The One & Only Paul Ponnudorai (b. 20 November 1961 ~ d. 7 July 2012)

Too bad I missed Paul's 50th birthday gig at CJ's Pub & Restaurant on 20 November 2011

THE MUSICIAN’S MUSICIAN

By Christopher Toh

22 December 2007

Paul Ponnudorai has been called the ‘greatest musical interpreter of our time’, but who is he?

With his long hair and easy-going demeanor, it’s easy to dismiss singer-guitarist Paul Ponnudorai as just another musician playing in a pub. But one listen to him and you’ll know he’s definitely not just hired musical help.

His fans (many of them musicians themselves) know him as the guy who can turn a tune on its head and make it an extraordinary piece of art. They bandy superlative terms like "genius" or "musical phenomenon" when describing him.

When his name popped up in a feature article in Time magazine in May this year, wherein the writer called him "possibly the greatest musical interpreter of our time," they thought his time - no pun intended - had come.

But it hadn’t. Ponnudorai still plays Thursdays to Saturdays at Harry’s bar at the Esplanade - a gig he’s had for five years. In a straw poll we conducted, many didn’t even recognise the name and one actually asked if he was "the guy who started that famous shop in Little India." (FYI: That’s P Govindasamy Pillai.)

While failure to hit the big time despite a plug from Time magazine might bug younger musicians, Ponnudorai is nonplussed: "(The Time article) was certainly a nice compliment, but I don’t think of myself as a guitar hero. I’m known and, yet again, not. I play because I love to play and sing. It keeps me happy. And if I can touch people with it, even better. Because having something is no fun unless you share it."

Ponnudorai will be sharing the music on Saturday with local jazz legend Jeremy Monteiro and American greats Tuck and Patti at the Esplanade as part of Monteiro’s annual Christmas concert series - an event the jazz maestro started five years ago.

Rehearsing in Singapore with Jeremy Monteiro (keyboard) & Howard Levy (harp)

"When people see him, I’m sure they will be blown away by his ability and his singing," said Monteiro, 47. "Tuck and Patti have called him a ‘phenomenon’. The people who come to the show will come away with a better understanding of who Paul is."

Still, knowing how apathetic the Singapore audience can be, Monteiro is well aware critical acclaim is not necessarily followed by fame. "If you’re good, you should be famous," said Monteiro. "But it’s not always so. Like some musicians are famous, but are they good? Paul is definitely good - one of the best kept secrets of the music world."

The story of this secret started in Ipoh, Malaysia, where Ponnudorai grew up. He picked up the ukulele when he was four and the guitar at six. A left-hander, he taught himself to play right-handed and learned to keep time by playing to the creak of an old ceiling fan. His musical influences spanned from opera to country, courtesy of his father, who would play music at home.

But Ponnudorai never thought he’d be a musician. It was his brother who invited him to play during happy hours at a piano bar in Kuala Lumpur. Said the bachelor: "And as the story goes, I walked into a bar and I never walked out."

Since then, Ponnudorai has led what many would call "a full life," although he’s only a youthful 46. He’s had to endure threats from jealous musicians wanting to cut his fingers off, and played to gun-toting gang members in nightclubs - where they made him play Wham!’s "Careless Whisper" 17 times non-stop once.

He’s also won the hearts of some of the greatest musicians, including trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, harmonica virtuoso Toots Thielemans, guitarist Tommy Emmanuel and vocalist Bobby McFerrin.

Ponnudorai's only album was released in 2005

He’s survived two car crashes, with the second in 1992 resulting in him having brain surgery. "I was worried, after the second accident, about the extent of damage," he explained. "I was afraid to pick up the guitar."

But a few months later, a musician friend of his asked him to come on stage and jam with him. "I said: ‘No, I haven’t played the guitar in months.’ And he said: ‘Look, you believe in God, don’t you? Have faith.’ So I did go up and I played - and I haven’t stopped playing since!"

And though he may have a few regrets, Ponnudorai says the music makes up for it. "I think if I could have afforded higher education I probably would have missed out on these experiences I have garnered over the years playing music. I would not have had the interaction with people, spanning a period of 28 years. I don’t think any amount of money could buy that experience or pleasure. You know they say it’s the journey that counts, not the destination. I believe that’s true. I’m enjoying the journey right now."

CREATIVE GENIUS: Ponnudorai deconstructs, reinvents and performs old songs with a singular passion

MUNSHI AHMED FOR TIME

10 May 2007

A man who is quite possibly the greatest musical interpreter of our time performs every weekend at Harry's - an ordinary bar in a Singaporean shopping mall. There, before a half-empty room, while soccer matches are screened and waitresses ferry beer and fries, Paul Ponnudorai sings with astounding virtuosity, accompanied only by his Spanish guitar. His voice swoops and growls with the range and soulfulness of mid-period Stevie Wonder, and his fluid, polyrhythmic style of guitar playing appears to have little precedent. But it is his choice of material, and the inventiveness with which he arranges it, that cloaks Ponnudorai in the aura of genius.

