Epic Mosquito Bites!

World Invasion: Los Angeles was about gazillion bullets, fit dudes in army uniforms, and massive destruction here and there, and thats about it lol. I kinda slept half way through while watching it with my dad last night, i mean who wouldn't? At that hour with the low volume we had to abide by, all i could hear was "tetetetetetete...kababoom..tetetetete....Aaaa!! Aaaa!!...tettetetete" (<-- tu bunyi machine guns btw lol!! :P) bahahhaa! Bangun2 je dah pukul 6, in front of the tv with a sharp pain on my back and epic mosquito bites all over my feet! Nice going Yasmin..

Anyway, I just got back from a family vacation to Cherating, (and will post pictures soon as requested :) and to my coursemates, i know i shouldn't be vacay-ing considering theres a major paper tomorrow but like.. my mom insisted on my going.. i just had to ya know!! *innocent face* haha :P) and a lot happened during the trip that got me thinking of a whole lot of other things lol. One of them would be this kid i met while my sister and i were buying banana fritters (pisang goreng).

By the looks, i'd assume she's around 5 years old, and her sister was older by a year or two. Both of them just got back from kindergarten, considering the uniform they had on with their pink bag-packs, and here they are, helping their mother and aunt selling pisang goreng and keropok lekor. So the elder sister was telling the younger one to sing a song.. It was quite hard for me to catch what they were talking about, with the Terengganu dialect and what not. But thanks to my 10 months in KMKN, i managed to understand a thing or two lol and so yea, the elder sister was telling the younger one to sing. I was anticipating on a nursery rhyme, like twinkle twinkle or something, or perhaps a nasyeed, or a malay song, something that these locals might be familiar with, or so i thought.

But................................ no, i was totally wrong. This kid didn't sing no nasyeed, no local malay tune, no nursery rhyme, instead this 5 year old kid, sang LADY GAGA's Bad Romance. I. Was. Literally. SHOCKED. hahahahha No, i have nothing against these kids singing lady gaga, but i remembered when I was 5, all i could sing was nursery rhymes, and was only introduced to what was hip then, The BackStreet Boys, when i was 7. And sampai ke kawasan yang so rather remote macam ni, Lady Gaga has successfully managed to spread her wings and touch these people's lives simply by crampin' together her whacky tunes.. That is just, amazing! Or is it?

I couldn't stop myself from thinking how we're easily connected to one another nowadays, after what i have witnessed. Imagine, it took months for a message to be conveyed 100 years back, but now, its simply at the tip of your fingers. This kid most probably has access to astro i would assume, and considering the channels on astro, who wouldn't be as well informed of whats out there? huhu. Its like, she has more choices in what to like and what not to, like this Lady Gaga incident, she could choose that over 'Anak Itik Tokwi' or something, where as I had no other choice when i was 5 but to like 'Old Mcdonald had a farm" coz i was not exposed to anything else. All this is good i guess, but, see, what they show on the media, is simply whats being accepted globally, and you cant deny the fact that its a bit westernized. And then i thought, if these kids are thought to sing Lady Gaga songs, who then would preserve our traditional songs in the future? Who'd remember them?? And what about everything else?

I've been to a number of cities. Kuala Lumpur of course, London, New York City, Chicago, Paris, Singapore, and guess what? They're all the same. Different looking people, perhaps, but they're more or less the same, wearing similar clothes, shopping at similar looking malls, listening to similar songs, different languages, true, but they're expressing of the same things, the same needs.

Its alright i guess, but you can't deny the fact that the more we're exposed to things...

the more we're exposed to the SAME things like everybody else,
the more SIMILAR choices we have with everybody else around the world,
the more we MAKE the same choices,
the more we lose our cultural unique-ness.

When you go to these countries, if you wanna see something more authentic, you'd haf to always go out of the cities and into their small towns, thats where you get to see different identities. But what if these small towns are also practicing the same things as to what they do in the cities, who'd then preserve their cultural practices? And by the looks of how things are going, i wudn't be shock if one day, every country looks the exact same from one another.

Thats one thing, what about the content of information being exposed? I believe everybody has the rights to be exposed to everything, but there's always a right time and the right level of maturity to it. Its easier to control this back then, but now, with the borderless access everybody has to information, this is no longer of our control. Thats good and yet scary in some ways :S I do understand that we need to move forward, we need to improve. But moving forward doesn't necessarily hafto be in the same freakin' way right? Everybody has their own ways, and im afraid people are losing sight of that.

Urbanization folks,
thats what they call it (haha :P).
and You can't stop it from happening,
nor slow it down..

So yea,
be well prepared for it :)