By OOI KEE BENG for THE EDGE MALAYSIA 27 January 2020 The dimensions for conflict perpetually vexing this strange political creation that the world knows as Malaysia are many. And they often go unmentioned — even unidentified and therefore unmanaged. There are various reasons for this. First, to state the obvious, racialism, noted in the … Continue reading
By OOI KEE BENG, Editorial for Penang Monthly, February 2020 February, 2020 “CREATIVE INDUSTRIES” is an infuriating term. Why it is so difficult to get a firm handle on it is that it epitomises the postmodern nature of our times, challenging not only a range of notions associated with “modernity”, but also connoting socio-economic and … Continue reading
By Ooi Kee Beng, for The Edge Malaysia, 30 December 2019 With disruptions in major industries changing the structure of daily economic life, all of us should sense very clearly by now that the education industry — if you will allow me to call it an industry — is a ripe fruit that is about … Continue reading
By Ooi Kee Beng, Penang Monthly editorial January 2020 In a rural setting, public spaces lie between households. These are spaces shared with neighbours. And as you walk out of the village centre, either up the hill, into the fields or down to the riverbank or the coast, Nature’s presence begins to dominate and you … Continue reading
By Ooi Kee Beng, Penang Monthly Editorial, December 2019. Not many peoples in the world discuss what they want for dinner while eating lunch. Malaysians do, and we like to laugh about that fact – taking it to mean that we are down-to-earth, we are immediate and caring, and we distrust abstract matters. We also … Continue reading
By Ooi Kee Beng, for The Edge Malaysia, 2 December 2019. The atypical ambition to make human development sustainable would not have come about in our time if not for the pervasive sense we all feel that human insatiability has gone too far. Human interference — or disruption, to use a fashionable word — with … Continue reading
By OOI KEE BENG. Penang Monthly, November 2019. There are tipping points. Key instances past which the world changes. The effect is often immediate, shocking and irreversible. And then there are changes that happen at a seemingly glacial pace, some lasting so long that a human can live his whole life and not notice them. … Continue reading
By OOI KEE BENG, for THE EDGE 27 October 2019. For Malaysian politics to transcend the primacy of identity and move on to policymaking that is truly constructive and progressive, in the building of a country that is socially harmonious, morally proud and economically influential, there are at least five aspects that require deep consideration. … Continue reading
By Ooi Kee Beng, Penang Monthly Editorial October 2019. When a process of liberation has actually succeeded in emancipating a category of humans, subsequent generations should find it hard to imagine the conditions of that subjugation, or even the type of society that allowed it. But then, few liberating processes are ever complete, or are … Continue reading
By OOI KEE BENG, for THE EDGE, 30 September 2019 Before Merdeka, the states that now make up the Federation of Malaysia each functioned to varying degrees and in different ways as part of the global economy that we knew as colonialism. But although one could say that the metropolitan centre then was London and … Continue reading
