Najib Abdul Razak said today the young generation should evaluate the achievements of the government from all aspects and not based on political perception and rhetoric.
Accepting reality doesn’t mean you condone what’s wrong. That’s when you stop being judgmental and begin to better your lot
Years ago, I read a sentence in a book on heart care that stayed with me forever. “Do not run up stairs, and do not run down people!” While the implication of the first instruction was clear, the second took time to unfold its deep meaning. I could not understand then how criticising or condemning others could affect the working of the heart. Today, with experience and deep thought, it is crystal clear. Judging or condemning other people, or even situations, comes from a refusal to accept reality. When things do not play out as per our beliefs and expectations, we become impatient and critical. It also comes from a feeling of helplessness, when situations do not play out as we would wish them to.
Years ago, I read a sentence in a book on heart care that stayed with me forever. “Do not run up stairs, and do not run down people!” While the implication of the first instruction was clear, the second took time to unfold its deep meaning. I could not understand then how criticising or condemning others could affect the working of the heart. Today, with experience and deep thought, it is crystal clear. Judging or condemning other people, or even situations, comes from a refusal to accept reality. When things do not play out as per our beliefs and expectations, we become impatient and critical. It also comes from a feeling of helplessness, when situations do not play out as we would wish them to.
A promotion that is denied, a change of department, or a new boss at office; relationship or financial troubles at home — the instinct is to fight back or sulk in frustration, rather than accept and move on. We try to force circumstances and life to conform to our beliefs, which are disconnected from reality. This leads us to push and condemn ourselves as well as others, leading to frustration and unhappiness.
Think about it — our unreal beliefs force us to condemn reality. In the first stages of romance, you focus on the beloved’s virtues and may not even notice the negatives. Time and togetherness expose the negatives. From here on, it is a matter of choice where you want to take your relationship. Most happy marriages are those where the couple chooses to focus on the good and accept the negatives without condemnation. Once the balm of acceptance works its magic, love takes over and helps find unique solutions to problems. In the melee of a competitive world that pushes us to break through circumstances to better our lot, acceptance is a virtue that remains greatly underestimated.
And yet, it can give us immense peace and happiness. Try it out. Think of something you are dead against. Force yourself to accept it as a reality you cannot change. It just is; stop fighting it. Now distance yourself from the negative emotion and think about how you can make things better for yourself despite the reality. Denial immobilises you; acceptance helps you move ahead. Accepting something does not mean you condone it. You may be dead against something and yet decide to accept it. It doesn’t imply weakness. Nor does it mean that you have given up all hope of things getting better. It just means you have stopped judging or condemning.
Acceptance is the point from where you can begin bettering your lot or that of others. Now you start responding and helping, rather than reacting and castigating. Now you have stopped denying or fighting those you cannot control. You accept the reality and can rationally and intuitively look for solutions that make it better for you, or make you feel better disposed towards it. To succeed, it is necessary to accept and then move on.
A very misunderstood word is 'perception'. Just 2 months earlier Najib had said perception was important for leaders, probably meaning it is okay if you do not actually work as long as people feel that you work. Then Hishamuddin went on to say that the crime rate had dropped but the perception of crime was high - which only Hisham understands. Then now we have Najib saying that 'the young generation should evaluate the achievements of the government from all aspects and not based on political perception' Najib, you insult the young thinkers of Malaysia with your presence at their convention. So, you must think they don't know the corrupt ways of the government you lead for you to have the cheek to grace the occasion dedicated to encouraging critical thinking. You are disgusting- I am lost. My perception is that these current leaders do not know what they are talking and should be thrown out. It is ironical that PM Najib should advice younger generation not to live on political perception and rhetoric when that is exactly what he and his BN leaders are doing day in and day out! Najib has also implied that whatever created by his BN government through internet and social media is always based on truth and whatever created by the opposition using the same internet and social media should not be trusted. He should know that people trust internet and social media more than his own government agencies, particularly MACC, PDRM and the Attorney-General's office! And before Najib embarks on any plan to train the younger generation on higher thinking skills, he should first implement an intensive training programme for his BN leaders to be trained on intelligent and reasonable thinking skills as without these basic thinking skills, he and his BN government will never achieve their great vision of making Malaysia a high income competitive nation.
Don't judge us based on perception alone". Back up your appeal with genuinely show the youths that the government under your leadership is clean, transparent, free of corruption, develop good policies and plans for the good of the people of the country. Please tell me something new, ad nauseam already. What an irony - telling others not to indulge in rhetoric, to be truthful and to embrace change. By the way who is this group of youngsters calling themselves thinkers? It is so funny, we have a group calling themselves intellects and now we have another group calling themselves thinkers Najib, the young generation of today are not stupid as you perceive them to be. They are very well informed and they dont trust BN. Period.
