Sweating over Kimchi & Other Matters

I had Korean with some friends the other day, there's this place called The Polo near Centrepoint at the end of Tottenham Court Road which has super spicy kimchi.

Someone had just arrived from KL and we started talking about some issues from back home. Things are best summed up in this International Herald Tribune article.

There are a lot of things which could be improved on in Malaysia. Just like any other country in the world, we have problems. To give credit when it's due, we are still a relatively young nation with a population so diverse that its hard to make compromises sometimes.

Here's another Thomas Friedman excerpt:

"I was having dinner with Wimar Witoelar, a popular Jakarta talk-show host, who was describing for me the young generation of the Indonesian middle class. He remarked that what many of these educated twenty- and thirty- year olds had in common was that they wanted to get rich, without having to be corrupt, and they wanted democracy, but they didn't want to go in the streets and fight for it. This generation of Indonesians understood that under Suharto there would never be a democratic revolution from below, because if the urban poor revolted it would mean a year of living dangerously all over again."

"So their whole strategy was revolution from beyond, or globalution. By integrating Indonesia into the global system via the World Trade Organisation, Pizza Hut, APEC, ASEAN, Merrill Lynch, PWC, they might be able to import standards and rules-based systems that would not have be present in the country otherwise." (this bit has been para-phrased)

"Indonesian military analyst Juwono Sudarsono described globalution to me as meaning that 'the global market will forve upon us business practices and disciplines that we cannot generate internally."

"Another Indonesian reformer expressed it more simply. He told me that he and his son got their revenge on Suharto once a week 'by eating at McDonald's'."

On another note, I finally managed to check out the infamous 'Police Abuse Ear Squats' on the Malaysiakini site. Check out the 'Keluar Dari Malaysia' one too.