From Serian to Mongkos

I have been staying for almost a week in a small town Serian, about 50 km away from Kuching the capital city of Sarawak, providing advisory services to a few state-owned oil palm estates here. It was my last day today visiting an estate in Mongkos and the estate sent their driver to pick me up from the one and only hotel in Serian early in the morning.

The old guy who has been working for about 25 years as a tractor driver transporting fruit bunches from the estate to the mill was reassigned to be a driver taking guests and collecting mails a couple of years ago due to his old ailment. I have known this old guy since a few years ago and many a time while fetching me to and fro the estate, this talkative old man telling me lots of stories, more appropriately his life stories.

This time around the old guy was so annoyed with his daughter who was supposedly on a boarding school in Serian, decided to quit the school even that there is only a few more weeks before her SPM examination. The old man was both furious and sad, as a laborer his whole life, earning a meager of salary to support his family, he has high hope on his children to study hard and excel in academic so that they could live a better lives than him, but alas none of his children completes the secondary school so the old man who are going to retire in a couple of months time naturally feels very disappointed.

As we drove closer to Mongkos, he saw kampong folks walking on the road going to work in their small padi field nearby, the old man pointed at them and said that probably his children were destined to be the laborers like them, earning their living in a hard way. Then he started to criticize the Prime Miniter Najib for not giving bonus to the civil servant but just a token of RM 500. I listened to this old guy patiently although he was actually telling me the same story again and again with some updates of latest hiccups whenever he fetches me from Serian to Mongkos.

It is just like when I’m travelling from remote area in Serian to the metropolitan Kuching, you see the changes in almost every aspects of life, from broken long-houses, scattered padi fields and black pepper farms, bad stretches of roads filled with potholes to high rise buildings, high-tech factories and sophisticated expressways, the complexity of life is also as such I guess. When the Prime Minister is proposing another 100-storey building to be built in KL, perhaps more attention should also be given to uplift the livelihoods of millions of people who are still struggling in poverty.

Express buses going way too fast

Few weeks back while renewing my wife’s car road tax I was told that I could only renew it for six months as I have summons not settled and thus being blocked by the traffic police. So reluctantly I went to the Traffic Police HQ in Seremban 2 and not surprisingly there were all together 12 summons not settled since a few years ago not on my wife’s car which is registered under my name but my own car. It was the latest 3 summons that causing the traffic police to block the renewal of the road tax so like it or not, I paid RM 300 each and got clearance from the traffic police then I went back to JPJ to get my wife’s car renewed the road tax for a year.

That’s the price you pay for speeding, but as a frequent traveler due to work requirement, I guess I can’t really avoid getting summons unless I can abide to the laws all the way. But when you are on a long straight road, highway especially, it’s just boring to be slow. But going fast doesn’t mean that it is reckless driving as it depends on the situation. If there are too many cars on the road, it will be dangerous to be fast as you would not know what other cars may do suddenly but if there is a light traffic, I guess it is ok to be fast a little bit.

I have seen too many times that lorries driving very slowly on the third lane and these people should be summoned for obstructing traffic as there were long queue of vehicles following at the back. I have seen too frequently that express buses driving way faster than they should be. You can ask the frequent express bus passengers and 9 out of 10 will tell you their bad experiences of how express buses going way too fast than the permissible speed. The recent case of express bus causing havoc on the North-South Express Way is just another example. If the express bus was following a legal speed, how on earth could it be skipped to the opposite lane in the way knocking down 2 cars, a van and a bus, causing 12 death and so many injured?

For the commercial vehicle, the legal speed is 80/90 km/h, as you can see on the big sticker at the back of the vehicle. That means it should go only to a maximum of 80 km/h on the trunk road and 90 km/h on the high way and you guess how many express bus drivers will follow that? I can tell you practically none. The 80/90 km/h sticker is for display only, nobody actually following that speed limit.

When I sit on an airplane, I know that I have no control of my life; it is the pilot, the plane itself and the Almighty. Now it seems that the bus passengers are also facing the same fate, it is the driver, the bus and the Almighty that will decide their fates like it or not.

Instead of issuing so many summons ekor which is useless to deter people especially the bus driver to abide to the legal speed why not the traffic police put more effort to educate them such as from time to time having road safety campaigns, frequently visiting the errant bus company making sure that their drivers are well trained and educated.

Bus drivers or for that matter all drivers/riders should realize that their bad driving behavior can potentially kill many innocent lives and the recent bus accident is just another misfortune that can be prevented if the bus driver who was also killed in the accident, could abide to the speed limit.

My teacher

Attended my uncle’s funeral two days ago and met up with my primary school teacher. It is almost 30 years since I left the primary school and seeing my old teacher, all the sweet and sour memories started to come back one after another. Time flies and once the very strict and well respected teacher has become an old man, still well respected among the community in a small town Arau, frequently presence himself in giving moral supports to the families in need, big or small occasions, weddings or funerals alike.

Before I approached my teacher who was sitting with another guest and chit-chatting, my father gave me a reminder, asking me not to ask my teacher whether he could remember who I am. I guess I’m not stupid enough to ask that question as I know how could it be possible for an old teacher in his seventies to remember the name of all his students, which could be more than thousands? I walked to him and wished him and surprisingly he still remembered me, and asking how my younger brothers were doing. I guess he could be chatting with my father before seeing me and knowing that I was coming back to attend the funeral.

