The first time I read these exact words was sometime in the mid-1960s in a letter that a young woman brought to me because she could not read. In those days illiteracy was rampant so it was not unusual to get help from a reader. I was already able to
A woman purposefully and continuously overfed her young stepson with unhealthy but delicious foods and sugary beverages every day to make him sick and die. What the …! Damn! The storyteller had me hooked. Incredulous, I asked, “Why?” “She did not want the boy, who was an only child, to
UNTIL about 12 years of age, children can learn any language to the extent that it becomes their native language. After that, the ability fades away. In 2008, a Canadian neuroscientist, Norman Doidge, published a book in which he dealt with this “fading away” of the language faculty and described
LATELY, I have been thinking a lot about why many people, especially those in remote rural villages, are bad at arithmetic and mathematics. This happened after I came across a few jottings on the matter in my old reporter’s notebook. The more I thought about it, the more it bugs
WHEN I was a child in primary school, English grammar was the bane of my existence. I hated it with a passion. And because of that, I hated the whole language. Heck, I couldn’t even spell ‘grammar’. To begin with, nobody explained why we must learn English. Every day, we
THE words were shouted and uttered in a manner meant to hurt. Shocked by the loudness, force of utterance, and bitter tone of the voice, I almost dropped the rattan basket that contained my usual load of pots, pans, and plates that I wanted to clean in the stony mountain
“ONE that would have the fruit must climb the tree,” wrote Thomas Fuller (1608-1661) of Aldwincle, Northamptonshire, England, one of the wittiest and most prolific authors of the 17th century. Taken literally, this is so true of rural life, especially in remote farming and hunter-gatherer communities such as those in
IT didn’t matter at all that she had no legs. I just loved her with all my little heart. Actually, I thought that legs were irrelevant because where she lived she had no use for them. I did not know then that she was 124 years old, but it would
THE first time I heard this question was in 1964 when I was 11 years old and in Primary 5. Since then, I have read or heard several variations but to this day the first one remains the clearest in my mind. I remember we were in school that day.
AMAZINGLY, even after six decades, the sight of any of these: charcoal fire, hammer, machetes, and bellows or air blower — still evokes vivid memories of a communal blacksmith’s shop in my village, Kampung Ta-ee in Serian. It was located just metres away from the boundary of our house compound
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