Overdue Update

It's been forever since I've touched this blog. My hesitance to return here is namely because I fell out of the habit and knew that once I started, it would again consume large chunks of my time. And yet here I am. Sigh.

The first thing I should write about is, of course, National Service. 3 disgustingly long months of my life spent as far east of east Malaysia as you can get while still being in Malaysia; Tawau. I would best describe it as a combination between incredibly packed schedules, not enough sleeping hours, and mixed rice for every lunch and dinner. Add nonsensical rules, crap quality uniforms and bad living conditions, and you'll have a pretty good overview of what my camp was like.

It may just be me, but I think that NS is based on a poorly planned system that wasn't thought through well enough before it was implicated. If I hadn't been selected as company commander I can safely say that I wouldn't have taken ANYTHING away from those three months at all. For pete's sake, they treat us like kids.

Allow me to illustrate my point. For starters, we are asked to decorate our dorm rooms. They give us paper and crayons and ask us to be creative. They even show us examples from the previous batches, and lookie here, they've copied their wall decor straight from my mother's child development center, where the kids range from 3 to 6 years old.

Maybe that's acceptable. After all, we spend all our free time in the dorms and they may as well look cheerful (albeit childish). But allow me to tell you about the character building and patriotic classes. In order to "make sure we're focused and enthusiastic" for a lesson, they make us to sing a silly song while doing a dance that accompanies it before the class starts.

There was one time they actually forced everyone to do the chicken dance, enthusiastically. They spread us out in a neat grid so they had a clear view of everyone and told us that if even one of us didn't do it with all our heart, we'd all have to do it again. I don't want to state how many times we had to restart. Their reason for it (and of course they have one) was that we needed to learn how to let our hair down at times and not care about what other people think about us. A good lesson for some to learn but they clearly forgot that a portion of society actually hold dignity in their souls.

And there they were at other times, complaining and scolding us for being childish, telling us that we needed to grow up and be responsible people.

In one of the early speeches a woman proudly told us that Malaysia was the only country that conducted their national service non-military style (obviously not counting the marching, the incomplete and largely disappointing M16A1 training in which they didn't even teach gun safety, the army style discipline they implemented). I would describe it as a pseudo-military summer boot camp but a friend of mine describes it far more eloquently.

"The only reason they don't conduct it military style, is because they conduct it kindergarten style" -Darlene

Now I would gladly rant on about the million other things I didn't like about it but I really should conclude. NS might do some good to an immature and unfit teenager who's exposure to the world can be quantified as abysmally little, but not much for someone like me. Their actual reason for the whole thing is to promote harmony between the different races. For some reason they've got it into their heads that spending in excess of 500 million (8k per person)each year on a bunch of 18 year olds with their own worldviews to promote racial harmony works better than starting some program in primary school which would be cheaper and probably more effective.

And my life after NS? Wait for the next update. =)