology at Osaka which is one of the most elaborate and most comprehensive centres for the documentation of Asian cultures, in particular. Nothing on Malaysia.

Nothing?

Absolutely nothing. But they're keen now, you see. So, they want to come to Kelantan and begin to do some documentation and what Pusaka tries to do is collect these things and then provide a foundation so that people have access, you know. That's at the more practical level.

Then there's the abstract level, of course, which is, all these things will basically open up a culture of discussion over these issues.

When we talk about traditional culture, you know, the language has become so reductivist, so incredibly scary. I mean, we're using terms like 'wipe out', 'suppress', and it's creating a great deal of cultural anxiety in the process.

And on the other hand, people who are interested don't have access, right, to go and find out a little more and to begin to open up the boundaries of the debate a little more.

What about our universities? Aren't they doing anything at all in these areas?

Ya, the universities, you know (chuckles), if we begin to discuss the educational institutions, we'll go into another major area of cultural development in the country.

People think the actions of Parti Islam (PAS) were the beginnings of our problems with Malay, you know, cultural expression. That's not true. It was the apex, it was the culmination of an almost three-decade-long attempt at institutionalising Malay culture, constructing it, very often to feed political imperatives and political exigencies. Beginning with the National Cultural Congress (1972), for example.

You try and homogenise issues of Malay language, issues of regional distinctiveness, and so on. And basically our educational institutions cater to this, right, and are expected to advocate this, rather than examine and explore a culture, particularly Malay culture, in its authenticity.

There's one thing we have to acknowledge in Malaysia and in Southeast Asia. Pluralism is our essence. That is also our greatest strength and our greatest resource. That from the very beginning of any kind of cultural sense, cultural collective in this region, mind you, not just in this country, it has been rooted in cosmopolitanism and pluralism and hybridity.

Well, actually the whole world is like that! But let's focus on uslah, basically. And we must acknowledge that. This is where things like politics, and more broadly, notions of the nation state have come to a stage where they are extremely, extremely problematic in terms of conditioning who and what we are. Especially since so much of the politics of this region is authoritarian.

Are you working with any institutions or agencies in terms of documentating this work?

We have had support, and I will say very nominal support, from organisations like the Japan Foundation. We won the American Ambassador's Cultural Preservation Award in 2002 for a menora project that we did.

We are now working quite productively, I would say, with the new Ministry of Culture (Arts and Heritage) which I must commend for its willingness to engage independent, autonomous and often outspoken people, especially on the issue of Kelantan. I certainly hope that that relationship can continue to be a productive one.

And we have had pretty reasonable support from the general public. But that does not make for a sustained effort in what we want to do. We have serious problems of viability, financial viability in particular.

And one of the reasons for that is that culture is still seen as something to do with song and dance. Not about (for example), when I speak of culture as basically reflecting the essence of who we are, as encapsulating our history and our past. And telling us very deep things about how we're constituted, you know, as a society. People can't seem to grasp that. And it's because, I think, our collective sense of self is still very underdeveloped.

On the practical side, that means there's very little in the form of social investment in work such as ours. We are a very charitable society. But charity is a very patronising thing, you know. But we are not a society that is consciouss of a deeper investment, you know, where we think of culture 50 years from now.

That's why we are very far behind. We are even very far behind from countries around the region.

How then would you explain the importance of documenting, preserving and reviving these traditional art forms considering there seems to be some kind of disconnect between, say, most people living in the city and these forms?

Well, it's an extremely elaborate and extremely difficult thing to do, not just to explain but to make the necessary associations of culture, of the past, of politics, of religion, of identity, of regionalism, and of this great divide.

One of the great problems Malaysians have is the problem dealing with how complex they are. And we seek very easy solutions in explaining who we are. And that's why we love rhetoric and sloganeering because they are easy, one-phrase definitions of who we are.

Culture, in the kind of work that we do, can never be appreciated if, as I said, we don't make all those necessary associations.

So, what I'm really pointing at is we have to open up our minds. It's (an) incredibly difficult thing to ask for but we have no choice, I think.

I think once we make the necessary connections, then we will be able to understand why we are suffering from so many of the problems that we go through now. I think through culture, we can explain things like social alienation, we can explain things like politicisation of religion, and we can really trace the evolution of who we are and have become, especially in the past three decades.

When you say, 'who we are and who we've become', you're talking about Malaysians as a whole?

As a cultural self, rather than as a nation state self. What I mean by nation state is that we identify ourselves...you know, I always say, when people ask me, for example, 'Do you believe in Bangsa Malaysia?' I say, 'No.'

I do believe in the Malaysian as an entity that has very long and very distinctive historical connections. But, I think it's very dangerous when we begin to define ourselves according to terms and according to the aspirations that have been enunciated really by politicians, you know.

How can politics define a cultural entity? It cannot. If it does, then it leads to very dangerous consequences because there is a propensity to be very ignorant then about where we have come from and how we find ourselves in these situations that we do today.

And everything is minimalised and everything is kind of reductivised.

When your whole identity and your whole sense of self is defined by politics and political intelligence and nation state aspirations, it's very alienating and it can lead in extreme circumstances to very dangerous circumstances.

As is happening in Kelantan today with young people. They have nothing in their lives but politics. (Pauses) Or something completely outside of that politics. Drugs, all forms of social alienation. I think the highest rate of things like drug abuse is in the state of Kelantan. With all its parsimony and sanctimoniousness, these are the problems we create.

And if it's not that kind of problem, then it's a problem of political indoctrination and the very fracturing of the society.

So, you're saying that the importance of documenting, reviving and accessing these traditional forms lies in the fact that it gives us something to hold on to in terms of cultural identity?

Yes, yes.

That helps us understand who we are better? And then helps us deal with the challenges we face better as well?

Sure.

And devoid of this understanding, and devoid of being able to access these traditional forms, are we then left in some kind of vacumn without guide?

Yes, yes. If you ask me what is the principal challenge facing this country today, it's alienation.

And there is culture. Culture provides a sense of cohesiveness of the individual, of the community.

But culture changes.

Culture does change. And it's very important to also understand when we speak about traditional culture (for example), in Kelantan, traditional culture is very community-based culture, very localised culture.

And if we want to use a theatre or arts term to describe something like wayang kulit, it's folk art, ya. And what is folk art? Folk art is extremely improvisational in nature.

There is a great misconception here (that) for example, mak yong and things like that, received the patronage of the palace. It's not true.

It received the patronage of the palace for a certain period of time but essentially these are art forms that emerged from the well spring of community responding to community needs, responding to community changes.

So, they've always been extremely versatile and flexible in nature. Um, and continue to be, right. So, it has always been responsive to change because its very nature is one of change and evolution.

We don't belong to, for example, Indonesian kraton (palace) tradition whereby, you know, art is all about a formalised tradition... how well you can continue to repeat, to perform a Mahabharata wayang or something.

