Malaysians (would) want a Minister Mentor. No.

The following is a cropped screenshot from an internet survery on Bernama, a news agency based in Malaysia.

43% of the 1000+ respondents want the dispute between the PM Datuk Seri Abdullah and former PM Tun Dr. Mahathir (TDM) by “Dr. Mahathir taking an ‘elder statesman’ role”.

No. That’s unacceptable for several reasons.

1. The power relationship between an official elder stateman and the PM will be unclear, even if a constitutional amendment was made to create such a post, I don’t see how creating a post would resolve a conflict between TDM and Abdullah. It would necessitate that the elder statesman office to officially overrule the PM in certain decisions.
2. Creating a post to help our PM and TDM interact doesn’t make sense: TDM’s problem is that PM Abdullah is a weak leader because he can’t uphold BN and UMNO unity. It’s not a matter of policy but personality. No amount of communication between the two of them can help that.
3. Creating a post would in effect be a personality-related post: to uphold the strength of personality of TDM himself, which in turn, entrenches Barisan Nasional’s hold on Malaysia for better or for worse.
4. That doesn’t necessarily mean good policy. Malaysia under BN is still run under patron-client relationships and probably won’t change as long as BN is in power. While patron-client relationship can act towards the benefit of the whole of society, it probably is a good cause of corruption and cronyism.
5. I will grant that there needs to be lasting institution(s) that transcends and operates longer than the brief term(s) of Dewan Rakyat MPs. But we already have the Dewan Negara, the Sultanate and the bureaucracy. If we are going to appoint something like a “senior statesman” it would really mean that all three of them are quite useless in providing the long-term governance Malaysia needs.

Dramafest: “that’s the best Filipino accent I’ve ever heard” Part 4

Credit: EH Eusoffworks

Darn work is preventing me from doing anything on the internet at all! Chugging along is “Maid In Singapore”, written by Nadia Olisa. I’m not sure who’s the lead Filipino maid though, so I’m just winging it. Anybody want to correct it for me? This one is relatively short. Forgive me for the typos if I missed out any.

Dramafest is an annual combined inter-hall drama event, where halls of residence at NUS come together to put up six short plays which revolve around a central theme. In this interview, I take a look at the creative thinking processes, the trials and the tribulations that they had to face on the road to Dramafest.

Highlight quotes:

Eva, on Nadia and her scripts.

Last year at Dramafest she wrote a script as well, the one with the two dolls, the psychiatric one. Once again, it was fun to act, that was the feedback from the actors. It allowed for a lot of acting, for example, the Filipino maid [character], she’s Singaporean. I had a Filipino roommate an entire year, and I thought she was Filipino.

Musa, on Jia Ru’s [??] acting who played the Filipino maid

She’s very experienced. She was the lead for the last two hall productions. So she has a very good passion for acting. She actually more interested in Thai, and speaks Thai very fluently. When I told her she had to be Filipino, she was “No, I want to be Thai!”.

SPOILER: Iron Man after-credit hidden scene sucks

Iron Man mini-review: Quite an impressive film, not the best but very much watchable and enjoyable. If there was some other megablockbuster released at the same time, I doubt that it would have performed as well. Nevertheless, Robert Downey Jr. did do a good job at portraying a man who is weaker than the suit he wears.

SPOILERS AHEAD: A comparison between Iron Man with Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins. Both are insanely rich — except that one’s just a regular multibillionnaire and the other’s a genius multibillionnaire. Bruce Wayne mask is his true face — he acts the playboy to cover for the hard-ass hero inside. On the other hand, Tony Stark truly is the playboy and IS the playboy at heart but becomes the hero out of necessity (character development?). At the end you know he still is the attention-seeking, charismatic fool by admitting that he is indeed Iron Man.

To get to the point, the hidden scene after the credits sucks. Samuel L. Jackson makes a cameo as Nick Fury of S.H.I.E.L.D. . It’s probably the worse scene in the film, Jackson just struts out with his gap teeth smiling like a retard trying to make Stark feel small but rather it just comes off as comedic. That’s a bad portrayal of Nick Fury — or any character that might have been there. It just watches like, “oh hey it’s Samuel L. Jackson with an eyepatch being nick fury”. He just doesn’t occur to me as any incarnation of Nick Fury, just SLJ with an eyepatch.

Dramafest: “What would a world without breasts be like?” Part 2

Photo by EH Eusoffworks

Continuing on with the Dramafest Interview, here is the portion of the interview where the producers talk about Laremy’s “Between You And Me”, the first play during Dramafest 2008.