Ponnudorai's style is to deconstruct a hackneyed standard, reassemble the parts in startlingly creative ways, and then perform it with a passion that nobody has previously dared. Thus the campfire dirge Five Hundred Miles becomes a spine-tingling R&B ballad, dripping with anguish. The Beatles' chirpy Can't Buy Me Love is transformed into a complex jazz exercise, incorporating some of the Karnatakan rhythmic phrases of Ponnudorai's South Indian ancestry. The Cascades' saccharine Rhythm of the Rain metamorphoses into the purest Burt Bacharach, with unexpected chord changes and lush melodic lines.

Comparisons could be made with José Feliciano, the Puerto Rican singer-guitarist who had 1960s hits with stylish remakes of songs like California Dreamin' and Light My Fire. But Ponnudorai is better. His ability to dice songs up, look into their hearts and perceive the common veins connecting every genre has won the attention of top international players who go to Singapore on tour. Harmonica virtuoso Toots Thielemans, drummer Billy Cobham, guitarist Tommy Emmanuel and vocalist Bobby McFerrin have all been in the audience. In 2002, trumpeter Wynton Marsalis showed up at a performance and was so taken by it, he grabbed his instrument and leapt onstage to play alongside a startled Ponnudorai, who did not recognize him. "He told me 'Ever since I got off the plane I've been hearing about nothing but you,'" Ponnudorai recalls. The pair jammed together for the next two nights.

Photo by Jack Hoo

Marsalis was referring to the buzz Ponnudorai generates among local and overseas musicians. Among the public, it is another matter. If you watch Ponnudorai play, there will typically be a handful of fans near the stage. Everyone else will be at the other end of the room, noisily drinking and making a mockery of Singapore's reputation as a city at the forefront of smoking cessation. The kind of musician that the world produces only a few times in a generation is in the house, but the laity barely notice.

[Read the rest here.]

A TRIBUTE TO PAUL PONNUDORAI

[First posted 20 November 2013]

RELATIVITY IS NO THEORY (updated)

Almost everything is relative, isn’t it? Spent the better part of my life peeling off layers of middle-of-the-road, middle-class programming (my dad subscribed to Reader’s Digest and sometimes bought their mail-order compilations of bland music). Yup, I fancied myself some exotic species of Bohemian. But where I live now - in an Orang Asli resort village in the jungly heart of the peninsula – I’m certainly the most middle-class person around. How many other households here actually have peanut butter and toilet paper on their shopping lists? Indeed, nobody else in Pertak Village has even heard of a shopping list (although, 20 years down the line, quite a few now order stuff from Shopee).

I take a measure of pride, though, in the fact that ours is perhaps one of three houses without a TV aerial. My daughter did offer me Astro once but I didn’t want to pay a monthly fee only to get high blood pressure from watching the Bulldog Broadcasting Corporation and the Crap News Network and the icky ooze of putrid commercials. No doubt if highspeed broadband ever comes to the wilds of Ulu Selangor and I can actually stream Netflix, I might just relent and get hooked up - or simply get hooked. After all, I’ve already long relented on electronic word processing, the internet, cellular phones, emails and SMSes. In fact, I’m generally quite impressed by digital tech and, since July 2025, can claim to be on friendly terms with AI.

In my early teens I thought my musical taste was pretty outré (that’s French for astonishing and bizarre). I was picking up records by Edgard Varèse, Conlon Nancarrow, Terry Riley, John Coltrane, and Sun Ra (pictured left). The Beatles made pop respectable for me, and I began to ease off on movie soundtrack albums and progressive jazz à la Dave Brubeck and Charlie Mingus after turning on, tuning in, and dropping out. When a brain-damaged sociopath stole my entire LP collection in 2000, I figured it was high time I updated myself on the contemporary music scene. However, try as I might, I just couldn’t get into hip-hop, rap, or techno – and death metal made me wish entire sections of the human race would die horribly, especially those generating the noise. Another sign of maturity, I sighed, acknowledging my thinning top and thickening middle in the mirror. But the truth was, I now qualified as a mainstream musical conservative – not unlike that snooty classical music reviewer who once dismissed as “fluff” everything written after 1856. Shockingly, in 2025, I find myself listening a lot to slick jazz-soul fusion groups like Incognito and Cory Wong & The Wongnotes (and, I admit, even some AI-assisted jazz-ethno-fusion offerings on YouTube)!

Not long ago I ventured into a fashionable chill-out joint (more like a low-budget sauna it was) where the in-crowd let their hair down (and their deodorized sweat out) twitching to b&d (bass & drums) and brainless dj scratching and a whole slew of absolutely soulless post-industrial neo-existential yuppie punkfunk. Didn’t do a thing for me. Why can’t they play some really sexy Senegalese m’balax? Or some truly inspired millennial techno-rap like 1 Giant Leap? Could this possibly be the unfortunate result of being born in the 1980s and having to listen to the dumbest music in the history of the Universe? Or just a long-term side effect of chlorinating and fluoridating the water supply?

“De gustibus non est disputandum,” the goddamn Romans used to quip. Can you figure that out? That’s right. There’s no disputing taste. Perhaps not, if everything is relative after all. But I’m still convinced that after a couple of generations, humans who habitually ingest fast foods are bound to suffer acute tastebud damage.

