At long last... the launch of TANAH TUJUH!

Dear Friends,

Completed the first draft in 1998... and it's taken 8 years to find a publisher who thinks the book is "excellent"! I'm very grateful to Raman Krishnan of Silverfish Books who decided to publish TANAH TUJUH ~ Close Encounters with the Temuan Mythos, thereby putting closure to Magick River's multimedia project for the Orang Asli initiated in 1999. Yeeehah!!!

Phase One was Guardians of the Forest - a 52-minute documentary produced in 2000 by Mary Maguire and directed by Alan D'Cruz (and generously funded by Andrew Bird of Verado Films, Ltd).

Phase Two was AKAR UMBI ~ Songs of the Dragon - a CD featuring the celebrated ceremonial singer Minah Angong and her funky ethnic fusion band comprising well-known local musicians. This 2002 project was made possible by a timely grant from the Japan Foundation.

Phase Three: the launch of TANAH TUJUH ~ Close Encounters with the Temuan Mythos at 2:30PM, 29 March, 2007 @ Alexis Bistro, Jalan Telawi 3, Bangsar. I've edited a special 20-minute documentary for the occasion - hope Raman can arrange projection facilities @ Alexis Bistro!

If you're able, please come and applaud... buy a copy of TANAH TUJUH hot off the press... have a cup of coffee... and celebrate with me!!!

Cheers & Hugs,
Antares
~^@^~
xxxXxxx

P.S. Here's a sneak preview of the backcover blurb:

TANAH TUJUH

… is what a large number of Orang Asli tribes call our planet. The Orang Asli constitute Peninsular Malaysia’s indigenous folk and there are at least 18 distinct tribes. The word tanah means “earth” or “land” and tujuh means “seven.” So Tanah Tujuh literally translates as “Seventh Land” or “Seventh World” or “Planet Seven.”

What does 7 represent in numerology and symbology? There are 7 major keys in the octave, 7 primary colours in the chromatic spectrum, 7 main chakras in the bioenergetic system, 7 days of the week, 7 hills, 7 sisters, 7 dwarfs, 7 wonders…

Front flap:

Antares is a writer, musician, and visionary who moved out of the city in 1992 and found himself living amongst the Temuan (second largest of the peninsular Orang Asli tribes) in the Malaysian rainforest, a few miles from Gunung Raja - a mysterious, mist-enshrouded mountain revered as the birthplace of a postdiluvian humanity.

Tanah Tujuh: Close Encounters with the Temuan Mythos chronicles his initiation into a fast vanishing aboriginal cosmomythology that offers an alternative view of reality.

Copiously illustrated with sketches and photographs, a Temuan Glossary, and a foreword by eminent anthropologist, Robert Knox Dentan.

Publisher: Silverfish Books, Kuala Lumpur

Google's a Giggle

Legend has it that the Google name itself was a misspelling of Googol (a nonsense word meaning 10 to the power of 100, coined in 1920 by 9-year-old Milton Sirotta, when asked by his mathematician uncle, Edward Kasner, to think of a way of expressing an unimaginably long series of zeroes after an integer).

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Google, Inc

Two computer science students at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, became obsessed with the problem of trawling through rapidly increasing masses of documents to retrieve specific data. Their prototype search engine would be named Googol - but, as luck would have it, neither knew the "correct" spelling of the word, hence Google, Inc - which, in less than a decade, has enhanced the net worth of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, both only 34, to US16.6 billion, ranking them the 26th richest humans on Earth.

It's amazing how Google has insinuated itself into our virtual lives in just nine years. When a brandname becomes a commonly used verb, you know it's here to stay. Gone are the days when you had to go to your nearest library to look something up. These days you simply Google it.

I remember my very first email account on Hotmail, circa 1998. Then Yahoo! came along and lots of folks switched. In those pre-spam, pre-pps days, nobody even thought about mailbox capacity. Along with broadband came obese files and all it took was one inconsiderate friend to send you a 3MB file - and that was enough to jam your inbox. Then Google introduced Gmail with the incredible offer of one free gigabyte of storage space... and before long we had all these Google AdSense wordlinks popping up on every webpage. One of the most exciting ideas presented by Google is, of course, Google Earth - a program that allows you to zoom in on your own house from an earth-orbiting altitude (remember that poignant scene in Men In Black when Agent K decides to look in on his long-lost wife via live satellite feed on his computer?)

What's Larry Googling for?

What I personally like about Google is that they have managed to retain the quirky sense of humor that sets the best and brightest computer wizards apart from run-of-the-mill nerds. If you look to the right of Google's famous search bar and click on "Preferences" you'll be offered a vast choice of interface languages - including Esperanto, Pig Latin, Serbo-Croatian, Quecha, Scots Gaelic, Sundanese, Telugu, Tatar, Uighur, Xhosa, and Zulu. Just for the sheer hell of it, you may also opt for Bork, bork, bork!, Elmer Fudd, Hacker, and Klingon.

When George W. Bush, "the worst president in history," bombed Baghdad in March 2003, his tech-savvy political detractors decided to "Google bomb" the White House, crosslinking Congressman Dick Gephardt's infamous description of Dubya as "a miserable failure" with the official White House website bio of President George W. Bush. Emails circulated the Internet urging people to key in "miserable failure" on Google - and then click on "I'm Feeling Lucky." It was absolutely brilliant and everybody was mystified by this remarkable show of quasi-omniscience by the #1 search engine. Pressure from the White House forced Google to fix the problem; and now when you key in "miserable failure" and hit "I'm Feeling Lucky" you get directed to a BBC news story, dated 7 December 2003, with the headline: 'Miserable failure' links to Bush, and the subheading: George W Bush has been Google bombed.

