Butterfly Roars (2009)

 JULY 18 — Hello dear reader, I do hope that you had a good week, well, not just good — a roaring week, a week as tender as the night, as beautiful as a butterfly. There is, as many of you may have gathered, no such thing as a usual week. All weeks are unusual, unique, stand alone. Weeks have individual personality, poise, style and attitude. This past week, in its inevitable uniqueness, has been full. Frantically flapping, chaotic Amazonian butterflies have wrought their unique forms of devastation around the globe, causing floods and other seemingly natural disasters. While in our own backyard, that odd conundrum of strangely silent roaring has been heard bellowing around Kuala Lumpur, and Selangor state. There is, so I am reliably informed, a brain stretching causal theory - Chaos Theory, prospered by the likes of one Edward Lorenz, which goes something like - when a butterfly flaps its brightly coloured Lepidoptera wings in the Amazon, a whirling tornado is let loose to wreak its havoc in Indonesia, but I’m not sure why Indonesia, or indeed why butterflies. It’s called, for want of a better name — The Butterfly Effect (aka sensitive dependence on initial conditions). So, energetic Lepidoptera cause wind, but, in my sun parched, durian sizzled kampung brain, I can’t help thinking — why don’t they, whoever they are — mad scientists, nutty professors and their ilk, just catch all these Amazonian butterflies, if they are so dangerous. Those entomologists might pin butterflies to little black display boards, label them with white Ariel 14pt text and place them into Natural History cases. The pin-stuck butterflies could sit there, harmless, for inquisitive people to observe, never to flap highly destructive wings ever again. Surely that would solve some of the world’s problems — anyway I digress. So, maybe it is due to the causal effects of these amazing Amazonian butterflies that a steel grill fell from a window, crushing a car beneath it, in Kota Kinabalu, and for two bikers to be thrown from their bikes, while trying to avoid a road block, again in Kota Kinabalu, this week. Is this, then, the result of chaotically causally bedevilment of mischievous Amazonian butterflies, or is it the end product of supremely foolish people. It may be the very same foolish people who consider that they have discovered gold in the hills of Alor Star. On examination, one man was told that yes it was gold, well sort of, but not fully matured yet, and needs to be left until it matures, like cheese perhaps, or mangoes in a rice sack. More sensible people prospered the notion that it may be Fool’s Gold (Iron Pyrite), and maybe, just maybe, it is. More, seemingly impish, butterflies may have been the cause of the mysterious pregnancies of 11 and 12 year old Orang Asli girls, in the Cameron highlands recently. Or, there again, maybe it is entirely non-mysterious Mother Nature and sadly abusive males who have impregnated these underage children, egged on by the addition of Viagra (Sildenafil) to Gombak coffee sachets, and/or secret karaoke sessions. Are those butterflies responsible for that silent roar which has been released in our beautiful land. This particular butterfly-wing pumping week, a silent, almost underground, roar was heard over current Kuala Lumpur and surrounding Selangor. Seemingly, this popularist royal roar had been building to its crescendo over ten years, bolstered in bonny Scotland, encouraged in Singapore and finally flourishing in magical Malaysia. This individual silent roar is not, however, to be confused with the British comical motion picture - The Mouse That Roared, a film about a small European state standing up to, and winning over, that dastardly bully - North America. Nor is it Silent Roar, a wildlife film concerning predatory Himalayan snow leopards, nor indeed that popular effluent produce of lions which is dried into pellets and used to deter cats from your garden. No this is an entirely different kind of roar, albeit silent, it is the roar of a virtual paper tiger, more akin to that Qi-Gong ‘roar of silent protestors’ in Beijing, 1999. This textual roar, clear in black and white, has the hand of a united front about it, the hand of change, of collective power and flapping butterflies. A raised appendage, perhaps by a later day Sultan of infamous Mysorean tiger heritage, but this leader is no hapless royal but a staunch protector of the rakyat. An elevated fisted hand perhaps in continuing salute to the concept of reformasi — once the sole prerogative of opposition politics, but now embraced by the opposition’s opposition — cries for reforming are now being bantered around the hallowed halls of the government collective, where once it was the unique, and seemingly indelible, mantra of opposition. A hand maybe designed to punch the very heavens — should it come to that, for that silent roar to be taken heed of. A hand maybe in the vanguard of hands of fellow travellers, all held aloft silently roaring to be heard by the seemingly deaf governmental, political monolith. Is it me, or is there something distinctly V for Vendetta about that concept. So the roar echoes on, around courts, in halls, around malls, heard in places where the rakyat gathers over teh tarik, or a quiet beer or three in seasonal restaurants, to chat innocently about those matters which concern them, their friends and families, on-line and off, engendered, perhaps, by extremely active Amazonian Lepidoptera. And so a butterfly flaps its four chitinous thoracic wings, various tigers give vent to a variety of roars, silently or with full voice, and each unique (unto itself) week, melds into the next and rolls us all on toward the fasting month. Fools seek, and perhaps find, their own particular variety of gold; innocent children are abused in the name of race/culture and steel grills, meant for sturdiness and protection, come crashing and crushing down. That was the week, that was, and if all goes well we shall have another, soon.