Moscow, The Red Square and Vladimir Putin

The Red Square and the Kremlin

THE iron curtain was torn down and folded into memory long before I finally landed at the Demodedovo International Airport about an hour outside of Moscow. It was early spring when I got there some sixteen hours after I left Kuala Lumpur on an Emirates flight, with a short transit in Dubai.
 A lot has changed by then to a nation once thought of as nobody's friend and a harbinger of Armageddon. It came closest perhaps in 1966 when Khruschev lined-up a portion of his nuclear arsenal in Cuba, much to John F. Kennedy's and America's disdain.

A marriage remembered

Somewhere in London

HER eyes lit up as I slipped the ring into her finger, moments after we entered into a union that both of us wanted so much to last for as long as we breathe. It was 25 years and two beautiful daughters ago.
 I could still look back at the time with much fondness, though both of us now have greying hairs. To me she never got one minute older from the time we vowed to share our lives ahead. I love her as much now as I loved her then.

Apples of my eye

Aisyah (L) and Yasmin - At Stratford-upon-Avon

ON her last day at the kindergarten, my eldest daughter, Yasmin, handed me a work of art she had just completed. It was the mark of her tiny palm against the paper's white background. A poem was also written on the paper, saying the tiny palm will one day be tiny no more.
 I shed a tear on reading the poem, also thinking that as she finished kindergarten, she'd be schooling and from there she will advance in her life and that one day, I will have to set her free to seek her own life and future.

No Woman No Cry - In Bob Marley's backyard.

One of Jamaica's most famous sons - Nesta Robert Marley

I MUST say the fun started the moment the British Airways flight took off from Gatwick Airport, just outside London that morning. I had arrived at dawn at Heathrow on a flight out of Kuala Lumpur, then hopped on an airport transfer coach for Gatwick.
 The 10-hour flight was to take me to Kingston in Jamaica, birthplace of the reggae music, Bob Marley's backyard, home to some of the fastest men and women on earth, the Rasta movement, and indeed 'weed', if you know what I mean.

Father ( A Tribute To)

We were never close but he was always there to shine the light on me

FOR reasons perhaps only he knew, my late father somehow thought I was Superman. While I may have the longest name in the family, mine seemed to be the one being called out for, most frequently.
 Being number eight out of the nine siblings did not help. When I sat down for a break under a mango tree, nursing my blistered palm after helping him fix barbed wires around our perimeter fencing at the kampung, I did wonder whether this man was out of his mind. I was barely eleven at the time.

Remembering Sarajevo

Prologue: The Dayton Peace Accord that ended the 4-year carnage in Bosnia-Herzegovina, part of the former Yugoslavia, was entered into at the Wright-Patterson Airbase in Dayton, Ohio, in November 1995. It was later signed by the various parties in Paris the following month. The author entered Sarajevo soon after, when some semblence of peace returned to the once beautiful city that at one time even hosted the Winter Olympics. This is his story, minus the politics surrounding the war.

Downtown Sarajevo after the war



Through the Great Plains - A ride across America

The cross-country Amtrak Empire Builder service

WHEN my youngest daughter, barely five then, wondered if America lies just within the Manhattan island in New York, we reckoned that mere words may not tell her much. Instead we decided to take a train ride, a very long one at that, across the huge nation.
 It was four in the afternoon, on a beautiful early summer day when the Amtrak train pulled out of New York city's Penn Station. Both my daughters, my wife and me were excited about the trip.

9/11 - A first person account

Author's note: This is a first person account of the incident as seen by the author, a journalist living in New York that fateful day of September 11, 2001. The author tells nothing more than what he saw and experienced that day. An epilogue at the end of the post will briefly deal with impact the incident has had on the global political and security landscape. 

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The South Tower hit by the second plane

I REMEMBER the 'Coach' leather handbag well. I got it for my wife three days earlier, only to return to the store the next day as she had wanted to change to one of another colour. 

 A year later, I stared at the same handbag lying on a dressing table in our bedroom, halfway across the world from where it was bought and wondered about fate of the lady who sold it to us. The store was located at the basement plaza of what was then the New York World Trade Centre.

 The day began just like most other in that early New York fall. The smell of freshly-brewed coffee filled the morning air as I took in my daily dose of rantings by MSNBC shock-jock, Don Imus, on his 'Imus In The Morning' show.
 I had the entire morning planned. After breakfast at the apartment on River Road, Roosevelt Island, I was to catch the residential bus for the subway station at the end of the little island straddling the waterway known as the East River between Manhattan and Queens.
 I would have caught the Q train together with thousands of other commuters and make my way to the 34th Street station where I was to change to the Brooklyn-bound N or R train. I would have had to get off at the Cortland Street station in lower Manhattan, a station which actually is right smack at the basement of the ill-fated twin towers.

