Happy Malaysia Day to all of you who are from Malaysia!
On another and related note, those of you who know me probably know that I am a big fan of Lee Kuan Yew.
Well, that’s a bit of a small understatement. I mean, it would have to be for someone who was somehow so moved that he decided to write an entire book about Lee Kuan Yew, which is by the way exactly what I did.
This Malaysia Day, 16 September, I’m very happy to announce the release of “One Date, Two Destinies: Lee Kuan Yew and the Birth of Malaysia and Singapore”, at a (Malaysia Day) discount!
This was a fun project to engage in, writing about the entire track of Lee Kuan Yew’s history from his birth up until the end.
I think it is crucial to look back at the past to understand history better, and this is one of the first things that a person will understand, I think, if they look just a little bit beneath the surface of Malaysian history and that which we call Malaysia.
I don’t think that there is quite a project that is like this, but I think that it was an extremely fun one – It contains many of my own personal reflections about Mr. Lee and the role that he played in Malaysia and Singapore, and in our shared history together, one that was born from a time of what can rightfully be called trauma.
I hope that you will find it meaningful and valuable for your own personal development and growth even as you reflect on these stories.
Thank you for your support in advance if you would like to purchase the book!
I finished Orientalism today, and it was truly unexpected that I would have. I was plodding along with the book as usual, maybe spending just a little bit of extra time. As I reached page 323 out of 378, fully expecting that the whole project would last much longer, I was shocked as I realized that everything beyond 327 was just page after page of references and indices for more than a hundred different citations, and ream after ream of definitions. Towards the end, it was, to say the very least, a strange anti-climax.
For better or for worse, I had somehow finished reading one of the grandest intellectual projects of the entire 20th century – Few books would make me reflect in this way or should give me a sense that I had learned something new that I considered worth passing on, but I am proud to say that Orientalism was one of those books. I talked about this in the last post, but it is strange to think about how we represent others, how those representations can be fair or foul, how they can distort our understanding of the world. I think that insight will go with me for much longer and it will always play a role in setting a small precursor check before I view or understand situations.
I find myself now in a strange place, thinking about the different things there are to read ahead. The things I didn’t mention I was reading, even as I had neglected to mention the fact that I am right now in the middle of one of those flights of fancy, which I take once in a while, as I try to gain a certain mastery or understanding of the world, which I had not had before.
The feeling doesn’t come all the time, but when it does come, it is quite intense, and here I am caught in the thick of it, looking at title after title from sociological tract after sociological tract.
The old familiar names like Durkheim, Weber, Foucault, and Fanon are casually appearing, and the somewhat newer names like Manheim are mixing together with some old and vaguely familiar but perhaps never truly encountered ones like Adorno, Saussure, Heidegger, Kant, Nussbaum, and Levi Strauss, amongst others. Even as I mentally determined that the next book I will read is Homi K. Bhabha’s “The Location of Culture”.
I don’t quite know when this phase will end, but what I do know is that the last time this happened, it continued for an entire year.
I appeared in a newspaper that year after having read 350 books in a single year.
I think it is unlikely that I will achieve that record again, because the books that I am looking up are much burn out.
The ideas are more complex, the terms on which to compare reality with the visible sight that life has accorded now are of a higher resolution, and in my subjective evaluation, therefore requiring more depth, time, and apprehension along the winding garden paths.
To give you an idea of what that means, from Orientalism alone I started up at least 40 separate ChatGPT conversations just to understand what Said was talking about, learning words that I had not encountered before across multiple languages, to not even speak about English alone:
I discovered again sociology of knowledge, location, subjectivities, and so many other things in new lights that have made me much more deeply think about the realities that we find ourselves in and how we create those. Professor Said has been a wonderful source of instruction in this regard, and his legacy, I think, does not need my validation, though today’s appreciation is not a paean – it is just a simple note of appreciation.
Where will this take me and what will I eventually learn from it? It is hard to say, but from what I’ve seen, it never really is in the direction of something bad. I don’t really think in terms of good or bad. It just all seems natural, per the towers injunction that is in my WhatsApp status message for anyone who happens to know my phone number.
Anyway, every story has an end, but this one seems to be being written, so I will not interrupt it.