I’ve often been accused of being an “intellectual.” Excuse me, that’s not at all an accurate description, even if I do have a penchant for polysyllables. But I now accept all labels, having learnt to peel them off before the glue dries. Now, the late dramaturge Krishen Jit - bless his huggable soul, may he relish his new job as Director of the Cosmic Theater of the Absurd – he was my definition of an intellectual. Somebody who can’t help conceptualizing reality. Yet, it sometimes occurs to me that if I had been living in China during the so-called Cultural Revolution, I’d probably have been frogmarched to a labor camp and forced to grow kumquats on stony ground, even though I don’t wear half-inch thick glasses (Look, Ma, no contacts either!).

One of my childhood heroes was the Russian-Armenian magician G.I. Gurdjieff aka Georgij Ivanovič Gurdžiev (pictured right), who enjoyed calling humans “those two-legged, three-brained beings.” There were no microchips or computers in Gurdjieff’s day, and nobody had heard of nanotech, or he might have said “four-brained beings.” However, Gurdjieff pointed out that to be whole beings we must connect our thinking, feeling, and moving centers and keep them functioning in dynamic equilibrium. The thinking center is located in our brain and neural circuitry. The feeling center is our emotional core, the metaphorical heart, where we experience empathy and compassion. The moving center is combination of ego, libido, and animal instinct (the solar plexus, sacral, and root chakras, if you’re familiar with such concepts).

An overactive moving center makes us dangerously and mindlessly impulsive (shoot first, talk later). Isolating ourselves in the ivory tower of the thinking center makes us Hamlets, beard-stroking theoreticians. And being stuck in the feeling center makes us compulsive consumers of melodrama (condemned to Drama Minggu Ini week after week).

Yup, it’s all a question of relativity. And you have to go through a hellish amount of relativity - demonstrating Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle over and over again - before you arrive at that point of Absolute Certainty where latitude and longitude intersect. But, have no fear, we’ll all get there yet. Then, finally, we’ll be able to hang a sign on our front door that says: NO RELATIVES, ONLY ABSOLUTES!

[Originally published in the May 2005 issue of VIDA! 

First posted 8 January 2007, reposted 15 November 2017]

Sexual repression & guilt ~ the root of all patriarchal evils, especially in Malaysia! (repost)

When I was 19 I went through an intense and highly compressed ascetic phase. For about two weeks I lost interest in food, sex and sleep. My mind went into overdrive and kept me in a constant state of excitement. I was absolutely determined to figure out what the hell I was doing on this planet in a human body - and what I had been, if anything at all, before taking birth.

My days and nights were spent reading, writing, thinking, observing everything around me, and discussing my ideas and insights with a couple of close friends. I didn't require much solid food, sometimes drinking only a bowl of soup and nibbling on a Marmite sandwich. Meat didn't appeal to me; often I chewed on some vegetables just to get their essence; and I couldn't be bothered or didn't need to sleep, though I would sit in lotus position and recharge my cells from time to time.

Soon I found my testicles retracting and my penis shrinking to a ridiculous size. All I did was burst out laughing because I suddenly understood why Indian yogis have traditionally subjected themselves to long periods of fasting and abstinence.

It was to focus their minds like a laser in order to cut through the crap of mundane existence and begin to stepdown and receive data from an extended range of the electromagnetic spectrum.

I've written extensively about my early initiatory experiences elsewhere so I'll fast-forward to the moment when, unexpectedly, I experienced a resurgence of my libido. I was absorbing the Sun's energy one morning and suddenly found myself with the most incredible hard-on ever. The word virile  came alive for me as I felt the solar force course through my throbbing veins. I gazed in awe at my rampant manhood, luxuriating in electric ripples of unmitigated concupiscence.

Priapus, Greek God of Fertility

It was as though my libido had died and resurrected itself as a hitherto unknown species of sacred sexuality wherein my own innate divinity was being expressed as a manifestation of the Primordial Progenitor. The Father archetype and I literally became one.

Omphalos stone

Hajarul Aswad, a piece
of tektite embedded in the
eastern corner of the Kaaba

From that moment hence, I was liberated from a hundred thousand generations of hand-me-down sexual taboos. In a flash I understood the serpent symbolism underlying all pre-Abrahamic belief systems. The esoteric word kundalini  was unknown to me at the time, but when I later read about the phenomenon I knew it was what had spontaneously happened to me.

The electromagnetic basis of all existence in a bi-polar universe is grounded in the sacred union of shakta and shakti, male and female principles. This simply means that the ultimate goal of yoga - which means "union" in Sanskrit - is conscious fusion between polarities on all levels - from the biological (as in sexual conjugation) to the metaphysical (as in the alchemical marriage between our divine and human aspects).

Tantra teaches us that the ego-transcending act of sexual union is among the most powerful and direct methods of realizing our own inherent divinity - at least when performed as an act of worship by those who have cleansed themselves of negative emotions like guilt, fear and hypocrisy.