The problem with you Mr PM is that you are only fighting for your own survival and as such you will do everything just to achieve that. I think its about time you think about us as well and start be the real PM and not NKRA kind of PM.. PM, Treat all of us as equals. In education, scholarships, government jobs, loans and ALL other government support. To make it easy...nurture us on merit and not race or religion. Hope it is clear enough The problem with BN is this. BN dont have the Rakyat at heart. Whatever project they do, it is about how much they and their cronies will pocket. You see najib, as a responsible govt sincerity is of utmost important and we Malaysians see BN is not sincere at all
Scorpene trial and the death of Altantuya are not perceptions. Bn has achieved so much. The have managed to syphon trillions out of the country, given loans that do not have to be returned, rescued sick Bumi companies with the rakyat's money, taken bribes in the hundreds of millions, mrdered beauties, imprisoned innocent people, beaten up prison inmates, killed innocent children in the pretex of self defense, employed IGPs who protect gangsters, fix up good cops, fix up sodomy cases, buy sub standard subs, pay 10 times more for defense equipment, force people to change SD the very next day (bala), give "one off" schorlarships, only have one thing in mind...sex and sex scandals, allows CMs to rob their states, Najib. I didn't realise you were in the company of idiots who would't know when they are being insulted. Sorry, it slipped me that, being the leader and greatest amongst them, you love to wallow in the adulation of your own kind.continuously suffer from denial syndrom, continue listening to an old senile PM blame others for their mistakes, continue employing morons like Noor Yaakob, Muhyiddin, Adnan, Rostam, condone robbery, allow butt dances, call others pendatang and later ask for apology. Yes hte have achieved so much haven't they? Neither are the Birkin bags. Nor the death of Teoh Beng Hock, Kugan or Ahmad Sarbani. We judge you by the way your team are doing for malaysia..a deputy minister from ur UMNO agreed to the implementation of hudud law in Johor..why are your still kept shut..or you agreed to it Or the huge budget deficit. Nor the perception of crime level in this country. These are real issues that cannot be swept under carpets. We have not seen real efforts to solve problems. Neither is there political will. It is still business as usual. failed to provide a proper system of education to all of us by failing to teach us English. You made us complacent with your Malys are the best in the world. Every other non Malay speak at least 3 languages and especiall English. You confined us to the Malay language only and shut our minds from reading other material in other languages and then you send your children overseas to be educated in English while we poor fellows were handed the shit by you. WHY ? If you dont believ go and see the service centre set up by DUMNO in Jalan Telawi for RNC and all his canvassers are from overseas DUMNO club members. They eat in luxury restaurants while we should be content with nasi lemak. They drink alcohol and wine we are confined to teh tarek. Ask Nazri and his son who are experts at assaulting weaker beings and move around with thugs. Those who have been issued with permits and APs should own and keep their vehicles and only they should drive them This is the sad thing about this country. PM Najib, perception or not, please do less PR , and do more real work. Dont be a Show.horse. Malaysia needs a work.horse to fight corruption, leakages , and good leadership to get Malaysia out in front. Can you do that?The horse has been man’s best friend for ever. We have admired its beauty, its dignity. We have adored its loyalty, its love. We have seen its courage, its grit in adversity.
From Hengroen, King Arthur’s faithful companion, to Caligula’s Incitatus, who became a senator, to Alexander the Great’s Bucephalus who died after the Battle of Hydaspes in 326 BC and lies buried in Phalia, a town named after him in Pakistan’s Mandi Bahauddin district. From Don Quixote’s Rocinante to Rana Pratap’s loyal Chetak, the blue-tinged Kathiawadi who died in the Battle of Haldighati, to Napolean’s charger Marengo, who at 19 carried his master 3000 miles to Moscow and back. Then you have Sea Biscuit, the undersized Depression-era race horse, hero of one of the most memorable films of our time, and Pilgrim, who with Grace and Tom Booker, the horse whisperer in the Montana mountains, told us yet another great story to add to the romance of horses.
No, the horse has not changed. He is still loyal, loving, devoted to his master, friend to whoever shows the slightest affection. But you and I have changed. We see the horse today as just another creature to exploit, make quick money off. We whip them to run faster and faster on the race course, or on the Andheri Highway, where carriage races happen after sundown to make easy money off betting. Or we make them gallop up and down Marine Drive yoked to heavy carriages till their frail, tired bodies give up in despair. I wonder who the yokels are who go for these joy rides. Don’t they see the wounds and calluses? Do they really believe these sad-eyed horses pulling overcrowded carriages like what they do?
Some have died in the middle of the road, gasping. Two recently fell off the Andheri flyover, tethered to their carriages, part of an illegal race egged on by screeching bikers and betting syndicates. They lay spreadeagled on the road below, too exhausted to even breathe their last. But not all are so lucky to be claimed by death. Most live a life too gruesome to describe. Even their off hours are agonising, standing in filth, unfed, and in seasons like this, knee deep in rain water for hours. Many are tied to beaches, pavements, slums, open patches of land illegally occupied by their owners.
At Dadar, Nariman Point, Khar Danda, Andheri East, they are tied to the foreshore where they have to deal both with the high tide and the rain. Where the horses are in enclosed areas, as in the Ambedkar Nagar slums, 4 to 6 are squeezed together in rooms 10 feet by 8. They can barely breathe. They stand there for hours, defecate, try to beat off swarms of flies without any space to move.