Ours, no. It's very free, it has always been very vibrant, and always very innovative.

And there are many, many misconceptions, for example. You look at the wayang kulit. One of the charges that has been directed at the wayang kulit is the fact that it uses the Ramayana. A 'Hindu epic'.

Firstly, there is nothing religious about the Ramayana. Even in Hindu culture. It is a parable and it is an epic tale. Nothing religious about it.

In the Malay world, the Hikayat Maharaja Wana is the Malay oral version of the Ramayana. In many ways, it's almost indistinguishable from the actual Ramayana performed in India. These are some of the complexities, you know, again.

And even that story is a generic story. Episodes of which are performed by a dalang (shadow puppeteer) and improvised upon by a dalang, right.

The puppet of Sri Rama, the puppet of Sita Dewi, the puppet of Maharaja Wana, they are generic puppets. Everytime they come to the stage, they take on different names, you know.

So, what is attributed to an individual puppet so that it's called Sri Rama, are the values and characteristics of that puppet. Not the name.

You see, these are very important distinctions that have to be made. So, you begin to appreciate how localised, how indigenised these forms become, right. And how they've been adapted, and how they fit in and settle into the whole community.

Now, if we are going to have a debate about culture, we must be able to begin a debate, if we are going to have a debate, for example, on culture and religion, we must be able to have a debate that can take into account all these factors, you see.

And to begin the process of having that debate, making sure that you can challenge fanatics, it is important that you have this knowledge.

And yet, there's just so little study, and so little exploration of this experience.

What also documentation does, I think, at the very core is give us a very deep sense of how complex we are. You know, we are simplifying ourselves all the time, and that's why I use the term 'reductivist'.

Our language becomes reductivist because of our sense of belonging to culture, community and nation also becomes very reductivist.

What would you say to people who think that these traditional forms are no longer able to help us deal with today's modern world and to understand the complexities of our world today?

It's very interesting because most people who say these things have no connection whatsoever with traditional culture. Have no understanding of its appeal, have no understanding of its function or its dynamics.

Now, every context is different, right. I'm not saying that wayang kulit can solve all our problems, that's where we go to. No, no.

All I'm talking about is that within its context, it is extremely important, ya. I am, for example, a practising Hindu who makes a pilgrimage for Thaipusam every year. Now, if someone says I cannot do that, there is a tremendous alienation that I'm going to feel for myself, and for my sense of obligation to culture, community and faith, right.

But that doesn't mean that you have to engage in it (chuckles), that it's a way of solving your problems.

We're talking about a culture that autonomises, that allows for all kinds of different contexts to find their own ways of resolving their own contradictions, and their own dilemmas and their own problems.

And that's where the question of politics becomes very important. You know, whenever we consider the question of culture, we want to run away from what has happened in the past 15 years that is, a proscription. A proscription has been imposed in the state of Kelantan which is a far cry from the kind of eccentric banning of performances that we may have by DBKL (City Hall) now and again.

This is a legislated form of proscription that contains all kinds of ideological posturings and that has one, very important objective. That is, to culturally cleanse a community. And it is a very brutal act.

It lacks, for example, the drama of TNT and dynamite and the bombing of the Bamiyan Buddha (in Afghanistan by the Taliban in 2001) but what's the difference? It's basically the inability to come to terms with the past.

And that's an extremely important factor that we can't deny. It has very serious effects on the psychology of the local community.

The Kelantan state government has remained adamant about banning mak yong, saying that is un-Islamic because it is based on fantasy and medieval elements. Is there a clash between these traditional forms and Islamic teaching?

Let's again be very careful of language. There is so much loose language in this country and especially in very serious matters like cultural politics and religious politics. Very loose language.

Let's disassociate Islam which is a faith, and by nature of it being a faith, it is philosophical and it is abstract and distinguishable from the pronouncements and the actions of Muslims.

Is it contradictory to Islam, er, some of the things you have said, 'fantasy'?

Ya, 'fantasy' and 'medieval elements'.

Let me add a few more. 'Women on stage', 'Hindu elements', er, there is also the element of, in wayang kulit, 'arouses nafsu (lust)' apparently, and a host of other charges.

The first point to make is one, how inane these things are. And let us acknowledge, (these charges) are nonsensical. They're ridiculous, they are ridiculous.

Number two, when you talk about a Muslim, when you talk about the kind of, again, ideological posturing that comes with this stance, we have to ask ourselves, what does it address and what does it deny?

It denies Islam as an experience, a historical experience in this region, in this country, and in particular, in Kelantan.

They talk about 'fantasy' and 'medieval elements', let us remember where these traditions come from. And we have to look at how Islam came to this region.

What was the Islamic experience? What was the Muslim experience in Southeast Asia? It wasn't doctrinal. (But) what we have now is a doctrinal promulgation of things supported by political power and political authority.

Islam came to this region fairly late, ya, between the 9th and the 13th century. Um, when Southeast Asia already had a very strong cultural foundation that was shaped and that was directed by animistic beliefs, and then Hindu beliefs, and Buddhist beliefs, and finally, the crest, the crest of the region was Islam.

And it came through a series of waves, you know. It didn't come through conquest. A very important factor if you want to understand the nature of Southeast Asian Islam. Didn't come through conquest which means people didn't convert at the point of a sword.

They did so willingly and they did so because they found in Islam, again, a crest to their own personalities and their own collective.

It came from a variety of sources not just from the Middle East. It came from the Middle East, but also within the Middle East, it came from a particular point in the Middle East, basically the Gulf coast Arab community who have always been a lot more open, always been a lot more cosmopolitan, always been a lot more liberal than the desert Arabs, for example.

It came from India which had an incredible cosmopolitan Muslim Hindu experience. It came from China, right. And took root here over a period of centuries, between the 9th and 13th centuries.

Another important thing was that its essential religious thrust was Sufiistic and mystical, right, which is a very, very inclusive form of religious understanding. A very, very inclusive form of religious practice which is also very deeply rooted in metaphysics and spirituality and the philisophical aspects of religion.

And that has continued all the way up to the early 20th century if you look at some of the early great Malay Muslim ulama like Tok Kenali in Kelantan who had a very deep sense of religion as a philosophical experience.

That has changed drastically over the past 50 years, or 70 years, as we begin to see greater infusion of politics in determining religious practice and religious identity. But you can't divorce things like wayang kulit from this phenomenon at all.

And I see things like mak yong, I see things like wayang kulit coming from this traditional sense of being a Muslim. That so much of the world is about metaphor, is about parable, is about negotiation, ya.

So much of our lives are speculative, you know. Constantly. Not doctrinal, right. Not doctrinal.

