Tag Archives: Unity

Did You Get The Message?

by

“If we have listening ears, God speaks to us in our own language, whatever that language is.” – Mahatma Gandhi

Read these posts first:-

(I have said this before and I will say it again – all you need is mutual respect on each others beliefs, culture and religion and we can get along just fine no matter what happens. Image source: http://www.ausgamers.com)

Read this:-

The 25-year old youth is being probed under Section 4 (1) of the Sedition Act and Section 298 (a) of the Penal Code for deliberately making statements to hurt the religious sentiments of another. Gopinath was alleged to have insulted Islam last week, which prompted several social media users to create the ‘Kami Benci Gopinath Jayaratnam’ page. The page currently has 5,529 followers.

Yesterday, Gopinath’s home in Taman Klang Jaya was attacked by several men, who destroyed furnitures and damaged his car. No one was injured in the attack as Gopinath and his family was not at home.

A group calling itself Jemaah Fisabilillah Klang said it masterminded the attack and even posted on the Kami Benci Gopinath Jayaratnam’s page that they would track down Gopinath’s family.

(Source)

And missing from the police’s list was this:-

A few years back, Shah Kirit was caught when his video came out in the public. In the video, he was speaking in a closed forum ridiculously explaining and insulting Hindu religion to the core and making sexual remarks about Hindu gods.

When the video came out, Shah Kirit apologized to the public, and despite numerous police reports against him, he was never caught. Tell me my Muslim brothers, if someone is to insult your religion like in this video, will you ever forgive him?

(Source)

It is claimed that there are about 4,200 different religion in this world.

When it comes to religion, some people sometimes (some all the time) do not keep in mind that the issue itself is very sensitive and in the history of mankind, minor sparks (cartoons included) have caused violent demonstrations, major conflicts and tragedies. And it sometimes creeps into absurdity too – no, not the religion itself but on how weak some a##holes conduct themselves with the religious issues (the fact that it is creeping to the young minds seems to be worse of the worse). Just imagine if each followers of the 4,200 religion start to hurl damaging statements at each other.

(Eddie Griffin’s simple and yet powerful message when it comes to religion – “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. Think about it for a second. Does it make a lot of sense than some religious zealots shouting that my God is better than your God? )

The law concerning religion hatred and slurs no doubt has to be fair and need to be enforced fairly on all who insult any religion but at the same time, let’s ask a more serious personal question – how will one attacking another’s faith & beliefs makes one own religion look and sound better?

Does your own religion (any religion) or your karma get cookies points whenever you “score” an insult on another’s religion? Absolutely not! Your religion (or faith or belief, whichever you want to name it) or your karma scores cookies points (if any) when you talk well about your own religion and do not make any cross reference to others and in the end, walk the talk. Do goodness to others, do charity to the well-deserving, do sincere kindness to all regardless of race & culture and at the end be humble.

But once you start to insult others (no matter was the excuse is), the situation can quickly escalate to worse and before you know it, it will be a tit for a tat. One insult another’s religion, the person insults back (without thinking much) and others gets angry (often in high emotion) and goes to do more damages and this goes on and on. When does this madness stop? What happens when there is no else to be insulted?

After all, what is religion and what is the underlying message?

To many it means many things but the underlying message has to be something positive, laced with love for fellow human and mutual respect and I know that no religion in this world will profess its followers to say anything and act in bad faith or bad intention. No religion in this world had professed that you need to kill or harm others in order for you to spread the religion. Whatever you say or do is between you and God and not to be manipulated to be imposed on others.

This is one of the reasons I don’t usually go to temples – the only time I am “forced” to go is when my wife wants to go too (or when I know I can get good parking spots). My reason of going to temples is simple – I am going to have my moment with God in an atmosphere that is calm, peaceful and conducive. I want to have a heart to heart talk with Him. If I am going to a place that is crowded with people, the queue (in front of the altar) is long & you have wait your turn, waiting hours (for prayers) are long due to the crowd, impression that my prayers becomes “invalid” because I don’t say or do something prescribed by the priests or the priests are more interested on how much collection that is coming for the day (usually during the “special” prayers), forget about it – I rather stay and pray at home. I know God can hear me even though I don’t say anything or I don’t chant anything that sounds exotic. At the end of the day, it is just between me and Him.

