The World Is Flattened / Your Real Home

Today's article in the Tech section of NST paints a rosy picture of the outsourcing industry as Malaysia is considered one of the more preferred country for this sort of business in the world (study done by Frost and Sullivan). Although the job is stressful and highly competitive, as was told to me by my patients, outsourcing really took off with the advent of the internet and fibreoptic cabling which sparked a new collaboration between America and other third world countries, in particular India. It is mostly taken up by young people, who do not mind working nights. Training for the post is stringent. Although they speak English but in their own accent, they were trained to speak in American or British accents, depending on which country they were assigned to. Some will take up common Western names like Thomas and Paul and Janet to help them better relate to their clients. When I have problems with my Ipaq PocketPC, I will just call up the toll free HP service centre based in Bangalore, India and the technicians there, who caters for clients in Msia, Singapore and the Philippines are usually very forthcoming in providing their assistance. What impressed me most is that they will just call me back a few days later to check if everything is ok (perhaps I should do the same for my patients). As in many Asian culture, many of these employees will apportion part of their salaries to their parents, while some will take day classes to aim for higher qualification and hopefully better pay one day.

We must be prepared to change and adapt, so says Thomas Friedman, the author of No.1 bestseller The World Is Flat. Globalisation is the trend because the world is shrinking. The playing field is flattened, and competition is thrown wide open. We must be reminded that multinational companies, like greedy individuals, will push for lower cost and increased productivity. Certain countries like China and Vietnam are much preferred because their goods are cheaper due to abundant and cheap labour. Even some traditional business in America, like the cotton mills, are closing down because of this globalisation effect.

Ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall (and communism), the world had to depend on only one system, capitalism. Unfortunately, capitalism has its nasty flaws. It can make some people very rich, and some very poor. However, people who are ignorant will not survive, especially if they are slow to respond to market forces, are not competitive and not in-sync with global trends. Even in the beautiful city of Dalian, China where major corporations like Microsoft, HP, Sony and Dell have set up bases there, university grads, especially those in the IT line, were told to take up a year of study of English to improve communication.

In the medical line, Mr Friedman cited an example of the use of high speed internet connection to transmit radiological images from a hospital in America to a country half the world away, with a 12 hour time difference, to be interpreted by their on call radiologist who can provide an urgent diagnosis when most of the radiologists in America are sleeping at night. I think the same could be done for blood test and pathological specimen report. However, in all these cases, clinical correlation based on physical findings of the patient is very important. Furthermore, the administrators must address the question of online information security.

So, where do we fit in this globalised world? Globalisation doesn't mean going to a Western country and having to eat Western food everyday. In fact, its exactly the opposite. With outsourcing and homesourcing, the workers can stay put, keep in touch with family and friends and continue to enjoy local food and entertainment at a fraction of a cost. Its not like we are katak di bawah tempurung. In fact, Friedman says that if all the frogs living in their particular well were to be able to connect from one well to another, they will have greater feedom.

And, while we continue to seek out greener pastures to improve our living conditions, we must not be too comfortable with life in this world. Our real home is heaven (not a heavenly home but really in heaven!). The emotional believer will say that heaven is so real to him or her now while the sceptic will ask 'Izzit really? Are we anywhere closer to heaven?'

I am just taking the middle ground. There will always be questions like Is there really a heaven? Who is going there and what will it be like? What will I do there? Why should I think about it while I'm still on earth? I believe if you have a deep relationship with God, you will sometimes want to think about it. In the meantime, I have just browsed thru the book written by C.S. Lewis called The Great Divorce about a group of people who took a day trip by bus to the kingdom of heaven. Here is a glimpse of what they saw about how solid and real heaven is, thanks to Lewis' wonderful imagination:

I got out. The light and coolness that drenched me were like those of summer morning, early morning a minute or two before the sunrise, only that there was a certain difference......

It was the light, the grass, the trees that were different; made of some different substance, so much solider than things in our country......

I saw people coming to meet us. Because they were bright I saw them while they were still very distant ...... the earth shook under their tread as their strong feet sank into the wet turf. A tiny haze and a sweet smell went up where they had crushed the grass and scattered the dew ...... the robes did not disguise the massive grandeur of muscle and the radiant smoothness of flesh ...... no one struck me as being of any particular age. One gets glimpses even in our country of that which is ageless - heavy thought in the face of an infant, and frolic childhood in that of an old man. Here it was all like that.

Work in progress - Your Real Home

Dawn of a new day

This blog does not provide commentary on the latest issues as published in the mainstream news about the political landscape of our country. However, looking at the reaction of the people from other blogs, I think it is indeed sad and somewhat alarming. Some people will say, why worry about it? Why not just live the good life? Because your country's future is, after all, your own future as well. Anyway, it is good that people are talking and blogging about it because it helps to keep some public figures on their toes. The pen is indeed mightier than the sword, or any other weapon for that matter!

