Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Bruneians and free food?
This video caught my attention recently of what seem to be taken during one of the festive events recently. A friend also added that this is a second of such incident happening. Upon watching I was amazed, disgust, and dumbfounded at the same time. I couldn’t believe my eyes. It felt almost surreal as if watching some third world country. Granted we are not that too far off.
But how did this happen and why was it left like that? Surely there must’ve been some sort of mechanism in place to ensure incidents like this would not or could not happen. But evidently it did. Some present there might argue that it only happened for a short period and order was restored afterwards, but it's not known. However my argument is that it shouldn’t happen in the first place. It’s embarrassing to say the least, seeing grown men and women struggling for food as if not eaten for a long time, and at the very sight of food cause such actions. At one point a young boy was seen jumping onto others in order to get his share. Some was grabbing rice right out of the warmer with the hands, and some even doing it blindly.
So my questions are, why did it happen and how did it happen?
Why did our people acted in such a way?
And why did the authorities let it happen?
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2 comments:
Whats th epoint. At the end of the day most comments will be pure speculation. No one can prove if the Bruneians just got hungrier or maybe we cannot afford food anymore. Or perhaps these ppl are jobless. Like the Singaporeans, maybe we also secretly have a 'kiasu' mentality. Could it be that we have lost our sense of 'behawar-begalat'. This would not have happened 30 years ago when salaries were much smaller and everyone lived in wooden houses (housing extended families!).
Sure this scene is definitely an embarrassment to any decent Bruneian.
My gut feeling is that, times are hard and nothing can be worse than missing a free meal.
My wish;
I wish JPKE would publish an income distribution index for Brunei.
I wish MCYS would take a hard look at Brunei's bottom quartile in income distribution. Maybe we need to do something there before we see open begging in the streets.
Nicely put bantal. Speculation on their motives or provocation is unknown, unless someone present there could shed some light.
However, the incident did occur and we can't just swipe it under the carpet (Not that you are suggesting it, but at least we can talk about it). Some argue that financial problem had some influence due to the fact that it took place in the middle of the month where salaries are almost spent.
We are undeniably living from paycheck to paycheck, where salaries will only last until the next pay day, some may not even last that. Average indonesian are living on day-to-day paycheck. How far along are we from that scenario?
Certainly we are not in a position to make any change but hopefully through our discussion, but we can ensure that when we are in that position, we can implement positive change. If you are already there, then we implore you to make that change, however small. Maybe we need to properly look at our wealth distribution.
I certainly hope you wish do come true.
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