Travelling with Mahathir

Dr Mahathir Mohamad

I DON'T believe that anyone would be able to describe former Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Dr Mahathir Mohamad better than he could himself.
 In the decade or so that I covered him as a journalist, most of the time on his working visits overseas, I never tried to fathom the man any deeper than what I saw with my own eyes. The truth, I believe, is that Mahathir never revealed much of himself to the public and most only knew him as Malaysia's longest-serving prime minister.
 But I tend to think that Mahathir was more relaxed when he was outside of the country, where often we, journalists fortunate enough to accompany him, at times saw his sides other than the firm and stern commander of the Malaysian cabinet.
 Mahathir struck me as a very intelligent man, as someone who does not waste even a minute of his time and a man on a mission. But most of all, I viewed Mahathir then as someone who has a single-minded approach in everything that he does. In his vocabulary, the word 'defeat' does not exist.

From Bahau to New York



Lower Manhatan New York, at night. Picture taken from Brooklyn.

THERE was a time long ago when I would sit by an abandoned rice field behind my house to watch the last lights as the cacophonous sounds of insects grew louder from a nearby forest to welcome the night.
 At the time, just as the days seemed short in a 'kampung' still without electricity and piped water, my future looked bleak. I hoped for nothing more than for it to change for the better.
 And so it did, when in the spring of 1991 as I first set foot in New York, on a familiarisation tour hosted by the giant telecommunication company, AT&T, the city swept me off my feet.

Into Africa

The Jacaranda tree. Harare turns purple when they flower.

 

THE immigration officer at the Harare International Airport in Zimbabwe pored through the pages of my red Malaysian passport, gave me a menacing glance and said, "You are only to remain in Zimbabwe for 24 hours. If you want an extension, you must go to our Interior Ministry to apply."
 I was dumbfounded because the Zimbabwean High Commission in Kuala Lumpur had allowed me a 14-day stay. The officer however refused to budge and I remembered the golden rule one must observe in a foreign land -- never argue with immigration officials for they can do anything they like to you.
 I was about to agree to his suggestion of paying the ministry a visit the next day when the officer signalled me to one side of the long counter. He whispered that US$20 would get me the 14-day stay I wanted, without going to the Interior Ministry of course.

A seat in the front row

This article was published earlier in another social networking site.

The Bank Negara Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur

AS a journalist, I usually have a front row seat in many important events. Not that I'm an important fellow, but just because it is my job to chronicle them as they happen.
 When Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak PM told a group of us in Vladivostoc, Russia, recently that Malaysia will once again host the Apec Leaders Summit in 2020, my thoughts flew back to the tumultous period when we last hosted the event in 1998, during height of the Asian financial crisis.

 I remember the crisis well. 

At the time I was a specialist writer with the Business Times newspaper, writing a lot on corporate and economic subjects.
 I remember staring into the stock price information screen in the newsroom, seeing nothing but red colour. Stock prices were falling like rocks and across on the foreign exchange market, our ringgit was in danger of becoming worthless pieces of papers. We were being pushed closer to the edge, where international debt agency, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), was waiting with open arms.

The shaping of my destiny

A rice field at a kampung I grew up in.

I wasn't a particularly bright student in school. I played around a lot, never believed in the system and wasted plenty of time. I went against every rule there ever was.
 The perimeter fencing at the boarding school then known as Sekolah Menengah Sains Negeri Sembilan in Kampung Gentam, about two kilometres outside of Kuala Pilah on the road to Bahau, couldn't keep my yearning for freedom inside. The only reason I was there was my late mother.
 Mother, while technically an illiterate, knew very well the importance of providing sound education for all her children. My sister before me was at the time doing magnificently well at the Sekolah Tun Fatimah in Johor Bahru. At the time, enrollment in a boarding school was a passport to sure success.

The Beginning...

The road to my old kampung, Kampung Kuala Kepis about 10 km from Kuala Pilah.
My house is towards the end of this road.

I NEVER knew I could write. In fact the 24 years I've spent as a journalist with the Business Times was a wonder, considering the only contribution I made to my school yearbook was that passport photograph the editorial board requested from every student leaving school that year, in 1978.

  I like to read though, and I read everything from entertainment magazines to the Roget's Thesaurus. And I would like to think that I have a great gift from God in the form of my sharp memory. I remember things, happenings, right from the day I was that small child running around the then white sandy beaches of Port Dickson, the place where I was born and where I spent perhaps the most wonderful decade of my childhood.