Let’s not escalate the seeds of disunity in the country further with attacks on each others religion & faith (we do not add this to the on-going delicate racial issue). Don’t be dumb, don’t be naive too – the world is not made of one race or one religion. There are millions of people in this world who practice a different faith from you and for them, their religion is true and well. If you don’t agree with this, well it is just too bad. Spending time and resources to claim the other religions are false and untrue is pointless and a gross waste of time. The sooner you appreciate the situation, the sooner we put aside the difference and be true to our own faith.

Remember, the underlying message of the day is “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” and not “my religion is better than yours”.

Related articles

Next Change: Ubuntu 12.04

by

UPDATE 3: You can download the Ubuntu 12.04 Manual from here

UPDATE 2: 9th May 2012 – Thanks to the Ubuntu community, I managed to fix the postgresql 8.2 error using command “sudo touch /usr/share/postgresql/8.2/tsearch_data” and removed the postgresql without any errors. Then I started to upgrade again (not using the Update Manager which still showed errors but using Terminal command) and this time, upgrade was rather smooth (perhaps thanks to the stable internet connection). The upgrade to 12.04 LTS was finally done after almost two hours. The review of the 12.04 will be done later if I have time.

UPDATE 1: 27th April 2012 – the upgrade from 11.10 to 12.04 LTS had hiccups when the upgrade package download connection was disconnected half way (due to my internet connection) – the same did not happen when I upgraded from 11.04 to 11.10. When I retried the upgrade, the update failed to work. After a few tinkering, I found the source of the problem – postgresql 8.2 was corrupted and need to be removed. Easier said than done, the removal failed as follows:-

Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
libmagick++3 amsn-data libemeraldengine0 perlmagick inkscape tcl-tls
Use ‘apt-get autoremove’ to remove them.
The following packages will be REMOVED:
postgresql-8.2*
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 660 not upgraded.
After this operation, 12.4 MB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? Y
(Reading database … 269406 files and directories currently installed.)
Removing postgresql-8.2 …
find: `/usr/share/postgresql/8.2/tsearch_data’: No such file or directory
dpkg: error processing postgresql-8.2 (–purge):
subprocess installed pre-removal script returned error exit status 1
update-rc.d: warning: postgresql-8.2 stop runlevel arguments (0 1 6) do not match LSB Default-Stop values (S 0 1 6)
Errors were encountered while processing:

Back to the original post

Read these first:-

(The next generation of Ubuntu with a more sophisticated dashboard – a far cry from the dull, simple version 6.10 that I installed back in 2006. Image source: http://www.webupd8.org)

Mark the launch date – 26th April 2012. This is the date when Ubuntu will be releasing their latest OS – version 12.04 codenamed “Precise Pangolin”. I have been using Ubuntu 11.04 for sometime now (suppose to upgrade to 11.10 a long time go but my OS update was screwed due to a silly mistake of mine – somehow I have “un-ticked” the upgrade source server).

And of the things that I am looking forward to in 12.04 is the possible inclusion of HUD. OMG!Ubuntu reports “HUD – Heads UP Display – uses an intelligent search-based approach to finding and accessing menu items you need. It’s smart too; HUD is capable of remembering what items you use most often and prioritizing them in the results. The goal is to make finding menu items faster, in turn speeding up your workflow”.