However, the erotophobic male priesthoods that sprouted in the wake of Abraham approximately 4,000 years ago have systematically perverted human sexuality with their erroneous doctrines of shame and false purity, wherein celibacy became promoted as a virtue unto itself.

Activation of the chakras above the navel was encouraged as a means to "get closer to God" - whereas activating the chakras below the navel was considered dangerous - even wrong - as it reinforced our animality and focused our senses on carnal pleasures.

Thus was sexual taboo entrenched in the Book Religions which gave rise to what I call the fig leaf syndrome. Humans became schizoid and a great divide separated their inner and outer personalities into private and public selves - with a hardwired conditioned reflex to cover up whatever was considered "private" and exaggerate or magnify everything regarded as "public."

This is why in patriarchal societies like Malaysia, issues of morality tend to revolve around sex. Corrupt and dishonest politicians are tolerated to the extent that they often get re-elected, but they must resign the moment they're caught with their pants down.

In effect, we're being given the message that it's okay to do just about anything - including abduct, extort, intimidate, torture, imprison and murder - so long as we keep our trousers on at all times.

By the same token, anything sexual is subject to strict censorship - no kissing, no nudity, no glimpses of genitalia. However, the worst forms of violence are acceptable: punching, stabbing, shooting, karate-chopping, beheading, crucifying, dropping bombs on crowded cities are all "okay."

Is it any wonder that our law enforcement agencies have attracted such a large number of sexual perverts and psychopaths? These are men who have been brought up to believe that their sexual nature is demonic  and must be suppressed or controlled through harsh laws. Burdened with chronic guilt feelings, these men harbor a subconscious fear of being assigned to hell after they die. And if you're going to hell for masturbating too often, you might as well go the whole hog and commit rape, murder, brutal torture, the works.

Have you ever wondered why on earth in the 21st century we still have statutes against oral and anal sex? Not only are these activities ominously classified as "acts against the order of nature" - they are also punishable with caning and imprisonment of up to 20 years! Each day that such nonsensical laws continue to exist in our legal statutes, they make a complete mockery of reason and sanity.

Only a perverted male priesthood could visualize a deity dressed like a stern-faced judge who can routinely sentence anyone to jail for up to 20 years simply for enjoying a bit of mildly kinky sex. How can you argue with such a twisted mindset? The keenest legal mind in the world cannot get you off the hook except by proving your innocence beyond doubt or providing a watertight alibi.

The ISA may be an extremely cruel and unjust law - but what about the laws against anal and oral sex? They are utterly insane and totally insufferable. If this Victorian era legislation were to be enthusiastically enforced, I'd venture that more than one-third of Malaysia's adult population would right now be serving time (free at last to enjoy as much anal and oral sex as they can handle, just as drug addicts can always find a regular supply if they befriend the right prison warders).

Infamous arsehole Saiful Bukhari Azlan with Khairil Anus Yusof,
special aide to Najib Razak

But do you think any lawmaker would even consider revoking these archaic laws so long as they can be ued against political adversaries?

The issue of sexual repression I have raised with this blogpost has a multitude of ramifications. Nature has designed our bodies in such a way that when we attain puberty, a psychedelic slew of hormones are secreted into our bloodstream which accelerate and enhance mental and spiritual growth. But if our early encounters with our own sexuality are fraught with guilt and shame and subterfuge, we shall find it much harder to attain mental and spiritual maturity.

This is precisely why patriarchies are invariably dead against sex, drugs and rock'n'roll - which may be considered evolutionary triggers in the context of modern living. Sexual freedom causes the young to mature more quickly. Drugs (specifically entheogenic substances like LSD, psilocybin and ayahuasca) - notwithstanding their potential negative side-effects - can facilitate neurological and sensory breakthroughs that provide otherwise unavailable glimpses of ordinarily inaccessible realities. And rock'n'roll  is essentially a code name for any innovative genre of music that serves to initiate young people into neo-tribal states of consciousness, often catalyzing new artistic and cultural forms into manifestation.


Going by the orc-like behavior of our policemen and security personnel, one can easily conclude that what we have in Malaysia is a sex-obsessed society of mental and spiritual retards. The more we attempt to suppress our sexual nature, the more obsessed we become with it. Four thousand years of religious erotophobia have produced only one significant result: the burgeoning of a multi-billion-dollar porn industry.

No sexually repressed society can ever produce great works of art. As long as our collective kundalini  is blocked or forced to express itself through "underground" routes, Malaysia will remain a mediocracy - where mediocrity rules unchallenged.

Think long and hard on this, people... and make sure your children do not grow up sexually repressed!

