Sunday is ending and Monday is looming upon us, once again. Sadness is an understatement, I am utterly inconsolable. I guess I should be looking at the bright side of life - what goes around, comes around therefore before I know it, the weekend will be here soon (of course after five agonizing days of waking up at 7am, hustling in and out of the hectic, polluted city looking wild eyed, feeling grouchy and angry). Such is the modern life, synonoymous with horrible traffic jams, long commutes, extended hours at work, disgusting, processed fast food and cellulite.
I woke up at 7.30am today to trek a jungle (okay, maybe less of a jungle and more of a park) in my valiant efforts to fight cellulite. I think cellulite is the repercussion of having a desk job whereby your ass is continuously glued on the chair for 10 hours daily. This is why I maintain that having a full time job not only erodes your soul, but leaves you with physical scars. Obesity and increased weight gain are side effects of having a full time job. Our bodies are weary from extensive sitting. I swear our ancestors from the stone ages did not have cellulite nor were they fat because they were constantly on their feet, running away from predators or hunting for food to ensure survival. How did humans evolve to this? From hard, menial labour, exhuasting our physical bodies under the sun to sitting in an artificially cold cubicle, dressed in our finest, doing monotonous paper work, pretending to be important and significant?
Anyway, I read Tan Twan Eng's Gift of Rain over the Merdeka weekend and it was trully engrossing. He paints Penang in a beautiful light with his skillful lyrical poetry, and he did justice to the history of the island during the insufferable Japanese occupation. I loved the complex relationships between the characters in the book and the description of colonial Penang depicted so accurately in the book. How the British administration and it's people just fled, without any sense of responsibility towards their subjects and how the locals were abandoned to fight (and die) for themselves against an enemy they did not know. The documentary 1941: The Fall of Penang also showed this to be a fact, that our colonial masters did indeed flee.
Which is why Independence was so important to them, as it is important to us now. The locals no longer wanted to be oppressed under foreign rule, they wanted to be free. To create the fate of their own nation, without the inteference of foreign powers who only wanted to take advantage of our natural resources. We all know by now, how Malaysia was formed and the struggles that Tunku and his team endured to achieve the nation's collective dream. So here we are 55 years later, still developing, growing, progressing towards a brighter future we all hope to share. It is apt that I write this now, as the General Elections are set to take place in the next couple of months. May the powers that be rule our nation fairly and just and let them not be consumed by personal gain and greed, if only to preserve (and not corrupt) the memories of our forefathers who fought for the nation's freedom.