(HUD in action hopefully in the upcoming Ubuntu 12.04 and never misjudge the ease of using keyboard shortcuts and hotkeys instead of using the usual mouse clicks. As I have experienced, it can very, very fast and very convenient)

In addition this, Tech Drive-In further reports about “10 New Features Added to Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin” which includes the following changes:-

  • Unity Dash’s default home screen has changed. Now, it shows ‘Recent Apps’ first, ‘Recent Files’ next and lastly, your most recent Downloads.
  • Home menu quicklist is a really useful addition
  • Apart from the usual three Unity lenses (Applications, Files and Music), there is now an additional Video lense too. It lets you select and play videos from a variety of sources ranging from your local collection to YouTube Movies, BBC iPlayer and TED Talks to name a few.
  • HUD is now an integral part of Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin. HUD have not yet replaced menus in applications though. So no need to panic.
  • Size of launcher icons can now be changed directly changed from ‘Wallpapers’ menu. No need to install CCSM just to do that anymore. As you can also see, there is now an option to change the default Ubuntu 12.04 theme from the same window. Useful additions and nicely done too.
  • This is perhaps the biggest visible change to new Unity. Launcher won’t be in the ‘dodge windows‘ state anymore (by default) and instead will be ‘always visible’. Dodge windows is not even an option anymore. It is completely removed.
  • Initiating Alt + Tab shows you just the open windows in the current desktop and not from all the desktops like it used to be
  • The decision was taken during the last Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS). Rhythmbox has just replaced Banshee in Ubuntu 12.04. Note taking application, Tomboy, has also been removed. Canonical seems serious about completely removing Mono from Ubuntu.

Those who have not used Linux before, the new release of Ubuntu may be uneventful. But installing free, open source Ubuntu as my secondary OS (having Ubuntu and Windows in dual boot) was probably one of the smartest I did when I upgraded to a 64 bit machine a couple years ago (I was curious and wanted to brush up on Linux as well).

This is because when I was abroad for an assignment last year and when my Windows crashed unexpectedly (due to a registry screw up – what else?), all I needed to do was to fire up my Ubuntu and was still able to connect to the Internet to check my emails using Firefox,  chat with my colleagues using Pidgin & Skype, open documents & spreadsheets using the free Libre Office and use OpenProj for project management, etc – well you get my drift. What I am trying to say here is that with Windows crashing down (and the only way to fix the crashed Windows was to reinstall Windows all over again – duh), it did not mean the end of story for me.

Linux are not like those days when you have to run most of the apps using line command in Terminals (you still do sometimes but it is not difficult once you get hold of the usual convention) and where a simple update of packages was a nightmare. But now, thanks to user friendly GUIs, software center with well-stocked apps and well organized update manager, it is in par and in some cases superior to Windows 7. You also don’t have to worry about firewalls and anti-virus in Ubuntu and best part is, it is also free and can run along with your Windows without much fuss.

I have moved from 10.10 to 11.04 (which introduced Unity user interface which combines search and dock functions in one) and finally to 11.10 (which refreshed the login screen with LightDM and tweaked the Unity to be more streamline. It felt lighter too), I can’t wait to move to 12.04 next week.

Related articles

Race Based Resolutions

by

UPDATE: Here’s one with MCA in the main role

Back to the original post

Seriously we need less of it…

(Tamil schools in Malaysia often suffer from poor image, under funding and poorly equipped infrastructure and despite the improvement of exam results over the years and promised assistance from the Government and political parties, there is doubt why it has not been merged into national schools. Image source: http://www.makkez.com)

MIC may have gotten their 2nd Minister-ship back to entice Indian voters to back BN but here lies the danger of backing a race based political party:-

Housing, jobs, education and socio-economic concerns were among the nine resolutions passed by some 4,000 branch chairman and delegates during MICs 65th general assembly.

However, they sought a fair distribution of benefits under the transformation programs, in particular ensuring that Tamil primary schools are properly equipped with pre-school facilities in line with the 87% target set by the Government for all primary schools to offer pre-school classes. At present, only 17.5% Tamil primary schools offer pre-school classes with MIC seeking to ensure that the remaining schools are fully equipped by this year.

(Source)

Does this means MIC going to be the sole champion of Tamil schools again?

Are they only capable of representing and fighting for the best deals for one particular race? It seems to be case most of the time – MIC for the Indians, MCA for the Chinese and UMNO for the Malays. And at every general assembly, we will hear this year in, year out. Surprisingly during election period, the same blokes who pledge to fight for his race will turn around and tell you that they will do everything they can for the voters who no doubt will not be from one particular race. So, which is which now?

