Nurturing Malaysian Ambitions

Posted on April 16, 2021 by DRSG

Brilliant people will pop up everywhere, anywhere in the world; We have P. Ramlee, Michelle Yeoh and Nicole David (counter to all racist theories purveyors) ; it’s the nature of the lottery of gene mixing during conception, regardless of parentage. But it also about nurturing and giving support to these inherent gene-given talents.

About life and business opportunities, I think with envy when I read, for example, the biographies of people like the founders of Google and Facebook, and 2020 Nobel Prize winner for Chemistry, Jennifer Doudna. Or the new generation of brilliant science geniuses coming out of China. Sure they had the good lottery-given genes to be inherently brilliant, but the system also nurtured them, and gave them the right environment, education, support and opportunities. Paths were open for them from young. Ready competition were there to weed out those who were so-so (and they were many). And when the time came for them to strike out in the world, the system and the government (or at least their policies ) supported them.

Stanford University strongly supported Google’s founders, Larry and Sergey, including giving them seed money, and arranging innovation and patent protection. And so did the University of California at Berkeley, with Jennifer Doudna. Do you know her discovery of gene editing using CRISPR was the basis for the making of the Moderna and Pfizer–BioNTech COVID-19 mRNA vaccines? Do you know that the co-founder and chief scientist of BioNTech, Dr. Ugur Sahin, is a Turk, born in Turkey? Shows you good genes can spring anywhere in the world. But Sahin moved to Germany when he was small and from there he took his opportunities well.

“Focus on skills, not certs,” says Tok Mat. True, but what is the government doing about it? Are we doing, for example, what China and many countries have been doing for decades—identifying the best and the brightest, and nurturing and giving them the best environment and opportunities from young? Because we do not have a Harvard, USC or Oxford, how about creating a program of getting Malaysians into these actual universities? (Many China Chinese are!) Catch them young, say Form One, and nurture them to be brilliant and ambitious enough to be accepted by these storied universities, based on merits and abilities as decided by the universities.

If you want to know how difficult it is to build a multi-billion company—the challenges, risk-taking, competition, naysayers, the pleadings for VC money, people-networking, etc., read (book below) about the journeys of Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify, the corporation now worth about $70 billion. If you want to embark on a journey such as his, you will need all the help you can get. Including from your home government.

Structural poverty exists. But, structural poverty of ideas also exists.

https://www.thevibes.com/articles/opinion/23955/the-us40-bil-behemoth-called-grab-could-have-been-malaysian-p-gunasegaram

About Grief and Loss

Posted on October 25, 2020 by DRSG

I have been meaning to write this for quite sometime; It is time, I think..

I write this with the benefit of looking back and with hindsight, and somewhat of detachment, many years removed. As I once wrote, seen through (but still, I must confess, with bitter-sweet feelings) “air-brushed vistas seen through silken veils blowing gently in the breeze: indistinct, ephemeral, out of context, faraway.”

I am no expert. After all, I just know me. People are not me. I am not other people; I know I am not special; I—and only me—do not have a monopoly tragedies. I am not, for example, like the parents (whom I personally knew) who held three (of their only) dying babies in their arms in succession. Or who lost someone they love, and never knew what happened to them, and just left hanging forever.

There are five stages of grief that were enunciated by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 book, On Death and Dying. The five stages of grief and loss are: 1) Denial and isolation; 2) Anger; 3) Bargaining; 4) Depression; 5) Acceptance. Sure—leave to to the orang putih psychologists to put in writing it in such antiseptic and stark terms. And that’s only half of it, I should say.

Do I agree? In parts, sure. But it is more complex than that such words can say or convey. People deal with denial and isolation; depression; and acceptance differently. In fact, it is a mess. Let me explain:

When you lose someone you love, what’s next it is not as easy as a question of conscious choice or a matter of logical or straight-equation choice you would make. In the movie, Silence of the Lambs, Clarice Starling said to Dr. Hannibal Lecter, “You see a lot, Dr. Lecter. But are you strong enough to point that high-powered perception at yourself?”

Fuck it, if even you know how to doctor yourself; I know I don’t.

It will be where your heart leads you. And it can lead to to many terrible, convoluted and confusing paths. And it takes a looooong time.

My grandma once related to me years after she lost her daughter—the daughter died when she was in her early thirties of kidney disease—and she told me, “I wanted to die; my heart felt like being ripped apart. I wanted to hide from people. When I see people coming down the road, I go down the river (and follow the river back home) to hide from them—I feel so unworthy, so ashamed (“oi’kum’ikum”) because I lived while she’s died.” Orang putih would say, that’s survivor’s guilt. Sure, it has a label but that does not mean you know how to deal with it.

For me, the bad and sad things did not stick; the good stuck–the smiles, the happiness and the laughs were the things I remembered mostly. And the good stuff that it brought about–the happy excited ice cube that will dance inside me when I was with her. For sure, the sadness, the bitterness, the loss, the tears towards the end are there; it’s just placed in a little corner in the heart—not because it have to be there to be summoned at will—but a reminder that the loss is something that, on the flip side, is so great, so good, so beautiful that will forever be mine. And, it it is important to be reminded that is such a great loss. But, still, it is an acceptable reminder. People are rational and brainy beings: sometimes the brain wins; sometime the heart wins. And that’s ok too; neither have to win the war.

And it’s ok to miss someone.