Steve Jobs famously said,
"Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish!" He also said, "Don’t let the noise of
others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important,
have the courage to follow your heart and intuition."I had some visitors over for Diwali, parents, grandparents like me, who were glibly quoting Jobs, saying how they knew a lawyer who gave up his lawyer-ing and now makes a lot of money ... I wanted to laugh, but decided to just smile instead. "Would you have let your son, your daughter, drop out of school?" I asked.
"No lah. Just saying." They didn't stop there, but went on talking about other stories in the same vein. I told them to buy a lottery ticket.
How we love reading and talking about our gods, and imagining their lives; living it vicariously. Life is difficult, and parents have a hard enough time choosing names for their children that their off-springs will not scold them for, a few years hence.
I was reading another story that said Malaysian parents considered money spent on tuition as money well spent. Some years ago, another parent told me that he opposed a single-session school system because his children would then have no time for tuition. These sentiments are not new. Even our part-time housekeeper, who can barely make ends meet, goes into debt paying for cram schools her children attend. (I went to school in the sixties in a small town where tuition classes were not yet fashionable. Only the dumb kids attended them. Which also meant I had plenty of time to stay foolish! As for hunger, I read like hell.)
Life has been all laid out for us. We cram like hell during our school and college years, so we can spend the rest of our lives as galley slaves in corporations, earning salaries that will allow us to consume like hell, and, hence, return the money to those who gave it to us in the first place -- albeit, in a roundabout way. And, all the time, we'll continue to complain and dream about our gods. All parents want, is for their children to succeed (whatever that means), and to do it in a way that does not bring them shame or trouble, or, at least, they don't hear about it. (Go to another country and if you want to create trouble!) Is that too much to ask?
So-oo Asian, the American media have lectured us for years. Yet, at no time in history, and in no country other than the US, have so many people been so totally enslaved, working their butts off for meagre rewards, spending everything they earn, consuming mindlessly, totally incapable of making a living with their own hands or through enterprise. (For my son's graduation in the US, the 'official' photographs were taken by a national conglomerate that had 300 universities in its portfolio. Photographs during my graduation were taken by a dozen roving photo-studio operators from KL and PJ, including Kedai Gambar Ah Meng.)
With the chances of becoming a Jobs or a Gates being next to none, is a life sentence all there is for us? Sure, grown men no longer have to live in fear of the whip, but that doesn't mean the reign of terror and bully is over. Intimidation is more subtle now. We started off as hunter-gatherers who shared food and protected one another against the elements and predators. Then we became civilised, and, with it, started the process of enslavement and abuse. What an irony?!
So, what is this piece all about? Ah yes, about staying hungry and foolish, and, I might add, staying young. You may think that the foolishness I am getting at are the risks some people take to make money. In which case, I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing. It's another form of it that I so admire; the foolishness to dare to imagine a better world and to go after it. The foolishness that drives our willingness to take on the likes of Ibrahim Ali with a video on YouTube, to take on a man who is reportedly proud that someone called him a Nazi. Yes, I have much respect for the young people behind That Effing Show. Stay young guys, and stay foolish and hungry. And maybe this country will have a future. Parents, will you allow your kids to produce an effing show? Or will you simper and kowtow in embarrassment because your children are causing so much 'trouble', and let others call them budak (kids) and kurang ajar (badly brought up)? Aren't we well past that?
Maybe, that's what Jobs meant: foolishness is the perfect antidote for idiocy.