That is why the voters should be more vigilant and reject any race based politics. If there is a true 1Malaysia concept out there, the last it needs is a segregation of Malaysia by the color of the skin and beliefs at primary school level (and if one goes by MIC’s latest resolution, at pre-school level).

Malaysians segregated when still young at primary school level will likely to face problems when they are united back during secondary school level. This is because it will take time for them to interact, understand each other and accept the differences more effectively. Certainly things would be different if we start off early – 6 years before, at primary school level – when the mind is still young and innocent. This is what “one school for all” strives to achieve.

Now MIC is resolute to ensure that Tamil primary schools are properly equipped with pre-school facilities in line with the 87% target set by the Government for all primary schools to offer pre-school classes. But whilst it is good to have pre-school classes at primary level, this is wrong way to go about it. Because this is how the old, corrupt and hard-to-change MIC would be go about it. Besides, some of the existing primary schools are already in bad condition. Wonder how a pre-school classes is going to improve the school as whole?

If indeed MIC has truly changed, it should change its paradigm as well. It should do something unthinkable, something very drastic.

It should think at nation’s level – not at community level alone. First thing it should resolute to do and certainly it will do the community (if it still insist) a great service in the long run, is to ABOLISH all Tamil Schools (or convert them all to national schools) and get all students to be enrolled in one school that unites all – fully subsidized, well equipped National Schools backed by highly qualified teachers.

And if MIC still intends to hold one for the community (for old time sake), it will resolute to ensure that the language Tamil should be part of the syllabus in all national schools and where one can take it as an optional exam papers (after all there is no harm having an option to learn additional language other than English and Bahasa Malaysia – India and China will be the two biggest economy powerhouse in the near future).

Tamil primary school ends at Standard 6 – these students at the end of the day need to be integrated back into the national school environment and the unfortunate part is these students will not be integrated immediately – they will spend another year in “remove classes” before the start of a slow, painful process of being united back with fellow Malaysians.

Can we cut to the chase?

One School System Revisited

by

Read previous posts on the One School System & National Language:-

JMD raised something rather interesting in his post “One School System – It’s now or never”

In one hand, those who desire to see a more unified and integrated society are labeled as racists while on the other hand, those who support the Chinese and Tamil schools had labeled themselves as victims. Never mind the fact that Chinese and Tamil schools are in fact, schools that were established based fundamentally and historically on racial grounds. But according to these opposition members, vernacular schools are not racist. The One School system is!

Are we racist in trying to get all our children to be together? I am sure we are not.

It is just a matter of time when we have a complete segregation of society where the two main race will not interact with one another in a lifetime. Do we really want this?

Anthony Loke must be delusional if he still wants to blame the government for not giving assistance for the students in Chinese vernacular schools to increase their proficiency in Bahasa Malaysia. But then again it is not vintage DAP if they do not blame the government for everything.

The most cost effective way is for everyone to enroll in national school where Bahasa Malaysia is the main medium of instruction.

(Read further and we may understand now why the Opposition may not be ready to run the country yet)

When my son was about embark his journey into primary school early this year, one of the tougher decision that faced me and my wife was whether we should enroll him into national school or a nearby more prominent Chinese school.

I say “tough” because the dilemma was presented to us by our family members, close relatives and family friends. Between me and wife, the decision was all too simple and easy – we already opted for national school for our kids many, many years before. After all, we too went through national school when we were young and I guess we did alright when we left school. Further, there is no other better place to learn up the national language and interaction with fellow Malaysians than in national schools.

For us, education is a matter of effort, preference and options – it does not necessary that you need to go to a Chinese or Tamil school to get good education (going to private schools will of course be another ball game but then how many ordinary Malaysians are well off to send their kids to private schools?) and in this high-tech age, it comes from Internet and other avenues as well.

