Time and tide wait for no man

This axiom is becoming more and more real each passing day. Each day passes by, without even glancing at us and move away with lightning speed, faster than anybody can imagine before. Yes...Time and tide wait for no man. No men so powerful to stop the flow of time. Not even to match it speed.

I am not too sure whether I am the only one who feel or notice that each passing day is becoming shorter and shorter in time. There are so much thing to do, but so little time available at hand. There is not much leftover in between the space for me to have any leisure moment at will. Not like the ole days. Nowadays, I have to really and literally 'watch' the time and pay much attention to its flow so that I can fit in every single task into the void it left behind. But time seems never to pay much attention to me.

Now Ramadan al-Mubarak is just around the corner. It seems like yesterday I celebrated the joy of Ramadhan, rejoicing and hoping for all the barokah the holy months has to offer. Once again the feeling is flushing and filling deep inside me. Welcome back Ramadan.

Wishing all of you my blogger friends, a blessing month of Ramadan ahead.

I-City...the city of illusion.

Really, I think this place is great. It is even better because it's free and you don't have to pay a single cent to enjoy yourself except for the parking (and the petrol or your vehicle of course). This is one great place to be mesmerized by the splendor display of LEDs in full psychedelic varieties. It was hard not to be amazed so much so I wasn't dare to blink my eyes even for a second. It was really a feast to the eyes.

Actually, I first stumbled upon this place, to be exact while blog-hopping and circumnavigating the colorful-borderless Blogosphere. Some Bloggers even managed to fool me into believing that alien has already invaded our earth and set up their base in the Bolehland. Others illustrated it as some romantic place in the far land - Winter Sonata. Later I thought it was probably a different dimension far from our reality or perhaps somebody else's dreamland. But it is not. This place is for real.

So one fine cloudless night, I decided to gatecrash this place in order to see it with my own eyes. I brought along my family and it took us almost 40 minutes from our home near Subang to reach this place. Where is I-city? To be frank I was clueless as well, and could not possibly point out the exact coordinate for your GPS gadget. Google map does not recognize this as a significant place to even highlight it in their map - just like my beautiful kampung. I know it is somewhere in Shah Alam. If you know where Jakel is (the new textile shopping heaven in section 7) and the back (?) entrance of UiTM, you are less than 5 minutes away from this splendid place. At night, you couldn't miss this place as you should be able to see the magnificent glow of light from the traffic light junction of this two landmarks.

The place is still in its infancy. If properly developed and correctly tuned this place can beat any theme park in the surrounding area, anytime. This place have vast land for future development and creative innovation. One word of caution though (at least for the time being). It may not be advisable to visit this place if it is raining or during the rainy season as the place will turn into a big swampy paddy field. You may have to bring along your Wellington boot to wade through the wet-barren soil. There are a few good eateries in this place, but many shop lots are still ghostly vacant. The elevated car park is so dusty with flying minuscule clay particles so don't bother to wash your trusty jalopy prior visiting this place. It will surely get a new evenly-coated surface with a rustic but stylish soil color by the time you get to your home.

All in all, the place didn't let us down and live up to our expectation. My family enjoyed the outing very much, except they missed my attention as I was so busy trying to capture those beautiful glowing subjects with my camera. Even though it was not a weekend, the crowd was considerably big. They were not hallucinating but ecstatically joyful.

No viagra please!

Imagine one fine day, our chubby boy or our luvly-jubbly-fully-blossom daughter come back from school after having their first session of yet-to-be finalized sex education syllabus, sit on our lap with sparkling eyes and suddenly start to probe us with these million dollar questions:

"does size matter dad - I mean with bigger power-tool my baby will become more chubby?"

"will I get pregnant if I share a swimming pool with boys mom?"

"If I borrow and wear my friend's underwear last night, would I contract STD next week dad?"

"When I grow up, can I raise my baby in a test-tube mom?

The unthinkable list of confusion can goes on and on. Those sort of innocent questions one way or another might some day haunt the unsuspecting parents. However, it is probably better be caught off guard rather than to be caught with our pants down... for sure. Like it or not, we just have to accept the fact that sex is not the subject whispered in the kelambu anymore.

Youngsters these days are more informed and well educated than us when we were at their juvenile age. Information is easily available over a cup of tea-tarik in a wifi-free kopitiam or in the comfort of their room. They are not easily contented with shooting aliens on their PlayStation anymore. Kids by nature are very curious and curiosity normally kills the cat. Internet explosion has given them abundance of choices and its all free, so much so they become very confused and disillusioned.

Sex education in a classroom is like eating satay and dip them with cencalok as the sauce. Or even worst - eating satay with cencalok and flush it down with a jug of tea boosted with super-potent tongkat ali. A total mismatch. By bringing this sensitive subject into the classroom and lifting the veil of this big taboo subject the schools are now facing with a totally new set of game to deal with. I remember during my early exposure with this subject at school, blushing teachers occasionally skimmed over reproductive system in class. Thus leaving us even more curious.

The intention is noble - to curb social ills, Internet pornography, abstaining from pre-marital sex, sanctity of marriage, incest, sexual abuses and harassment, unwed mothers, unwanted babies, be more respectful of gender and sexuality, to respect our bodies and one another, and probably at the end en masse castration of pupils at school. This subject if poorly implemented with no proper syllabus or well structured course ( and monitoring) this will backfire. Students for example armed with the knowledge of contraceptive might be more daring and confidence in experimenting with each other thus committing immoral activities freely. With the popular love-birds' motto 'if you love me, let's do it', thing could even get much nastier than one's thought .

When everything in place, teachers might have to take liability insurance just to cover themselves from being sued by horny parents who could not possibly think with their head anymore and believe that their kids are now turned into a celibate. That is another issue.

You know what. I got a brilliant idea. In addition to teaching sex education in school, why not teach parents too. Teach parents to teach their children at home. I would love to go back to school and learn this exciting subject. It can be a very refreshing experience indeed.

Personally I believed the best way for us, the mortals to handle this prickly issue is by going back to the basic. Our religion. Sex education has been readily discussed and taught in Islam (sleep separately when children baligh reaching the age of 7, women should properly covered etc.) Strengthening the family institution as the core value is also some thing that need to be addressed as well. Most parents neglect this responsibility and left the school to handle.

I genuinely do have concerns over this whole kinky scenario, none of which have anything to do with sex education in our court regarding sodo-mee or semen tainted love-bed of which Bolehland reporters faithfully reported in such lurid details usually reserved in specialty magazines abroad. My main worry is that our kids will be overdosed with pheromone and not knowing how to deal with it. This could be a potentially dangerous predicament.

As the sign of judgement day becomes clearer, you don't be surprised one day not far in the future you might find some parents named their kid with Mat Siphilis or Mek skrotum.

Hancussss....