WE grew up eating his father’s mee rebus, either biasa or “special”.
Zainal has since taken over Haji Wahid’s restaurant at Taman Sri Tebrau in Johor Baru. He has since added variety to his late father’s original dish such as mee rebus tulang, mee rebus udang and mee rebus ayam.
I took my boss for breakfast at Zainal’s place on Tuesday morning, Nothing has changed, I told him. Well, the taste of the mee rebus that is. But I cannot say the same for Johor.
I find that every nook and cranny of the state is changing.
Colleagues visiting Batu Pahat town enthused how the town is a happening place.
Even my boss is amazed with the state’s transformation. A colleague had picked him up from the airport and drove him into the city. He remembered several places he had gone to before but these areas have changed tremendously. “What was here before?” he asked as we drove to Iskandar Puteri.
Housing estates have replaced what used to be oil palm plantations. Who would have guessed that Iskandar Puteri-Gelang Patah was a black area back then.
My mother had said it was notorious for being communist infested. She remembered an old photograph of her uncle and another policeman, who later became my late father’s brother-in-law, with a detained communist.
In fact, that uncle resigned from the police force when he was told he was going to be transferred to Gelang Patah. “Aku dah hilang akal kalau aku pergi sana (I would have lost my mind if I agree to go there),” he had told his wife back then.
The residential housing business is booming there. It is progressing from being a communist-infested village to a fully integrated city with a world-class environment for business, living and leisure. Oh, Gelang Patah used to be famous for its otak-otak. I wonder if it still is as we are finding more and more otak-otak kempas being sold at stalls and eateries.
Kempas is another area that has benefited from Johor’s development as it is part of Iskandar Malaysia, an ambitious economic region mooted by former prime minister Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi 10 years ago.
Its progress is nothing short of phenomenal as described by Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak, who was on a two-working visit to Johor early this week.
It was hardly surprising when Najib, at a press conference at the end of the visit, expressed his satisfaction with Johor’s progress under the stewardship of Menteri Besar Datuk Seri Mohamed Khaled Nordin.
Iskandar Malaysia alone has received RM221 billion in committed investments to date. With that, the government can expect a 10-fold returns on investments. The government had pumped in RM20 billion into Iskandar Malaysia since its formation in 2006. Iskandar Malaysia is in the third and last phase of its development.
Besides Iskandar Puteri, Najib was also in Pengerang on Monday to officiate the installation of the tallest and heaviest propylene fractionator process column for Petronas’s steam cracker facility at the national oil company’s US$27 billion Pengerang Integrated Complex (PIC).
Now, Pengerang was what we termed as tempat jin bertendang but developments there are progressing well. One of the largest industrial developments in the region as well as Petronas’s largest downstream investment to date, PIC is on track for overall start-up in the first quarter of 2019. The project is 48 per cent completed. Najib said he would make frequent visits to Pengerang.
He also announced a RM5 million Federal Government allocation for the construction of a mosque there.
He also launched four new stadium projects, of which three will be in Larkin and one in Mount Austin. Now, we were told by Khaled that the prime minister had never launched anything that has yet to be up and running but high confidence in the state government’s projects undertaken by Johor Corporation and Kumpulan Prasarana Rakyat Johor could probably be the reason why he did it.
He also visited Johor Baru’s hippiest place, Kilang Bateri. Impressed with what he saw there, especially since the traders there are operating without any government assistance, he announced a RM2 million grant by Khazanah Nasional for small traders. During the visit, Najib also had an audience with Sultan of Johor Sultan Ibrahim Sultan Iskandar and Tunku Mahkota Johor Tunku Ismail Sultan Ibrahim.
At the end of the working visit, a senior local politician noticed that the prime minister looked happy. “He seems to be in a good mood,” another said.
He probably knows that he can bank on Johor to help the country achieve the status of a RM2 trillion economy in the next seven to eight years.
Thursday, December 8, 2016
Thursday, December 1, 2016
What do you want to be?
Sometime ago, I posted on my Facebook status asking my friends whether they remembered what they listed as their ambition, the one they wrote in their school’s confidential files. I did this after an old friend asked if I had always wanted to be a journalist. Some of them did reply and I found their answers quite hilarious.
Of course, we were kids and were easily influenced by the things around us when we were small. I think our class teachers must have had a good laugh reading what we listed out.
I had wanted to be a police detective when I was in Form 1 to Form 4. I attributed this career choice to watching too many Hollywood police serials on television.
In fact, a study was carried out by a team of students from Rutger University-New Brunswick on how television influences the way youth are socialised into potential careers.
“These days if you talk to a teenager or even a college student, many will tell you they got interested in a career from a TV show they watched,” said Bernadette Gailliard, an assistant professor of communication at the School of Communication and Information, who led the recent study.
The Rutgers team analysed 27 scripted and 29 reality shows from the 2012-2014 seasons. They picked the top-rated shows from those two seasons, but excluded competition shows such as Project Runway or Survivor, in which cast members are eliminated weekly. They dissected every scene’s dialogue for references to the character’s job. They found that the characters on top-rated scripted shows tend to be in one of three professions: law, medicine or the police force.
“I think they are more represented because they are careers that are highly valued in American society and, in many ways, are particularly central to various parts of American life,” Gailliard observed. They also found that characters on scripted shows are more diverse and they tend to be more career-orientated than on reality TV. Scripted shows do well in depicting the day-to-day responsibilities of characters with jobs, but there is not much information on the character’s career history.
“The career trajectory is missing on scripted TV,” Gailliard said. “If you’re interested in this career at 15 or 18, what does it take to get there? How much training do you need? How many years of school do you need? You won’t find out from TV.”
