When Someone Passes Away

A neighbour passed away last Saturday. As I reached home from attending my French class, I saw many people in the house. I thought perhaps they were having some gatherings, as they often did. The next day one of the sons informed me that their dad had passed away on Friday. As our houses here are very small, all the funeral arrangement were done at the nearby mosque. All the kenduri and tahlil too were done there.

My late neighbour was just slightly older than me. His wife had passed away a few months before, after being ill for quite some time. I was quite badly affected when the wife passed away. She was a person, who, most of the time could be heard from far away when she spoke. That was her personality. When she fell sick, she became weak and she spoke very softly. No more the active and energetic lady that she was before. Every time I talked to her children about her illness, shadows passed across their faces and there were sadness and anxiety in their voices as they described her deteriorating condition. That was about a year before she passed away.

In early January this year I was shocked to hear the passing of Alan Rickman. It seems he only just recently knew about his cancer. He looked healthy and strong and he looked much younger than his 69 years. I just totally adore him in the Harry Porter series, Robin Hood The Prince of Thieves, Rasputin, Sense and Sensibility, Love Actually and most recently as Louis XIV in A Little Chaos. He was such a talented and consummate actor who will not be easily replaced. I feel like he should have more time, to do his thing, to hone his already superb skill. That forceful, intense, stellar performance with that particular voice of his. What a combination!

Nowadays, every morning I wake up, I am just thankful that I am still here. Life is vulnerable, fleeting and fragile. We just never know when we will be taken away. Someone healthy and strong suddenly is strickened with a serious illness and was gone in a matter of weeks. Some others suffer for months before they were taken. When I read memoirs about people becoming very very sick, losing their minds, unable to recognise their loved ones towards the end of their lives I feel very sad and very scared. But what we can do about it? There is no way to find out, when we are going to die or how we are going to die. Even if we know that, there is nothing we can do to alter that. So much so, perhaps it is better that we do not know. Perhaps the best thing we can do is to appreciate life by living as fully as possible while we still can. Enjoy whatever we love doing, savour the beauty of relationships that we care about, take life a little easier and adopt personalities, attitudes and behaviours that promote peace and happiness.

I very much hope that I will always be wise with all my relationships. Not to be petty about things that are not important. Not to take people for granted. I am trying hard to be more forgiving, which is not easy for me. I hope in my own subtle ways I am able to convey to my loved ones that they are important to me and I love them because I am actually terrible at displaying my emotions.

Today in My Life

For today, I am just thankful to be here still. To be able to love and take care of the loves of my life: Mickey, Tam and Adik Comot. To be still present in the lives of my nephews and nieces: Atan, Normah, Syikin, Ajun and the others. To be connected to my friends still. All those mentioned are of paramount importance to me. They are my simple pleasures, they are also my miracles.

Even if not everything in my life are a bed of roses, I am very much aware of my blessings. Despite my challenges and my difficulties, I still have abundant of them. I am grateful for everything I experience in my life, the good and the unpleasant too.

Why Not Say What Happened: A Memoir

This book by Ivana Lowell is my third book of 2016. Read this book halfway about a year ago then left it at that, as my attention was captured by other books or other reading materials. That, unfortunately, is a bad habit of mine. So, a few days ago, read this book again from the very beginning. That is what happened when you are not very organised in your reading habits.

My Take On This Book

This book is about someone from a very privileged background, lots and lots of money, houses in every continent and rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous of the world is a common occurrence for her.

Neglect does not necessarily belong to the poor. Even if you are a child of very wealthy parents with an army of maids, nannies and governesses, you can still be neglected. Is not that your parents do not love you. They do very much, but they are just clueless about normal parenting. That is Ivana's life story. Her mum, Lady Caroline Blackwood, though she loves her children, is very handicapped at being a mother because she herself was deprived of parental love, despite having parents and despite the family's millions. The other main reason is because of her alcoholism. I always think that the poor are focused on trying to make ends meet that they have very little time to spend with their children. But the rich it seems, pass the responsibilities of parenting to maids and nannies while they indulge in lavish entertaining and socialising.