His teaching career spanned not less than 3 decades I guess, teaching my aunties, me and my younger brother through the sixties, seventies and eighties. I guess we hardly can find a teacher as committed as him nowadays. Those days when I was growing up in the seventies, there was no such thing as “pendatang” issues. Even though I was from a Chinese Primary School Hwa Aik for six year, I was then to Secondary School in Dato’ Sheik Ahmad, just a few kilometers from my house which was surrounded by Malay kampong. My dad speaks fluent Malay, my late-grandma spoke excellent Malay although my late-mother didn’t speak Malay at first but she learned up pretty fast, she was a well sought after tailor in Arau, a lot of Malay ladies engaged her in stitching baju kurung, I remember how my mom getting herself so busy before Hari Raya as her customers would be coming to our house to ask for their baju kurung.

I hardly can remember any of my teachers in the secondary school or lecturers in the University but I surely cannot forget someone who is so committed to his duty as a teacher not only in the school but as a good friend to the parents and a role model to the community in a small town Arau.

As all these racism issues become more disturbing than ever mainly being cooked up by crooked-mind politicians, it seems the peaceful and harmonious days in the seventies or eighties have passed us as more and more politicians choose to take the racist’s path to achieve their ulterior motives.

What seemingly Ok may not be Ok

Sometimes, it takes a tragedy to remind us that a seemingly OK thing can lead to a regrettable incident. We often see monkeys loitering around our housing estate and we thought that it was OK. There are stray dogs running around and we thought that it was OK and some people even feeding them up and thus stray dogs breed more stray dogs on the streets.

Sometimes you see herds of cow or goat roaming at the road side and we thought that it was OK and nobody seems to bother about it except perhaps those driving in those kampong areas often have to be extra careful about the cow or goat cross the road out of the sudden.

It is saddened to read about a pitiful baby girl in Seremban succumbed to death reportedly being attacked by a wild monkey. I guess we could never imagine that such bizarre thing can happen but it happened and the first-time mother who had just given birth to her unfortunate baby girl has to possibly endure a life-long heartache as a result.

After carrying the baby for a good 10 months, undergoing the labour pain and how cruel life is, the baby girl just managed to breathe a few days of fresh air and a miserable monkey took away her life.

What seemingly OK may not be OK after all!!!

Age is catching up...

Celebrated my wife birthday a couple of day ago and mine will also be around the corner. We bought RM 75 a piece birthday cake from Secret Recipe and it was the most expensive cake we had bought so far and there is still half of it lying in the refrigerator. I don’t celebrate birthday as to me getting older is not something good to be celebrated.

But like it or not, time flies and we often didn’t realize it until there are some signs. Yesterday while having my eye sight checked, the optometrist asked me whether I’m having any difficulty in reading and I said no. He said I have the farsightedness as well apart from my normal nearsightedness. I said come-on, I’m not even 40 years old yet and farsightedness, is it possible? The optometrist snubbed, raised his eyebrows and smiling to me as though he was telling me to come to the painful reality of getting older.

A couple of months ago I felt the knee pain when I was jogging with my wife. It had never happened before but I know that it will happen someday. I know that I could be seriously short of Ca as I’m allergic to milk and as a heavy coffee drinker, all the Ca required for bone will be draining out fast. Knee pain is quite new to me but my teeth are rotting faster than ever. Worst still, I could hear the scratching sound when doing squatting or kneeling and that’s horrible. I went to the pharmacy and was recommended to take some supplements of Glucosamine. Like it or not I have to take it as I don’t want to be affected by joint pain when I’m going on tour to Kunming, China next month.

Like it or not, age is catching up and that’s a reality of life that everyone will have to go through.

Is more expensive cigarette a good way to deter smoking?

It doesn’t bother me how much cigarette prices are going up tomorrow. But the question is whether it is effective to encourage people to quit smoking by increasing the prices exorbitantly. It may to a certain extent as a 20-stick pack will now cost about RM 10 and that's a lot for an average income person. I guess most of the smokers will turn to the smuggled cigarettes which are cheaper. As it was reported by the Star, there are approximately 100 types of smuggled cigarettes available in the local market.

If you are in Sabah, especially in places like Lahad Datu, Sandakan or Tawau, you can see many toddlers peddling around selling illegal cigarettes. These are very young street kids, boys and girls alike either following their parents or they themselves squatting outside the coffee shops or wet market selling illegal cigarettes. Very often you can see the young boys are puffing as well when they are selling.

Increasing the prices of cigarettes may not necessary be effective to deter people from smoking if cheaper options of smuggled cigarettes is easy available. Hence, the Ministry of Health should instead impose stricter rule to widen the demarcation of non-smoking areas especially in the restaurants even the open air ones. Very often we can see the irresponsible people smoke openly in the restaurant even there are babies or toddlers around them. It is a smoker’s choice to disregard the health hazard posed by cigarettes, but our authority on the other hand is not doing enough to protect the non-smokers especially the young kids from the inhalation of nicotine especially in public areas.