And not ideological. And what we see now is really a transformation or metamorphosis of this understanding of being a Muslim and what Islam is from the philosophical, from the spiritual into something doctrinal and ideological.

And things like wayang kulit and mak yong are snared and trapped in this.

Would you say then that Islam, as it was understood and practised in the past, did not force people to give up their traditional practices? I mean, both could co-exist.

Ya. Well, you know, it's not that they didn't give up. Their pre-Islamic cultural sense naturally evolved with Islam, just fit into Islamic tenets.

And there was no contradiction?

No contradiction, you know.

When you take something like traditional wood carving in Kelantan, you know, it is frowned upon by puritanical forces. Because they say, 'You worship trees.'

It's not a worship of trees. But in the traditional Muslim, mystical, Sufiistic point of view, pantheism is a very important aspect of belief.

What is pantheism? Pantheism is the belief that God exists in everything. So, you respect the environment, you respect the natural world. You don't worship the tree!

It is a particular way of locating the sensibility within the world, within nature but that kind of complexity goes when you have this terrible infusion of doctrines.

The politicisation of Islam as a religion?

I mean, that is the process. But, it's really an attempt to reduce the religion to a way that it can be easily controlled and manipulated, you see. So, it's a very deep process.

We are constantly engaging, for example, on things like, you know, big debates on murtad (apostacy) and syariah (laws) and hudud (laws) and all these things.

But, I'm sure you're beginning to understand what underlies all these impulses and all these desires and all the forces that are actually operating to make this issue of religious politics so simple, so black-and-white.

We will never get to the heart of the problem if we talk about things like murtad over and over again (chuckles) without actually going to the heart of what the anxieties are, right.

And remember that all I've said to you, it's not easily accessible or easily taught to most Muslims. I think if you asked most Malaysian Muslims, right, 'Can you tell me about the experience of Islam in this country?'. They won't be able to tell you this at all.

You look at a state like Kelantan. Women cannot be on stage. Kelantan doesn't have a matriarchal system, alright. But its economic life revolves around women. It has had a history of women controlling business, entrepreneurship, local economy.

Social life, then as a result, is based on women. Polygamy is very common (but) so was polyandry (when a woman has more than one husband).

Even the mythology of the state of Kelantan is rooted in women. Till today, for purposes of tourism, we talk about Negeri Cik Siti Wan Kembang. Negeri Puteri Saadong. What does that mean? And who are all these people? And what does it say about the Kelantanese cultural context?

When Munsyi Abdullah, who travelled by sea from the west coast of Malaya to the east and he landed in Kelantan, right, he was shocked to discover what a cosmopolitan place it was. Because he had this idea that it was tremendously backward. And he arrived at the mouth of the Kelantan River and he found that all the shops are owned by Chinese who speak perfect Malay and got along so well with the local Malay community.

And then he goes inwards, and he finds that the women dominate everything. They are out there, they are obvious, they're very manifest. They are extremely dynamic in society. And this criticism is levelled against the men whom he describes as lazy, not very intelligent, (and) they are out to gamble, drink and pick fights.

Now not much has changed (laughs) except now the whole political power (has).

But, ya, imagine in a space of 15 years, telling a society that comes with this kind of legacy, right, that a woman can't be on stage, that she has to be segregated at the counter, um, right, it affects... now, the purpose of something like this is very specific.

You know rules like these will not affect an older generation. Tell a 50-year-old Kelantanese woman she can't stand with you, she'll whack you with her handbag!

But it affects somebody who is 30 and below. Because it is repeated in schools, it is repeated and permeated within our modern system.

We send our children to school to be liberated, right, and this is the kind of thing they pick up. Things like segregation. And it brings about a great deal of cultural contradictions.

In mak yong for example, very interesting and lovely, and it's a very wonderful visual thing to see. In a mak yong community during a performance, you get the women who are the principal actors deciding on a story late in the afternoon. What story they are going to perform in the evening, right.

And it's wonderful to watch. You have four or five of these extremely dynamic, powerful and strong women sitting in the core centre. And they are talking and they are discussing and they are debating.

And then you get an outer circle of the eight, or nine, or 10 male musicians sitting there smoking and nodding in agreement. Not a word, right! Except for interjections ofBagus!' (Good), Betul (Right), or something. And it's incredible to see! It really is wonderful to see.

Now when a society is severed from all of this, what happens to the psychology? What happens to the collective psychology?

Let's get away from this kind of nostalgic exercise we're talking about. You know, how important our heritage and culture and all this is when you are not willing to actually acknowledge how powerful a role it actually plays in local communities, (and) in individuals in that local community. And her sense of a collective community.

We must stop being sentimentalists. We are terrible sentimentalists in this country. When we talk about heritage and history, you know, it's all 'La, di, da.' Nice stories and so on.

No, it has tremendous meaning. And history, the past, culture are all very important.

And that's why it's very important for puritanical political forces either to suppress it, or to control it, or to construct it in such a way that it becomes completely neutralised, right.

That is the problem with our culture today. That it doesn't empower. It has been neutralised.

Unesco has certified mak yong as a world cultural heritage. What exactly does that mean in real terms for us?

I made a comment in that way. My comment was basically that question. What does it mean to us?

On a practical level, right, it reaffirms what I said earlier that at a global level, there is deep interest in the culture of Malaysia. And there's a deep interest because the culture of Malaysia encapsulates certain things that are very instructive to the world today. Issues of pluralism, right. Issues of religion. Issues of women in religion. Issues of multiculturalism.

Through culture, we speak of these things and we set an example. So, on a practical level, that's an affirmation, and that's an important acknowledgement to have.

But now we have that acknowledgement, what are we going to do about it? Are we going to gather 13 to 15 girls together and learn a few mak yong movements? And get a group of 10 boys so they can learn to play the instruments?

Good, that's stage one. After that? How much are they going to be didedahkan or exposed to all the aspects of ilmu dalam, you know, inner knowledge of the art form? Of the function and dynamics of the art form in the community?

How, for example, are groups like Pusaka, how is a body of scholarship going to be created, right, to further facilitate something like the Unesco thing?

More importantly, what kind of scholarship are you going to create? You know, is it just about documenting, you know, sitting down and writing all these stories, or is it again about providing an intellectual context, making intellectual sense of what all this means? And how it can further instruct us! On who and what we are as a people. And why we matter in a cultural sense.

And if these things don't happen, then it's a badge you're going to wear on your lapel (chuckles) that doesn't mean anything at all. Really. I've always said this, I'll say this again.

If you do not have an understanding of the more profound aspects of mak yong, aspects of psychology, aspects of community relations, then mak yong is just damn boring movements. Very, very dull and boring movements, that's it.

There's a reason why they move in that way. Gerak angin to get their senses, your bodily senses aroused and opened so that you do not feel oppressed as an individual.

If you are going to make those movements and you don't understand that this is about getting your individual self opened and alive, then what's the point? What is the point?