This memoir gives a portrayal of the lives of the wealthy. Ivana changes from one boarding school to another anytime she feels she cannot adapt to life in that particular school. Her parents do not particularly care how she or her sisters are doing at school. The children go to boarding schools, may be finishing schools after that. However, it very much amazes me that there was no mention of Ivana ever wanting to go to varsity to further her education. Of course, the fact that they are very well connected means she still can have a job with top level executives at Miramax. That is the thing about having money and knowing the right people.

They are fabulously wealthy and their wealth is beyond the understanding of ordinary people like me. Ivana's maternal grandmother was none other than Maureen Guinness, one of the three famous "golden Guinness girls". They have so much money that Ivana's mother buys houses at her whim and fancy. They stay partly in England, partly in America and at times in Ireland where the family originates.

Ivana herself suffers from alcoholism and goes from one rehab to another trying to cure herself. The memoir describes her struggle with alcoholism and other emotional issues in her life and it is also about her relationship with mother.

Brief Summary

Beautiful, intelligent and wealthy, Ivana Lowell seemed to have it all. Part of the Guinness dynasty, her family were glamorous and well-connected. Her charismatic but spoilt grandmother Maureen had made an excellent marriage with the Lord of Dufferin and Avon and was a leader of the fashionable set in her youth. Her mother, the writer Caroline Blackwood, socialised with the most glitteringly bohemian and high-profile figures of New York and London. Caroline had intense love affairs and was married to the painter Lucian Freud and the talented composer Israel Citkowitz before finally settling down with the poet Robert Lowell.

However, being born into the Guinness inheritance was not the blessing that it appeared to be. Ivana's life of glamour and high-living has been marked by tragedy and loss. Like her brilliant but troubled mother, she has been plagued by an addiction to alcohol which took root when she was still a self-conscious schoolgirl. Having survived a childhood accident which left her physically scarred and the instability of a frenetic home life, she is also faced with the discovery of a secret which threatens to undermine her entire past.

This frank and witty memoir is both vibrant and sad. It is laced with anecdotes and familiar names from the 1940s to the present, but it is ultimately an account of the relationship between mother and daughter, the story of two women whose deep affection for each other withstands everything that life has to throw at them.

Epilogue A Memoir

Finished this book by Will Boast over the Chinese New Year holidays.

Summary of Epilogue A Memoir
Will Boast's parents, Andrew and Nancy, met and married in Southampton, a port city on England's south coast. Fleeing the social and economic malaise that blighted the country in the late '70s — workers on strike, power outages and high inflation — and with ambitions for his young family, Boast Sr. moved them to Fontana, Wis., where he worked for a plastics company.
Will was in elementary school, and for him and his younger brother Rory, it was an adventure.

When he was a senior in high school, his mother was diagnosed with a brain tumour. She suffered a slow and painful decline before her death during his first year at college. The next winter, his brother Rory was killed in an accident, driving to a party with friends. And then — yes, there is more — while he was away at graduate school, his father died when an untreated ulcer, brought about by alcohol abuse, ruptured. At this point the author is only 24 years old.

The very fact of suffering bereavement three times over would have been enough of a story. But for Boast this was not all. As he works his way through family papers and his father's possessions, he comes across a file that reveals a secret that had been kept from him and his brother.

Andrew had been married in his youth — and had left (actually they divorced) his wife and two sons, ensuring that the children of his second family knew nothing about them. Just as he is casting about for a way to deal with his new reality — as an orphan, as the only surviving child — the author discovers that he is not, after all, the only one left.

It turns out that there will be other discoveries to make about his parents — it's a family fairly riddled with skeletons and ghosts in the closet. But their secrets are not of crimes or any kind of depravity. Rather, what will haunt the reader is that the things kept hidden, the tragically preserved secrets, reveal a past shrouded in abandonment, shame and regret.

