The Cybergypsies- Bear, (((rrrree)))(llie**&^ Good

Best book I have read in my life? Maybe. That was what I was telling myself some 2 weeks ago. Now, yes. It is the best. Indra Sinha's Cybergypsies is a stunning tour de force, entertainment in the form of book reading at the highest quality.

What doesn't the book have? Imagination? Yes. Suspense? Yes. Reality? Yes. Humor? A big fat yes. Sattire? Thoroughly. Emotion? Greatly. Intellect? Yes. Enlightenment? Yes again.

Everything one should and would ask from a book is in this 392 page of absolute great craftmanship.

Cybergypsy is the account of Bear (Sinha himself), a copywriter at an advertising firm who details his travels on the electronic frontier and also in his 'real' life, often hovering on a guilt of losing his real life as he gets addicted to the Vortex of imaginations, and trying to recuperate and win back the Eve- the woman of his life, the woman he married.

In between this two ends, Bear travels to deep aeons of humanity, through his work with Amnesty he is exposed to the biggest conflicts that took place in the world at the time of writing- i.e. Saddam Hussein's crude mass murder on thousands of Kurds in Kurdistan, The Chinese prison guards' electric raging brutality on Tibetan freedom pledges, and also a corporate company's crude blindfold after a gas explosion in its factory wiped out almost an entire skirt of Bhopal in 1984. Harsh realities yes, but Indra mixes these harsh realities with a pint of imagination, narrating the story to us a-la a Shades or a Vortex game. The book is a celebration of the reality in which we live in, telling that of a man who transfixed himself to a fictional world and by the end of the world, realized that the gargantuan reality, no matter how harsh or unnerving, is where he wants to be. How subtly he narrates he wants to be Eve more than a Luna he never knew, and how he sees a soil homing so many little insect lives to be more of a miracle rather than Cyri, the beautiful horse in the Vortex.

Above all, the book subtly reads to us that instead of choosing 'not to know' realities which are harsh and live in our own imagination, we could stand up and make a difference, and be counted for if we had the guts to be honest to ourselves and accept the truths around us.

Sinha is a phenomenal writer, one who relates deep humanity with his narration, a touch of subsequently stunning humor, and also is, on a personal level, an amazing person because he has in fact travelled to such contrasting ends in his travels. From writing an ad for a nuclear plant, writing a Kama Sutra book and narrating a voice over for a video adaptation of the book, talking to pornographers, trying to hack and sabotage into the computer of a person believed to be nude-picturing underage girls, sitting beside a man who writes an indefatigable, utterly logic defying letter to Saddam Hussein pledging him to flee Kuwait,receiving a letter containing torture items that were personal belongings of the Dalai Lama, and narrating ad voice over with actor John Hurt. He has done it all. And he tells it all to us in this brilliant book.

We get a glimpse of how the pre-internet generation were already addicted to the online bug, how viruses were already a fashionable trend back then, and above all we see how much the Internet becomes a vortex that sucks people in and caters as a permanent hom for many people, leaving them both destructed and delusional, and at the same time, how it acts as a channel of reality, an expression of free speech, a flow for information that were blocked by governments and also companies.

Read this book if you could. In one word, this is 'Important'.

THIS IS IT- REVIEW

If you are a Michael Jackson fan, then you’d be hard done to miss this wonderful piece of musical documentary.

If you are not, then Wikipedia him up, get to know him further, and go to theatre and discover the man you never knew. Yes, none of us knew him. Michael might have spent the eon of his adult life scrutinized in the public eye and by the unforgiving media which gave him a torrid time, but ever wanted to know how this reserved, silent looking enigma behaved, talked, walked, smiled behind all the images that the media is? Here is your answer- that is if you are observant enough to notice the small things that are shown in the film, things that define and paint the ‘real’ MJ for you.