Toni Moletteri, a communications major on Gailliard’s research team, said television is not a great source of information to learn about careers. “It’s unrealistic. It doesn’t show all the hard work that they have to do, especially doctors. You’re in school for 12 years. They hardly talk about that on TV shows.”
But in Form Five, with a break from television as it was exam year, I changed my career choice to “wartawan”. I made this change after my language teachers made the Bahasa Malaysia and English classes interesting. I could have listed “auditor” (I was in a Commerce class in Form 4 but was “promoted” to a Science Class three months after the start of the school year) but I didn’t want to end up crunching numbers like my late father.
Two friends on Facebook said they listed their ambition as archaeologist. One turned out to be a teacher and later a journalist, while the other trained as an astronomer but is now in the construction business.
A good friend of my late brother, Johari, wanted to be the country’s first nuclear physicist. Well, someone had already beaten him to it. When I was told that Tan Sri Dr Ahmad Tajuddin Ali, who is now the chairman of UEM Group Bhd, is the country’s first nuclear physicist, I was reminded of Johari. I don’t know if he actually became a nuclear physicist.
A colleague said he wrote “askar” as he was influenced by the Combat television series. He also wrote “nelayan” after his fisherman father.
A former schoolmate wanted to be a flight stewardess and she got what she wanted. She told me she liked travelling, and back then, she also thought it was a glamorous job. But, when she joined the airline, she found out how “hard it was to be on a flight for hours on end meeting to passengers’ needs”. She’s now in human resource, which she describes as “not an easy job” as well, as she has to “suffer heartache and headache all in one”.
Another journalist friend had a long list of ambitions: teacher, journalist, lawyer, archaeologist, soldier and finally a rock singer (influenced by the singers of Led Zeppelin, Uriah Heep and Manfred Mann’s Earth Band). He achieved the first two.
One of my editors wanted to be a sailor while another friend, who now holds a PhD, wanted to be a newsreader.
Now, I seriously wonder what our children are listing as their ambition. If indeed, television influences our career choices, are any of them listing pilot as a chosen career, following the successful airing of Malay drama series Suri Hati Mr Pilot on local direct broadcast satellite pay television service.
Or would the girls harbour hopes of marrying a pilot instead?
Of course, we were kids and were easily influenced by the things around us when we were small. I think our class teachers must have had a good laugh reading what we listed out.
I had wanted to be a police detective when I was in Form 1 to Form 4. I attributed this career choice to watching too many Hollywood police serials on television.
In fact, a study was carried out by a team of students from Rutger University-New Brunswick on how television influences the way youth are socialised into potential careers.
“These days if you talk to a teenager or even a college student, many will tell you they got interested in a career from a TV show they watched,” said Bernadette Gailliard, an assistant professor of communication at the School of Communication and Information, who led the recent study.
The Rutgers team analysed 27 scripted and 29 reality shows from the 2012-2014 seasons. They picked the top-rated shows from those two seasons, but excluded competition shows such as Project Runway or Survivor, in which cast members are eliminated weekly. They dissected every scene’s dialogue for references to the character’s job. They found that the characters on top-rated scripted shows tend to be in one of three professions: law, medicine or the police force.
“I think they are more represented because they are careers that are highly valued in American society and, in many ways, are particularly central to various parts of American life,” Gailliard observed. They also found that characters on scripted shows are more diverse and they tend to be more career-orientated than on reality TV. Scripted shows do well in depicting the day-to-day responsibilities of characters with jobs, but there is not much information on the character’s career history.
“The career trajectory is missing on scripted TV,” Gailliard said. “If you’re interested in this career at 15 or 18, what does it take to get there? How much training do you need? How many years of school do you need? You won’t find out from TV.”
Toni Moletteri, a communications major on Gailliard’s research team, said television is not a great source of information to learn about careers. “It’s unrealistic. It doesn’t show all the hard work that they have to do, especially doctors. You’re in school for 12 years. They hardly talk about that on TV shows.”
But in Form Five, with a break from television as it was exam year, I changed my career choice to “wartawan”. I made this change after my language teachers made the Bahasa Malaysia and English classes interesting. I could have listed “auditor” (I was in a Commerce class in Form 4 but was “promoted” to a Science Class three months after the start of the school year) but I didn’t want to end up crunching numbers like my late father.
Two friends on Facebook said they listed their ambition as archaeologist. One turned out to be a teacher and later a journalist, while the other trained as an astronomer but is now in the construction business.
A good friend of my late brother, Johari, wanted to be the country’s first nuclear physicist. Well, someone had already beaten him to it. When I was told that Tan Sri Dr Ahmad Tajuddin Ali, who is now the chairman of UEM Group Bhd, is the country’s first nuclear physicist, I was reminded of Johari. I don’t know if he actually became a nuclear physicist.
A colleague said he wrote “askar” as he was influenced by the Combat television series. He also wrote “nelayan” after his fisherman father.
A former schoolmate wanted to be a flight stewardess and she got what she wanted. She told me she liked travelling, and back then, she also thought it was a glamorous job. But, when she joined the airline, she found out how “hard it was to be on a flight for hours on end meeting to passengers’ needs”. She’s now in human resource, which she describes as “not an easy job” as well, as she has to “suffer heartache and headache all in one”.
Another journalist friend had a long list of ambitions: teacher, journalist, lawyer, archaeologist, soldier and finally a rock singer (influenced by the singers of Led Zeppelin, Uriah Heep and Manfred Mann’s Earth Band). He achieved the first two.
One of my editors wanted to be a sailor while another friend, who now holds a PhD, wanted to be a newsreader.
Now, I seriously wonder what our children are listing as their ambition. If indeed, television influences our career choices, are any of them listing pilot as a chosen career, following the successful airing of Malay drama series Suri Hati Mr Pilot on local direct broadcast satellite pay television service.
Or would the girls harbour hopes of marrying a pilot instead?
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