Will decides early on that he will contact his half brothers and, at some point, that he will tell them of the sizable inheritance his father has left. In the account that follows, of subsequent trips to England, visits with elderly relatives and, eventually, meeting each brother in turn, he struggles — perhaps too much — to be fair to the memory of his dead father, even in the face of his half brothers' recollections of their own unhappy childhoods.

My Take On This Book

This is a powerful and an unflinching memoir about personal tragedies of losing your loved ones, one after another, about family secrets, about the complicated relationships between father and son and between siblings, about the awkwardness of trying to connect with siblings you never knew you had and also about wanting to know the truths about your parents. It is also about the anxiety and resentfulness you feel when the father you knew and loved is portrayed rather unpleasantly by your half-siblings. Will Boast is very frank about his feelings, especially about his father, his brother Rory and his half-brothers Arthur and Harry.

A Little Bit About The Author
Will Boast was born in England and grew up in Ireland and Wisconsin. His story collection, Power Ballads, won the 2011 Iowa Short Fiction Award. His fiction and essays have appeared in Best New American Voices, Virginia Quarterly Review, Glimmer Train, The American Scholar, and The New York Times, among other publications. He’s been a Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford and a Charles Pick Fellow at the University of East Anglia. His New York Times bestselling memoir, Epilogue, is out now from W.W. Norton Co/Liveright and Granta Books in the UK. He currently divides his time between Chicago and Brooklyn, NY. This fall he'll be a Literature Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.

The longer version… I was born in Southampton, England, and grew up there and in County Limerick in Ireland before my family emigrated to America, where we lived in Wisconsin. I attended the Sisters of Mercy National School of Limerick (Ireland) and Fontana Elementary School and Big Foot High School (Wisconsin). I did my undergraduate degree at Knox College and my graduate degree at the University of Virginia, after which I did post-grad fellowships at Stanford University and the University of East Anglia. Along the way I've also lived in Chicago, Madison (WI), San Francisco, Berlin, and Brooklyn. I'm currently a lecturer at the University of Chicago, though I'm on leave this year on a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome.

Alongside my literary pursuits, I've played, toured, and recorded with bands, and music has been a constant passion for me since high school. Through college, I played tuba and trombone in various ensembles and jazz groups. Since I've played drum set in rock bands, most of them San Francisco-based. Over the past few years, I've become interested in long-form narrative journalism and one-hour TV drama. In addition to projects in those mediums, I'm currently finishing a novel.

The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee

This book by Marja Mills is the first book I finished in 2016. I adore To Kill A Mockingbird (have written a bit about it, under post title My Utterly Gorgeous Read 1) and I put aside the other books I am in the process of finishing once I bought The Mockingbird Next Door. There is this intense curiosity to know more about Harper Lee who won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with that book. There is also this perpetual question of why Harper Lee, or Nelle to her friends, didn't write another book ever after that.

Summary of The Mockingbird Next Door: Life with Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is one of the best loved novels of the twentieth century. But for the last fifty years, the novel's celebrated author, Harper Lee, has said almost nothing on the record. Journalists have trekked to her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, where Harper Lee, known to her friends as Nelle, has lived with her sister, Alice, for decades, trying and failing to get an interview with the author. But in 2001, the Lee sisters opened their door to Chicago Tribune journalist Marja Mills. It was the beginning of a long conversation - and a great friendship.

In 2004, with the Lees' blessing, Mills moved into the house next door to the sisters. She spent the next eighteen months there, sharing coffee at McDonalds and trips to the Laundromat with Nelle, feeding the ducks and going out for catfish supper with the sisters, and exploring all over lower Alabama with the Lees' inner circle of friends.

Nelle shared her love of history, literature, and the Southern way of life with Mills, as well as her keen sense of how journalism should be practised. As the sisters decided to let Mills tell their story, Nelle helped make sure she was getting the story - and the South - right. Alice, the keeper of the Lee family history, shared the stories of their family.

The Mockingbird Next Door is the story of Mills's friendship with the Lee sisters. It is a testament to the great intelligence, sharp wit, and tremendous storytelling power of these two women, especially that of Nelle.