I really want to start treating this like a diary again. I have failed before, but hopefully this is a small success. If it does end up as a failure, you will notice because it won’t update. I will try. Failure is normal, it is expected, and I probably will again and again. Anyway, here’s my attempt.
One of the things that I’ve started to do is to read Edward Said’s Orientalism, and I think it is a fascinating book. It’s not often that I spend more than a single day reading a book, yet somehow I’ve been captivated by Professor Said’s scholarship. Reading it has become a daily activity for me. As I walk and I run, I read passage by passage, because it is just that interesting and that worthy of the evaluation on a day-to-day.
Interestingly, it’s also one of those things that makes me want to capture down what I think and what I don’t think, and not necessarily even in a perfect way. Even in searching the immediate impressions that it has left, I find that it has left so many different footprints which I have yet to completely explore or traverse.
What stands out most immediately is this idea of how representations shape reality, and how what we see is affected by the assumptions and the way that we think about this given world.
Amongst other things, it showed to me how just a few people can end up shaping how entire groups of people think of countries, nations, people, civilizations. I think that that is a fascinating insight, because, amongst other things, it is one of the beautiful embodiments of the realization that in any given society it is not necessarily the great mass of people who would decide how civilization would see itself.
Rather, it is only a few people who, although they might be limited in their access to the world at large, might somehow still end up shaping what people think about, appreciate, and eventually understand, in a game of what one might call—perhaps in a way that Professor Said would not approve of—Chinese whispers.
This is how we understand the world, one might say: the scholar or the like just read a book and decide that that is indeed how certain people are, how certain classes of people are, how others should see whether Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, people of every single race or religion, mediated through little representations made with sensors that we use to appreciate only small, local, and immediate parts of it.
It is quite surprising to think about this idea.
At least for me, it has been interesting, because I didn’t always reflect upon this: how, in fact, the things that we read end up distorting reality, even if they are meant to create factual representations of it. It is a funny insight.
I wonder if the books that I have read all this while have been giving me a false representation of the world.
Somehow or another, they feel as though they have not yet.
Somehow or another, a lot of the things that I have thought about have been confirmed by them.
Of course, maybe that’s one of the symptoms of being a victim of representations—or, if not a victim, then a selector of these representations and the things that they show to us.
It is also nice somehow to learn a whole ton of new words, and also about skills of thought, just because Professor Said mentions so many different concepts that I find interesting and that I find myself inclined to just research and understand for long stretches through the reading.
To say that I have synthesized everything would really be a lie, and I’m sure that this thought process is going to shift and evolve in response to new information in the days ahead.
For now, what I can say is that all of this is fun, and it’s nice to act like a student and also to write like one again.
As I was practicing the cello this morning, I remember feeling a big sense of frustration that I wasn’t hitting the notes properly. In that moment, I caught myself in an interesting thought: “Shit, Timmy is going to scold me later.”
I thought about how my fingers were clumsy and how Timmy would stare into my soul, judging or pondering what I had failed to do in the course of the week.
Somehow, though, in the course of that thought a small shift took place in my frame.
“What if that happened to him?”
I remembered, at that instant, that my teacher was an actual musician and got paid to do shows. I imagine making the mistakes that I make on a stage in front of a paying audience. Wouldn’t that be catastrophic, somehow? Performance is part of the art of any creator and creative, and the logical end point of practice is doing, to the extent that we are paid or compensated for the things that we manage to successfully do.
It is never about practicing for the public, but instead showcasing the byproducts of a completed thought process: the willpower of somebody who did everything that they needed in order to succeed. Whether it was to do it without mistakes or to somehow accomplish the goal or the task that they set out to accomplish without errors, that’s what it takes to make it, I thought – it was the willpower to actually just do it right.
It was a small starting point, but it has made me start to rethink and think about everything else that I do in my life. These years are short and they are brutal, but the question is whether you should accept a reality where you don’t make it, where you’re not giving every single ounce of your energy into bringing the things you want to life.
Your awareness of things
Your financial success
Your skills and abilities in the things you value, appreciate, or say that you like
Your relationships with those around you whom you can say that you love
It gave me food for thought that even now I am chewing upon, and I anticipate myself chewing upon in the days, minutes, and seconds ahead.