Indeed, internet guerrillas had a field day Google bombing Bush. Run a search for "weapons of mass destruction" and you'd hit on a spoof webpage announcing: "These Weapons of Mass Destruction cannot be displayed." You then had a choice of exiting the site gracefully - or typing the name of any country you wished to attack and hitting the REGIME CHANGE button. The site included a wry admonition: "If you are George Bush and typed the country's name in the address bar, make sure that it is spelled correctly (I-R-A-Q)."

Larry Page seems very pleased with his search results ;-)

De Mockery of Democracy

[My young friend Kamil sent me the following assignment question, asking for some viewpoints from me. I figured my response to Kamil was worth blogging, so here it is...]

It has been said that democracy may not be the perfect form of goverment but it is better than the alternatives. To what extent do you agree?

Certain assumptions are being made here that may be inaccurate or incorrect, So before we can answer the question, let's examine what these assumptions are.

Assumption #1: Democracy exists and is practised in certain countries.

In truth democracy is purely theoretical. Even in old Athens where it was invented, there was only democracy up to a point - beyond which one could get arrested for subversion, imprisoned, and end up drinking hemlock. The state is forever jealous of its authority and power, and will not hesitate to use force if persuasion fails. In so-called democratic countries, we find that the public is led to believe it has freedom of choice - but in actuality that freedom does not extend beyond the most trivial matters (like the make of car you drive or the scent your date prefers). In all crucial areas decisions are made by "backroom boys" acting on behalf of a tiny handful of plutocrats (people who own banks, newspapers, TV stations, bomb factories, armies, spy agencies, and governments).

The machinery of political power is driven by popular votes. However, elections can be rigged, conducted on an uneven playing field, and stolen outright. Voters can be bought, hoodwinked, disenfranchised or overlooked completely. Because "majority opinion" is measured quantitatively, human destiny can be jeopardized or hijacked by a corrupt and dishonest clique willing to take extraordinary risks. The proverbial man-in-the-street doesn't stand a chance against a cartel of well-funded criminals, who obtain their money through illicit means and buy up all the airspace. He can't be heard against a well-coordinated media blitz.

In effect, scratch a modern democracy and you'll find mobster rule. Robber barons and pirate kings now come with a slick corporate image and very expensive tailoring. But gangsterism is gangsterism, and privilege actually means "private law." So when even the law is privatized, is it any wonder that justice is blind?

Democracy originally meant "popular rule" - in effect, government of the people, by the people, for the people. Which sounds pretty similar to Marxist/socialist ideals. However, you only have to have the means of influencing the collective psyche to make the people believe they are exercising their democratic rights when all they can do is predictably react to pre-programmed stimuli.

Assumption #2: Though imperfect democracy is "better than"...

"Better" is a very vague term and begs redefinition. This dish is good but that one is better... in reality the other dish is simply different. You cannot compare pheasant-under-glass with a hamburger. Each recipe works in a specific context. In other words, a fair comparison is hinted at where none is possible.

Assumption #3: The word "alternatives" implies Communism.

A popular misconception is that the opposite of democracy is communism. Actually, it's dictatorship we're talking about: what's antagonistic to popular rule is state despotism - whether the despot is a single individual or a faceless committee. The alternative to democracy might also be monarchy - or various spin-offs like aristocracy, meritocracy, or plutocracy. Nevertheless, there are no clear-cut categories of power. If we have an absolute monarch who is approachable, open-minded, empathetic, humble, friendly, and wise - let's take as an example the notion of a "King of Kings" like Jesus the Christ, or Aragorn of Arathorn in J.R.R. Tolkien's ringlore - the public may actually enjoy great freedom and security, prosperity and success under such benevolent and enlightened rule. As opposed to the situation where a supposedly democratic government functions under the secret orders of an invisible brotherhood of black magicians and decadent junior gods: people would endure increasing oppression and never know who exactly is taking away their freedoms and rights, life just seems to get rougher and tougher all the time.



The concept of government itself needs to be reassessed. An individual with sufficient inner discipline can be described as a Self-Governing Individual who does not subscribe to or support any form of external government. When enough such individuals emerge in a community, it's possible that anarchy will blossom in a wholesome and workable way where each member of the community cooperates with the others consciously, willingly, and wholeheartedly. Imagine the amount of creativity generated by humans no longer engrossed in destructivity or obsessed with conformity and homogeneity.

One can view government as an unwelcome intrusion - akin to a high fence built around the crest of hill to prevent people from rolling down through carelessness. In trying to ensure "public safety" what government effectively does is disempower and desensitize. After a few generations, people would become incapable of taking any initiative whatsoever, in a sure-footed way. They will NEED official guidelines, clearly-marked trails, and instructions at every turn. In effect, people would no longer be able to sit quietly atop the hill and gain divine inspiration from the beauty around them – because the man-made “security” fence mars the view and is ugly, that is, a violation of the natural environment and the unwritten laws of harmony. This may suit those in power very nicely, but it invariably incapacitates the masses from independent and original thought. They will become blind and allow themselves to be led around by ravenous wolves disguised as professional seeing-eye dogs.

What would be much "better than" democracy would be an evolutionary quantum jump that would effectively upgrade Consciousness and Intelligence and realign them with Compassion. No amount of theorizing can make this happen. Those of us who realize this simply have to embody our ideals and break free of semantic traps such as the question above. No statistics are required. It only takes ONE individual to crack the code - and before long, not only the entire species, but all lifeforms will regain their primordial freedom.