Mills was given a rare opportunity to know Nelle Harper Lee, to be part of the Lees' life in Alabama, and to hear them reflect on their upbringing, their corner of the Deep South, how To Kill a Mockingbird affected their lives, and why Nelle Harper Lee chose to never write another novel.

Note: On July 14, 2014, the day before publication of this book, Harper Lee issued a statement saying that The Mockingbird Next Door was executed without her cooperation or permission and based on false pretenses. Apparently Lee issued a similar statement back in 2011 when Penguin Press announced that it had acquired the book.

My Take On This Book
This to me this is a superb memoir. It gives us the description of the lives of the Lee sisters, Nelle Harper Lee and Alice Finch Lee, of their family, their parents, their friends, their education, their livelihood and their personalities. It is about their past and their present as narrated to Mills.

Books and reading are very important in the lives of Nelle and Alice even when they were children. Remember Scout Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird? Her teacher scolded her and accused her of lying when Scout told her that she read a lot at home at the time when she just started schooling. That was Nelle's childhood too. She was a child who read a lot and who thrived on books. Nelle described her early reading life, in a July 2006 letter to Oprah, that ran in O, The Oprah Magazine that began "Dear Oprah, Do you remember when you learned to read, or like me, can you not even remember a time when you didn't know how?"

Another quote from the book which I adore "Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books. Instant information is not for me. I prefer to search library stacks because when I work to learn something, I remember it."

Then there is the million dollar question of why she never wrote anything else after To Kill A Mockingbird? A lot of people were guessing for the reasons starting with, for example, the difficulty of living up to the impossible expectations raised by To Kill A Mockingbird. But according to one time pastor and long time friend Thomas Lane Butts, Nelle gave two reasons for that. First, she wouldn't go through all the pressure and publicity she went through with Mockingbird for any amount of money. Second, she has said what she wanted to say and she will not say it again. The second reason is a bit vague to me however. Marja Mills stated in the book that love of money and the things it can buy didn't motivate Nelle. She just wasn't interested in luxury, though she did value the opportunity to give bountiful sums to charity and to educate people behind the scenes.

It is quite clear from the book that there was a strong friendship between Marja Mills and the Lee sisters as she interviewed the sisters for her Chicago Tribune articles as well as when she moved into the house next door to the Lees and stayed there for eighteen months. Mills even came back for visits to Monroeville quite often, even after Nelle was placed into an assisted living centre, after suffering from a serious stroke in February 2007. It is a bit puzzling to me, that Harper Lee later issued a statement that the book was executed without her cooperation and permission, just before the publication of the book in 2014.

The Freedom of Having Your Own Mind

The letter pasted below in italics is part of a write-up by reporters of the famed Malaysiakini online portal. The letter is from Malaysian Communication and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) to the blogger Din Merican. Din Merican is of course one of my favourite blogs.

There is some undesirable elements here

Mum, is this politically correct for me?

To me, a favourite blog is something that I like to read. I open that blog everyday. I read the articles that I like. A lot of the times, there are something good, something worth knowing, something worth pondering about, something intriguing, or even something funny. That does not mean I like or I agree with everything that is written in that blog. Far from it, there are things I detest too. I am an adult, I have a good brain, I have a rational mind, I can think for myself and I can decide what is good or bad or what is in between. I am not that gullible, that I would swallow everything up without having the benefit of a doubt here and there. Malaysia Today, for example, is a very popular online news portal. However, personally, I find Raja Petra's writing to be rather arrogant, somewhat bile and vitriolic at times. But I still read that news portal because there are also things that Raja Petra or the other writers write that I very much agree upon. We are all adults here, we have a choice, we can choose, we can be selective. Like on TV " viewer discretion is advised".

