SOUL SCRIBBLES

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. W...

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 t...

“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 ...

Social media platforms were a hive of activity on Tuesday, with Netizens posting photos and videos of the fire that ravaged the intensive care unit of Sultanah Aminah Hospital (HSA) in Johor Baru. Six ICU patients perished in the fire and one hospital employee was reported to be badly injured.  Within minutes, the country got wind of the incident when the posts went viral on Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp. My friends were sharing the same photos on Facebook and WhatsApp. Some, in fact, did not click the share button for other people’s postings, but instead copy and pasted the photos on their own social media accounts as if the photos were theirs.  When I was told “... you got no idea how the ground zero look alike (sic)” on WhatsApp by a local youth leader, I didn’t want to burst his bubble. He was excitedly sharing on WhatsApp the same photos that I saw on Facebook.  I should have told him that I didn’t need to be there to know what was happening. I was following the ...

The train used to be my main transport home to Johor Baru.  I would take the night train from Kuala Lumpur on a Friday, reach Johor Baru in the wee hours of Saturday morning and return to Kuala Lumpur on the night train on Sunday to reach the city at dawn and go to work directly from the station.  My parents preferred me to travel home by train although it would take a longer time than going home by bus. They think train travel is much safer than the bus.  And with the planned high-speed train to Johor Baru, it would take a far shorter time to get home.  But, I can’t say the same for the train service to the East Coast. I would rather drive or fly to Pahang, Terengganu or Kelantan. I took the train once to Kuala Lipis on a tourism assignment. I had to board the train in Kuala Lumpur and go south to Gemas before taking the connecting train to the East Coast.  I remember having to wait for a few hours in Gemas before the sleeper train to Tumpat arrived. It tak...

The exercise book is torn and tattered at the edges. I believe that it is as old as I am, if not older. In it are recipes my mother had jotted down over the years.  These are recipes that have been passed down through the generations. My mother learned some of the family’s much loved dishes from our late paternal step-grandmother, an aunt or two and from cooking and baking classes that she attended when we were young.  That book is her prized possession. When she moved to stay with my brother in Putrajaya, she accidentally left the book in my home. She nagged me endlessly until I had the book delivered to her.  She refers to it from time to time, especially when there is heavy-duty cooking involved during the festive season. She wants to get the ingredients correct. Yes, there are no measurements in her cooking recipes, just the ingredients, unlike the recipes for baking cakes and cookies, where the ingredients have to be precise. Like all other elders, her cooking...

WE were having lunch at Alamanda, Putrajaya, the weekend before Merdeka when we heard singing coming from the concourse.  Two old men calling themselves Patriot Buskers were performing evergreen Malay songs. The first song was an oldie, Datuk M. Nasir’s Ekspres Rakyat when he was with the group, Kembara.  Their second song caught my attention as well as my brother’s. We actually sang along to it, much to the amusement of his children. It was Setia. No, it isn’t a pop song but a patriotic one and a classic.  Setia was penned by the late Tan Sri Mohamed Rahmat, who was then information minister. Some say it was Malaysia’s second “national anthem”.  I can still remember national broadcaster Radio & Televisyen Malaysia (RTM) airing the song before transmission ends at midnight. The choir singers, dressed in their respective traditional costumes, singing “Demi Negara yang tercinta, Di curahkan bakti penuh setia…”  Oh, how long ago was that? Another friend re...

Astro Awani pix Nine years ago, I took part in the National Day parade. It was the country’s 50th year of independence but Aug 31 was, to many of us, just another reason for a holiday.  Growing up, celebrating National Day was about waking up early in the morning to sit in front of the television set to watch the parade.  After the parade, we would go back to sleep; if we hadn’t fallen asleep in between the live telecast.  A few years after I started work, I remembered going to Dataran Merdeka with my housemates and their friends on the eve of Merdeka Day. We did the countdown as the clock at the tower of the Sultan Abdul Samad Building struck 12 at midnight. After shouting Merdeka three times, we made our way to what was called Bangsar Boulevard (the open air stalls at one of the roads in Bangsar Baru) where we had supper until the wee hours of the morning. In later years, Merdeka eve was spent watching fireworks at KLCC.  One year, I actually took a room at...

I love mosques; so much so that I include visiting mosques in my travel itineraries, where possible. It all started two years ago in Bali when a friend and I, spending the New Year on the island, decided to venture some 200 km to Singaraja to look for what is said to be the oldest mosque there. It was on the eve of the New Year that we set out on our journey there. We had googled the night before, looking for places to go to, when we asked ourselves, “Where is the oldest mosque in Bali?” We had read about Masjid Agung Jami’ in Singaraja and the oldest handwritten Quran kept at the mosque. The Quran was dated 1830s and handwritten by I Gusti Ngurah Ketut Jelantik Celagi, a Hindu royalty who converted to Islam following a civil war then. It is still legible despite the years. The handwriting is flawless. We were told by the imam of Masjid Agung Jami' that the Hindu prince had studied Islam under the tutelage of one Haji Muhammad Yusuf Saleh. One of the conditions he imposed o...

If you are a reader of the New Straits Times, you may have seen the changes that we have made to the special interest sections that we called the Life & Times effective last Sunday.  If you’re not (a reader), why don’t you give us a try; well … the SIS, if not the main paper. From August 2 onwards, the Life & Times takes on a new life.  While each pull out section continues to maintain its respective themes, it now has its own titles.  Correct me if I am wrong but I think this is the first time that we've made such drastic changes to the Life & Times.  Before this, we only had separate titles for the Sunday edition.  Once upon a time, we named it Nuance and then changed it to People. I don't quite  remember when we revert to using Life & Times on a Sunday.  So, the Sunday's Life & Times is now Plush, BOTs (Monday), Heal (Tuesday), Flair (Wednesday), JOM! (Thursday), Groove (Friday) and Pulse (Saturday).  We...