But also it's an important kind of marker in that it says that there is a world community out there that appreciates and acknowledges mak yong as something that is important to identity, and yet you have politicians from Kelantan itself who are saying, the community should do away with it.

Yes, and again, look at what kind of language they use. 'Wipe out', 'suppress', er, and things of an extremely violent variety.

And, again, as I say, we lack the more dramatic aspects. We don't have blood on the streets in Kelantan because of what is happening.

But, don't underestimate the kind of violence that is inflicted on the self when you are torn away from this kind of practice, you see.

And also the kind of language that is introduced into the discourse of religion and of the Malay. Things like syirik (to be guilty of polytheism). Now, syirik is a very, very important charge. It can't just be loosely levelled at people. Kurafat (heretical) and things like that, you know. It violates, it really vulgarises religious language.

And what it does is, when language is used like that, it's just so incredibly violent and ferocious, it creates a great deal of fear and anxiety, er, and it begins to stunt the experience of the religion itself.

Very, very violent language. They use it as if they are allowed to use it. They are not allowed to say it! You can't simply issue fatwas calling people syirik and kafir and kurafat and these things. That's nonsense.

But we allow it because it's a siege mentality. Who's going to counter?

I can say all I want but I, you know, will then eventually just be, 'Oh, kafir. Apa yang dia tahu? (He's an infidel. What does he know?)' And things like this.

Again, I look at things like wayang kulit as having very, very important relevance, in terms of things like religious politics, to movements by certain groups in this country to call for the imposition of sedition laws on non-Muslims who speak on Islam. Where does it end?

When you use this kind of language, it's not just about words, it's about a mindset that you begin to create, you see. And I believe, so much of religion is this country now, particularly Islam, is caught up in this siege mentality. And then again, there are groups calling for the imposition of sedition laws on non-Muslims speaking on Islam.

What nonsense! My first degree is in Islamic thought. Of course, I know about Islam. And why shouldn't I comment on it?

My father (Prof Dr Khoo Kay Kim) is a leading historian in this country. So what, he's now supposed to teach Malay history without speaking about Islam, is it? Where does it end?

And it really begins in things like, the moment you can say to your own culture, I'm somehow impure you know, a part of me is impure because that's what it is, isn't it?

You're somehow unclean because you have these influences or these elements. What kind of psychology are you beginning to breed?

It is a very serious problem in Islam today. Everywhere, right. How are Muslims dealing with the question of plurality, not just with the outside world, but within their own world!

Remember, the Taliban is not just about its engagement and its enmity of the outside world. It also has very deep enemies within its own self (chuckles), ya.

And the term I use is 'cultural cleansing' so that you create a void, you create a vacuum

The Culture, Arts and Heritage Ministry has indicated strong support, including financial resources under the Ninth Malaysia Plan, for the revival of these traditional forms. Do you think it's too little, too late?

Let me just say this about the new ministry, ok. When I spent most of my journalistic years in the Star, and I was an arts and culture journalist, I think I spent a lot of my efforts haranguing the last administration to have this independent ministry of culture, arts and heritage.

We have that now. And as I said, we have been encouraged by their willingness to engage with independent, autonomous institutions such as ours.

I'm also grateful, and we have come to a stage in this country where we have to be grateful for such things, to have a deeply intelligent minister at the helm. Because in my years as a journalist, I was also confronted with the former two ministers of culture, which were abysmal to say the very least.

And a minister (the present one, Datuk Seri Dr Rais Yatim) who is engaged in the contemplation of culture. These are very important things to acknowledge.

I think their financial resources have been lessened a little. That's fine because it's still a lot of money but we have to be very clear, I think the ministry has to be very clear, as to what it is it is willing to invest in on a long term basis.

I think there's been a lot of attempting to popularise culture in an attempt to make sure that culture permeates the society. That's all great. Very good. But there must also be serious scholarship. There must be resources poured into serious and credible and viable generation of ideas concerning culture in this country and what it means in a deeper sense, right.

This is culture and intellectual engagement. Activity is not enough. Construction of institutions and buildings and all these kinds of things, not enough.

At the core of any effort at revitalising culture is ideas, is intellectual engagement, and with serious scholarship so that we have a very clear sense of what culture means in all its dimensions.

And I know not all the resources can be poured into these things but I hope that sufficient resources, and again resources that will eventually produce the kind of scholarship and intellectual foundation of culture that this country so desperately needs.

We lost several masters last year...

Including my teacher. Great loss. Great, great loss.

This was Dalang Dollah (Abdullah Ibrahim, better known as Dalang Baju Merah), right? And it doesn't seem as if there is a new generation of Kelantanese, for example, who are attracted to these traditional forms, or who are emerging as future masters. Is the younger generation losing their cultural heritage? Do they feel disconnected from it?

Erm. We have lost, in all the years that I've worked there now in Kelantan, close to 15 years, I've seen master after master die at an average of one per year.

Dalang Abdullah's death was, for me personally, the biggest blow. He was my mentor, he was my teacher, he was really like a father to me. And he was my foundation in Kelantan.

He was also one of the most intelligent, witty, funny, subversive, stubborn man I've ever encountered. His spirit of rebellion was incredible!

I remember his rebelliousness. He didn't just deal with the PAS government. He dealt with cultural bureaucrats from the Ministry of Culture all those years ago who told him he should perform a different kind of wayang kulit , that it should be tamed, not be so naugthy (chuckles).

And he resisted. He resisted for 30 years. And because he possesses that very distinctive wayang temperament (laughs).

What wayang temperament is is another book altogether. But yes, his passing basically marks or signifies the passing of an entire, not just generation, but a particular attitude and particular approach to traditional theatre.

Things like wayang kulit, mak yong, and so on are not dead. There are younger practitioners taking it on but they are not of the same (pauses) gravitas, and they are not of the same stature. And they do not possess the kind of deep knowledge of the tradition as the past masters.

Dalang Dollah used to laugh at younger dalangs. He used to mock them, really. He called them 'TV dalang'. And what he meant by 'TV dalang' was basically, you performed a wayang as if it were a TV show, right.

And so, it was all about getting two puppets together and bashing them, and making a few coarse jokes, vulgar jokes, and entertaining the audience.

For him, wayang was different. He was hugely popular but he combined entertainment with tremendous skill, great understanding of character. And what is understanding of character? It is understanding of human nature. And the battles that go on between human beings. And of course, he had a deep knowledge of the metaphorical dimensions of wayang and the parablic dimensions of wayang.

You don't get that now with the younger dalang. In this way, I'm deeply pessimistic. I do not think that wayang kulit or mak yong will die or go extinct. But I think they will just lose all sense of the tremendous vitality they once had.

Is there no way of regaining it?

Er, it's hard to say. I don't know. That I don't know.