Let's say that someone (who else if not MCMC) decides to block access to Malaysia Today or some other news portals or blogs because it thinks that the news portal is corrupting the minds of its readers. Seems to be happening too often nowadays anyway. What's my reaction to it? I will be very irritated. Truth of the matter is I am already irritated because I read Asia Sentinel all the time and it is blocked now. The person who blocks the portal think I am a moron because I will believe whatever things I read or whatever people tell me. I have no discerning power, I have no mind of my own. I am so feeble-minded, can very easily be swayed and I can so easily be corrupted too. This notion is also supposed to be very true for Muslims in Malaysia according to, of course, our "respected Muslim  clergies". Many bloggers and writers have written about this attitude that is so prevalent in Malaysia nowadays, that Muslims here are so very very weak in their aqidah that they have to be protected, at all cost, from all "undesirable" elements all the time, even to the point of ridiculing the general public.

At the end of the day, the power that be, can of course be capable of limiting or depriving whatever resources or freedom available to us. One thing for sure is that they cannot control our minds. They can preach or block whatever they want, but it is still diligence, dedication, sincerity, responsibility, honesty and trustworthiness that will endear them to us.

🐭🐭🐭🐭🐭🐭🐭🐭🐭🐭🐭🐭🐭🐭🐭🐭🐭

2016-01-20 9:00 GMT+08:00 MCMC New Media Unit <newmedia.unit@cmc.gov.my>:
Ruj. Kami : SKMM(T)09-NMSMD/960/2016 (14)
Tarikh : 20 Januari 2016

En. Din Merican (dmerican2@gmail.com)

Tuan,

BERITA PALSU BERKENAAN LAPORAN PORTAL SARAWAK REPORT BAHAWA SPRM MEMASUKKAN 37 SYOR DAKWAAN TERHADAP YAB PERDANA MENTERI DATO’ SRI NAJIB RAZAK

Dengan segala hormatnya perkara di atas adalah dirujuk.

2. Adalah dimaklumkan bahawa Suruhanjaya Komunikasi dan Multimedia Malaysia (MCMC) mendapati bahawa pihak tuan telah menerbitkan sebuah artikel yang mempunyai maklumat yang tidak benar di bawah tajuk “Malaysia: Prime Minister Najib Razak on the way out?” melalui pautan berikut:

https://dinmerican.wordpress.com/2016/01/18/malaysia-prime-minister-najib-razak-on-the-way-out

3. Untuk makluman tuan, pihak Suruhanjaya Pencegahan Rasuah Malaysia (SPRM) telah mengeluarkan satu kenyataan rasmi pada 18 Januari 2016 yang menjelaskan bahawa laporan portal berita Sarawak Report yang mengatakan kononnya terdapat 37 syor dakwaan berasingan telah dikemukakan oleh SPRM terhadap YAB Perdana Menteri Dato’ Seri Najib Tun Razak melibatkan kes SRC International, adalah tidak benar.

4. Oleh yang demikian, pihak MCMC dengan ini menyarankan pihak tuan untuk menurunkan dan menghentikan penyebaran kandungan berita palsu tersebut bagi mengelakkan daripada melakukan kesalahan di bawah Akta Komunikasi dan Multimedia 1998 (AKM98).

Sekian, untuk tindakan segera pihak tuan. Terima kasih.

Yang Benar,
Jabatan Rangkaian Media dan Pengurusan Keselamatan
Bahagian Pengawasan Digital
Suruhanjaya Komunikasi dan Multimedia Malaysia (MCMC)
Off Persiaran Multimedia
63000 Cyberjaya
Selangor Darul Ehsan
Malaysia
Tel : +60 3 8688 8000
Fax : +60 3 8688 1000

Food for Thought 10012016

Hmmm.......let me see. This is tough.

What do we do, when we hear an individual says or writes unpleasant things about ourselves? We might just shrug it off, life goes on. How we react to that provocation is our choices. Some weirdo has nothing better to do perhaps. On the other hand, we might also get angry, scream profanities until our faces turn red or blue, threaten bodily harms to the person, throw tantrums like small children, or may be hit the wall with our fists until they bleed.

