The Malaysian Insider :: Books
The Malaysian Insider :: Books |
| Posted: 01 Jan 2013 05:52 PM PST KUALA LUMPUR, Jan 2 – "It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards."—Yann Martel, Life of Pi.
You learn early, if you are fortunate, this simple truth. You prepare yourself for Life by realising there is no possible preparation; you learn to accept uncertainty. Try telling this to a 23-year-old attempting to backpack alone all over Europe with very little money and no itinerary though. Ten years ago, this was our hero. He was convinced that there was a Master Plan for him, that Life had meant him for greater things. Yes, absolutely so. That was until he realised he was about to miss the ferry from Stranraer to Belfast. You see, the train he arrived on was half an hour late.
The boy's look of dismay was interrupted by the Scotsman calling up his wife looking for parking nearby: "Honey? Can you take this kid I found to the ferry?" The intrepid traveller in question was me, of course, and I was about to get rescued. "If you stumble about believability, what are you living for? Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?" ― Yann Martel, Life of Pi. Five minutes later, I was in a Volkswagen Beetle hurtling for the ferry port. Small talk ensued. "Malaysia? Isn't that near Bali?" the Scotsman's wife asked. "Sort of. Indonesia and Malaysia are neighbours," I said. "Terrible isn't it, the bombing? Those terrorists…" What could I say? This was a year after 9/11 and everyone was still a little paranoid. What could I say? I was saved by my Good Samaritan driver, who continued without waiting for my reply: "My niece Barbara, she was backpacking, just like you are, in Bali. She flew back three days before the Kuta attack. God bless her." I nodded, glad I wasn't going to get kicked out of the car for sins unknown. (You see, I wasn't exactly immune to paranoia myself.) "Barbara plans to go back, you know. She loves the islands, she said. Where else should she go, you reckon? Does Malaysia have any nice islands? I bet it does." I reached my ferry with barely any minutes to spare. As I moved over the waters towards Northern Ireland, the only thing on my mind wasn't relief at not wasting my ticket but astonishment at the kindness and generosity of two complete strangers. "It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation." ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet. I am walking to one of my favourite cafés and, truth be told, I am a little grumpy. I have had a wisdom tooth removed yesterday and my gums are still sore. This also means no coffee for me, which, a decade since my last backpacking adventure, is a pretty big deal. I have gotten fatter and older; I am a spoiled 33-year-old expecting the world to be delivered to me on a silver platter. Or at least this is what I tell myself in my worst moments of self-pity. It could well be the drugs my dental surgeon gave me working a little too well. You wisely ignore me, my poor, dear overworked partner. You have been telling me to shut up since yesterday; which is what you usually do, but this time you had an excuse.
While I continued groaning on the sofa, you made congee for me, with nuggets of minced pork and steamed eggs. You let it cool in a large bowl and reminded me to eat it before it got too cold. My gums were still sore, of course, but I had never tasted anything more delicious, I swore. You simply rolled your eyes but couldn't hide a smile. "Do not seek the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer." ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet. Today I am allowed out of the house though I'm pretty sure it's only an excuse for you to have some decent coffee. You caution me for the umpteenth time: no coffee. Sure, why not? Take all the fun out of life, why don't you? But I couldn't hide my smile either; better to have you admonishing me than not. We walk into the café and immediately we spot a few familiar faces. Friends! Hugs and kisses, a swift flurry of questions about my oral health, random topics of conversation: these are better than the stuff any pharmacist could give you. Then more customers walk in. Strangers. Well, maybe not exactly strangers. One comes over to say hi; he's the baker who makes our favourite sweet potato cheesecake at another café. He's been busy and missing for months. Another stranger drops by our table; a petite Japanese woman in classy threads. Good gosh, she's my yoga teacher – from a different lifetime almost. I tell her she looks ravishing. More chatter, more happy smiles. I forget about any pain. A friend from Singapore wryly observes, "What's with you? You seem to know everyone here. I don't know why any of us even like you." Laughing, I fake a punch at him. A text message comes in from another good friend who was here earlier: "The soundtrack for today is Joy." She's right. What a wonderful day. The thing I have learned, if I have learned anything at all, is that we cannot predict the future, only live in the present and celebrate what we have. "The world isn't just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no? Doesn't that make life a story?" ― Yann Martel, Life of Pi. I think about the two strangers who had been so kind to me once upon a time, and the lesson they taught me of always keeping an open heart and an open mind. If you do, why, anything could happen. Life of Pi, by Yann Martel (Knopf Canada, 2001) Letters to a Young Poet, by Rainer Maria Rilke & translated by Stephen Mitchell (Vintage, 1986) * Kenny is a beginner at Life, always experiencing and always learning. Read more of his stories. |
| From UFOs to ‘tsunami bomb’: New Zealand archive secrets revealed Posted: 01 Jan 2013 03:18 PM PST WELLINGTON, Jan 2 – A new book has revealed rare historical gems buried in New Zealand's national archives, including a bizarre WWII plan to create a "tsunami bomb" and military files detailing supposed UFO sightings. Author Ray Waru said he wrote Secrets and Treasure to highlight the material publicly available at Archives New Zealand in Wellington — where almost 100m of shelf space is crammed with historical artefacts. "It was totally overwhelming at the beginning," he told AFP. "I knew I wanted to get in the important things, the Treaty of Waitangi (New Zealand's founding document), the Declaration of Independence, the women's suffrage petition, and a few other things.
The suffrage petition Waru refers to contains 36,000 signatures and was dramatically unfurled on the floor of the New Zealand parliament in 1893 by supporters of women's right to vote. Stretching for almost 300 metres, the petition, currently undergoing restoration, proved successful and led New Zealand, then a British colony, to become the first country in the world to grant women the vote later that year. Alongside notable historical documents, such as a letter written by explorer captain James Cook before his final voyage, are curiosities like "Project Seal", a top-secret US-New Zealand attempt to create a doomsday device to rival the nuclear bomb. The project was launched in June 1944 after a US naval officer noticed that blasting operations to clear coral reefs around Pacific islands sometimes produced a large wave, raising the possibility of creating a "tsunami bomb". Explosive tests carried out in waters north of Auckland led scientists to conclude that the weapon was feasible and a series of 10 massive blasts offshore could create a 10-metre tsunami capable of inundating a small coastal city. "It was absolutely astonishing," Waru said. "First that anyone would come up with the idea of developing a weapon of mass destruction based on a tsunami... and also that New Zealand seems to have successfully developed it to the degree that it might have worked. "I only came across it because they were still vetting the report, so there it was sitting on somebody's desk (in the archives)." Waru said the project was shelved in early 1945, despite the success of initial, small-scale tests. "If you put it in a James Bond movie it would be viewed as fantasy but it was a real thing," he said. Among the other oddities in the archives are Defence Department records of hundreds of UFO sightings by members of the public, military personnel and commercial pilots, mostly involving moving lights in the sky. Some of the accounts include drawings of flying saucers, descriptions of aliens wearing "pharaoh masks" and alleged examples of extra-terrestrial writing. New Zealand's most famous close encounter was when a television crew recorded strange lights off the South Island town of Kaikoura in 1978. However, in a disappointment for ET spotters, the military concluded the lights could be explained by natural phenomena such as lights from boats being reflected off clouds or an unusual view of the planet Venus. Waru said it was seemingly humdrum documents, like school magazines from the early 1900s extolling the virtues of the British Empire, that provided a window into the attitudes of the past. "There's masses of records and kilometres of important files but you realise pretty quickly that every piece of paper is related to an individual at some point in time," he said. "So it gives the modern researcher a peek into the private lives of individuals, which I found interesting—divorce files from Dunedin, letters a young soldier wrote home to their parents." – AFP-Relaxnews |
Anything could happen.
The Scotsman whom he had stopped outside a 7Eleven to ask for directions cheerfully shared this bit of Gaelic rail lore with him. Was the Master Plan about to be revealed as nothing more than an aimless scam?
Doctor's orders to rest my jaws. More instructions: no food that is hot, spicy, fried, caffeinated, etc. This about covered anything remotely tasty, really.
"But once you start digging, one story leads onto another and I'd just follow my nose."| You are subscribed to email updates from The Malaysian Insider :: Books To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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