Because it's not just about getting the knowledge, you see. It's about being of a certain temperament, right.

And many of the older practitioners complain about this. That the younger generation is really less open. Their minds are less open and their spirits are less open. So, we may have progressed in terms of facilities and assistance and so on.

But the older generation of performers, many of them are oralists, they're not literate. But their sense of the world is so much vaster, and they always complain that the younger generation do not have that vast appreciation of what the world, they use the word dunia, ya, is and can be.

As for the young, when we host performances in Kelantan, we get a very, very good audience. Pusaka makes it a point to host performances in local settings. We (are) talking basically village setting, kampung settings. Deep sometimes, in Bachok, or wherever it is.

And we never get fewer than 300 people at a performance, including some very young people. But the attitude of the young is very interesting. Because do they feel disconnected from it? Ya, perhaps slightly.

Erm, and they are ambivalent about what all this means. And very often their response is one of uncertainty, and it's a very awkward kind of response. Except for young kids, of course. Wayang kulit is stunning to see for young kids. Eight-year-olds, nine-year-olds, they are fixated.

But you know we are doing - I've just received this (DiGi) Amazing Malaysian thing (laughs self-consciously) - but we do this incredible project, erm, with dikir barat and mak yong music and wayang kulit, and I think we are engaging about 50 or 60 children around the local community, from the schools, and I'll be very, very interested then at looking at how - and again, these are autonomous efforts, ya, they're not ministry guided or anything - and I'm very keen on trying to identify the psychology that goes on there and really looking for one or two younger students who really have it in them, who are captivated by it, and then maybe engaging them to really study seriously and take it up as something they could do.

You're not Kelantanese. You're not Malay. And yet you have steeped your adult life in learning and preserving these traditional forms. How did that happen? And what has it meant to you personally?

I love that question. It's always asked of me. And I used to get very irritated at one time but you know...

Remember, I'm as hybrid as hybrid can be. There are two answers to this question, both of which I will give you.

One is, personal and autobiographical and says a lot about the nature of upbringing and how it is absolutely crucial and essential.

Because my parents are wonderful people. My father, he's a man who firmly believes in the principle of cultural interaction. Firmly. Very principled in that.

And he was also one of the architects of the nation, whom I think, and I say I think, right, (because) he may not agree with me, I think has been very disappointed by how the nation has evolved.

But nevertheless, in terms of upbringing, my father is Chinese, my mother is Indian. And my father is a minority among the Chinese. Peranakan, ya. My mother is a minority among the Indians. Jaffna Tamil.

So, you have this minority within minority condition, which is a very interesting dynamic. And I was raised by a Malay woman, right. All my formative years as a child was spent with this Malay woman.

And so, it was an extremely multicultural house. I was instantly exposed to a whole variety of languages, to a whole variety of cultural experiences, and to a climate of openness within the very setting of my home that has made me hold on to and made me root myself very firmly in that openness, which is cultural openness.

And what I also witnessed in my own home, of course, is how this is played out in practical terms. What kind of negotiations you make. And they don't need to be articulated, they don't need to be politicised. (For example), we don't cook pork at home.

And my home name is Din. (Laughs) Very, very bizarre sometimes, walking on the streets, and (somebody yells out) 'Din!' You know, you actually turn and look. I react, absolutely.

So, you begin to see how these things are put into practice. How these negotiations are made, how these concessions are made. And the wealth and the richness that comes from that experience.

I find it impossible, it is impossible in flesh and blood and in the very core of my existence, to not go into a cultural context and not feel a sense of belonging. I just find it impossible.

I travel widely now. There's no cultural context into which I go and do not feel curiosity and do not feel a sense of belonging. And do not feel this working in my mind of making associations, you know. The human connectedness.

You know I did my Masters in archaeology which is very, very interesting because you begin to understand when you study and begin to look at the earliest human civilisations, that we were, from the very beginning, connected. Whether it was through conflict, or whether it was through confluence. The nice way or the negative way, human beings are always connected.

And I'm then extremely fortunately to be born one, into that family, two, into this country, and three into this region that for me encapsulates, in very firm ways, what cultural openness is all about.

That we are continuing to refute and deny that these days says a lot about where we have come at least, politically.

But nevertheless, we still have the opportunity to appreciate all that.

People say, you're not Kelantanese, you're not Malay (chuckles). Well, I've never had problems with Kelantan. When I went there, I was extremely nervous because you have this stereotype of what a Kelantanese (is), that somehow they are extremely insular or they're not very welcoming or accommodating. What is the word they use? Clique-ish!

I didn't find that at all. I found the Kelantanese community, in particular the traditional theatre community in which I found myself, to be extremely sophisticated, very cultivated, and very open.

And a lot of this I saw, of course, in my own dalang. And you know, Malay-ness is all about belonging.

What is Malay-ness? Malay-ness is about the fact that everybody can belong, you know. It is so incredibly complex culturally. What we know of the Malay today is political.

If you are asked to define the Malay, you do so in Constitutional terms. Not in cultural terms because the Malay world experience in this country is so vast. The Negri Sembilan experience is completely different culturally from the cultural experience of its neighbour, Johor, or Malacca. Of course, Kelantan then becomes a completely alien place altogether.

Now this is a problem for politics. It's not a problem for culture. In fact, in cultural terms, this is what wealth, and this is what richness is all about.

So, I have never felt alienated. And even when I was in school, as a mixed child, it was very difficult, all the jibes in an increasingly racialised and polarised society. That was the beginning, 1970s onwards when you really had this kind of intense racial feelings. But, I felt most comfortable with the Malays. Somehow there was this cultural openness among Malays that I didn't find even in members of my own two races, the Chinese and the Indians.

And what this means, of course, in the broader sense, is that the Malay world is incredibly open and that it has been forged and it has been comprised of so many influences and that it has a capacity to draw people and allow influences to settle very easily within its own worldview and framework.

That is what it has meant to me, personally. It has also given me a very deep insight into understanding how the workings of history and culture are so interconnected and so inter-related. That's on the positive side.

On the negative side, you also see, for me, the kind of terrible problems that increasing politicisation of race, religion and society can bring about.

On the one hand, I deal with absolute, great masters. When you look at Dalang Dollah perform his opening of the buka panggung, amazing storm clouds that he can create with the tree of life. That's one aspect of the work.

The other aspect of this work is this kind of rigid, ugly, vulgar language and personality. You take a person like Annuar Tan (of PAS). Does he understand sophistication? Does he understand cultural depth? I don't think so.

To me personally, on the intellectual front, is to try and fight against, or challenge this kind of reductivist language.

You know Kelantan, in the field of anthropology, Kelantan is a very important subject. It was one of the greatest cases in the 1960s, 1970s of something that was called psychoanthropology. That is, the anthropology of psychology. How people deal, for example, with depression and so on.