[Originally published on 20 April 2009 as part six of a series - Where Malaysia is headed. Reposted 11 February 2014, 2 April 2016, 20 July 2017, 27 March 2019 & 14 November 2020]

Advent of The Bunyip ~ musings about my son (repost)

Grandfather Dai had only three sons, but he had had countless daughters. Countless… because many of them had been drowned at birth in huge jars of urine kept as manure for the fields. In those days a Patriarch’s word was law. The Patriarch was the Progenitor – and the Progenitor held the lives of his progeny in his hands. Taking a daughter’s life was not regarded as murder. It was simply a means of ensuring fewer mouths to feed. ~ Dai Moong Yang (In Those Days, 1995)

Ahau's 13th day on earth

IN EARLY 1993 I spent a few weeks editing and retyping a collection of stories written by my maternal Aunt M.Y. (also known as Grace Lee) - but the significance of the lines quoted above didn’t fully register till 30 December 2012, during a long conversation I had with two healer-counselor friends, Heiko and Selina Niedermeyer, who have studied a wide range of emotional and psychospiritual healing modalities over a span of almost 20 years. They had recently completed a workshop with Bert Hellinger, founder of Systemic Family Constellation, which postulates that no soul enters into physical embodiment in isolation – it invariably enters through a complex soul cluster called the Family Constellation and therefore any healing process must always include an overview of the individual’s family dynamics.

Early blowpipe practice

In the course of our conversation, Selina mentioned that Bert Hellinger had discovered a nexus between murder in the suppressed family narrative (literally skeletons in the closet) and mental/emotional dysfunctionality. Apparently it is not uncommon for the souls of the murdered to be reborn within the murderer’s bloodline – but with characteristic disabilities like Down syndrome, autism or schizophrenia. The moment I heard this I had goosebumps. My sweet cousin in Singapore (the late Dr Dixie Tan) had two dysfunctional sons and two fairly normal daughters. My own brother Mike had been diagnosed with schizophrenia decades ago; and my only son Ahau, labeled autistic by some, was unlikely to ever interact “normally” with others because he was born with an unusual vocal cord that makes it difficult for him to simulate human speech.

Ahau at age 6 (pic by Emanar)

Our great-grandfather Dai, through sheer ignorance compounded with arrogance, had been instrumental to the murder of many newborn female babies. Perhaps the same number that had returned as dysfunctional males to haunt the bloodline like a family curse.

During a two-hour session I had with Heiko and Selina in the first week of January 2013, I conjured the spirit of my great-grandfather Dai. He had the haughty air of a typical Mandarin, scion of a rich land-owning clan, and it took him a while to even acknowledge that drowning newborn female infants was nothing less than murder.

His only defence was that he wasn’t the only one who practiced infanticide; it was fairly common in old China (and even in fairly recent times, many couples aborted female fetuses because the government’s one-child policy didn’t allow them another shot at conceiving a male heir). Finally, that impassive, inscrutable mask shattered and a few teardrops began to flow down his cheeks. He looked, for a moment, humbled.

A 10-year-old Bunyip

“Please ask forgiveness from the souls of those you thwarted from taking earthly incarnation, and then forgive yourself,” I told my great-grandfather’s spirit. When he slowly faded from view, I knew the family curse was finally broken. My only begotten son Ahau Ben would be the last in the bloodline to bear the karmic consequences of his forbears’ abysmal ignorance and self-serving cultural myopia.

After some initial hesitation I decided to share this story to illustrate how “the sins of the fathers” do get passed along the chromosomal track. I use the word “sin” in its original sense: in Middle English the word sinne was a term commonly used in archery to mean “missing the mark.” As a metaphor, missing the mark indicates poor aim, barking up the wrong tree, misreading the map of life, or possessing an entirely erroneous and distorted view of reality.

Humans who have yet to attain enlightenment tend to commit stupid, destructive acts as a result of a benighted perspective, usually inherited through parents and imbibed from their tribal and cultural milieu. A society that places a greater value on male offspring is likely to adhere unquestioningly to patriarchal attitudes that glorify skills in combat and the ability to “bring home the bacon.”

Amphibious Ahau by Dorota Nierzwicka

What happens, of course, is that such males end up in decision-making positions, bringing along their blinkered perspectives and prejudices. As military chiefs they will be constantly itching for the glory or martyrdom of warfare; and as corporate heads their ruthless ambition will blind them and harden their hearts to the wholesale desecration of the sacred landscape for illusory short-term profits and bigger bonuses.

However, life does not occur on a single plane. Almost every event or situation can be interpreted on many levels. Likewise the Advent of The Bunyip (a nickname I bestowed on Ahau Ben when he was a toddler, partly because of his amphibious nature (he loved playing in the bathtub and later the river); but mostly because he did seem to me a somewhat chimerical entity, a creature right out of fairy tales and long-forgotten legends.

Ahau was named after the Mayan starglyph for the Sun or Solar Christ. His second name Ben is inspired by the Mayan starglyph for Skywalker or Celestial Messenger. It so happens that the last King of Mu was reportedly named Ahau too. Not one to settle for the mundane, I delighted in creating a mythic context in which to locate Ahau’s entry into my life. I have written about this at length before, so I will say no more about the mystery of Ahau’s being (click on this link if you wish to read about it).

THERE IS ANOTHER possible explanation for the way Ahau turned out. He arrived at 2 in the morning of the 21st March, 1996, by Caesarean section at the Hospital Kuala Lumpur. I didn’t know till a bit later that the nurses had given him a hepatitis jab without first asking my permission. When they asked me to consent to a second follow-up jab, I expressed deep consternation that they would administer a vaccine to my child without first consulting me. Of course, I refused to grant permission for another jab, having learnt of the unholy alliance between the pharmaceutical companies and the medical profession that has made vaccinations enforceable by law.

