Collin Ng's Blog

Born in the year of the ferocious tiger I am but it does not mean I am immuned from the 'Claws of the Tiger', so says the subject heading. The 'Tiger' I am referring is the financial institutions, the banks that will resort to anything to make sure their borrowers make good their loan payments. Granted, they have to make sure every step taken is as legal as possible but the immense pressure lashed on borrowers who have inevitably fallen on bad time & struggled to meet payment schedule makes no difference to a typical Ah Long's modus operandi. The only distant difference is banks won't throw paint & write graffiti on wall unlike Ah Long. However, their (the banks) soft approach is equally, if not more deadly. This will inevitably drive desperate one to do the unthinkable, sigh! Naive enough to trust a friend of mine, I agreed to stand as his guarantor for a S$40,000 loan taken with a co-operative in 1999. This friend used to work for a catering ...

The still highly regarded former PM of Malaysia, Tun M by some quarters in Malaysia is insinuating something in this latest posting of his, titled 'Sand For Singapore' or rightly put, pointing his arrow at Singapore (sadly...again). During his long tenure as the PM of Malaysia, he was the one who decreed ban on selling sand to Singapore and I strongly believe (coming from a layman's perspective), the decision was based on his personal dislike of Singapore than any valid reasons. I now wonder aloud...how wrong can it be for one country selling sand to another country solely based on commercial transaction, even for the sole purpose of land reclaimation by the 'land-scarce' country? Isn't it free economy supposed to work this way? Will the so called security from that 'selling country' be compromised or threatened as a result of losing some sand from the abundant supply? If jet engines can be sold by this sand selling country to another count...

The article below was written by a Malaysian writer, Azly Rahman who is a Muslim but whose pragmatic views on the current situation in Malaysia have earned my praise and of course & deservingly, a posting on my blog too. Read on... By Azly Rahman Quote There is a Buddhist lesson in how we ought to perceive Malaysia’s emerging style of terrorism. When one is bleeding after being shot by an arrow, the first step is not to look for the culprit that shot the arrow and pondering why was it shot but to pull out the arrow from the victim’s body and to quickly put a stop to the bleeding. This is what Siddharta Gautama would teach as crisis intervention. Malaysians might never know who carried out the series of church bombings, nor what organisations are behind them, and if there is a higher order involved in the long-term planning of terror. Postmodern debates will be a tedious exercise on whether this or that name of a Universal God can be copyrighted or whether a pastor or an archbishop...