Most are cold shoed, which means rather than finding a shoe that fits the horse’s foot, owners get the hooves brutally hacked to fit into smaller shoes. This makes the horses unstable on their legs, their hooves begin to rot. The iron shoes slip on wet streets. When they fall or flail, they are flogged to shock them into quickly standing up. This makes them slip again. Their legs are swollen and stiff. Most suffer from laminitis, which causes shooting pains up and down their legs every time they take a step. To make them turn left and right, spiked bits are clamped in their mouth. So their mouths bleed all the time. You think they are chewing food. They are actually swallowing their own blood.
This cruelty must stop. Delhi has already banned horse carriages. It’s time Mumbai did the same. There must be a limit to the pain we can inflict on these helpless creatures who were once part of legend and history. The Victorias are but cruel remnants of the Raj. Free India must learn to free its animals from such brutality. There are other ways to travel. There are other ways to seek joy rides. There are other ways to celebrate your wedding than turning up on a sick, wounded horse that has not been fed for days.Someone aptly said, it is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favour of vegetarianism, while the wolf remains of a different opinion. This seems fairly true with the likes of us who keep ranting and raving about corruption, while those in power remain unimpressed. Not only are we bone-tired voicing our concerns against corruption in virtually every aspect of our lives, even our minds have grown numb with fatigue when it comes to corruption. .. like, oh, not again.
For the sheep like us, it comes as a passing joy when an occasional wolf, like former President of BJP Bangaru Laxman, 72, is awarded four years in the slammer by a CBI Court, eleven years after he was caught accepting a bribe in a sting operation by Tehelka, compromising the national security in intent. The Delhi court has wisely upheld the principle of justice so well articulated by Cicero – ‘Crimes are not to be measured by the issue of events, but by the bad intentions of men’ – pre-empting Bangaru’s counsel’s stand that he had not actually compromised the national security because no order was actually placed with the fictitious company! Well, talk of a sinking man clutching at a straw.
But we all know that poor Bangaru’s only sin was to get caught and that too for a laughable sum of taking Rs. 1 lakh! In any case those were early days of sting operations and one can hardly blame a bloke for falling for the Westland ruse; his brothers (and even sisters) are getting much smarter now. Even then, remember, this is only the first round. His counsel has already announced their intent to challenge the order in the High Court, which may take another eleven years, and then another eleven in the Supreme Court may be, so that we can be sure that in all likelihood Bangaru may well die in his cozy bed of ripe old age.
Be that as it may, perhaps we the sheep nevertheless have a cause for celebration. Perhaps times are beginning to change. Perhaps the wolf shall not always be allowed to remain supercilious. After all, how often have the courts even dared to award such rigorous imprisonment for a politically laughable graft of Rs. 1 lakh ever before? Perhaps …
But what was interesting was the reaction of Congressmen. their spokesman, another ‘wolf’, Manish Tiwari, sagaciously pontificated why those who live in glass houses should not throw stones at others! In other words, according to Manish Tiwari, BJP should live and let live. As long as you have corrupt elements in your party, you should not lift a finger at our party. And by extension, because every single political party has its share of Bangarus, nobody should point a finger at another! As long as you don’t point a finger at us, we forgive you your Bangarus…that was the drift…
What is worse, every time we think our politicians have broken a record for how low they can sink, they break their own records all over again. Take UP for instance. As if our politicians have not made a scam out of every conceivable field, fodder, food, ration cards, CWG, 2G, employment, medicines, mines, education,… – you name it – UP has shown a new low by making money out of the Toilet Scam. If you think it is shameful that about 63 crore people in our country should be defecating under open skies having no access to latrine (accounting for nearly 60% of the world population without access to latrines), what should be the level of shame if in the largest state in our country, politicians should make money out of funds allocated for lavatories for the poor? Yes, in UP, which was supposed to have constructed 17.1 million toilets, the 2011 census accounted for a mere 5.5 million! But let us not single out poor UP and the politicos there. Nationwide, the Total Sanitation Campaign claims to have built 87.1m toilets, while the census 2011 counted a mere 51.6m households with toilets! That means a lot more than 36 million toilets must have disappeared into the pockets of our politicians (since a lot of the 51.6 million toilets in the households are likely to have been outside the ambit of the Total Sanitation Campaign). Can you imagine the pockets of any other politicians in the world being lined with anything dirtier?
Yes, we always knew corruption in India stinks. But now we know how badly. If a CBI court held Bangaru guilty, it is because the courts know how a large number of us sheep are awake and vigilant today, thanks to the awareness campaign by Anna Hazare. That is why we must resist suffering from issue-fatigue when it comes to corruption. If we stop getting angry at corruption, because our nerves have grown numb with repeated exposure to it, or merely because a particular instance is small (as in case of Bangaru) as compared to the scale of corruption we are aware of (like CWG or 2G), we would be opening the doors for corruption wider! We may never achieve a zero-corruption society; but that does not mean we cannot develop a zero-tolerance-for-corruption mindset.
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