People like Raymond Firth, Carol Laderman, Clive Kessler did formative studies on Kelantan, on things like main puteri. How, from that kind of intellectual level can we be reduced to the kind of vulgar and debased context we find ourselves today in, says a lot about us.

What else, do you think, needs to be done to revive these traditional forms?

On the practical side, a great deal needs to be done. We need to create awareness in terms of appreciating the complex of ideas and the structure of traditional theatre, its nature, its appeal in community, what it means to community, how it shapes individuals and so on.

This great complex of ideas. And we need to create a strong intellectual foundation.

On the broader front, what needs to be done is, I think, Malaysia, as a culture, community, society, and only then, nation, must commit itself to greater self discovery and introspection.

We must matter as people.

Our problem now is, I think, as a community, culture, and so on, that we take ourselves seriously. And that is why we don't see the kind of social investment, we don't see the kind of great development taking place in culture, and by extension then, we don't see a commitment to really generating ideas, discussing ideas, talking at the most profound and far-reaching and visionary ways.

You know, we're all fighting for a better society, it seems. But, it's all on a kind of act and react kind of basis. It's not one that is visionary. And you know, this (Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi) administration, for example, I think is a very important administration. Because even in terms of culture, and so on, what this country needs is one, it needs to come to terms with the past 22 years because I think we bring with us very deep wounds, right, about who we are as a people, and what really our desires and aspirations are.

There is, for example, a kind of frustration creeping in with this new administration, but we have to be very aware that what is proposed is very radical, right. And is very progressive but whether we have the resolve, whether we have the foresight, and whether we have the openness to begin to engage and talk about what we really are and who we really are. Then, everything is going to be neutralised.

My fear with Malaysia is not that it's going to fragment or break but our greatest challenge now is battling a culture of mediocrity and nothingness. The great challenge for our country is whether we can transcend our culture of mediocrity and nothingness.

--- end ---

Pic from this link

Image of the Architect

Once upon a time, architects and engineers worked their designs using t-squares, set squares and drawing boards. Now they use computers of course.

I belong to the generation in Malaysia that started with the Imperial Units of Measurement in the beginning of my studies and had to change to the Metric System when I was still in the university. I am also those who did not get the full benefit of learning how to design using the computers and I believe people who are 10 years younger than me had the same dilemma although they are more computer savvy due to the exposure and expectations of their time at work. People younger than that started to work using the computer fully and those below 35 should have been able to pick up the skills of using Computer Aided Drawings tools and such, either at school (university) or at work.

Being a lecturer now I have the excuse, but I wonder if people my age who works as an architect have the skills to do CAD... I know for a fact that some do not and that might prove to be detrimental to their technical skills CV.


Pic taken from link

LIVERPOOL FC ARE THE WINNERS!

You saw it just now. You saw it last year! Liverpool Football Club are the Winners! This year with the FA Cup 2006, last year with the Champion's League Winner's Cup 2005...and in both games we were down and we we came back!

WE ARE THE COMEBACK KINGS!
We are Liverpool Football Club!


Last year Dudek was the Hero, this year Reina was the Hero!







And in both years we had our Captain Fantastic, Stevie Gerrard as the Ultimate Hero!






We are the Champions!






You'll Never Walk Alone... Liverpool FC, you are my inspiration...


I shall have my own comeback!

Rafa, you're the man!






Pics from this link.

FA Cup Final 2006

(FA Cup - the prize for the winner...who will it be? Liverpool or West Ham?)




(Pic above was taken during the Champion's League Final Match in Istanbul 2005. What jubilation it was for being victorious. Can we repeat another victory again this May 2006 with the FA Cup?)

It will be a brilliant match between Liverpool FC and West Ham United at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff (pic below), that's for sure. I am so excited about the match because it will mark a certain milestone in Rafa's team, and cap a wonderful season where we ended 3rd in the Premier League just short of 9 points off the leaders.



Nowadays I find myself always humming to the tune of "You'll Never Walk Alone" (see lyrics in the last post) to entertain myself and make myself happy. There has been a lot of pressure on myself to complete my work and I just cannot concentrate much, and has been so poor at it.

Oh well, I should be going back home soon enough and I wish I had gone back earlier because I would have had more time to use to prepare for how to work in Malaysia and get my PhD done at the same time. But I have been always too ambitious and do not really know how to judge how much to work during the time given, and always fall short of my own expectations.





Wow, look at the jubilation of the Liverpool FC players (in the pic above) when they realised that they had won the Champion's League after Dudek saved the penalty. Even though Dudek did not figure that much in this season's campaign and we will see Pepe Reina in goal in Cardiff, Jerzy Dudek will always be a symbol of the victory that was won on penalties. Below is a pic done in retro B&W style that showed just how much he was being appreciated.




Liverpool fans are the best in the world, and many had said so (including Johan Cruyff) who witnessed the never ending faith that the fans showed when they sang YNWA at half-time to give support to the players. Even though the team was down 3-0 at half-time... Yes, Liverpool fans are really something. Even when they lost to Benfica in this years CL competition, they cheered Benfica as the worthy winners at the end of the match. And if you go to http://www.redandwhitekop.com you will still get posts and threads by the Benfica fans who always kept giving well-wishes to the Liverpool fans, noticeably for the last Semi Final Match against Chelsea. Surely other football clubs should get jealous of Liverpool fans.





And look at that huge flag (pic above), the one that left a gap to be filled later for the 5th Champion's League Cup Winners Logo to be inserted. Who are these Liverpool fans, so reverent are they to support their team. Unbelievable...






And finally, here he is in the pic above, the talismanic captain, Captain Fantastic, Stevie Gerrard, and it was just a little under a year ago when he was considering to leave the club, due to pressure and miscommunication between him and the club. He has grown in stature and after winning the PFA Player of the Year award recently, that showed really why people admire him so much and I bet he is so glad now that he did not leave.

Good Luck Stevie and the Liverpool FC Team...To Rafa Benitez, I salute you!

(All pics taken from photo gallery of www.redandwhitekop.com)

Hillsborough Tragedy

In the memory of the Hillsborough tragedy on 15th April 1989 where 96 Liverpool Fans died at the Leppings Lane end of the stadium in Sheffield, I would like to share the song, You'll Never Walk Alone...

When you walk through a storm
Hold your head up high
And don't be afraid of the dark.
At the end of the storm
There's a golden sky
And the sweet silver
Song of a lark.
Walk on through the wind
Walk on through the rain
Though your dreams
Be tossed and blown.
Walk on
walk on
With hope in your hearts
I And you'll never walk alone
You'll never walk alone.
Walk on
walk on
. . .