Recently, I was rereading the works of the famous Russian writer who was sent to hard labour camp , Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose words continue to speak to people through the ages especially to our present time. Here, we have a responsible citizen of the former Soviet Union, a Nobel prize winner in literature in 1970, who had set about to write about the suffering of his people and what life was in the extreme condition of hard labour where 20 million people have perished. In his novels, especially One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich and the historical account The Gulag Archipelago, as well as the period of internal exile after his release from camp Cancer Ward, we were given a truthful portrayal of the police state rule which had stripped the population of the most basic of human rights.

And while he was living in the West when he left Russia, we would expect him to recommend the Western system with its free society as a model for a nation that had suppressed her people for decades. However, he had a different opinion. In his acceptance speech for an honorary degree at Harvard University in 1978, he talked, in his usual noble language, about the rights and wrongs of the Western society. For the sake of this blog, I would just pick up a few pointers which I feel are relevant:

The West had utter contempt for justice

The American people had taken their freedom for granted. While he had been living in a nation which was ruled by terror, he saw that the majority of the people in America do not have proper regard for the law, but only the letters of the law. He saw that the people do not have intrinsic moral values, but only care about the legality of the matter. Therefore, it had become the most litigious society in the world, with all its lawsuits and counter lawsuits. All that concerned them is to fight for what is legally theirs. Do we see a similar rising trend here?

The society is guided by money

Living in a capitalistic, democratic society, people follow the values that lead to materialism and commercialism. People are judged not by their hardwork and talent, but by how much they earn. Even the media are not interested in reporting the truth, but thrives on sensationalising an issue so that their paper can sell. He said America does not have the moral will power to lead the world because the people are preoccupied with their materialistic gain.

God continues to be marginalised

Since they have become so much in love with wealth, God is without meaning in the lives of ordinary individuals. Even with the brilliant technological progress in the West, including space exploration, no one could redeem the West from their moral poverty if their people do not believe that there is an intrinsic evil nature in man,which tends to despiritualise and dehumanise a person. Solzhenitsyn believed that in his old Russian culture, which is a God believing culture, and through the extreme sufferings of his people, lay his own salvation. This is one of the reasons, I believe, why he had returned to Russia in 1994, despite being deprived of his citizenship earlier.

The hardships of his people had brought about a spiritual strength that America and other western civilisation cannot compare with.

The full text of his speech can be found here.

Like a tormented prisoner, Solzhenitsyn spoke the truth. Here is an excerpt from his first novel One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, followed by a few quotes from this living legend.

"Senka was a quiet, luckless fellow. One of his eardrums had been smashed in '41. Then he was captured; he escaped, was recaptured and was sent to Buchenwald. There he evaded death by a miracle and now he was serving his time here quietly. If you show your pride too much, he said, you're lost.

There was truth in that. Better to growl and submit. If you were stubborn, they will break you.

Alyosha sat silent, his face buried in his hands. Praying.

Shukhov ate his bread down to his very fingers, keeping only a little bit of bare crust, the half-moon-shaped top of the loaf - because no spoon is as good for scraping a bowl of porridge clean as a bread crust. He wrapped the crust in his cloth and slipped it into his inside pocket for dinner, buttoned himself up against the cold and prepared for work."

"Do not pursue what is illusory - property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade and can be confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life - don't be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness; it is after all, all the same: the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing" - quote

"Violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone. It is necessarily interwoven with falsehood" - quote

"I am of course confident that I will fulfill my tasks as a writer in all circumstances- from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime. No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death. But may it be that repeated lessons will finally teach us not to stop the writer's pen during his lifetime? At no time has this ennobled our history" - quote

Work in progress

Work in progress

Seeing is Believing

What is real?

Does reality mean only external things - the happenings around us? Or does reality consist of what is without as well as within? Do we take into account our thoughts and ideas, our dreams and visions, our emotions? If yes, how are we to verify whether the spiritual experiences, for example as expressed by the mystics, are real? Many of us can relate to the testimonials of the mystics as if they are ours, especially pertaining to theme of the oneness of the universe, even though we come from different beliefs. However, we cannot subject these testimonies to scientific experimentation nor can we disapprove of them as untrue.

What if you take reality to be represented by a timeline? I was eating at a crowded mamak corner when this man whom I was sharing a table with opened up a conversation about his concept of reality being the here and now - this very moment. It seems from the Big Bang till many generations ahead of us, the only reality that matters is this very moment when I am breathing the air and holding the cup. He seems like a preacher full of fiery enthusiasm, and he was actually practising what he had preached, trying to convince me that this very second is the only reality - and if he were to squash my brain between the palm of his hands, I would (obviously) cease to exist. But we don't live for the moment. We are creatures that can reflect, dream, enjoy music, appreciate art, marvel at the Twin Towers, get angry when we miss a U turn, get frightened when we lost our way!