First of all, talking on a technical point of view, Kenny Ortega should be given all the credit for making this film. Many predicted this will be just a PR stunt in order to recoup all the lost money when ‘This is It’ did not materialize after MJ’s demise. Instead, this documentary showed MJ and his passion, and also showed how much hard work it involves in making a concert of this magnitude. Everyone who conceived the idea of executing ‘This is It’, especially Michael and Kenny should take the cake for being such wonderful visionaries. By the time you walk out of the theatre, you will think it’s a waste. Not that the movie is a waste, but that the fact that ‘This is It’ was never executed is a waste- Never before has a concert of this magnitude been attempted to, and MJ, even at 50, had all the energy to have made it a stunning spectacle. ‘Smooth Criminal’ was re-shot in a 60s style, ‘Thriller’ was shot with a 3D effect, and also the ‘Earth Song’ had a new brilliant music video accompanying what already was a wonderful song. 10 dancers are transformed into a 1000 using CGI to be used as a background for ‘You Don’t Care About Us’. All these things are of such untried magnitude, we haven’t seen something like this on the stage before, and it is a pity we will not see it now. At least, the most we could do is watch this documentary.

Secondly, this film shows you an assortment of the very best. Check out MJ’s new lead guitarist, she could easily rival the legendary Slash, she was that talented (her name doesn’t stick with me yet), and the fact that she was a young woman on a guitar, and also pretty, makes her and her talent a feast to watch. The dancers are all from the top shelf, they are not only from US, from are spread from all over the world- from Holland to Australia. Only the very best are chosen for this project- from all involved areas, even for dance masters who even come from Russia. And of course you have MJ. If any of you thought he had lost it after not having performed at such an arena for almost a decade, you are definitely wrong. MJ sounds pretty much the same, and amazingly when he is on his attires, the ‘Prince’ looks genuinely like the ‘Prince’, his half-a-century age never showed.

To round it all, there is the somewhat personal side of MJ. Notice him having a lollipop in his mouth while watching dancers rehearse for a Thriller 3D video. Watch him give a wide smile full of satisfaction when Kenny says, ‘Lights out, hold for applause’ after rehearsing a song. I read once that the stage was MJ’s sanctuary, it definitely shows here. Such a perfectionist he is, he even knows accurately about the beats and the tempos of his own song that he can instruct his musical director. He takes enormous responsibility on the stage, he walks up and says ‘wait for my cue’; though he would be at the middle of the stage singing, already having his hands full, he still raises the cue for a new beat, or for the entrance of dancers, all the miniscule things were channeled through him. In an era where pop starts are pampered and look for a rest as soon as possible, MJ is like a God on stage, he keeps trying, he keeps going. ‘Let’s do it one more time, that is why we have rehearsals’- you hear him say that line thrice in the film, and that line summarizes his dedication to his cause. MJ only gave probably less than half of this effort (he says after singing ‘Can’t Stop Loving You’ that he shouldn’t sing because he should be saving his throat for the concert) yet it already looks a good enough effort in the rehearsals, imagine what he might have gave to the audiences if he had been at the concert. Apart from that, he always uses phrases such as ‘God bless you’ when anyone, anyone at all does a good job during the rehearsals, and every time he wants to change or disagrees with something, he would say ‘do it for love, L.O.V.E’. For some, it may have been cheesy that such lines are uttered during a stressful rehearsal, but be a skeptic if you want to be, but that is who MJ was. Notice him hugging everyone from the crew after a session. Watch him give a meaningful speech to his team when they wrapped up the rehearsals.

‘This is It’ is easily one of the best documentaries on rock music ever made, and the quotient of it was elevated even more by the fact that MJ did not manage to realize the one more dream he had, the one more vision that he had. However, This is It saves it from being a waste- cameraman who captured those magical moments, so that the people would know what actually went on in This is It.

And as the film rightly says- it’s a film for the fans. Cherish it. With love. L.O.V.E.

The Observer- Episode 8- Campus Tapestry

It started one day in a narrow corridor, I walked up clumsily, already missing the orientation, bespectacled at the size of a small orange class located in middle of many other orange classes.

Orange. A color untried. A display of difference. A blatant shout-out saying aloud to the rest of Malaysia- 'we are a stand-out'- all done from a distance, in a small shadowy, lonesome street in the middle of what was supposed to be the future city of Malaysia- Cyberjaya.

