Enlightenment

 

Had me a Eureka moment whilst sitting on the loo reading the New Straits Times. – Haiya! Don’t be like that, lah. When you gotta go, you gotta go. And when I gotta go, I gotta read. And reading crap while taking a crap is ok, wat… It’s not like I bought the thing, it was just there. Times are hard, people steal copies of the NST from government departments to put in their loos for toilet paper. In my defense, the shampoo bottle was too far away to reach from my perch on the throne so I grabbed the closest thing to read.

I plonked my way across to this gem on p.5, with the headline “Police summon festival organisers”. I didn’t realise Seksualiti Merdeka was a festival, but ok. Apparently the police have summoned the organisers to record their statements. So, aside from being unaware of the festival, I also learned that Datuk Ambiga Sreenevasan is one of the organisers. Wow! That’s elevation. Until yesterday, she was simply speaking at the opening, now she’s been promoted to “organiser”. In the very next column below she gets to say “huh??”.

If I were loaded, I”d love to take out a full page coloured ad in the mainstream papers expressing heartfelt gratitude to Datuk Ambiga for agreeing to officiate a banned festival. After all, it’s the kind of thing we patriotic Malaysians love to do. We’ve all seen those things, you know the ones where someone spends obscene amounts of money thanking some VIP for flushing a newly installed toilet for the first time.

But I was distracted from this fantasy by a sudden sharp dose of reality. I’ve worked it out! We’re a nation of funny buggers. Everything is clear if you picture the people behind these statements as wannabe stand-up comedians. I’ve always been a bit slow, but I get it now.

 

 

 

 

“The police is (sic) right in their decision to ban the event as they have put the security of the country first.”

Yep, events made up of talks, forums, workshops, performances, etc. aimed at awareness, education and affirmation of sexuality rights as as a human right – dangerous shit, man.