Reading Tuesdays with Morrie

Yes, I have heard about the book,saw it on the Best Sellers list and all that. But I never did feast my eyes on the book until now,compliments of the PJ Community Library.

It is such a simple book and backgrounds a one-on-one lecture between a Sociology professor, Morrie Swartz and a sports journalist, Mitch Albom. Easy reading, deep thoughts.

The lessons in this book encompasses acceptance, emotion, communication, love, values, family, openness, and happiness. Morrie tells Albom the importance to forging a private culture to withstand the more popular culture of the times which dictates our behaviour and cause us unimagined sufferings as we try to live up with it. Morrie oftentimes quoted his favorite poet, W. H. Auden, with "love each other or perish". As Morrie reaches the advanced stage of Lou Gherig's disease, he described "detaching himself from experience" as the way out of all our sufferings.
Morrie, in his dying moments, analogises death to be akin to a wave crashing into the shore and matter-of-factly says "When you're in bed, you're dead"- his final surrender.

Great book. I will write the important values in greater detail in another posting.

A Runaway Performance

Adapted from a short story by Akira Kurosawa, Runaway Train is an excellent movie, played to the hilt by the protagonist, John Voight as the escaped prisoner Oscar Manny. Pity he failed to get the Academy Award and had to be contented with the Golden Globe for Best Acting.

Through out the movie, one can feel the chilly Alaskan winds,the freezing snow and the madness of Manny as he braved the elements of nature as well as the constant fears he habours as he balances his options between living and dying.

You can practically feel the adrenalin rush watching this movie as Manny met with the ultimate choice of death bringing his nemesis Warden Rankin along with him.

A great movie by Voight besides Deliverance and Midnight Cowboy!

Return to Sender

It has been a long time coming.The payments finally ended!

I started investing in the Australian Scholarship Fund when my daughter was 2 years old in 1992. The guy who introduced the scheme to me was one smooth operator. He promised me the sun and the moon just to get his commission. Being oblivious of downsides, I agreed to subscribe to the fund.

It started innocently with paying a mere initial AUD40 which silly me thought is well within my means. Never did I know that it will move up from year to year. My last payment was AUD150. Then there was the foreign exchange losses and the drop in Australian interest rates that made the fund too small to eke out a reasonable scholarship quantum to support even 18 months of tertiary education (which has inflated crazily upwards)

If I had put the money into a property, it could have given me much more in returns by now. Too bad, poor choice of investment. Gotta live with it.

So next time, if you should be approached by such smooth-talking snake oil sales people, keep away from them. Investing in Bursa shares now is much less risky!

The Invasion of the Greedy Ghouls

'Tis surely must be the season of the hungry ghosts!

I have attended three AGMs of public listed companies thus far and this time I really came into close encounter with a new breed of beasts-the greedy kind.

Who are these people?

Mostly senior citizens. They looked very kind and gentle at first sight. Sitting around and chatting convivially just like ordinary folks. But....when the food came in after the AGM was over,what do you know?

Like Transformers, they mutated into monsters and in a bout of pre-feeding frenzy, grabbed at whatever food that was laid on the tables. With steady and ready platters and well trained hands and fingers, they scooped away curry puffs and cookies, leaving almost nothing for the other less fortunate shareholders and proxies. Really shameless as the scooted away with the loot!

The aftermath? Half eaten puffs and cookies-testimony of greed and inconsideration for others.

Sadly, some of these folks who smuggled out the cookies from the Sime Darby Convention Centre were caught red handed and had to return them to the empty platters on the table.

Alas, what a woeful end for them at the SCOMI Marine and SCOMI Engineering AGMs!

GTG Learning Weblog-Wither Thee?

I had been trying to read this blog for almost two days now but it no longer existed.

So,I emailed Eliz the blog administrator of GTG Learning Centre and she told me that the blog has been discontinued as they could not find spare time to actively contribute to it.

A sad ending for a blog that started ambitiously and had to fall by the way-side because of "work pressure", to put it politely.

My first experience at terminating credit cards.

This afternoon, I went to the Public Bank nearby and got rid of my 2 platinum cards. The Customer Relations Officer filled a form and I signed it. She then cut off the corners of both my cards.

Why, terminate the cards,you may ask?

The short answer-it continues to charge me annual fees. And it is not cheap, mind you. RM333 per annum per card, to be exact.

When other banks can give you a waiver on their annual fees for the cards they issue such as CIMB and EON, I cannot see why a great bank such as PBB need to reconsider the waiver when a customer requests one.

So,as you can see,PBB is very efficient in terms of retail processes but they can surely backpedal on matters that brings in the money such as fee income!

Brilliant!

I watched this movie with awe. What fabulous acting from Merle Streep,Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams. A simple story with about the best dialogue I have heard in a long, long time.

It tells of a story of Sister Aloysius, an overtly conservative and disciplinarian nun who serve as a principal of a school in the Bronx who suspected Father Flynn, the county priest of untoward behaviour towards an Afro-African student serving as an altar boy in his church. It highlights the issue of doubt and of human failings as we grapple with suspicion and our values.

The last part where the priest succumbed to the pressure to ask for a transfer and the principal in tears because she has doubts about her suspicions speaks volume about the absolute need for proof before you can actually start pointing fingers.

It should have won the Academy Award for best actor (Sean Penn-Milk)and actress (Kate Winslet-The Reader)if the field had not been too competitive in 2008!