Dramafest is an annual combined inter-hall drama event, where halls of residence at NUS come together to put up six short plays which revolve around a central theme. In this interview, I take a look at the creative thinking processes, the trials and the tribulations that they had to face on the road to Dramafest.

Laremy, introducing his play:

I wrote this play because it’s always something I wanted to do, I wrote to be about feminism and femininity in Singapore. Because, as much as I don’t want to use the label, but I think I am a feminist, in that sense of the word, and I thought I would like to use art to convey that message. So that’s why when Dee asked me to do something like this I was very excited. What I did was to do some surveys, because I’m not a woman, I don’t have breasts and I don’t know what it feels like. So I got surveys from 30 people.

Danielle, on whether its right for a guy to comment on breasts:

I think you can’t really say that his viewpoint was right or not. When we were rehearsing the play, we were also talking about whether there are lines that we agree with, or lines we disagree with. For me, there was one part which was a bit chunky about feminism, which I struggled with — for one thing I don’t have the memory — but it also it was something that didn’t connect with me. When we were doign it there were a lot of issues. The more we rehearsed, the more meaning and links we saw between them [the characters].

Eva, on the Irish drinking song:

If you listen to it, it has a lot of good advice… The support one, and check for lumps.

The Wheels In Tun Dr. Mahathir’s Political Thought

To understand Malaysia, one must understand its leaders. Recently, Tun Dr. Mahathir has set up his own blog, and I found this except particularly significant because I think it gives a lot of insight into the thought processes that have shaped Malaysia in his administration.

“Politically, the opposition is the enemy. Being forced to work with the opposition is not undemocratic but it shows up the weakness of the Government.

A weak government is not good for multi-racial Malaysia. It leads to unwarranted challenges against its authority. Governments cannot please everybody. If a Government cannot be firm and is forced to flip-flop there will be a lack of confidence which does not augur well for the smooth implementation of policies or project…

A Government with little need for opposition support would be better able to disregard the sniping that all Governments must face. It should however take note of opposition views and respond where necessary.

In today’s context, the Federal Government is unable to initiate necessary changes to the constitution and would be held to ransom every time.” — Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohammad, May 02, 2008 (http://www.chedet.com/2008/05/weak-government-is-not-good-for-multi.html).

Clearly, Dr. Mahathir is quite conservative. Saying that he favours a strong government is an understatement, and if anything Abdullah’s quote, “Aku pantang dicabar” (I will not stand challenges to my authority) seems to be a closer fit to describing Mahathir’s philosophy than Abdullah’s. It really boils down to a defence of authoritarianism.

How is working with “the enemy” an indication of government weakness? What does he define as a “weak” government? His argument basically consists of the inability to change the constitution and set policy as the opposition would “snipe” and make “unwarranted challenges” to government efforts. Nevertheless, the government somehow can take into consideration the oppposition, but obviously at its own leisure.

So the next question is, what are the political mechanisms for a government to be able to be effective? I believe that there is a cultural argument for this. Students of political science may have encountered the notion that the “Asian way” of organization is based on networks of affiliation and hierarchical patronage which permeate the previous government. Thus to lose key leaders in government would mean that a entire branch of people in the bureaucracy would have been cut off from performing their jobs.

Is there good reason for political “sniping” to reduce the efficacy of government? Let me postulate a reason which suggests the answer, “no”. If Barisan Nasional and the government has a centralised method for framing an agenda, pursuing legitimate reasons for policy and coordinating the actions of its members, then its will have greatly bolstered its policymaking capability. It doesn’t have a BN-centric “epistemic community” — a network of personnel largely dedicated to framing issues and giving BN the intellectual and moral high ground, i.e. “the confidence that it needs”. Again, it boils down to network politics.

If anything, “political sniping” disrupts policymaking because BN doesn’t have the internal institutional support as a bulwark against it, and probably has relied on government infrastructure to give that support that it no longer has control of.

In conclusion, it is in my opinion that Mahathir’s opinions are largely predicated on political realities — but realities which are weaknesses and flaws in BN’s institutional capabilities. He says the government needs to be strong through less opposition, but that necessity stems from the fact that BN has little capability to withstand opposition at all.

If BN wants to continue to stay in government, the answer will at least partially lie in reforms to become institutionally more capable of organization outside of government. I’m not sure if the resignation of Abdullah Badawi achieves that, and I am more inclined to think that it will just rearrange the networks of patronage within BN rather than giving the institutional support that it needs.

On a side note, I really have to re-read Zakaria’s Illiberal Democracy.

