ART HARUN
The Italian poet and novelist, Cesare Pavese, widely
considered as among the major authors of the 20th century in Italy, left
a brief note before his suicide.
The last sentence in that brief note says, “don’t gossip too much.”
Malaysians, and I must say, especially the Malays, are obviously not taking that advice to heart. It
is simply amazing that nowadays Malaysians are so caught up by the need
to know what somebody else – especially celebrities - is doing. We have
become a nation full of kepohs!
The advent of information technologies in the 21st century and of course the near free availability of connectivity in our country currently have contrived to elevate gossiping to something of a national obsession.
Day in and day
out all of us, to a certain extent, partake in acts of gossiping, be it
political, social or even economics in nature.
However,
what is really irksome is the proliferation of blatant breaches of
privacy by way of the publications of, more often than not, photographs
of some celebrities on the internet. This is often followed by
unsolicited and gratuitous form of self righteous comments about the
photographs and the celebrities in question.
Ultimately, there will also
be the usual self-righteous advice such as “kembalilah ke jalan Allah”
aimed at the celebrities in question.
Yesterday I
read about a certain young lady singer whose pictures in a wet long
t-shirt were splashed (no pun intended) all over the internet world.
Those pictures were apparently taken during a private pool party. I also
saw a picture of another lady actress wearing a bare-back dinner gown
making its round on the internet.
Needless to
say, both set of pictures drew the usual
“you-are-a-bad-Muslim-gal-kembalilah-ke-jalan-Allah” kind of comments
from the moral nazis.
Today I visited a news
portal and the major “news” on that portal today is about a Malaysian
top student who is now studying abroad – who inevitably must be of the
female gender (this kind of things actually only happen to the female
sex. The males are quite obviously less interesting and significantly of
no gossiping value) – who posted some pictures of herself on her fb
page.
Apparently, before she went abroad, she
used to wear the tudung. Her current picture shows her having blonde
hair and wearing laced up legging.
Almost
instantaneously, the closet mullahs began attacking her on her fb page
with the usual “kembalilah ke jalan Allah” advice. She has since,
apparently, deleted her fb page as a consequence.
Which
begs the question, first and foremost, why are we so kepoh about
whatever others wear or do? The next question, why are we not only so
kepoh, but are so quick to judge other people simply by what they wear? I
mean, we don’t even know these people and yet we are so quick to draw a
moralistic line, compare that line to that of ours and impose ours on
hers.
What makes us believe that a girl in tights
or bikinis or a wet t-shirt is of lower moralistic value than those who
wear the tudungs, hijabs or baju kurung?
Which
brings all of us to the next frightening conclusion and that is, to the
contemporary society, externalities are more important than the
internals. It is like our whole moral compass is dictated by what we can
see in three dimensions and that’s it. Nothing else matters.
And
so if a girl wears a tudung or a baju kurung, she is quite obviously
better, moral wise, than a girl wearing a plunging neck-line t-shirt.
Little do we know the plunging neck-line girl works 2 hours a day as a
volunteer worker at a day care center as opposed to the girl in baju
kurung who don’t even think to help anybody in this world.
Umberto Eco, in his speech, “The Loss of Privacy” (published in “Turning Back the Clock”: Harvill Secker, 2007) noted, with accuracy if I may add, that “the first thing that the globalisation of communication through the internet threatened was the notion of boundaries.”
He
then cleverly pointed out that the globalisation of communication as
such shows two aspects of ourselves which were hitherto not quite as
obvious. Firstly, there reside in everyone of us, what I would call, a
“flasher” tendency, ie, the need to be seen. Secondly, there is also
correspondingly, a need to see, which I would call the “voyeuristic”
tendency.
He might be right on both counts.
Facebook, for example, serves to prove
that most of us, if not all, feel the need to constantly exhibit
ourselves to the world by uploading our own pictures or “updating” our
status profile, no matter how inane they are or might be. Eco himself
referred to a website where a person felt the need to post pictures of
his own colon notwithstanding the sheer insignificance of such pictures.
Thus
we would have pictures of ourselves eating nasi lemak on our fb pages.
Or a profile status which reads
“I am now at MARA building, KL.”
Correspondingly,
there is also a desire to be a kepoh voyeur, ie to know what others are
doing or to pry on others. How else do we explain the popularity of the
so-called reality tv shows which portray the live of an entire family
24 hours a day? Most of us, it appears, are closet voyeurs!
But of course, in Malaysia, as in any other things, we have to take it a step further.
After
blithely exposing ourselves on the internet with our pictures, thereby
satisfying our primordial flasher tendency, we would go on prying on
others, thereby satisfying our voyeur instinct. Most people in other
societies would stop there.
No.
We, Malaysians will not stop there. We than have to satisfy our
yet-to-be-scientifically-or-philosophically-explained “Mullahistic
tendency”.
We would then
judge the person in the pictures which we have – morally and rightfully,
to our mind, pried upon – and offer her (inevitably it is a “her”) our
advice, which we consider, is our God given right and in fact is the one
and only right thing to do.
“Kembalilah ke jalan Allah.”