We meet again

And I'm back from the two-and-a-half year hiatus since my last post. I've cleaned up a lot of my older posts, written when I had too little blogger wisdom and too much Maddox.

It is with heavy heart that I revive this little piece of cyberspace. Truly, if there wasn't an event so big that I have to write it with such urgency at this late hour, otherwise my chest might explode from all that pent-up rage. I've been a long-time reader of Malaysia Today, Jeff Ooi, Lim Kit Siang among other political blogs and news sites. It is until today that I feel the need to voice myself out over this matter, lest I might mistake myself as someone who condones such actions.

And I refer to the sudden announcement of Malaysian petrol price hike.

The announcement was made at 5pm today (yeesterday), and the pricing change takes effect seven hours later. Imagine in those seven hours, every car from every household rushes forth to the nearest petrol station to have its tank filled. Imagine that happening to every petrol station throughout the country, because petrol prices are fixed by the central government. The only good thing about this was that the announcement was made five hours earlier compared to the last one.

Of course, back then, I didn't drive. Now that I have my own set of wheels handed over by my father, I really feel the pinch. I left for the petrol station at 8pm, fully expecting a two-hour wait at least, and indeed the line of cars stretched 500 meters from the station to the nearby junction. I didn't bother, so I took a U-turn and went along my merry way.

Two hours later I came back to the same station. The line was much shorter, but for the next two hours I barely moved 50 meters. People were getting desperate. I saw people getting down the car and running over to the station with empty water bottles, cars cutting in from the other side of the road. I swapped to my oldies CD and hummed to the tune.

11.25pm. I yelled at the lady in front of me, for stopping her car in the middle of the road (to fill up the two bottles of petrol her son had gotten her from the station), causing five or six other cars from the other lane to cut in. Trust me, you don't want me to yell at you. I sang Bass in one of the top school choirs in the country for four years.

11.40pm. I was practically screaming to Starship's 'Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now'. I was still in the line, still some 30 meters away from the station. The cars in front of me still aren't moving. I looked at the fuel meter needle pointing at 1/3 full and felt like I've been stabbed in the gut. I snuck a U-turn at the next car opening (many cars are already doing the same thing) and drove home. I spent two hours of my life sitting in a cramped space, and made an ass out of myself for something small that I would have usually overlooked.


Now look, motherfuckers, you said that the announcement was for the price hike in AUGUST. Just ONE DAY AGO. Not only that, you motherfuckers also said that there will be no price hike after the elections. Wait, what's that? "...last year, the government paid RM43.4 billion for subsidies, of which RM35 billion was allocated for fuel."? That wasn't subsidies paid, that's just money not earned. Money that even earned, would probably only benefit a small group of cronies anyway.


One day we're all going to run out of fossil fuels, and by then we would have already be driving cars that run on water. But before that, dear oil-exporting country that charges importing-country rates for petrol, please, please, please use the extra money you get from this 78-sen increase WISELY. No more of sending 'astronauts' into space when you can't even design your own car engine. No more spending of the people's money for private purposes. No more hiding of the truth where our money is going to.

In return, use that money to revamp the whole public transportation system. When I was studying in Singapore I could afford to miss two buses and still arrive at school on time. When I was in university here, just to get to the nearest decent mall, I had to change two buses and walk for another twenty minutes. To be honest I hate driving, and I'd gladly pay for public transport IF IT WERE ONLY A TENTH AS EFFICIENT AS THAT IN SINGAPORE. All I want is an integrated bus and rail system where I can go downtown in half an hour. Not an hour and a half.

My dear government, now that the damage has been done, it's up to you to minimize the after-effects. By tomorrow I'll still be going to the petrol station, feeling RM23 poorer for a full tank as compared to if I had brought along a passenger to help me 'bungkus' oil. But that's because I have no choice. I still need my car to bring me to places, and I shudder at the thought of getting an 'entry-level' graduate job that pays like RM1500 a month and requires me to spend at least an hour travelling every day.

As I end my post and go to bed, I hope for the day where I have no need to yell from my car window, because I would have been on the bus that comes every ten minutes, reading an Isaac Asimov story.