Or, we can sit down quietly for a while, and try to think of a reason why the other person say bad things about us. Perhaps it is just rumour mongering. It might be pure slander. The person may be jealous of our opportunities, successes or achievements. May be he or she has ulterior motives and will gain something important through our downfall. Nothing new, has happened before.

But, what if, there is this nagging feeling at the back of our minds that perhaps there is some truth to what is being said or written. That nagging feeling can turn into a nasty headache, if we are honest with ourselves, and admit that a major portion of what is said or written is indeed true. What should we do then? Just shift to denial mode? Feign ignorance and continue everyday like nothing happens? Bring out all the defensive mechanism weapons and out come all kinds of excuses? We are very well aware that the subject matter being mentioned is of paramount importance for the development of the future generations of country.

THE DISGRACE OF MALAYSIAN UNIVERSITY EDUCATION
Posted: January 6, 2016
By: Murray Hunter
www.asiasentinal.com

Mismanagement, waste, and corruption in public universities

Malaysia’s public universities have dropped completely out of the World University Rankings maintained by the Times of London. Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia was ranked 87th in the top 100 Asian rankings in 2013, but has since fallen out. Not a single Malaysian university made the top 100 Asian rankings.

The collapse of higher education in Malaysia has grown so marked that World Bank economist Dr Frederico Gil Sander recently said the state of the system is more alarming than the country’s considerable public debt. The talent needed to develop the Malaysian economy is not being produced.

It isn’t just the Times survey. Malaysian public universities have also shown mixed results in other surveys like the QS rankings,where three Malaysian universities rose slightly while Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, International Islamic Universiti Malaysia, and Universiti Teknologi MARA, all slipped. Not a single Malaysian university made the top 100, According to the QS ranking profiles, Malaysian universities have lost significant ground in academic reputation and tend to be weak in research, with no Malaysian university even reaching the top 400.

Public Universities Vice-Chancellor/Rector Committee chairman Kamarudin Hussin, also vice chancellor of Universiti Malaysia Perlis (Unimap) claims that the ranking methodologies favor older, more established universities. Yet many universities within the top 100 Asian universities were established relatively recently. Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, ranked 7th was established in 1980, Nanyang Technological University, ranked 10th was set up in 1991, and Pohang University of Science and Technology, ranked 11th, was established in 1986.

Even ideologically governed schools better

In addition, a number of universities from countries that are not democratically, governed like Sharif University of Technology (43rd, Iran), Isfahan University of Technology (61, Iran), Iran University of Science and Technology (69), King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (71, Saudi Arabia), and King Saud University (72, Saudi Arabia), all made the top 100 Asian university rankings last year.

Kamarudin accepts that Malaysian universities have “many issues that must be resolved….(and) there are plenty of oversights that must be fixed”. However, unfortunately, he didn’t mention what they are, or offer any solutions.

Probably the tone Kamarudin used in his article hints at the first problem – the view that authority takes precedence. Kamarudin asserts that academic freedom exists, but should be subject to the views of the so called “majority,” which could be read as authority. In August last year, Kamarudin was one of the strongest opponents of students attending the Bersih 4 rally, threatening disciplinary action such as suspension or even expulsion of students who attended.

Independent thought suppressed

Suppressing independent thought is counterproductive to creativity, critical thinking and problem solving, the very mindset that Malaysian universities seek to develop. Among the characteristics required are people who are knowledgeable and have the right to choose.

Malaysian universities begin to lose the plot where their leaders are glorified with unnecessary ceremonies that make a mockery of academia, and tend to dominate the persona of universities, rather than act as facilitators for people to excel.

This leads to unnecessary expenses such as lavish dinners with highly paid entertainers to celebrate this or that event, this award or that. Some of these dinners are very extravagant, costing up to hundreds of thousands of ringgit. Vice chancellors make lavish trips both domestically and internationally, with no apparent benefit to the universities except for MOUs that are never acted upon.

This is in a time when university budgets are being slashed, the minister has directed university management to be frugal and seek funds outside government allocations.