One survivor's account of the Hillsborough's tragedy
Alan Hansen on Hillsborough

Act for Persons with Disabilities

A member of Parliament from the opposition party, DAP, blogged about the Act for Persons with Disabilities, and there some things that I still am not convinced that the Act will be strong enough.

I am questioning the Act although a lot of people are excited about it, including myself, I would like to know - How much teeth that the Act has to enforce things? The government must also start a commission to help monitor that act, but we have to give the government some reasons to get that commission going. One thing which I kept hearing / reading is less than half of 1% of the population is disabled people, and they estimate at 1%. And then when they build the infrastructure, they allocate only 1% for disabled people, ie accessible carparks, accessible housing etc. Imagine for 100 carparks only 1 is accessible. I have sat in meetings and witness that's how they do it. Based on population. But I read somewhere that the estimated number is 6-10% of the population. So how?

I think one priority that we must push for is the census taking done properly for disabled people, and the registration process by JKM. UNESCAP gave guidelines on how government should do this in their website.

The definition of disablities as well need to be enshrined somewhere. Hopefully the Act will be a good one, if not back to square one again… here's hoping and praying…

(I commented this on Peter Tan's blog)

Series on designers: Moholy-Nagy 1895-1946

I remembered Ed Brierley my Architecture Theory lecturer mentioning about Moholy-Nagy many times in his lectures. I found the name to be strange as you don't pronouce the "y". The author of the Guardian article introduced this Hungarian born Bauhaus artist as "the most inventive and engaging of all the Bauhaus artists, galvanising the movement to ever-greater heights." When you read about Moholy-Nagy in the text books, he gets a mention now and then, but not as much as Walter Gropius, Mies Van der Rohe, Marcel Bruer, Paul Klee and the others. She further regretted that, "What a shame Britain never embraced Laszlo Moholy-Nagy when he fled the Nazis in the 1930s." I wonder why and I proceeded to read the article, here in its entirety:

The Fiery Stimulator



By Fiona MacCarthy
Saturday March 18, 2006
Guardian

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, one of the leading figures in the Bauhaus, arrived to work in England in 1935, two years after that experimental school of art and design was closed down by the Nazis. His English was not fluent. Taken to a party in London by John Betjeman, he said smilingly to his hostess: "Thank you for your hostilities."

The remark was not entirely inappropriate: Moholy-Nagy's reception in this country was not an open-armed one. Even so-called modernists found him baffling, the boiler-suited technocrat with the magnificent grin. His sheer versatility was suspect in a country where they liked you to be one thing or another. Painter, sculptor, photographer, film-maker, industrial designer, typographer: what was Moholy-Nagy not? The Bauhaus itself, which placed great emphasis on programmes and production, seemed alien to a nation still steeped in the gentler traditions of the arts and crafts. London Transport's design impresario Frank Pick expressed a widely held artistic xenophobia in dismissing Moholy-Nagy as "a gentleman with a modernistic tendency who produces pastiches of photographs of a surrealistic type, and I am not at all clear why we should fall for this. It is international, or at least continental. Let us leave the continent to pursue their own tricks."

When he arrived in London, however, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy was at the height of his extraordinary powers.



Laszlo Nagy had been born almost 40 years before, on a wheat farm in southern Hungary, near the village of Moholy, whose name he later appropriated. His father deserted the family and he was brought up by his mother and his grandmother. He looked back at that childhood as "a terrible great quietness". The young Laszlo began to study law in Budapest but soon afterwards was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army, fighting in Galicia and on the ferocious Russian front in the first world war. He was wounded, hospitalised and suffered horribly. On and around the battlefields, he made his first drawings and wrote poetry. One of these poems, Light Vision, deals with principles that from then on were to obsess him: "Space, time, material - are they one with light?"

Through the 1920s, Moholy-Nagy was part of the new artistic movement sweeping across Europe, a revolutionary movement in which representational and story-telling art was jettisoned in favour of the abstract, primordial, elemental. Functional design for mass production and mass distribution was seen as a means of repairing the devastating social damage done by war. This was the brilliantly iconoclastic period in which Mondrian and Van Doesburg were pursing the objective harmonies of rectangles and primary colours in their paintings, and Gabo was conceiving his constructivist monument to the industrial revolution. Moholy-Nagy was especially attuned to the Russian suprematists Malevich and Lissitsky, with their visions of aerodromes and radio stations, architecture of mass communication for a brave new world. A famous group photograph of the Constructivist and Dadaist Congress held in Weimar in 1922 shows Moholy-Nagy alongside Hans Arp and Tristan Tzara, taunters of the bourgeoisie.

Moholy-Nagy was fundamentally a painter. "It is my gift to project my vitality, my building power, through light, colour, form. I can give life as a painter," he wrote at the end of that most destructive war. His early visual experiments took the form of a return to fundamentals, exploring the relations of colour, shape, position by glueing coloured strips of paper on to backgrounds of varying tones. One of the attractions that constructivism had for him was that it expressed the pure forms of nature: "the direct colour, the spatial rhythm, the equilibrium of form".

At the same time, he was fascinated by the city, by the skyscrapers and factories, the fast-developing industrial landscape of the early 20th century. Moholy-Nagy thrived on ideas of dynamic progress, of mechanisation, the inherent possibilities of new materials. As he wrote in MA (Today), the avant-garde magazine then being published in Vienna: "Everyone is equal before the machine. I can use it; so can you. It can crush me; the same can happen to you." His grasp of new technologies was prophetic.

Moholy-Nagy was entranced by the mechanised production of artworks, ridiculing the artist's traditional stance as individual creator. In 1922, his Telephone Paintings were exhibited at Der Sturm gallery in Berlin. The series of three enamel panels had been ordered from a factory specialising in commercial signs. The geometric motif of vertical bar and two crucifix forms was identical on all three panels; only the panel sizes differed. Moholy-Nagy later claimed that he had ordered them by telephone, giving his instructions to the sign painter by means of graph paper and a standard industrial colour chart. This may not be entirely true: Moholy-Nagy could be a joker. Still, he titled the Telephone Paintings not with words but with letters and numbers like a factory production code.



He foresaw photography as the artform of the future. As the discovery of one-point perspective gave creative impetus to the Renaissance, so Moholy-Nagy realised that technical advances in photography and film would transform social and cultural values as the 20th century progressed. He predicted: "It is not the person ignorant of writing but the one ignorant of photography who will be the illiterate of the future."

Moholy-Nagy settled in Berlin in 1920 and married soon after. His Czech-born wife, Lucia, had trained as a photographer and they worked together in developing the photogram, a photographic image made without a camera when objects on coated paper are exposed to light. They developed photoplastics, fluent, lyrical and curious photomontages, sometimes with drawn additions, which had enormous influence on 1960s graphics. At the same time, Moholy-Nagy was one of the first designers to realise the potential of photography in advertising and commercial art.

