NAZRI Aziz finally stopped skirting the issue and decreed that the security guards in Parliament had no right to decide on the dress code for female journalists in the House. The controversy began after several journalists complained that they had received warnings from security personnel for being indecently dressed. They felt they’d been victimised because they had been clad as decorously as Theresa Kok, Parliament’s doyenne of homespun fashion as her idea of good dressing vacillated between French and ranch. Mr Nazri thought that the security guards should have better things to do than surreptitiously check out lissom lassies but even he drew the line at very revealing outfits as he was a puritan who thought that Deep Throat was a film about a giraffe. So his advice to the guards was simply, “Down with hot pants!” Even so, Mr Nazri was a good politician who believed in networking through an occasional golf game. And he was a great golfer except when he played and the last time he did, he hit a birdie, an eagle, two caddies and four Members of Parliament. All told, it was a memorable day: it was the first time since independence that an eagle had been spotted on the Royal Selangor Golf Club. Ms Kok, on the other hand, didn’t like golf because she thought it had more holes than Parliament’s roof. But she was fond of poetry and knew her Omar Khayyam so well that when asked once by her Form Five science teacher to name three things that contained yeast, she replied famously, “A loaf of bread, a jug of wine and thou.” Parliament’s security guards weren’t impressed by Omar Khayyam because they were too busy keeping all hemlines Yeast of Suez down. They were single-minded men with stony eyes and granite chins who didn’t like women to show style. Actually, they liked styles that showed a woman even less because that was Just Asking For It. But out there on the streets, crime was up although the police insisted that it was merely a statistical anomaly and off by at least 43.861 per cent give or take an errant Mat Rempit or two. If you left out the snatch thieves, the casual rapes, and the occasional murder, “crime rates in Kuala Lumpur are actually down compared to 10 years ago”, the police said in a statement which cheered up the Tourism Minister no end. Azalina Othman Said was an original thinker who, when she was Sports Minister, instituted the Build-British-First policy of attempting to convert Malaysian academic research centres in England into massive sporting facilities so that Malaysian athletes could properly train in the bitterly cold and damp conditions that they were really accustomed to. As Tourism Minister, she wanted the country to put its best face forward to attract well-heeled tourists and succeeded dramatically in attracting heels from Indonesia and elsewhere. To rectify that situation, she cut off federal funding to the State governments of Penang, Kedah and Perak because she was worried that they might misuse the money. The solution: the setting up of new federal departments in the three States so that the funds wouldn’t be misallocated wisely. It was good politics and bad bureaucracy. But life wasn’t fair because if it were, the Beatles would still be together and all their impersonators would be dead. Life wasn’t fair, agreed S. M. Mohamed Idris morosely, because even if you exercised, watched your weight, and grimly eschewed the good things in life, you still lived until you died. That was why he was tormented by deep and metaphysical questions that frequently kept him awake at night, those treacherous, troubling ones like “why did the chicken cross the road?” As Parliament’s resident Poet Laureate, Ms Kok was equal to the occasion. “Because,” she replied deadpan, it was sheer “poultry in motion.”
• S. Jayasankaran is the bureau chief of Singapore’s Business Times and can be contacted at sankaranjaya@yahoo.com

Source: Malay Mail – July 16, 2008