Month: October 2023

DON’T WORRY, BE HAPPY

All happiness depends on a leisurely breakfast. –  US journalist John Gunther 

Happiness might be broadly defined as a subjective sense of wellbeing and can be wide ranging, from simple contentment to intense joy. 

We crave it because it feels nice and brings a whole lot of good stuff in its wake, like good health and its attendant benefits. What exactly produces it is less clear, however. For all you know, it’s yak butter: the Bhutanese are said to be the “happiest” society on earth. 

There are weirder definitions. One of the Beatles’ best songs was the attention-grabbing Happiness Is A Warm Gun, a lunatic sentiment shared by all mother-loving, apple-pie eating, flag waving members of the US’ National Rifle Association. 

John Lennon saw the headline in a gun magazine and thought it an “utterly mad, fantastic” thing to say. In itself, that is doubly poignant given the circumstances of his death: a “warm gun” being one that’s recently been fired. 

There are also upside-down ideas about the feeling. A puritanical religious group for example, might be haunted by a constant fear that someone, somewhere was having fun in the country and was, therefore, treacherously happy.  

You can almost always find farce between the tragic and the absurd.  Who’d have thought it would belong to Bo Derek: “Whoever said money can’t buy happiness simply didn’t know where to shop.” Sort of reminds you of one RM, doesn’t it? And I don’t mean Ringgit Malaysia either.

Along the same lines, journalist and diplomat Clare Booth Luce observed that while “money can’t buy happiness, it can make you awfully comfortable while you’re being miserable.” 

The English comic Spike Milligan merely wanted an opportunity: “All I ask is a chance to prove that money can’t make me happy.” 

For all her novels about love, regret and loss, the English novelist Jane Austen was brutally pragmatic in real life: “A large income is the best recipe for happiness that I’ve heard of.” 

For the comedian Rodney Dangerfield, it was about marriage. “For 20 years, my wife and I were blissfully happy. Then we met.” Ditto for the journalist Max Kaufman: “I never knew what real happiness was until I got married; and by then it was too late.”

To the actress Mae West, it was simply her irrepressible joie de vivre:

“Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.” 

Then there is the cynical view. One axiom of the human condition goes like this: “On a beautiful day like this it’s hard to believe anyone can be unhappy – but we’ll work on it.” And who’d imagine Albert Schweitzer as a cynic: “Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.”

But for really shrewd observations of the human experience, we should listen to English entertainer Bob Monkhouse: “Real happiness is when you marry a girl for love and find out later she has money.” 

It could also be sitting with a warm pizza box on your lap in front of the television. To wise, old Benjamin Franklin, it was beer because it proved “God loves us and wants us to be happy.”  

And to the Peanuts’ Lucy van Pelt, always an astute observer of life, it was a “warm puppy.”

You can’t top that.

ENDS

WALKING ON THIN ICE

A self-made man is one who believes in luck and sends his son to Oxford. – Australian author Christina Stead

Life isn’t fair. Have you ever noticed that the implacable Gods of chance always pick you for a tax audit, but never to win the lottery.

And yet, for my friend Cletus, a golf match is always a test of his skill against his opponent’s luck.

That’s life. But, as always, man has never failed to come up with crafty solutions to stave off bad luck. One could touch wood, sprinkle salt over one’s left shoulder or stumble on a horseshoe. Better yet, one could do all three things in quick succession. In his epic Quatrain 666, Nostradamus guaranteed that the aforementioned practice would consign unlucky intent into oblivion.

That’s superstition for you, the belief that supernatural influences are just waiting to trip you up. But before you deem the belief irrational, remember Stevie Wonder made a lot of money out of it. Or that the song made keyboardists realise the clavinet could sound just as funky as distort on a  lead guitar. 

I only mention this because I read this morning that it’s Friday the 13th today, a news-flash that caused me to sit up sharply in bed, which is never advisable because it tends to knock one’s head against the bed post. Which, I suppose, is just as well as it’s made of wood, the bed post, that is.  

The fear of the number13 is so steeped in the human psyche that it’s crept into the lexicon: the word triskaidekaphobia was coined precisely to describe it.  

Its origins are shrouded in mystery but it’s generally believed to stem from the Christian belief that Jesus Christ was crucified on a Friday together with the attendant faith that13 people were seated together for His Last Supper.  

Perversely though, the day of his crucifixion is known as Good Friday which is surely an oxymoron. From all accounts, there was nothing good or mannerly about it. 

Asked what were the things he most disliked, the iconoclastic thinker, Christopher Hitchens replied “Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.” Hitchens might be unduly harsh in his assessment and the truth is probably closer to what Bertrand Russell said: “Fear is the main source of superstition” because, I suppose, what we don’t understand we can make mean anything.   

