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By Ooi Kee Beng For The Edge Malaysia, December 25-31, 2017. Reprinted in Penang Monthly, February 2018. Freedom cannot be understood apart from power. Like with all good dichotomies, it is never clear where the one turns into the other, or lives off the other. Today, it is a staple in management courses and sloganeering … Continue reading
By Ooi Kee Beng, Editorial, Penang Monthly, December, 2017 Yes, Penang has amazing food, be it fusion or hybrid, street or mall, traditional or accidental. And yes, it has amazing desserts too, like the Penang Road teochew chendol for one. Even the age-old ais kacang. Even the humble bebola ais. And don’t get me started … Continue reading
By Ooi Kee Beng, “This Week in Asia” in South China Morning Post, 6 December 2017. AFTER ALL the analysing done by pundits on Malaysia’s political dynamics in the post-Mahathir period, the country has now come to the strange point of being in a potential pre-Mahathir period. There is now the more-than-theoretical possibility that 92-year-old … Continue reading
By Ooi Kee Beng for The Edge Malaysia Weekly, November 27, 2017 – December 03, 2017. Strangely, moderation is not a subject that needs to be discussed and elaborated upon. It is the default position in any stable society. Instead, it is the nature of extremism — especially when it is happily growing within a … Continue reading
By OOI KEE BENG, South China Morning Post, 16 November 2017. EXTREME WEATHER hits most places on Earth every now and then, and recently more than ever. But when freak storms appear with an intensity stronger and more devastating than living memory can recall, it is wise to conclude that we should not take blue … Continue reading
By OOI KEE BENG, for The Edge Malaysia, 23 October 2017. A nation starts building itself long before the nation-state is established. There were Germans before Germany was established, and there were Italians before Italy was founded. There were definitely Malayans with a sense of being Malayans before Malaya was founded in 1957. Where the … Continue reading
By Ooi Kee Beng, Editorial in Penang Monthly, October, 2017 The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of the communist experiment, and to the extent that the experiment was an application of Marxist ideas about class conflict as the driver of human development, the reunification of Germany that followed also meant for many … Continue reading
By OOI KEE BENG, “Picking on the Past”, column in Penang Monthly, October 2017. (Published on Merdeka Day, 31 August 2017 in The Malaysian Insight). MALAYSIA is a special place for its natural geography and its human history, but most importantly of all, because of its demographic complexity. The peninsula is on the western receiving … Continue reading
By Ooi Kee Beng, “Picking on the Past”; Column in Penang Monthly, November 2017 (earlier version published in Forum, The Edge, Malaysia, 25 September 2017). Who am I? A simple question to ask oneself, and yet, no simple answer suggests itself. As long as the issue is about the singular person, it appears to be … Continue reading
By Ooi Kee Beng, Penang Monthly, September 2017. Nurul Izzah, Daughter of the Reformasi, and of the jailed opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, was pulled into politics as a young girl. Now 36 years old, she has become a major figure in Malaysian politics. The future looks bright for her, and many see her as a … Continue reading
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