Twenty years after Ahau’s birth a heated debate rages between pro- and anti-vaxxers with the main contention being that evidence linking vaccinations with autism has been systematically suppressed by vested interests – because once a vaccine is approved and becomes a routine medical procedure, vaccine manufacturers stand to rake in billions every year. Intuitively, I tend to be anti-vaccination because I generally feel a great deal more trustful of nature and the body’s immune system than of medical or any other species of science – especially since the bulk of it is fueled by corporate funding and private grants.

The possibility that it was a hepatitis jab that triggered my son’s autism has certainly crossed my mind many times. But as I can think of no way I can obtain irrefutable proof of this, it seems pointless to hold on to this suspicion.

Ahau is the way he is and those of us who know him well adore him exactly the way he is – even though it still strikes me as absurd that he should take advantage of everyone around him, recruiting us into his service, instead of taking more responsibility for himself. No doubt this can be attributed to the fact that his ancestors on my mother’s side were landed gentry (my aunt boasted that it took men on horseback 11 days to collect the rent) - all the males being archetypal spoilt brats - or perhaps Ahau’s sense of entitlement is due to his residual memory of having been an absolute monarch in a lost civilization called Mu.

22 September 2017

[First posted 25 September 2017, 20 March 2019, 21 March 2021, 22 March 2024 

& 22 March 2024]

Arrogance and the Art of Political Shadow Boxing (updated & revisited)

This post was inspired by a journalist friend who left the following comment on my Facebook wall: "I've met [Anwar Ibrahim] in person and he looked right through me, although I had to personally escort him. He makes my skin crawl. A couple of reporters I know who have interviewed him also say that this kind of arrogance was pretty normal even when he was DPM." Anwar had just been acquitted when I posted this in January 2012. Then AG Abdul Gani Patail immediately appealed the verdict, to the disgust of those who can't imagine ever being so viciously vindictive and venomous.

At 19 I met a fortune teller who read my palms and told me I will never have a boss. And that has held true my entire life. I don't regard anybody or any spirit as my "superior."

All political leaders, including Anwar Ibrahim, must ultimately bow to the rakyat as their boss. Others may bow before some concept of God or Devil. I don't.

In effect, other people's arrogance is just a joke to me. Arrogance, I know, is only a front - a form of ego armoring required for warfare. Just as Muhammad Ali used arrogance and conceit as a psychological weapon to inject apprehension and anxiety into his opponents, every successful politician learns to talk big and scare his adversaries. In the animal kingdom, puffer fish and peacocks inflate various parts of their anatomy to scare off rivals and attract potential mates.

Anwar Ibrahim addresses a rapt audience at Kelana Jaya Stadium (photo: TV Smith)

Anwar is good at that - and he is used to being in the limelight. Every rockstar knows what it's like to have thousands clamoring for you to appear on stage - it's addictive and scary at the same time. It takes a special kind of temperament to thrive under those high-pressure circumstances. Anwar has got it in abundance - he has trained himself all his life to become a political icon.

Have you ever had to escort Mahathir or Najib anywhere? Would they have looked right through you too... or looked straight into your eyes and noticed what a beautiful human being you are and suggested you add them on Facebook? The point I'm making is simply this: in a primitive culture where politics holds sway and policemen obey only those they deem their superiors, we desperately require regime change.

Anas Zubedy,
corporate wunderkind

If you remove Anwar Ibrahim from the equation at this juncture, what you're asking for is that the status quo remain unchanged. Look at the ego conflicts amongst activists and opinion makers - people like Haris Ibrahim, Ambiga Sreenevasan, Lim Chee Wee, Art Harun, Azmi Sharom, Malik Imtiaz... and let's toss in a few from the murky side, like RPK, Anas Zubedy, Chandra Muzaffar, Ezam Mohd Nor. Do you honestly think the ship of state will sail smoothly on course if it was left to a committee of debaters, public masturbators and would-be emancipators?

Until there are enough enlightened souls in our midst - ones who have internalized God and no longer regard external authority as real or legitimate - we will need some sort of political structure. And the best one (or the least noxious) I have seen thus far is the Pakatan Rakyat coalition led by Anwar Ibrahim.

I'm seriously tired of apparently intelligent people putting the brakes on the change by misapplyng their skepticism at what is, to me, a critical juncture in our political evolution. So, who do you wish to see in Anwar's place? I'm really interested to know....

[First published 18 January 2012, reposted 22 October 2012 & 23 November 2016]

My Son, the Reincarnated King of Mu! (updated)

The High Hut aka Jabba @ 1996. Took about two months to build and cost me less than RM2,000. Our hillbilly fambly lived here without electricity... until a freak mudslide in October 1999 forced us to evacuate.

Best bathroom I ever had!

Life with the Pertak Hillbillies - old photos, sweet memories

Thought I'd found the ideal location, about 30 yards from a gentle 200-foot waterfall called Lata Puntung (Blowpipe Falls), right below Bukit Suir - which I later learned was the abode of the dreaded langsuir (jungle sirens akin to harpies or vampires).