Dramafest: “Let’s pretend to be serious here” Part 1

Several weeks ago, I did an interview with a few people whom I really respect for what they do and how much they put into it. The producers of NUS Dramafest (with a director and a playwright) managed to take two hours to sit down and answer my questions. Dramafest is an annual combined inter-hall drama event, where halls of residence at NUS come together to put up six short plays which revolve around a central theme. In this interview, I take a look at the creative thinking processes, the trials and the tribulations that they had to face on the road to Dramafest.

The transcripts will be released in sections every other day, as I take time to transcribe them. I’ll post up notable quotes from the producers, and the actual transcript for that “episode” will be available after the jump.

Episode 1: “Let’s Pretend to Be Serious Here”
The producers introduce themselves, and talk about the behind-the-scenes organization of Dramafest, coping with regular school work and the general school calendar.

Eva, on balancing school and dramafest
As I was directing as well, even when I papers daily up to Wednesday of Dramafest week, ever since Monday, I had a lab report or something due or an actual exam on Wednesday and Friday was the actual day. So while I could set aside a few hours as a director, but if an actor tells me that they have an exam the next day, I can’t very well tell them “no, no, no, you can’t study you must have rehearsals now.” The play I directed we did it in two, three days in the end. The time constrain was so great, but actually we casted them pretty early too. Also because one actor sprained his knee very badly.

Laremy, on balancing dramafest and other activities
I think based on… I’ve been in hall for four years, and I kinda feel for everyone when he said that time taken to achieve this stuff. Somehow, I understand the need to put everything in one month, but I think that itself affects everyone’s performance. Because people who often do drama, also do dancing and singing, that also affects what’s happen. It’s a two-way thing.

Musa, on coordinating schedules
We planned out early, but then we hit recess week. And you can’t really ask people to come down on recess week. People going off for their holidays, you can’t ask them to not go off on their holidays because basically it’s an extra thing. Then, week after holidays is exam week. We can’t ask people to put away their study time to come down. It’s basically not our fault, it’s just the timing constraints.

Eva, on Chethan being a freshmen producer
Because [Chethan]’s a brave soul. Actually when I produced last year I was a freshman, so I don’t think you really need experience, it’s just that you must be willing to take the risk. Apparently not many people are willing to do that.

Click the jump for the full first episode of the interview.

Reflections on Conference Reporting

Recently, I’ve managed to publish a report at The Ridge Online on a small conference held by the SIIA, featuring Professor Shamsul AB from UKM. This is not the first time I’m reporting on conferences, I’ve posted extensive summaries of speakers at the MSLS, here and here.

For the more recent piece, “BN’s Loss Not a Surprise“, aside from grammatical comments, the feedback I received was:

“style: news report is distinct from academic paper. it’s rare to see additional readings; related articles, perhaps. it also need rigorous grammar. Please ration the use of direct quotes and indirect quotes, each serves its purpose. And please breakdown long quotes to shorter one, which are easier for readers to digest.”

The problem with the conference reporting is that there’s a tension between brevity and completeness. On one hand, there is a author’s imperative to be brief — otherwise the author is going to lose an audience. For a newspaper report, what’s needed are sound bites and general gist of the event. Furthermore brevity in writing saves energy, which means that we’ll be better motivated to continue with the next article.

But on the other hand, there’s a need for a wholesome understanding of an issue which contributes to word bloat. First, authors have to assume that readers have no prior background to an issue, which means that additional explanation has to be included. Secondly, there are many issues and side issues that are raised by a speaker, with valid explanations that need to be elaborated. Leaving them out would make it look like the speaker isn’t making a backed-up claim. Thirdly, there are questions, reactions and authors analysis that also ought to be included.

So how do you compromise? In retrospect, this is what I should have done:

• Write the article with two sections in mind: a summary article, and a longer “appendix”.
• The summary article should not be more than 500 words.
• If the summary article published online, it should be accompanied with two pictures.
• The shorter summary article should contain the gist of the talk, two-three quotes, prominent questions, and reactions.
• The longer appendix should contain expanded arguments, side issues, other notable quotes, and analysis.
• The shorter summary should link to the longer appendix, or otherwise be truncated so that the longer version is contained in the “jump” or the “read more” link.
• I never did any analysis in this one. Coincidentally I don’t have much to say about Professor Shamsul’s reasoning, except that I never got to ask my questions.

I think because I didn’t write it in the traditional narrow-broad approach (pithy summaries on ahead of deeper explanations) but in a flow-of-arguments style, it got tagged as “News Analysis” rather than “Breaking News”. I think that’s a good call.

There’s a lot that I got down that I didn’t include in that article either, and it’s already pushing a thousand words. There are more points that he made. The question-and-answer session is completely neglected.