Before we turn back to actually take notice, three years and seven months pass, and you look at each other and realize that you need to ask that question- when are we going to see all of this again? Except for that one day in December when we might all stand in hordes, smartly-dressed- but the most we will be able to do is nod and smile in approval- flanked at one side by our parents of relatives- the other mentally relishing the end and a new journey to begin. But how many of us will take that long glazing glare, and look beyond this humane flaws, this criticisms, this less-than-perfections, this hype, and actually reflect what has happened in the past four years?

They got nothing to do with the purple, yellow, orange corridors. They have nothing to do with a fancily named Makan 'Lah', nothing to do with a sneering library baggage room caretaker, nothing to do with pregnant lecturers punching a doorknob in frustration, nothing to do with a class-whole attempt to remove a wisdom-plucked lecturer from teaching us consumerism, nothing to do with a herd-like rush to the labs and faculties as deadlines draw to a close. Nothing.

All they have to do is with us- the people. We made those 4 years. And beyond all these, I see stories that are worth carrying in our memories. Life often passes by being mundane and unspectacular, but little do we realize that all we need is the ability to spot an unique story.

When I came here, I was a youngster chasing a dream, who thought the dream was more important than anything else, that obsession is a good thing. Today, that obsession has transferred to passion. And unlike when I had come, everything else does matter- life's greatest lesson- nothing is trivial. Everything matters. Treat every matter with due respect and consideration.

Remember the young man who fought against the odds to be here- most of us neglect to know too much about him because it would make us feel guilty at our inability to cope with hardships as well as he has done. As well as he has fought against pain. When I came, I used to think my severe gastric was a pain off the top shelf. It is then that I realized so often we people try to potray ourselves on a standout by just inducing self-pity. Pain is an escapism to short-handedness. Since I met this man, I had stopped making pain a barrier for myself. You don't need to fight pysichal pain, but you need to accept it, and adapt it. When you do so, it becomes so much a part of you that you do not recognize that pain as a pain anymore. To date, it has been two full years since I last had a truly recognizable gastric attack. Now and then it threatened, but I never fed myself to entertain that notion. And would I have made this progress if I hadn't come here and met this person? No.

Many have viewed me over the course of these past four years as someone passive, quiet, reserved. I had a majority of my youth being just how I describe myself- an observer. Though detached to the normal eyes, I remain very much part of my surroundings, observing people, their attitudes, and always looking for stories. And when I told any small story I had found to my friends, they used to say they'd never find such stories in their campuses. My campus is unique- they'd say.

We all might stand up and yell a loud, deafening no to them, saying that our campus is just an overhyped rubbish- that the () sucks, that this () is ruined, so on and so on. But all those things don't matter. We matter. The stories came and were viewed because of who we all were and are. True again, we never had the environment of spending that much of time together as it would have been in any other campus- another thing we could rue about.

But at the end of the day, we can't reverse four years, and neither it is justified to have regrets as we collect our black caps and robes next month and make a beeline for escapism.

I do not know whether the place we had studied in for four years is unique per se or not. But a place is not unique by itself- it is the people who make it unique. I do not know the president to realize whether he is one unique man or not- but I do know this much- We are unique. We, when molded together, is like an assortment of different characters of different colors, a stunning variety- from an Indonesian bright mind whose humbleness beats you to death, to an eccentric tall guy who knows little more than being a nuisance, which is how I saved his number in my phone, to date.

Remember this assortment, as live fizzes too quickly, you might realize someday that this assortment was really something else. And rest assured, I will remember this assortment, even the tiniest parts of it, and even as years pass by and life drains any images of past- I will still be here, writing, typing, the quiet observer that I am, reversing the order of life and collecting larger images the quicker life passes by. We all stand at crossroads now. My path is visible. I need to travel alone. I know this day will come.

But though I travel alone, my path is one that collects stories, that is who I am, who discovers the little ironies of life and makes tapestry out of it. So go on in your paths. I hope when the day comes, you will have the time and memory to come see my tapestry.