It was quite spooky when I first moved in around April 1994. Whenever I was away for a couple of days, I'd return to find the food left for my dogs untouched but putrefying and crawling with maggots. Didn't take me long to discover why my dogs and the local folk seemed so wary of the location. It was the scene of a tragedy that occurred around 1907 when a mining tunnel (the eerie entrance to which was scarcely 50 yards from my High Hut) collapsed, burying alive 200-300 workers. Nobody can say exactly how many died, as the mine owner made himself scarce, fearing bankruptcy from having to pay compensation to the miners' families.

Fortunately, I had quite a few visitors who were geomancers, healers, shamans and wizards - and their collective efforts to ritually cleanse the area eventually cleared the psychic murk and brought more vitality and cheer to the spot.

Star Commander Lee Ahau Ben Anoor-Antares in his Pleiadian scoutship.

Ahau, Antares & Anoora at the High Hut @ June 1996 (photo: Jesse Hang)

Father & Son, June 1996 (photo: Chief Jesse Hang)

Father & Son @ 2008 (photo: Gabriel Herbst)

When my son Ahau Ben was born (at 2:00 am, 21 March 1996, at the Kuala Lumpur Hospital) everyone noticed that his head was remarkably large. (The photo at right was taken on his 13th day on Earth.)

He had to be delivered by C-section as his mother's pelvis was a little out of whack due to childhood polio. So when I first saw him, his curly hair was neatly pasted in tiny beautiful ringlets around his enormous head. I greeted him in star language and welcomed him to this funky and exciting but pretty much messed-up planet.

Our jolly joy boy rarely cried and smiled most of the time, a beatific Buddha smile. Before his first month I was calling him Doctor Baby because he seemed to be healing his mother Anoora's wounded heart by gazing at her with pure adoration whenever he suckled at her breast. Initially she couldn't handle the emotional intensity and had to quickly pass the infant to somebody else.

Anoora was hydrocephalic at birth, a melon-head baby who looked so grotesque her mother immediately offered to sell her to a nurse. However, her father intervened and sent the infant to Pahang to be raised by relatives. When I first met Anoora, she had no grasp whatsoever of what love was all about. Now her own baby was tutoring her on a daily basis.

This came as no surprise to me as I had established contact with the incoming soul during Anoora's pregnancy, and it had "told" me its original home was the Great Central Sun and that its mission on earth was to demonstrate the power of love. So I chose to name him Ahau Ben - Mayan starglyphs meaning Sun God and Skywalker or Celestial Messenger. Later I read somewhere that the last king of Mu (a lost civilization many have confused with Lemuria in the Pacific) was named Ahau. It now appears that Mu may have - in truth, if not in fact - referred to a vast bioregion encompassing East Asia and what is now known as Australia (see map below)!

Our Big Head Boy never learned to crawl. I guess his head was too heavy to be supported by his limbs. Instead, he inched along the floor on his bottom for a few months - until one day he decided his legs were strong enough to try walking. From early infancy, Ahau was exposed to many languages: English, Temuan, Cantonese, Tamil, star language... and he was always attentive to birdcalls and animal sounds. Ahau's great-aunt Mak Minah often sang Temuan lullabies to Ahau. Long after Mak Minah's death in 1999, Ahau still listens raptly to the entire Akar Umbi CD, occasionally singing along.

When he was around six months, he enjoyed squatting by himself a short distance from our High Hut and I would observe as he smiled secretly to himself, as if conversing with invisible folk.

I had expected Ahau to learn human speech quickly but he did just the opposite. His vocal range was astonishing: he could produce extremely high-pitched squeals that reminded me of dolphins and sometimes he uttered distinct syllables in an unknown tongue. Certain phrases would be repeated consistently, but it sounded like no language known to any of us. One day he distinctly said: "Maniam!"

And from then on he began experimenting with endless variations on the theme. I began telling friends that Ahau spoke Maniamese - a language consisting of only one word expressed in countless ways. Subsequently he switched from Maniamese to Bunyip - a language spoken by only one person on earth, Ahau Ben, affectionately dubbed The Bunyip.

Close friends and family began to express concern about Ahau's inability or refusal to communicate in recognizable human languages. I teased him about being a non-English-speaking Bunyip and he would smile and go, "Ho ho ho!" in as low a register as he could muster (this was before his voice broke). He apparently understood just about everything people said to him - but only very rarely would he deign to communicate in English. 

When he was three, I went away for more than a week and when I returned, I distinctly heard Ahau say, "Welcome back, Daddy!" as he threw open his arms for me to lift him up.

One day a friend's 10-year-old son rushed out from the room where he had been tickling Ahau and excitedly reported that Ahau had said to him: "Okay, that's enough!"

Nevertheless, I finally succumbed to well-meaning advice and took Ahau to see a specialist at Tawakal Hospital. The Egyptian neurologist who examined him said the only way to ascertain if there was any problem would be to do a series of MRI scans. So Ahau was made to swallow some liquid anesthetic which knocked him out within 15 minutes. It was quite surreal to watch my unconscious boy being wheeled into the MRI chamber - it was like a scene out of a sci-fi movie. 

