THE WORLD AROUND ME

It's been some time I wanted to write this story. It may sound ridiculous to you but bear with me because it may not be the first time you heard this and it is not new in the military camp. It happened in the National Service Training Programme, which is a compulsory training camp for selected Malaysians. At least one in a family will be randomly chosen for the program. There was a man in his young adulthood selected for the program. He was enrolled in the program with his girlfriend and some of his best friends from high school.  The camp was located deep inside the tropical forest with no town or villages nearby. However, there is a highway that connects to the camp to ease local transportation. Therefore, unless it is urgent, no one could leave the camp in the span of these six months. Everything   in the camp  was new and exciting for the young juniors. Males have a short and tight haircut, and females are permitted with hair up to only shoulder length. Everyone is we...

"Genesis 17:20   And as for Ishmael, I have heard you. Behold, I have blessed him, and will make him fruitful, and will multiply him exceedingly. He shall beget twelve princes, and I will make him a great nation.  21   But My covenant I will establish with Isaac, whom Sarah shall bear to you at this set time next year. " Too often, we pay immense attention to the main character in the story we read or movie we watched and completely ignore its sidekicks. In the Bible, it was mentioned that God established the covenant with Isaac, and from his clan,  the Messiah  will come. Thus, we often see only Isaac but overlooked Ishmael, whom God promised to bless. We thought Ishmael was just another insignificant character that no one would remember and not worthy of studying upon. The world,  including Arabs themselves who are the direct descendants of Ishmael,  thought the same for hundreds of years. No one questioned where are the...

  I'm not an Afghan, nor an American. But today I can't help but write this article about what happened in Afghanistan. The picture above shows a British soldier holding a baby handled over by a desperate Afghan mum in Kabul airport. The baby is throwing over the razor-sharp wires at the airport compound as many families desperately seek to leave the country as the Taliban approached. After the Taliban took over the country, they had blocked Afghans from leaving the country. By then, there were already 18,000 Afghans left with the U.S. troops in loaded military planes. The plane can't take any more Afghans, and some have decided to brace themselves outside the plane, which led to the tragedy that humans fell off the airplane we see today in social media. The Muslim critics used this picture to criticize the U.S., claiming that the U.S. dropped bombs in Afghanistan in 2001; in 2021, they dropped humans.  One question the world asked today is why Afghans  desperately  ...

  Most of us, who came from decent family backgrounds and neighborhoods may be heard of school bully but if you have never involved in one, you may not have an exact idea what it is like.  My first time getting bullied was during my first year in kindergarten. For more than ten five years old kids were kicking and stomping on me while I curling up to hide my head and stomach on the floor at the corner of the classroom. The beating lasted for about twelve seconds but it felt like years. From that, I suffered from a broken skull and nose, bruises all over my body from head to toe. I was bloodied all over my body, with dirted and torn shirt. That was not the only time that happened in my life. It happened again and again. I was broken physically and sometimes mentally. You may ask how and why that happened? Have I done something wrong?  Reviewing this event after twenty-five years, I will have to say I did nothing wrong. I was just like you, thinking where I did wrong but to...

FYI, I'm thirty years old this year. According to the Malaysian EPF guidelines (check the chart below), I should have 30k RM in my EPF account right now. But, instead, I do not have this amount there. Throughout my lifetime, I worked full time for less than three years and have been paid  less than a year  for EPF. You may be curious about where I was and what I did all these times. Well, I was studying, I was a student and still am literally.  The new basic savings schedule according to age (EPF Malaysia) I'm a Ph.D. student in marine geology. I completed my master's degree in the year 2017. Attended Hokkaido University for an internship during the winter, and started my first permanent position as a Quality Control executive officer in Eastern Steel Malaysia during the summer of 2018. I n the spring of the same year,  and started my Ph.D. at the Tongji University of China. I have to remind you that before I stepped foot in Japan, I was a pretty much penniless kid. ...