He was a born teacher, convinced that everyone had talent. In 1923, he joined the staff of the Bauhaus, which had been founded by Walter Gropius at Weimar four years before. Kandinsky, Klee, Feininger and Schlemmer were already teaching there. He was brought in at a time when the school was undergoing a decisive change of policy, shedding its original emphasis on handcraft. The driving force was now "the unity of art and technology". Moholy-Nagy was entrusted with teaching the preliminary course in principles of form, materials and construction - the basis of the Bauhaus's educational programme. His co-tutor on the course was the painter Josef Albers, whose career was to develop in parallel with his. Albers and Moholy-Nagy are joint subjects of a major exhibition at Tate Modern, London, which serves as a reminder of the exhilaration of being at the Bauhaus at that time.

The hyper-energetic Moholy-Nagy also ran the metal workshop at the Bauhaus in Weimar and later in the purpose-designed buildings at Dessau. The metal shop was the most successful of departments at the Bauhaus in fulfilling Gropius's vision of art for mass production, redefining the role of the artist to embrace that of designer as we have now come to understand the term. The workshop experimented with glass and Plexiglas as well as metal in developing the range of lighting that has almost come to define the Bauhaus. The lamps were produced in small production runs, and some were taken up by outside factories. The royalties made a welcome contribution to the school's always precarious finances. Wilhelm Wagenfeld's table lamp, with its sheeny opaque dome, has remained in production and spawned many imitations. As we choose our pseudo-Bauhaus lighting from Ikea, it is Moholy-Nagy we must thank.



"Fiery stimulator", "principal drummer boy and teeth chatterer": the recollections of other Bauhaus masters and his students have left a strong impression of Moholy-Nagy's galvanic personality. He became in effect chief publiciser of the Bauhaus, designing the layout for its publications and directing the typography for the "Bauhaus books", textbooks of Bauhaus principles. Through his "new typography", Moholy-Nagy set an unmistakable visual image for the school using simple modern letter forms, strong colour, intriguing combinations of photography and text. Single letters, vowels, consonants would be isolated and treated as compositional elements. This typographic approach was serious yet comedic, as was the Bauhaus itself.

It was also at the Bauhaus that Moholy-Nagy began the project that was to preoccupy him over the next decade and take its place in his mythology as a kind of alter ego, a Frankenstein's monster. This is the Light Prop for an Electric Stage, a huge kinetic sculpture for the theatre composed of colour, light and movement: light as performance art. The light prop takes the form of a cubic box containing a glass and polished metal mechanism designed to stand alone on a darkened stage. The audience watches, through a porthole in the box, the machine's direct response to a two-minute illumination sequence created by 116 coloured lightbulbs flashing on and off.

In 1930, the light prop was the hero of Moholy-Nagy's abstract film Light Play: Black-White-Grey. Though I knew the work well from illustrations, it was only last summer that I came face to face with the lifesize replica at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. I found myself agreeing with Moholy-Nagy: its effect was magical beyond belief.

By the time the light prop was at last completed, he was embarking on yet another life. Moholy-Nagy was now remarried, to Sybil Pietsch, a film scriptwriter he had worked with in Berlin. As the German political situation darkened, they travelled hopefully to London via Holland. Moholy-Nagy's friendship with JG Crowther, science correspondent of the then Manchester Guardian, had encouraged him to seek refuge in this country. He was also influenced by his reading of Voltaire's Lettres Philosophiques sur les Anglais, which convinced him that England was a haven of free speech.

Of the influx of mainly Jewish refugees arriving in England in the 1930s, many were artists, architects, designers. Moholy-Nagy had been preceded by his former Bauhaus colleagues Gropius and Marcel Breuer. He and Sybil joined them briefly at Lawn Road Flats in Hampstead, one of London's few modernist buildings, before moving into their own house in Golders Green.

There was a solidarity among the emigres. A touching picture of Moholy-Nagy at this period shows him on the promenade at Bexhill-on-Sea photographing the just completed De La Warr pavilion, whose architect, Erich Mendelsohn, was another recent exile from Berlin. Moholy-Nagy's fellow Hungarian Alexander Korda commissioned him to design special effects for the science fiction film Things to Come. He was asked to make a film about the sex life of the lobster, at a time when David Attenborough was still a boy. A quizzical Moholy-Nagy spent several weeks on the Sussex coast getting to know the fishermen, grappling with their dialect, recording their families and close community. At the other end of the social spectrum, he took photographs for Bernard Fergusson's book Portrait of Eton and John Betjeman's Oxford University Chest. Where Sybil responded to 1930s England with an often explosive impatience at its snobbery, Moholy-Nagy remained unemotional, professional. The English class structure was the object of his fascinated observation.

But Moholy-Nagy was not totally cold-shouldered. He designed the publicity for Jack Pritchard's English modernist Isokon Furniture Company. One leaflet included a typically dreamlike small drawing of a figure floating in a bath, suggesting that a Breuer Long Chair gave a similar sensation. Imperial Airways commissioned him to design a mobile exhibition to tour the British empire in a railroad car, promoting the still-novel idea of air travel. He became display consultant for the menswear store Simpsons of Piccadilly, bemusing passersby with his abstract compositions of striped shirts and bowler hats. But these activities were desultory in relation to Moholy-Nagy's far-reaching design philosophy.

In 1936, he returned to Berlin intending to record the Olympics on 16mm film. His aim was to investigate spectator psychology, pursuing the physiological contrasts between the international visitors and the rabid German nationalists. At the entrance to the stadium, he met a former Bauhaus student now in SS uniform. His ex-pupil attempted to persuade him that by joining up with Hitler he could eventually influence the Nazis. The episode so disgusted him that he left Berlin immediately. Not long after, Moholy-Nagy's paintings were removed from public galleries in Essen, Hanover and Mannheim, branded "degenerate art".

Moholy-Nagy sailed from Southampton in the SS Manhattan in July 1937. He had been appointed head of the New Bauhaus in Chicago. Joseph Albers, who had stayed on at the Bauhaus in Dessau until its closure by the Nazis, was by this time also in America, teaching at the radical Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Gropius now held the chair of architecture in Harvard. America appeared a more fertile ground than Britain for the promulgation of the Bauhaus's ideals.

Moholy-Nagy, ever questioning, observed that in the US, "the provocative statement is constantly annulled by chequebook and cocktail party. Am I on the same way?" The most inventive and engaging of all the Bauhaus artists died of leukaemia in 1946, bequeathing to the world one of the prime examples of mass-produced design of the mid-20th century - the 1951 Parker pen.



See the current exhibition:
Albers and Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World is at Tate Modern, London SE1, until June 4. Box office: 020-7887 8888.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

Pictures in this blog taken from this website and this website. The article was reproduced in its entirety and was not intended to mislead the reader that I had written it. This blog is purely for my private consumption and academic purposes.