I don’t know about the Ridge; it hasn’t begun to use the “jump” yet. I think that authorship for the online edition is still very much modeled after print journalism because it doesn’t take into account the stuff that we can do online that radically changes the way journalists structure our articles. I should probably start using the jump as well.

Six:Dramafest 2008 reviews, and more interviews

I’m thoroughly sad that I’m not part of Six Confessions: the Interhall Dramafest 2008, the second iteration of short plays by a whole bunch of really talented people. I was acting last year and I met some really fantastic people, and being on the opposite side of the curtain comforts me none.

I suppose that being in the audience of has its perks. It really exceeded my expectations. There was a sensation of each play trying to outdo the last one — pity the first play. Even though there was only two-three weeks for the actors to pick up everything, I think that they did a great service to the audience by presenting us something worth watching (and that’s not doing it the justice it deserves). Plus, it was free.

A short review of plays at Dramafest by chronology

A feminist Irish Drinking song. Whodathunk. Girls, pretending to drink beer?

“Between You and Me” by Laremy is a Brechtian play discussing femininity and the female breast. It takes the format of a discussion by two women (and a man) about their sexual experiences and how they relate to their breasts — whether embracing it as a form of dominance, as a integral part of feminine sexuality, or eschewing the condescending male gaze. It does break the forth wall, the actors do acknowledge and address the audience, and asks them, “So what is the message we’re trying to tell here?”. They then break out into an Irish Drinking Song ala Whose Line. Danielle Woong, a producer again taking up a part, took up an ostensibly male character’s role, which comes off as particularly gender neutral.

Viknesk being a lecher. I mean, portraying a lecher.

“Maid in Singapore” by Nadia is a social awareness play which tries to highlight the plight of foreign workers hired as domestic help. It juxtaposes two families: one where the female employer is abusive towards their maid, possibly because her husband is cheating on her; the other where the husband is secretly having an affair with the maid. Viknesk again gets a similar role from last year’s Dramafest: a sleeping, lying bastard. I like how there is a tension between both sides of the story — one cannot be abusive to a maid, yet if the maid is elevated to the level of equal, then another set of problems emerge.

I Fake it in bed! Oh yeah? I fake it in bed and out of bed!

“I Fake It In Bed” by Desiree, is ostensibly inspired by Postsecret, a website where anonymous people reveal their deepest secrets by sending in postcards. Three characters take turn to make short pity confessions of the perverted things they do. I think that while this was the shortest play of the six, it was also the tightest play. Acting and timing was spot on, and had a wonderful twist at the end. It was very much like a six-word story, and was a delight to watch.

Wilvin in his perpetually “huh?” state.

“Suzuki” by Nobu, Xiaoxuan and Joe (Eva too) takes place between two office workers who are pulling an all-nighter to complete a project. A side conversation quickly turns into a comedy of errors when the worker mistakenly thinks that his boss is talking about his Japanese girlfriend when he is actually talking about his motorcycle. Timing was well done, it did manage to garner the laughs and Wilvin does look the part for the stoned and fatigued white-collar worker.

Heh heh heh, you’re not getting an operation because I am a bastard. Heh heh heh.

“A Matter of Principle” by Laremy is a situational play where a young man who only has a month to live appeals to the hospital manager to approve a highly risky procedure to save his life. From what I heard the director is acting the role of the young man and his depiction was a stuttering, unsure man. The bureaucratic manager was spot-on, although I would have imagined it in a more John Cleese bureaucrat manner. Personally, this is my least favourite play, I think the manager was unduly villified and cardboard-thin so the play really turns out to be pulp fiction shock than a criticism of just principles.

Okay, I think slept with him who thought he slept with his sister who think she’s lesbian. Whatever, it doesn’t really matter as long because it’s funny!

“The Night Before” by Manbeer, another Dramafest sophomore, is an ensemble comedy where four people wake up in bed together, all thinking that they had slept with some one or another, hilarity ensues. While it isn’t exactly the most original of ideas, it was well executed and Musa probably saved the drama as the deus ex machina. I don’t know how he knew who slept with who, presumably because it was his party, but he just sorted all of them out and left them to be funny.

Small rant: Dramafest seems to have a naming problem. We can’t call it Six because you’d go like, “Are you taking part in Six?” and I would definitely go I’d rather not discuss my personal life right now. On the other hand, we can’t call it dramafest either (although that’s the most common way to refer to it) simply because there are a zillion other dramafests out there.

