rumahku

For the past few months I have been spending time (and lotsa money) to "rehabilitate" the house that I never grew up in. It belonged to my mother and her mother and the mother before her.... but my mother has recently decided to pass it on to me. RUMAHKU. Actually I'm just a "guardian" as any rumah pusaka actually belongs to a paruik. The project manager is my sister, Nor Haslinda Hashim. Thank god she seems to know what she's doing (albeit at my expense) since she has architectural training from Universiti Teknologi Malaysia. Dr. Naziaty of Universiti Malaya has been very encouraging too. There's no ramp to get into the house yet but the new staircase is quite accessible and safe for some people. There's an accessible toilet on the ground level...yeay.

The view from the frontyard overlooking sawah padi. Just beyond the bamboo grove is Sungai Muar.

magical realism

I did it again - I bought a book by Italo Calvino last night.

Books

I learned the Arabic alphabets before I did any other. I started learning it even before I attended primary school, and unlike most other kids my age at the time I skipped the sekolah makan TADIKA (kindergarten). Instead I attended mengaji at night and during class, I’d recite the Quran using a copy that was available at the surau.

Our family did not have a copy of the Quran at home until some time in the 1980s. The first Quran that my parents brought home was a brand new copy that they’d gotten for free from the village masjid, if memory serves me right. But it was not the family’s first book.

I can vaguely remember that around puberty I usually spent the afternoons sprawled on the couch reading HAMKA. It was one of my father’s few books. Some time later I found all of his books scattered under their bed at home while … I can’t really recall why I was looking there. But a couple of the authors’ that I can still remember were HAMKA and Agus Salim, both of whom were Indonesian [Minangkabau] progressive thinkers in the first half of the 20th century. Father read those books while he was still in the army for goodness knows why. Agus Salim’s book was written in two languages – Indonesian and Dutch. I don’t remember much else about those books, but there was a line in HAMKA’s that stayed with me for awhile. It was the part where he thought that something beautiful could never be sinful.

So puberty was a time when I actively looked for books. It was around this curious time that I got hold of a sibling’s book, THE READER'S DIGEST BOOK OF THE HUMAN BODY, which somebody said years later was a seminal book on sex, hippie-style (because it contains drawings of unshaven men and women!).

I can’t recall the first book that I bought with my own money. But I can remember very well the most recent book that I bought_a novel by W. Somerset Maugham. I’d read his novels before but when I was at the bookstore suddenly it occurred to me that I needed to have a copy at home. Come to think of it right now maybe it’s time I stop buying books and save the money for something else.


Something beautiful can never be sinful

9 november 1972

I found out a while ago that my REAL birthday was today in 1972.

Merdeka Ennui

As of late, I'm getting more and more confused about the meaning and usefulness of heritage. Wait, what do I mean by "heritage" here, you may wonder. I'm talking about a general sense of belonging. HOME.

Am I on my way to joining so many disaffected people all over the world? Or is age fast catching up with me. Or is it because I lack history?

Historical GIS of Penarikan

Let me share with you a little bit about my current preoccupation called historical GIS.

Historical GIS can be defined as using geographical information systems to map and understand past landscape changes.

In the US, UK and Europe, integrating geography and history in GIS is now commonly done in this brand new field, which is about 10 years old.

In Malaysia, land use/ land cover studies using GIS are plenty but specific case studies on historical sites are still lacking.

As a geographer who has a keen interest in history, I figure I can contribute to this endeavour to enhance our Malaysian heritage knowledge.

My current research is on the Penarikan in Jempol. Visit this site for more information:
http://www.esri.com/news/arcuser/1207/malaysia_land-use.html

I was looking for an old edition of Collins-Longman's atlas when I found it at a small bookstore in PJ last weekend. And so I bought it for a mere RM10.