Reading my mate's blogs, made me so envious of them. Take for example Ashraf’s www.mindspring.wordpress.com or Kay Own’s http://kayown.blogspot.com/. They seem so profound, fraught with such brilliant ideas, humourous jokes, and intelligent opinions, while mine is so airy fairy. And I haven’t seen the others. So I made a resolution which I hope will last. Unlike my lifelong attempt of making new year's resolutions which never lasted for more than a few weeks. I resolved that I am going to read the news every day. So read the news I did. But I found that I skipped all the columns and pages on politics and went straight to Opinions or Life and Times. Well at least it is a great improvement from going straight to the entertainment column. Baby steps, I told myself, baby steps.
So last Sunday as I was browsing through my favourite portion of the Sunday Paper, Opinions, amidst such motivating and amazing features and opinions on interesting, informative and beneficial matters like About capturing history on film, and about providing better working conditions to our men and women in blue, I chanced upon this article.
It just stood apart from all the other columns I had read. In short I found it simply braggadocian. It just perturbs me if our nation is eventually going to be led by leaders who came from snooty upper class as so clearly painted in this column. Ok, I admit, hands down, I am covetous of such a lifestyle. I am angry at myself that I cannot provide such luxury to my beloved children. But my personal insane womanly kiasu envy aside, let’s all pause and think for a second. How an article glorifying and bragging such privileged lifestyle, inherited by birth, not through hard work, or intellectual capacity, do any good to the nation as a whole?
How can a leader who has had such priveleged upbringing, who can shop for the latest techno gadget in Tokyo
. Who will champion the cause of single mothers whose children’s sustenance are never being paid, who has to work twice or three times as hard to be recognized, who end up paying hefty legal bills just to keep their children who they have been supporting for years single handed anyway. Who will champion the cause of youths who have done wrong, but wish for a second chance to improve their lives by going back to school but do not have the means to do so?
With leaders like that, What is to become of our father land, I wonder.
>
Out of the cage: My mother, the techno whiz-kid
18 Mar 2007
Khairy Jamaluddin
OUR family had a birthday dinner a couple of nights back. It was the best kind of family birthday dinner.
Just the immediate clan, three generations eating chocolate cake, banoffee pie and Thai food.
When the presents were finally unwrapped, the birthday girl was beaming from ear to ear. She was not surprised with her gifts, but rather the delight was merely a confirmation of getting what she wanted.
First to have its wrapper torn off was a black Bose SoundDock for her to blast the music on her iPod anywhere in the house — loud enough to play out by the pool and small enough to carry downstairs for her dancing classes on Sundays with her buddies.
The next present, which she was already anticipating, was a 7.2 megapixel Lumix camera with a 28mm wide-angle Leica lens (she insisted on a model with the Leica enhancement) in matte black and loaded with a 2GB memory card — in time for her to take on her 10-day trip to
It wasn’t any of my sisters’ birthday, neither was it my wife’s. And my nieces are both too young to appreciate techno toys.
No, the proud recipient of the stuff that would make most tech-savvy guys jealous was my mother, who just turned 72.
We were all going to get her presents that we thought a septuagenarian would like, but it turns out we were mistaken.
We should have known better.
My mother has been at the cutting edge of technology usage for quite some time.
When I was a small boy growing up in
Those were the days of the first Walkman and full-sized, remote controlled (but not wireless) R2D2s.
Without having to ask, she got me my first video game console — the Atari — on which I learnt hand-eye co-ordination and timing, especially by playing Jungle King, which I thought at the time was the greatest game invented and certain never to be bettered.
She followed that up by buying me my first PC, with roman alphabets and the basic hiragana Japanese characters on the keyboard for me to attempt to learn word processing.
This was followed by a whole host of Nintendo hardware, including both the game console and the portable games with Donkey Kong throwing down barrels at you to jump over.
When I first went off to boarding school, she would snail mail her letters, but as soon as they became affordable, she got a facsimile machine at home from which she would fax her weekly messages to me.
At university, when most people were still figuring out how to navigate around the world wide web, we began communicating via email (she was an early Jaring subscriber) and quickly learnt how to add attachments and links.
She was the first one I knew who bought a flat panel LCD TV (she knew exactly which one she wanted and she knew she didn’t want plasma).
She surfs the Internet regularly, either directly or getting her secretary to print out her favourite websites, which oddly include blogs that vilify her son.
Although a late adopter, she has become an SMS fiend ever since my wife showed her how predictive text worked, rattling off quick messages throughout the day.
She now carries the Nokia E70, which flips out a full QWERTY thumb-board for her oxymoronic long SMSes.
I have seen people stare at this elderly Malay lady in a selendang, typing away furiously on her specialist phone.
Sometimes when she is at a function which I could not attend, she would snap a photo on her phone and MMS over the (sometimes incriminating) image to me. Nobody ever suspects my mother of being James Bond.
She is relentless in her desire to want to learn and keep up to date.
When we bought her the iPod, we thought that she would reach her breaking point. After a while, surely, the old timers just give up learning about the latest fad.
We couldn’t imagine her loading up songs on her iTunes and sorting out her playlists. Clearly we were wrong.
I checked her iPod recently and was surprised to find her favourites — Hetty Koes Endang, Broery Marantika, Elvis Presley, Nat King Cole — all neatly organised in her "Mama iPod Playlist".
Of course, later I found out that she didn’t really do it herself but asked one of my sisters to load up her music player.
She has reached a stage where she knows she can master all gadgets she fancies, but is content to let other people sweat away at the thankless job of downloading and uploading songs.
Still, I wouldn’t put it past her to start downloading songs on her computer (legally, hopefully) and insisting on an iPod adapter for her car stereo.
She saw me using my BlackBerry the other day and wondered out loud if she should also get one — this is usually a cue for me to go and buy her the device.
Sometimes, the technology has traction with her (iPod) and sometimes it fails her tech test (Nokia Communicator). But she hasn’t been afraid to try.
My generation was already born in the electronics age. My mother was born before World War Two, way before modern communications technology.
Electricity in Alor Star in those days was generated from the river by the Hutten Bucks company.
For our generation, the change has been tremendous, but when compared to the advances that my mother has seen in her lifetime it must seem glacial.
It amazes me that she continues to try and stay ahead of the curve. This is an example of life-long curiosity in how things make our lives easier and more enjoyable.
On her birthday, I prayed for her good health so that she will one day enjoy movie on-demand from the classic Shaw Brothers library streamed directly into her handheld device via mobile broadband while making a conference call with her grandchildren over seamless internet telephony.
When these services become available, you can be certain Mama will be among the first to sign up