And yet, there is something sinister enough about a black cat crossing your path to make the hairs at the back of your neck prickle. Especially if said cat suddenly stops to stare at you with a silent, murderous and baleful regard.

Of course, it may all mean nothing and we are simply letting our imaginations run riot. As Groucho Marx observed: “If a black cat crosses your path, it signifies that the animal is going somewhere.” 

Something surreal, however, happened on the day that the Islamic clergy-led state government of Terengganu announced it would not send its women gymnasts to take part in next year’s Malaysia Games. The reason: the sport required attire that were not courteous, not suitable and not sharia-compliant. 

At the very moment the announcement was being made, a black cat crossed the path of a workman who’d just spilled salt under the ladder of his counterpart, perched there to repair the thirteenth bulb of the thirteenth chandelier on the thirteenth floor of the Terengganu state assembly building at that very moment a mirror cracked in the men’s washroom on the floor. 

It was bizarre…

…You’re traveling through another dimension – a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind…

ENDS

A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES

You’d think Anwar Ibrahim would know better.

Malaysia’s premier was, after all, a former finance minister and a good one at that: he delivered two budget surpluses during his tenure. It’s never been repeated.  

He would have witnessed numerous government bailouts during Dr Mahathir’s tenure – from Bank Bumiputera to Renong – and he must have absorbed some lessons.

The Spanish philosopher George Santayana warned that “those who refuse to remember the lessons of history are condemned to repeat it.” That’s exactly what is going on in this case: a proposed purchase of a debt-strapped plantation company (Boustead Plantations or BPlant) by a well-managed plantation firm (KLK) that, in any other capitalist economy, would be as humdrum as waking up to smell the coffee. 

Except that BPlant is Malay and KLK, Chinese. And this is Malaysia where policymakers haven’t woken up to reality for the longest time. 

To understand the fuss, you have to appreciate the New Economic Policy, a 1971 initiative to redress the economic imbalance between Malaysia’s poor Malay majority and their “richer” Chinese counterparts. Its premise was fair enough: the Malays only owned 2% of national wealth then, a recipe for disaster.

When it began, the policy’s litmus test, was for the Bumiputera (Malay) to achieve 30% of national wealth. Over five decades, however, it’s become clear that it will never be achieved. Nor, I think now, was it ever meant to be achieved, the better to remain, forever and ever, amen. 

There are no estimates for the amount taxpayers have spent to uplift the community but it must run into the hundreds of billions. It’s 53 years old now but it’s still a work in progress. 

No one talks about the policy’s other aim – to  eliminate poverty, irrespective of race. Or its overarching aim – national unity.

Indeed, I’d argue the  policy’s implementation has been the single largest hindrance to national unity. Even a simple corporate exercise like BPlant’s, for example, can become tainted with suspicion. 

How does a heavily  indebted state-owned, but politically  important, firm resolve its situation without relying on market forces? 

The answer: the beggar-the-taxpayers approach, aka Bailout. It’s a tried and tested approach, set in stone by Dr Mahathir and continued by successive governments. 

It’s simple, expedient, and convenient.  The problem is much has changed over the last decade:

  • Our national debt is now over RM1 trillion;
  • Our subsidies are an unsustainable RM81 billion a year; and
  • Our pensions bill is escalating alarmingly.

I suppose we can always kick the can down the road, but that’s why we’ve reached this position in the first place. 

Now to the brouhaha. 

BPlant has RM800 million in debt which must be paid by year-end or face bankruptcy. That isn’t all: it has another RM600 million in debt left.  The matter is politically sensitive because of BPlant’s shareholders: Boustead Holdings and its parent, LTAT the military’s pension fund. 

BPlant also needs another RM600 million to cover replanting costs. 

To settle the problems, LTAT wisely put it up for sale by tender. There were six serious offers, the best being KLK’s. This was acknowledged by Boustead, LTAT and analysts alike.  

Indeed, KLK bent over backwards to demonstrate goodwill. Standout statistic: its offer of RM1.55 a share valued BPlant’s shares at 67 times forward earnings, expensive by any standard. In addition, both LTAT and Boustead were offered first dibs at two estates ripe for property development. 

It was win-win all round. But, scenting NEP-sacred cows being sacrificed, the opposition began lamenting the erosion of Malay corporate equity and the hits, as they say, just kept on coming. To a fragile coalition, it was enough. 

The deal got aborted. Nothing has been said about a bailout, but it would seem the expedient solution.   

If so, there are no winners, Not LTAT, not KLK, not Putrajaya, and certainly not Anwar. 

Do you think foreign investors are impressed?   

And you still wonder about the ringgit? 

ENDS