We waited anxiously as the neurologist studied the magnetic resonance images. Finally, he turned around and said: "Well, the good news is the scans show his brain is perfectly normal, no fluid in the cranium, apart from this bit of mucus in his sinus passages."

I enquired if there might be some medical explanation for Ahau's disinterest in acquiring the routine skills other kids his age find easy to master. The neurologist mulled over this for a few moments, then he said it could be due to any number of factors - from genetic to environmental, he couldn't really say for certain.

He remarked that Ahau had the largest brain of any kid he had ever encountered. "He could turn out to be a supergenius... or maybe he's really an alien," he added with a smile. His parting words were most reassuring: "My advice to you is to keep him away from doctors!"

Well, there are days when I wish Ahau was like other kids. It would be nice to hear from him the inside story on his mother - what it was like being in her womb for nine months. Every father relishes going on long walks with his son, doing a bit of male-bonding and stuff... but, then, I'll never forget the look on Ahau's face when he saw me being wheeled into an ambulance in December 2009. Without a moment's hesitation, he ran up the steps and plonked himself on the seat beside me, determined to accompany me wherever I was being taken. His surrogate mum Mary (above, right) had to forcibly drag him out, reassuring him that his Daddy would be fine and that he could visit me very soon...

When I emerged from a 5-day induced coma and regained my strength, I kept hearing Ahau singing to me from a few feet away. I was convinced that Sungai Buloh Hospital was only a short distance from Magick River... later I realized that my mind was operating in multiple dimensions and that Ahau was watching over me from the astral plane or dreamtime - perhaps his natural habitat.

I was shown a glimpse of an alternate universe where telepathy made human speech redundant and reminded that Ahau had chosen to incarnate through Anoora and me because it was the only way he might escape school - where his brain would be formatted and stuffed with useless information, rendering him incapable of completing his mission. He didn't travel all this way to conform to human expectations.

A few years ago, Ahau had met a Mayan clairvoyant named Carlos Palada and taken an instant shine to him. We looked on in amusement as Ahau plonked himself on Carlos's lap and began "talking" excitedly to him in a series of high-pitched squeals that sounded like some antique dial-up modem. After 10 minutes or so, I could no longer contain my curiosity. I asked Carlos if he could understand Ahau's language, and Carlos explained that Ahau was transmitting high-frequency packets of visual data, decodable only to somebody with an activated causal chakra.*

"Well... what's he telling you?" I asked, and Carlos said something I'll never forget:

"He was showing me video clips of what this place looked like about 80,000 years ago. There were dinosaurs around then. He's from a fifth-dimensional race that only appears on third-dimensional planets like Earth whenever we're undergoing a massive transition... their work is to stabilize the electromagnetic grids... his last visit here was sometime before Lemuria was destroyed."

Ahau's favorite spot in the whole wide universe!

Whenever Ahau's stubborn resistance to acquiring basic skills gets on my nerves, I have to remind myself that I actually heard this report from Carlos Palada - an amiable guy with emerald green eyes, working for a Japanese construction firm in Singapore, when I first met him in 1997 at a Flower of Life workshop. Carlos had absolutely no reason to make up such crazy stories.

I mean, even if Ahau's an alien... why can't he brush his own teeth, dress himself, open bottle caps, wipe his own bum?

Ahau, Anoora & my grandson Max at Soluntra's Rock

I can hear Ahau sending me a burst of high-pitched audio signals which might translate into something like: "Where I come from intelligent beings don't grow teeth, don't wear clothes, we drink directly from the clouds, and there are no assholes that require wiping, because we're smart enough to eat stuff that doesn't turn into shit!"

Okay, okay, okay, Ahau.... I'll cut you some slack.... for now.

__________________

* In May 2014 Ahau gave us a scare when he collapsed in fits and had to be hospitalized for 5 days. The doctor at KKB district hospital took a long time to intubate him and when I asked him why it was so difficult, he declared that Ahau's larynx was like no other he had ever seen. "Nothing wrong with it, just that it's not a normal human larynx." It was only then I understood why Ahau refused to speak human languages - his vocal cords are simply not designed for human speech.

In the wee hours of 21 December 2017 I found an Arabic-subtitled video on YouTube summarizing the Pleiadian involvement with Earth's evolution and did a screen capture of this unusual map:

Postscript: When a friend heard about Ahau's 5-day hospital experience she intuitively sent me some Transfer Factor (a colustrum-based tonic that reboots the immune system). Ahau enjoyed the orange-flavored chewable tablets and finished his two-month supply. Miraculously, he began to really flesh out, acquiring impressive muscle tone in the process. Here are a few portraits of the former King of Mu taken since 2015...

Ahau making his way upstream while Bonzo lazes on a rock

Ahau with a sling after breaking his left humerus on 1 January 2017

Wefie with his dad (who has also acquired some middle-age spread)

Portrait of the 21-year-old Ahau as a robust young lad

[First posted 21 October 2011, reposted 21 December 2017, 4 July 2018, 20 March 2023

& 15 November 2023]