lekowala!

“The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.” -Rabindranath Tagore

“One woman told how her son was beheaded. Another described how her husband was tortured, tied to a tree, his eyes gouged out and then drowned. A third recalled how her husband was killed – his eyes torn out, his ears and lips cut off.”  Read more here…

fishing

Originally uploaded by lekowala.

Josh and Matt have never seen a live chicken running around in a kampong. Matt has been reminding us and so that was part of our doomed mission on Pulau Ubin ( I was hoping that there were one or 2 around). But of course Pulau Ubin is chickenless… I did ask the friendly people there and they laughed at me… zhen4 fu3 na2 jou3 le4 (han yu pinyin for “Gahmen took away” - bird flu lah) . I would really hate to have to bring them to the zoo or seng choon farm to see a chicken. But still we got to fish and caught a nice spotted sand whiting which Grandma cooked later at night and Matt and Josh got to eat it (I stressed upon them the need to eat your catch to honour the fish’s life, if not then set the fish free). Actually we also caught a Therapon jarbua but let it go cause it was small and looked like it would grow to put up a better fight another day.

Luckily there was that wild boar in the pen of the drinks seller. At least that wild element of being on the island was suitably impressed upon the kids.

Anyway, it was nice to have the kiddies see how people lived in the past, and enjoy the rustic charm of Pulau Ubin.

Here’s one cool lady

“Letters from Burma” is nice to read.  I recommend it to students doing their GP.  Its better than reading dry essays from “model essays” as there are nuggets of information about politics and history all interwoven into the everyday life of the people.   It exudes such an aura of buddhist calm that I was reminded of my readings in Mindfulness and the Eightfold  Noble Path.  She drew inspiration from the Mahatma hence her non-violent (ahimsa) approach.

This was a nice book to read.  Everytime I read the lines, smells of lemon grass wafted about.  Its about poor farmers in 1970s Thailand that had to pay landlords 2/3 of their harvest as rent and student activists who tried to fight for  the farmers’ rights.  These students were usually from the city who knew nothing about rural life but still driven by keen social awareness to rouse the farmers into some proactivty.

Still the parts about the villagers struggling through poor harvests are heartwrenching but interesting to read.

There was a part where the daughter of the village head was cooking breakfast and all she could cook was rice gruel in water with lemon grass.  Well that sort of scene really gets stuck in one’s head.  There was one where her sister was trying to feed the baby but was producing no milk so couldn’t nurse the baby….  Lots of those in this book.

http://members.authorsguild.net/minfong/work13.htm

proteins and an antibody

Originally uploaded by lekowala.

I was numbering my proteins in this cartoon for the next set of lectures when the I felt the tremors today… except that I thought my colleague in the next cube was shaking my chair. I turned round and saw him quite far away. He didn’t feel the tremor nor did our friend who was talking to him. I guess numbering the proteins helped me detect the movement. I thought “that’s it, I’ve been staring at the screen too long and need to take a break”

Poor Indonesians, its just one thing after the other.

I just happened to be reading A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson a few days ago and reached the part about earthquakes. The Richter Scale was actually called the Magnitude scale by the people who invented it (Richter and Gutenberg) and the scale is logarithmic which means each increase of 1 in the scale represent a 10-fold increase in energy.

At a CNY dinner at my parents’ place.  My dad was telling stories about the past and my cousin Alvin decided to take notes.  I think it started by how my dad would go clean our grandparents graveyard.  It became a family history thing and threatens to become a Peranakan play since Alvin is involved in theatre…  There were the stories about pre-war Empress Place, Geylang Bahru, Spohia Road.     My dad described the indulgent lifetstyle of my grandfather and some granduncles.  There were the cabaret girls, servants, opium smokin, gambling, civil service, raleigh bicycles, 2nd wives.

Then of course there was the japanese war and how my aunties were kept hidden in another person’s house.  I shot about 2 hours worth of handphone video recording the story telling.  Another uncle and aunt were there to add nuggets of stories of their own.  Running around were the little children and there were 4 generations in that house.  So the atmosphere was quite conducive to try to extend that beyond the 4.  We even took down the photographs of my late grandparents from the wall.  This was the first time we actually knew our grandparent’s names.

Soon a family tree took shape and there was mention of a Hakka blood line and I joked that “sekali” we are all hakka…  the dangers of digging up the past!   There was also questions like why the peranakans enjoyed cantonese opera..  My dad said that the housekeepers were usually cantonese speaking so most peranakans could understand cantonese, my uncle said the women were usually very pretty..  I tend to believe the latter.  Alvin and Lina tried to get most of the names but these were beyond my dad even and he said we needed to go back to the graveyards…  And he only knew how to navigate there using a tree (the forked branched in particular) as a landmark.

As I type this a 77 mb 3gp format video is being sent to my cousin through yousendit.  It would be nice to see all my dead relatives come to live in a peranakan play…

This is probably the most enjoyable animation on a biological process that I have seen. Its so entertaining. Click here to go there.

Here’s Kai. I wrote about him in this post. I bought 2 of his albums and there was a song there that marked a beautiful memory for me. A few days ago he commented on the post . It was a pleasant one, long, thoughtful, like a nice glass of wine or a sit down by the lake.. That prompted me to take out the harddisk from my old toshiba satellite-pro and whacked the 1 Gig disk into my harddisk casing Otterman provided… soon it was whirring and i firewired it into my mac…. Its strange how I never thought of doing that.. i almost threw the old laptop away.. now I have saved so many photos from my postdoc in Kew. Gosh, Thanks Kai. Here’s a picture of yu that was in my old laptop as well.
Then the next day I had a dream… it was my my dear old friend who’s dissappeared/ run away from my life and many others… So he was there just by the aisle of the cinema and holding on to a baby, he smiles at me and its the same smile when we first met in kindergarten, just at the old hawker centre whilst his grandma was buying soya bean. He sits next to me and before he could say anything… the damn alarm rings… I wake up and cycle to work in the quiet and desolate cold morning.

1215 hrs. I am at Novena and after mass, I buy a pot of Narcissus bulbs for his mum and bring along the Rudraksha rosary beads that I bought for him in Tamil Nadu… I go to his house thinking he or his mum will be there but a maid comes out and says that the house owner is a totally different name…

Kai was right, people change, things change…