So, we dismissed our relatives’ concerns and enrolled our son in a national school. When we went to his school during the first day, we noticed that in my son’s class; almost 98% of students were Malay students. We gathered that the missing non Malay students were in the nearby Chinese and Tamil schools. The remaining non Malay students in the class including my son had trouble speaking Bahasa Malaysia fluently and had to contend with speaking only English with the other fellow students and not mingle well with the rest who only spoke Bahasa Malaysia.

It looked like a problem to us and my wife even insisted on sending our son for tuition on Bahasa so that he can pick up fast and not left out on the education and interactions with fellow students and teachers. But I decided that sending our son to tuition would be a waste of time (and money) as we were sure that although he may struggle for a few months, he will pick up the language on his own. Now, he can speak and write Bahasa fairly good and get well with rest of his fellow classmates. So there is really no issue with language at national schools.

So, what is stopping us from going to the same school, learning to interact with each other and strive for the betterment of our beloved nation? Why the different schools and the sorry excuse that Bahasa Malaysia, being our national language is not important for advancement in career and further studies? Doesn’t speaking in one language means we will be more united?

Before we put the blame on cheap politics, we also need to address the concerns of the parents who still send their kids to Chinese and Tamil schools. It is not much and it is not impossible for the Government address them, considering that education system in this country forms the back bone of nation building.

What are the concerns?

1. Quality of teaching and teachers.

When we wanted our son to go to national school, the main concern raised by our relatives was the quality of teachers in national school. Some, I am afraid have not even mastered the other main language – English. Chinese school on the other hand may not have fared better (you need to master Mandarin instead) but they seems to have better teachers. They even have programs for students for the weekends and the amount of homework given may even frighten the bolder ones. When it comes to education policies in our national schools, we seem to have gone backwards with not teaching Mathematics and Science in English.

But that seems to be changing – in 2011, the Government introduced KSSR (Kurikulum Standard Sekolah Rendah) and one of the thrust of the new curriculum which focuses on six key areas namely communication, spiritual attitude and values, humanitarianism, literacy in science and technology, physical and personal development is to produce holistic individuals

And what I have seen so far from the books and methods of teaching in Standard 1, it looks like we are on the right path. We may need to fine tune the curriculum here and there in the future but I won’t say it is worse than before. It looks in par with Chinese and Tamil schools but less stressful (excluding the stress that my son gets at home, of course)

2. Preservation of Chinese and Tamil language in schools

Frankly speaking, I don’t see how Chinese and Tamil students will lose touch of their own language by going to national schools if efforts are done to have special classes on the said language. Tamil school was my last option for my son but even after enrolled in national school, he picked up the Tamil language fairly better than the rest of us. The school has dedicated teachers for Chinese and Tamil language and the non Malay students are made to participate in these classes without any negative impact on the core syllabus and mastery of the Bahasa Malaysia and English.

But there is no point mastering Chinese and Tamil if one cannot master the national language, Bahasa Malaysia and English first. As true blood Malaysian, it is rather shameful if you are still struggling to speak and write in Bahasa long after you have left school.

As of many things in this world, when we start with something new or radical, we are going to face problems. But if that new and radical thing will ultimately solve sticky situations like racial tolerance, unity, etc, then we should strive for it. One School System is the best solution for national integration, no doubt about that – the question remains, for how long we are going to keep our national treasures, our young ones grossly segregated.

Indeed, One School System – It’s now or never…

Related articles

Making of a Bangsa Malaysia

by

(Bangsa Malaysia also means a nation of people who speak in one voice. Image source: Mob’s Crib)

Whilst we are so against racism in Malaysia, obviously we are not angels ourselves…

OutSyed the Box rightfully nailed the point with this:-

The time has also come where we must seriously consider merging the school system into just one school system i.e. based on Bahasa Malaysia and English only. We need to abolish the Chinese and Tamil language school system. The Chinese and Tamil language heroes say that if Chinese and Tamil schools are abolished, their language and culture will also disappear. Wrong.

