Category: Uncategorized

Turns out that this baby is fairly affordable, when it comes to fancy cars, that is. RM 240k OTR price, with a RM5k monthly installment on a 48-month installment plan. Nice!

I’m just worried that this would happen.

I attended a public lecture today, on the UUCA and The Constitution given by Dr Azmi Sharom, Assoc Professor at the Faculty of Law, Universiti Malaya. The gist of his lecture can be summarised as – there are constitutional grounds for having the UUCA but the question is whether those constitutional provisions are limitless or if there are limits to them in order to grant all citizens equal rights.

This question is currently being put to the test in the case of the UKM four who have brought their case to the High Court. The crux of the argument is that a university student has less rights than a dumb jock who does not qualify to get into university. The larger issue is to ensure that our universities churn out future leaders, innovators and thinkers instead of sheeple.

He did not really have much to talk about and there were not very many questions from the audience since the topic is a fairly dry one on constitutional law. However, Azmi Sharom is friggin’ hilarious! He kept the entire auditorium entertained and in stitches for slightly more than an hour. He really knows how to speak to the crowd and pull people in. I even contributed a little to the entire act. It was fun!

I wonder if Azmi conducts his actual classes like this. It would be fun to have a lecturer that can turn a boring topic into the funniest lecture that I have attended in ages.

According to an article in TheStar, “The Kelana Jaya Wanita Umno division has passed a resolution calling for the Penal Code on baby-dumping to be amended to include penalties for men who fathered the children.”

This is just dumb.

It is a lose-lose situation for the father. This law can only be upheld if the position of the father is legally recognised. However, in our legal system today, the father is defined as the man whom the woman is married to. That is why the JPN requests for a marriage certificate when registering a child’s birth for a birth certificate.

I think that we can safely assume that in most of these cases, the baby that is dumped is as a result of an unwed pregnancy. The man is probably not man enough to own up to the act or the woman does not want to marry the man – maybe it was a casual one night stand thing for the both of them.

However, it is a lose-lose situation. If the baby gets dumped, the man gets recognised as the father and gets penalised. If the baby gets nicely delivered, the man is not recognised as the father and loses all parental rights. I don’t even want to imagine the situation of an extra-marital affair where the father is not the father and so on.

It is about time that the law is changed to recognise the father as the biological one.

Our country seems to have recently been wrecked by the death of a student at a local college. The primary cause of death is supposedly the treatment that the student received as part of a ‘ragging’ exercise by the senior students. As a result of which, there was plenty of outrage with government and university officials coming out to officially ban ‘ragging’ exercises at universities ahead of the beginning of the academic year for a lot of students.

My opinion on the matter – bad move. Banning the exercise will never stop it. Ragging is often a rite of passage that everyone goes through at university. If done correctly, it can build valuable bonds between seniors and juniors. However, when taken to the extreme, it can definitely cause physical and psychological harm, possibly leading to death either directly or indirectly associated with the activity.

Banning the time tested activity is just going to drive it underground, making it far more difficult to regulate and control. What should have been done is to ban extreme ragging and release guidelines on the limits of the activity. For example, any form of direct physical contact should be banned and any senior who assaults any junior should be caught and charged to the full extent of the law for causing grievous bodily harm.

Students may think that they were put through hell during their freshers’ week – until it becomes their turn to organise things. I missed quite a lot of sleep during my orientation week, and got quite pretty grumpy because of it. We were also put through a lot of seemingly stupid and dumb activities. We also had to put up with inane requests from our seniors to get things done.

However, when I became a senior, I lost even more sleep when I was involved in organising fresher activities – we had to make sure that the freshers were back to their rooms and wake up early to prep the things organised for the next day. Also, we spent weeks in advance, sacrificing our semester breaks to get things ready for welcoming the freshers. Trying to torture freshers in the nicest way is not easy to do without advance planning.

Also, because I was involved in organising these activities, and making the juniors do all sorts of silly things that they did not want to, I became quite well liked. Until today, I still sometimes run into people randomly at work or while shopping and have them come up to ask me if I was Shawn, their senior at university. While I have to politely tell them that I cannot recall their names, I can still recognise their faces. We end up having an amiable chat after that.

Now, looking back at my university days, I dare to say that I look back at things nostalgically. My history with ragging goes way back to secondary school, where I can still remember doing a hundred push-ups when I pissed off some of my seniors. I can still remember the song Buli, Buli, Buli that we were all forced to sing along doing various disgusting things. The coolest thing that my seniors ever did was to enact a serious ghost story that was so good, that some people pissed their pants.

Ah, those were the days.

I have just read different takes on the events that transpired at the recent PKR retreat – where there was some shuffling of heads in Selangor and the Federal Territories. The article from TheStar claims that the PKR leadership feud has taken a turn for the worse with the Selangor Menteri Besar quitting as party state chief. However, the alternative news seems to have a different take on the matter, claiming that the Menteri Besar suggested that they separate party and state.

Alright. It’s both spin. Regardless of which, the important thing to note is that the MB will now only helm the state, while leaving party matters to Azmin Ali. The FT party matters will be given over to Zaid Ibrahim instead.

Personally, I think that separating party and state is a good thing to do. If the same person is in charge of everything, there will definitely be issues. Personal interest, party interest and state interests may not always be aligned but if one man is in charge, they will always be aligned – without any conflicts of interest since they all serve the same interest only.

To me, this should be a model adopted by all states – separating the political powers from state powers. In fact, I might even suggest that it might be something to consider for our future at the federal level. Our present model of parliament makes the UMNO president our de-facto Prime Minister. However, this need not necessarily be the case and we might want to consider direct elections in the future. There are advantages and disadvantages to both.

So, while I think that the problem brewed for too long, I think that the steps taken were the correct ones. In fact, this was something that should have been done from the very beginning – separation of powers. Tan Sri Khalid should not have been in charge of party matters. Leave the running of the state to the technocrats and leave the running of the party to the politicians.

Followed the instructions here for an authentic vintage feel, using Gimp.