It’s amazing how fast later comes when you buy now! –Comedian Milton Berle 

We went to church on Christmas morn punctually, 30 minutes before Mass. But the cars parked there already signaled a massive  turnout.

Sure enough, we couldn’t find a seat inside but had to settle for three seats deep in the madding crowd. All the three halls upstairs – which were live- streaming the service – were packed. And there were many who stood throughout. 

The excess was due to  people like us, who hadn’t been to church after Covid made on-line Masses respectable; those who went to church twice a year; and those who felt compelled to go because the year was ending. The excess was  the majority. 

The end of a year always has an effect on people because an end, any kind, signifies new beginnings, a fresh start,  and such things generally go better – to the prudent at least – with divine help ergo Church on Christmas morn: six days before the New Year. 

Time just zips by doesn’t it? Example: Do you know it was a year ago today? 

Its rapidity, the eternal change, can give you hope. “History is the sum total of things that could have been avoided,”  was how former German Chancellor and eternal optimist Konrad Adenauer saw it. 

Or it can be understood as useless and hypocritical. “What is history but a pack of lies agreed upon,”  snorted the great, if cynical, Napoleon Bonaparte. The Russian writer Leo Tolstoy was equally disbelieving: “History would be an excellent thing if only it were true.”  

Everything’s relative. When I had my first job and living away from home for the first time, there was this recurring thought:  why is there so much month left at the end of the money?  There’s also the question of whether a minute is sufficient. Answer: it depends on which side of the bathroom door you’re on.

Then there is the opposite sensation, the feeling of sudden clarity, the lucidity of powerlessness.

I was looking around at the people in the house during Christmas Eve and realising that these were people I’d known for years, and accepting that time does, indeed, go on and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. 

It may be a great healer, but time’s a lousy beautician. It marches on, and as singer Dolly Parton complained, “sooner or later you realise it’s marching across our faces.” 

2024 taught us that Abraham Lincoln wasn’t quite correct. You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time. And that,  Donald Trump knew, was sufficient. 

So let’s brace for the future and cheer the present. Let’s welcome the New Year with pomp and circumstance, and begin  making resolutions for a Better You that you have  5 days to formulate. If time is any teacher, you will promptly start paving the road to hell with those intentions in the very first week of 2025 but don’t worry your pretty little head about it.

You can always start again next year. 

ENDS 

“Life is like an onion: you peel off one layer at a time and sometimes you weep.” – Writer Carl Sandburg

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.

For one thing, my wife’s finally back from Singapore, and my daughter’s home for the holidays. 

Then my brother’s family is down from the US. So are various cousins and their offspring. They will be at our place for Christmas Eve as I am the only Catholic in my family: the rest are either nominal Hindus, serious ones – those who actually understand the philosophy – and those who’ve read too much Richard Dawkins for anyone’s good. 

But Christmas isn’t just a day, it’s a frame of mind. Which most people  instinctively grasp: my family is no exception.

They like and appreciate the scene: the tree, the carols, the pineapple tarts, the wine, dinner, the atmosphere. And don’t forget the beer: that’s why there are carols like It’s a Wonderful Time For A Beer.

As for us, we’re doubly secure  because we’ve assuaged our consciences by going to church first thing in the morning. 

But the ones who most love the season are the children. Raisa bought presents for all 4 of them and they will believe that it’s from a bearded, jolly, fat man with a limited dress sense living somewhere in the South Pole. 

Raisa had no trouble believing the same thing until she was almost seven. Then an embittered cousin whose belief had been shattered by a Grinch-like priest decided to spread his disillusion and Raisa suddenly found out that Santa was, actually, Daddy. 

I was furious with said relative: he was clearly a Rebel without a Claus.

On an ecclesiastical note, Satan can metaphorically be described as the “scarecrow in the religious cornfield”. Pity the dyslexic devil worshipper then: he could end up worshipping Santa.

The season makes you reflective. I look around and I realise I’m a lucky fellow, to have family and  friends in a reasonably happy and secure environment during a period of intense upheaval and suffering in other parts of the world.

So I think, OK, maybe I don’t deserve any of this. Then I think, I have food allergies that I don’t deserve either so maybe, what the hell, that’s just how the cookie crumbles. 

That’s just life. As the Jewish author and humorist Sholom Aleichem wryly observed: “No matter how bad things get, you’ve got  to go on living, even if it kills you.” 

Or as Dr Mahathir Mohamad night have noted: “It’s good to be here…but at 99, it’s good to be anywhere.” 

But I digress, and to get back on point, it‘s good to be here during the Christmas season. My daughter said she began perspiring the minute she stepped out of the airport’s air-conditioned chill into the humidity of Sepang. It had been 7 degrees in Amsterdam when she left.

I’ll take the equatorial  swelter any time. The rains ensure December’s the coolest month in the year, which helps. 

Not quite a White Christmas but a Right One will do nicely, thank you.

At the end of the day, perhaps we should just count our blessings, touch wood, and cross our fingers. Because it could be far worse. 

As  comedienne and actress Lily Tomlin predicted: “Things are going to get far worse before they get worse.”

Merry Christmas everyone. 

ENDS

Man is the only animal that blushes – or needs to. – Writer Mark Twain 

You learn all sorts of things from other people. 