There are 1.5 billion Chinese in China who will make sure that the Chinese language, culture and the Chinese people will never disappear from the face of the earth. The same argument applies for the 1.0 billion Indians in India. This however is Malaysia. It is not and cannot be China or India.

When Chinese, Indians and anyone else migrate to Australia they learn to speak English in a jiffy. No one asks for Tamil or Mandarin to be made national languages in Australia. No one sings the Waltzing Matilda in Tamil or Mandarin in Australia.

The same logic applies to Malaysia. It is high time non Malays in Malaysia learn to speak Malay like a native Malay. Getting straight As for Bahasa Malaysia in the SPM does not mean anything if you still say ‘saya api kereta naik mari’ or ‘saya naik keleta api mali sini.”

It is not cute anymore. Actually it is quite embarrassing. Please lets speak the language the way it should be spoken.

Let put aside the fact that most of us get very nervous in police stations and even well prepared linguistic experts may fumble with Bahasa when confronted with stern looking policeman and after becoming a victim of a crime (in this case a snatch thief victim). Let’s look at the mastery of language by ordinary Malaysians – Malays and non Malays alike.

This is something I too pondered on in my post titled “Bangsa Malaysia, Bahasa Malaysia”:-

That’s right – how many of us can speak the national language rather fluently? If we can’t speak with one voice, how then we are expected to be living united as one Bangsa Malaysia? I have high regards to the national language which itself is a strong fusion of many languages – Sanskrit, Mandarin, English and more.

After 53 years of gaining independence, if we are unable to speak the national language, Bahasa Malaysia and the globally wide used language, English fluently – we can’t do anything but to put down our head down and walk away ashamed.

It is an irony that whilst many of us talk about creating a Malaysian Malaysia, we are not willing to speak in one language. It is not harm preserving our forefather’s language but it should not be at the expense of Bahasa Malaysia and English. My grandma who is in her late 80’s speaks fluent Bahasa Malaysia and over the years, picked up English (courtesy of her great grandchildren who speak English and not Tamil as the main language in the house).

To the credit of the non Malays, things are also changing (thanks to education and closer interaction with other Malaysians). A long time ago, we used to use words like “gua” (me) and “lu” (you) whenever we speak Bahasa Malaysia but things have changed. We use the proper “saya” and “awak” these days. How fluent we are in speaking and writing a particular language is all depends on the environment that we are. We are all in Malaysia and on daily basis, we have to speak, read and write in Bahasa Malaysia one way or another, so to say that we did not have the chance to learn is a wasteful excuse. The same goes for learning other main languages – English.

I started schooling in national school – so at a very young age, I was fortunate to be exposed to both Bahasa Malaysia and English (still recall how our Standard 1 teacher, the very strict Mrs. Bala used to get us to shout the basic pronunciations in Bahasa at our very top of our voice). The use of Tamil language was more confined to home, which explains on why I am quite weak in writing and reading Tamil (my parents put more focus on Bahasa and English as well). And when I had no place in the local university and had to study in private college, I had to go full force on mastering English – it was THE language of Law.

And when I started work, I was in an environment where Bahasa Malaysia was the primary spoken and written language. I forced myself to improve on my Bahasa Malaysia (Bahasa in a working environment is more fluid, less “royal” than the Bahasa that I used when I was a member of school debate team) – I seriously wanted to make a lasting impression on my superiors and subordinates. These days, it is a mix of the two. Opportunities to learn languages come in many forms – work environment, friends, studies, etc. It is up to us to grab the opportunity and learn up the main 2 languages in the country.

So, if you, after 53 years of independence and having plenty of opportunities to learn up on Bahasa Malaysia and English still say “saya naik keleta api mali”, shame on you for not taking the trouble to master the two main languages in this country. As Malaysians, the right way to get the future generation to master both languages is to make away with Chinese and (struggling) Tamil schools and proceed with one school structure that will not only improve the mastery of language and quality of education but also foster greater unity among young Malaysians.

Read Also

Support for 1Sekolah

Bahasa Malaysia, What’s the Point?

Extra SPM Paper