Another rant: What’s the point of having a theme when nobody ever adheres to it? Last year it was Colours, and there was only one play that had actually something remotely to do with colours. This year, the theme was Confessions, and again there was only one play that was actually somewhat confessional. Really, the M18 rating notwithstanding, it felt more like the theme was “Sex”. You can see there’s sex in all them plays except a Matter of Principle, but it’s there alright.

And finally, I am arranging for a roundtable interview with all the producers! Eva, Danielle, Chethan, and Musa, and guest scriptwriter Laremy Lee, since one of his plays got axed by CFA but nevertheless two others still survived. It’s not going to be easy, but I think it’s going to be worthwhile. I think that there’s a signficant bit of interhall politics going on here, and it can probably die out if there isn’t enough leadership. Furthermore, interviewing them will set a standard for next year’s dramafest, and the following years. So I am committed to doing it, whether or not if it gets published in the Ridge. It just deserves to be documented in more than just the perfunctory ad on Ridgeonline.

Note to self: need camera, quality voice recorder, and a good place to do an interview

Edit 21 March: Included pictures with attempted witticisms from EH Eusoffworks.

Project ASEAN University Interview Series

Truth be told, there isn’t anything at all like an awareness of ASEAN at the ground and community level here in Singapore and Malaysia. News about university life is still contained by state boundaries. If we’re ever going to get something like an ASEAN community, that barrier has got to be broken with stories of real people in real situations (and not just a song).

Recently, I’ve proposed to the Ridge of the National University of Singapore that I would conduct a series of interviews with student leaders across ASEAN universities. Taking advantage of the contacts I’ve made at Model ASEAN , this shouldn’t be such a difficult task. As long as I don’t make NUSSU look bad, it should be alright.

This is the plan. First, I need to talk casually to someone in the university about the socio-political issues that undergraduates face. I need to get to know what the feeling on the ground is like and what the culture is like. Then I plan to talk to someone who’s somebody in their equivalent of the students’ union. I’ll ask them about fee hikes, student culture, activism, and et cetera. The magic is, all this will be done over the internet. A recorded VOIP session is the standard I cut; IM chat gets terribly short answers and doesn’t convey personality.

Hopefully I’ll be able to conduct and publish one interview per week at the minimum. With 10 countries in ASEAN and quite an uncountable number of tertiary institutions, there seem to be a limitless number of institutions. I can always expand to other regions as well, such as Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. I’m also trying to see if East Timor is possible.

Now, of course, space at the Ridge is limited, and not all the contents of the interviews can be published . I hope revealing the additional unpublished stuff here on this blog will be uncontroversial. Furthermore, I’m really excited about doing this. I’ve been longing to do a long-term project like this for a long time.

So expect some real, on the ground stuff, coming soon to this blog.

A loss is a loss: (knee jerk) reactions to Malaysian Elections

When I talk to my friends in Singapore, telling them that the opposition has had their best victory in Malaysia, their instant reaction was “that’s bad.”

In turn, my reaction to that is a confirmation of what I’ve been thinking all along: Singaporeans are generally conservative. Perhaps for these people, change is something that they’re not intrinsically prepared to handle. I suppose everybody reacts against change to some degree or another, but why is a 33% opposition win bad? Is the Malaysian opposition party vilified in the Singaporean mind? Or does the BN enjoy a privileged situation? Or is change just categorically bad for Singaporeans? I don’t know.

What I do hope for Malaysia in the following years:

• Less apathy. I hope that the latest election will show that anything’s possible, that a difference can be made.
• The possibility of a peaceful transition of government. I’m not predicting it, but hoping that our democracy is mature enough to make it possible.(Unless BN is really incompetant, they’ll probably get a slightly better result the next election due to the shock from this election.)
• Greater protection of rights. It’s a pipe dream, but one day we’ll achieve a bill of information rights for the Malaysian citizen, with a provision for the internet and bloggers.
• Better, cleaner executive branch of government. Haven’t seen any substantive improvement of the Malaysian bureaucracy despite Abdullah’s promise the last elections.
• Less racism. We say we’re a multicultural society, but that’s the polite “face” that everybody puts on. To put it mildly, I know people who seriously don’t like Malays, and there is discourse of the minorities “naik kepala” (arrogantly trying to take control)*. I think that societies in Malaysia have to start helping everybody regardless of race. I hate to say it, but the Chinese community as the demographically most affluent society in Malaysia has to help everybody get up, Malay, Indian, Asli or Chinese, or else they’ll always be racism.
• Barisan National reforms. I’m not against the BN. I don’t oppose the BN continuing as government as Malaysia indefinitely per se, but I am not satisfied with the current condition of Malaysia. That is probably the best way that they can counter the rising influence of the opposition.

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Don’t feel like writing long entries today.