Waste, incompetence

The waste goes much further. The Malaysian Auditor General’s 2012 report, for instance, cited Universiti Malaysia Sabah’s (UMS) mishandling of its computerized maintenance management system. After the university spent RM400,000 between 2008 and 2012, the auditor general found that data was not keyed into the system and the person responsible for managing the system had no IT knowledge.

The cost of three building projects ballooned 8.9 percent at Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia (UTHM) due to delays and inexperience of the contractor.

The auditor general further found at Universiti Malaysia Perlis (Unimap) that funding allocations didn’t take into account the basic needs of students in the planning and construction of its main campus. Despite the allocation of RM438.64 million for setting up Unimap under the 8th Malaysian Plan, only 25 percent of the campus plans have been completed, which university management blamed on budget constraints.

What is even more startling according to the report is that Unimap made the first payment to the contractor working on the permanent campus before the contract was fully negotiated and signed. The report further states that workmanship is extremely poor, cement in many places is cracking and crumbling, roads and parking areas are inappropriate and much of the equipment supplied is not functioning.

According to the report, from 2002 to 2012 the university had no dormitories and has been renting them and ferrying students to campus instead, at a cost of RM138.4 million. In 2015, Unimap arranged with the Proven Group of Companies to supply additional privately owned accommodation at Titi Tinggi, some 35 km from Kangar and 40 km from the main campus at Ulu Pauh. Details of the agreement have never been made public, but Unimap will pay rent for 15 years for the use of this accommodation, but ownership will continue to remain private.

The Unimap-Proven venture is contrary to the Education Ministry’s vision of universities earning income through hostel rental to students. Thus in the medium to long term the university will be restricted in the ways it can earn revenue to fund future budget cuts.

Similar issues exist at Universiti Malaysia Kelantan (UMK) where the lack of student accommodation has led to severe overcrowding at hostels.

Corruption rampant

Mismanagement and waste is one issue, but outright corruption is another.

Any significant time spent within Malaysian academia will produce stories about corruption. However, most, if not all of these remain hearsay, as there are few reports of corruption to higher authorities and very few charges are ever made, with no convictions.

Just some examples that have come to the writer’s attention are consultancy companies run and operated by faculty, with deans and deputy deans as directors and shareholders. Students have told the writer in confidence that examiners at master’s and PhD level ask outright for payments to pass. A particular dean of a new faculty used a company owned by proxies to supply equipment. University cars have been sent to workshops for repairs that don’t exist.

Academics are paying for articles to be published in academic journals without peer review, and the heavy use of research grants for questionable travel is common.

University staff tend to be fearful of their superiors, most extremely hesitant to blow the whistle on their peers and superiors. In an interview with a state director of the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission, the writer was told that the MACC would provide a neutral and discreet place for those who wanted to remain anonymous and report corruption. However those few that came forward faced hurdles with the MACC that were almost insurmountable, such as being requested to file a police report which would jeopardize anonymity.

Domineering vice chancellors

A major problem is leadership. Vice chancellors tend to be domineering, not allowing room for dissent from their own faculty and university members. Often staff are selected on loyalty rather than merit. Strong vice chancellors can browbeat the university board and get their own way on operational issues, due to the transitory nature of university boards.

Universities within Malaysia have become dominated by vice chancellors who are intent on micromanaging their universities. The strong power-distance relationships that develop between the leader and subordinates is powerful enough to destroy many of the management checks and balances that exist to prevent mismanagement and even abuse of power.

It’s time to re-organize Malaysian public universities from the top down. Not only is new leadership needed, but heavy reform of the organization so that these institutions should function as they are meant to. All importantly, vision beyond self-glorification is desperately needed by public university leadership.

Murray Hunter is an Australian academic who recently taught at a Malaysian university.

************************************

FROM THE HEART OF AN HONEST MUSLIM
By: Dr. Tawfik Hamid
(defendingiraniandemocracy.wordpress.comt)

“I am a Muslim by faith, a Christian by spirit, a Jew by heart, and above all I am a human being.” says Dr. Tawfik Hamid.

I was born a Muslim and lived all my life as a follower of Islam.