Here, I thought this man was probably one of the many frenzied individuals who believed in the familiar saying, 'eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die'. In other words, life is short. But this person is more neurotic than I thought because he actually believed in living only for that very moment whether he was breathing or eating or whatever. I was actually looking very hard for any sign of neurodermatitis in him!

If, as I have mentioned earlier, we are to take the universe as a whole, then the whole process of past, present and future should also be taken as a whole, as if they exist together in a way that only a Creator would know how. And the Creator would also have to exist outside that timeline in order to see through everything. It's like looking at a straight line ( a 2D object), in a 3D environment.

I remember watching The Polar Express, which was shown at the IMAX 3D theatre at Berjaya Times Square.It has a beautiful storyline about a little boy, along with a few other children still in their pyjamas, taking a magical train ride to the North Pole. During the show, I could see many children as well as adults sitting in front of me, actually reaching out to try to catch the falling snow. The hissing and squeking of the Polar Express were more real and scary. Even the artwork looked more outstanding. In future, we will all be watching movies like that. Would you like the feel of cobwebs dancing on your nose, water sprinkling on your face, or a canonball hitting you as you watch the Pirates of the Carribean ? And how about sitting in a computer controlled mechanical chair as you watch the Batmobile maneuvering a tight corner somewhere in Gotham City. If you are coming to KL during these long holidays with your children, you may want to bring them to IMAX for it is now Open Season!

Still on the topic of reality, the following excerpts from Margery Williams in her book The Velveteen Rabbit illustrates this beautifully (with apologies to plastic surgeons ) -

'What is real?' , asked the Rabbit one day when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender before Nana came to tidy the room. 'Does it mean having things that buzz inside you or a stickout handle?'

'Real isn't how you were made,' said the Skin Horse, 'It is a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with but really loves you, then you become real.'

'Does it hurt?', asked the Rabbit

'Sometimes', said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful, 'When you are real, you don't mind being hurt.'

'Does it happen all at once, or bit by bit?'

'It doesn't happen all at once', said the Skin Horse, 'you become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are real, most of your hairs have been loved off, and your eyes drop out, and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all because once you are real, you can't be ugly except to people who don't understand.'

A faceless and voiceless society

The internet community is becoming a faceless and voiceless society especially with the increasing popularity of blogging and text messaging. The same holds true for the 16 million mobile phone users in this country with their SMS and voice messaging. As technology gets better and better, we will sooon have video messaging. A new platform streaming into our internet blogging lifestyle is podcasting or audioblogging. This is the seduction of new technology and we must reap its benefit before it goes out of fashion.

Yes, this is a great time for the autistic individuals to make their presence felt in society! Autistics are inward looking people who lack social skills and the sensitivities belonging to a normal social person like establishing eye contact, facial and bodily expressions and proper voice tone. These conditions are predetermined genetically (God bless them). It is becoming a dream come true for them because they are known to be attached to computers and IT know-how. The same may hold true for other unfortunate individuals like the social phobics, the speech impaired, the stutterer, the deaf and dumb, the semi-paralysed and the handicapped (God bless them all). Do you know that Bill Gates, a very capable and high functioning person, has some autistics traits and poor social skills? In a book written by John Locke titled Why We Don't Talk To Each Other Anymore, it was mentioned that he would comb his hair to look presentable before emailing. He would rock his chair repeated during meetings when the tension was high; he had dated on a virtual romance and would rather chat to his date online and over the mobile phone about a movie that they had watched together than to do it face to face.

Now, blogging has entered the mainstream. There are many 'ready to go' free blogging service like this one that makes your entry into the blogosphere so much easier these days. I believe bloggers will supplant the mainstream newspaper one day.

There are also many people who do not blog. There are people are witty and outstanding when it comes to actual conversations. They would effortlessly talk about everything under the sun including politics, business, childen's education and current issues. We sometimes need an environment of such nature (eg in a local kopitiam) where the spirit of conversation, the humour, the color of various emotions are given full freedom of expression. For this reason, I have also purposely left out many issues of daily concerns in my blog because I knew they could be found in other blogs but more importantly because these are best discussed in an open, face-to-face settings with friends and relatives.

However, bloggers would argue whether you would sacrifice your time and money to travel 10km for a business meeting when you can easily do it online. I say we need a balance of both. I am not against building your blog into a social network platform as, hey, I am a blogger myself! Some activities like virtual dating, internet TV gospel, online counseling service and virtual job interview are making their presence felt and we cannot stop them. Living in a global village, it is hoped that we can bring people living everywhere, especially in remote areas, together. Connecting humans, as the Nokia slogan says. But we must move away from our computer screens into a more personal, interactive lifestyle. We cannot afford to turn from becoming TV addicts to computer addicts.

If society as a whole, even among the majority of us who are not socially impaired, begin to embrace this speechless and faceless technology without the intimacy of human warmth, I see a future where we enter into a newer version of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

And now, I am just happy to let my painting do the talking.....