One of the jobs magistrates do is to witness hangings, at least in those days when they were still administered. This was what R told me about the first hanging he witnessed as a magistrate in the 1980s.

He had to be at Pudu Prison early because the deed was always done at sunrise. 

But what really struck him was what the hangman did after the fact: he stooped and washed his hands in the early-morning dew on the grass. 

Of course, R asked. The man, a devout Muslim, replied he’d just “washed the (sin of the) hanging off” his conscience. 

So, the ever-careful R did the same. You never can tell! 

Early in my career, I had occasion to meet Mokhzani Mahathir, then an up-and-coming businessman. His first question was curious: what sort of Indian was I?

I normally try and dodge such questions because I find most non-Indians are puzzled by the distinctions. But he persisted, saying he knew of the differences.  So, I replied I was Malayalee, and my parents were from Kerala. 

He shook my hands, grinning.  “Countryman,” was all he said. He clearly didn’t have any hang-ups about his ancestry. 

In the early-1990s, tycoon Vincent Tan began buying shares in MUI, a public-listed conglomerate that, among other things, owned a bank. The tycoon kept buying the stock until he was on the verge of a hostile takeover. 

It was either that, and a relatively cheap way to get a bank, or greenmail: a tactic where an investor buys enough shares to threaten a hostile takeover, only to force the company to buy back the shares at a premium.

The markets were agog and the business press were in a frenzy. I asked to meet Tan and, to my surprise, he invited me to lunch. 

 Would he sell? 

“You’ve to understand something about me,” answered the magnate. “Except for the family, everything’s for sale.”

(For the record, Tan sold off his MUI block for a handsome profit.)

I’d asked Ananda Krishnan for a meet but didn’t get a reply. Then out of the blue, he called and asked me to come to his office at 3pm the next day. 

His office took up an entire floor in the Maxis Tower. It was lushly carpeted and full of artwork, so much so there were paintings stacked on the floors. Masses would be an understatement. (“I love art and buy too much. Someday, I’ll create an art museum.”)

AK said he hadn’t eaten the whole day and tea was served. A cake was rolled in and he cut slices while saying it had no butter or fat and was, therefore, healthy.

It tasted like it too, but he ate with every appearance of relish. I’d heard he was a health buff: he swam 50 laps a day without fail. 

It was a pleasant enough interview and when I stood to leave, he said he had a present.  

It was another cake. 

In the car, I asked Hassan, my driver, if he liked cake. He said yes. Enthusiastically too. So, I gave him a present. 

I’d forgotten about it until Hassan rounded on me the next day. He didn’t believe my story that it had been from a billionaire.  

It was terrible, he said, and so he’d fed it to his chickens. 

They sneered at it too. 

ENDS

Wrinkled Was Not One of the Things I Wanted To Be When I Grew Up. – Bumper sticker 

There is a gymnasium in the apartment block where we live so I suppose I belong there.

Let me rephrase that: I don’t belong there at all but I go there. 

I guess the Bible’s right, everything is Vanity. You don’t get my sort of body just like that. It takes years of neglect. 

I admit it: I have finally reached that stage in life which Bob Hope described as “the time when even your birthday suit needs pressing.” 

So my wife decided to get me a physical trainer, to beat me into shape so to speak. I feared the worst the minute I saw him: he looked like Sherman.

The tank I mean, not the cartoon character.   

Worse still, were the  people patronising the place. They were, to a man, trim, fit and athletic-looking. I use the word “man” here loosely, of course. There is, for example, one woman who didn’t need to lift weights at all: she did that every time she stood up. 

The muscly Rahul – that was the trainer’s name – even had his ears ridged in abs and getting into shape was clearly a Holy Grail to him. The man simply didn’t seem to care, or realise, I was pushing 70. 

For the hour he was hired, he kept me on a relentless, non-stop pattern of exercises that, at its end, left me exhausted, panting and, despite the air-conditioned chill of the gym, soaked in sweat. 

If you think about it, we are always being judged on how we look or comport ourselves. First impressions matter. 

I remember the first time I met Rebecca’s father. I was playing a cricket game for the university when it broke for lunch. 

Becky had invited me over for lunch and so I just jogged over as her place wasn’t that far. 

But it still was some distance away. I had long hair to boot so you might reasonably conclude I wasn’t looking my finest when I reached said destination. 

Her father opened the door thinking I was the pizza boy. When I informed him of my bona-fides, maybe I should have expected the reeling away in shock, and the stricken look.

In real life, he was a policeman and a no-nonsense one at that. 

Looking back,  not my  classiest entrance perhaps. Alas and all that, but these things happen. 

It could be worse. Some people actually comment on appearances for a living. And it can be withering. 

Take fashion critic Richard Blackwell’s description of Camilla Parker Bowles back in 2000. Camilla is now the Queen Consort of England. 

“In feathered hats that were once the rage, she resembles a petrified parakeet form the Jurassic age: a royal wreck.” 

Fortunately for Mr Blackwell, he died well before she became Queen. 

Mark Twain was more acidic than Blackwell: “Last week I stated that this woman was the ugliest woman I’d ever seen…I have since been visited by her sister and now wish to withdraw that statement.”

You probably want to know how my exercise regimen is working out. All I know is that I now have aching parts in places I didn’t know I had muscles. 

ENDS