After the barbaric terrorist attacks done by the hands of my fellow Muslims everywhere on this globe, and after the too many violent acts by Islamists in many parts of the world, I feel responsible as a Muslim and as a human being to speak out and tell the truth to protect the world and Muslims as well from a coming catastrophe and war of civilizations.

I have to admit that our current Islamic teaching creates violence and hatred toward non-Muslims. We Muslims are the ones who need to change. Until now we have accepted polygamy, the beating of women by men, and killing those who convert from Islam to other religions.

We have never had a clear and strong stand against the concept of slavery or wars, to spread our religion and to subjugate others to Islam and force them to pay a humiliating tax called jizia. We ask others to respect our religion while all the time we curse non-Muslims loudly (in Arabic) in our Friday prayers in the mosques.

What message do we convey to our children when we call the Jews “descendants of the pigs and monkeys”? [Yet, both Arabs and Jews are descendants of Ibrahim (Abraham)!] Is this a message of love and peace, or a message of hate?

I have been into [Christian] churches and [Jewish] synagogues where they were praying for Muslims. While all the time, we curse them, and teach our generations to call them “infidels”, and to hate them.

We immediately jump in a ‘knee jerk reflex’ to defend Prophet Mohammad when someone accuses him of being a paedophile while, at the same time, we are proud with the story in our Islamic books that he married a young girl seven years old [Aisha] when he was above 50 years old.

I am sad to say that many, if not most of us, rejoiced in happiness after September 11th and after many other terror attacks.

Muslims denounce these attacks to look good in front of the media, but we condone the Islamic terrorists and sympathise with their cause. Until now our ‘reputable’ top religious authorities have never issued a fatwa or religious statement to proclaim Bin Laden as an apostate, while an author, like Rushdie, was declared an apostate who should be killed according to Islamic Shari’a law just for writing a book criticizing Islam.

Muslims demonstrated to get more religious rights as we did in France to stop the ban on the hijab (head scarf), while we did not demonstrate with such passion and in such numbers against the terrorist murders. It is our absolute silence against the terrorists that gives the energy to these terrorists to continue doing their evil acts.

We Muslims need to stop blaming our problems on others or on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. As a matter of honesty, Israel is the only light of democracy, civilization, and human rights in the whole Middle East.

We kicked out the Jews with no compensation or mercy from most of the Arab countries to make them “Jews-free countries” while Israel accepted more than a million Arabs to live there, have their own nationality, and enjoy their rights as human beings. In Israel, women cannot be beaten legally by men, and any person can change his/her belief system with no fear of being killed by the Islamic law of ‘apostasy,’ while in our Islamic world people do not enjoy any of these rights.

I agree that the ‘Palestinians’ suffer, but they suffer because of their corrupt leaders and not because of Israel.

It is not common to see Arabs who live in Israel leaving to live in the Arab world. On the other hand, we used to see thousands of Palestinians going to work with happiness in Israel, its ‘enemy.’ If Israel treats Arabs badly as some people claim, surely we would have seen the opposite happening.

We Muslims need to admit our problems and face them. Only then we can treat them and start a new era to live in harmony with human mankind. Our religious leaders have to show a clear and very strong stand against polygamy, paedophilia, slavery, killing those who convert from Islam to other religions, beating of women by men, and declaring wars on non-Muslims to spread Islam.

Then, and only then, do we have the right to ask others to respect our religion. The time has come to stop our hypocrisy and say it openly: ‘We Muslims have to change !


Dr. Hamid is an Egyptian scholar and author of the article. The world needs more people like him—ones who have the courage to face-up to reality.

Dr. Tawfik Hamid (aka Tarek Abdelhamid), is an Islamic thinker and reformer, and one time Islamic extremist from Egypt. He was a member of a terrorist Islamic organization JI with Dr. Ayman Al-Zawaherri who became later on the second in command of Al-Qaeda. Dr. Hamid is currently a Senior Fellow and Chair of the study of Islamic Radicalism at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies.