SOUL SCRIBBLES

“Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add colour to my sunset sky.” It sounds romantic if what poet and playwright Rabindranath Tagore wrote is taken literally, but not so for the clouds over Kuala Lumpur and elsewhere in the past week, which were an indicator of rainstorms, that, more often than not, brought about heavy rain, floods and massive traffic jams. Some of us, if not all, know of people who have had experienced being caught in such situations during a downpour.  My first experience with floods was when I was schooling at Convent Johor Baru. Heavy rain and high tide had caused Jalan Yahya Awal to be flooded. Back then, my late father and I had this understanding that whenever Jalan Yahya Awal is flooded, I was to wait for him at the back gate of the school.  The only other time I got trapped in a flash flood was in Kuala Lumpur in the late 1980s. I remember having to wade through knee-high, dirty water late one night at...

MY niece, who is studying at a university, lives in a residential college where she shares a room with four students from other states. She came home for the mid-term semester break recently and shared some observations with her parents about her college mates.  One pertinent observation she made, besides their weak command of the English language, was that they were somewhat “isolated” from the outside world. It was quite shocking to her that some of her college mates had not been to Kuala Lumpur before.  “I tell them of some of the known places in Kuala Lumpur and it drew a blank stares. I talk about some famous shops and they didn’t know about them,” she said.  She, too, had a dose of culture shock as some of her college mates spoke in their own dialects with thick accents, which was difficult for her to understand. “I had to get someone else to tell me what she means although she was speaking in Malay,” she added.  Upon hearing her story, I extended an offer ...