Tuesday 13 May 2014

Sheer Sailing Pleasure o/b Americas Cup Racing Yacht (Part 2)

Auckland Tower as seen from Boat

Another view of Auckland Tower

Auckland Tower sitting on top of the Catamaran Boat

Sheer Sailing Pleasure o/b Americas Cup Racing Yacht (Part 2)



The famous saying "pictures tell a thousand words" is truly applicable to the City of Auckland as seen from the Bay. Truly awesome and true to the words "City of Sails". Owing to her windy nature the City's weather changes very fast. Now you see clear sky and within a jiffy cloudy and overcast sky. This frontal depression weather system, is the opposite to the one I'm used to in the UK. I don't want to confuse anyone here ! In the UK the centre of low pressure (which we called depression) runs roughly in a North Easterly direction. However, in New Zealand the centre of low pressure runs in a roughly South Easterly direction. It is not necessarily so, but only as a general rule. The wind generally flow from the High pressure area to the Low pressure area. That way it tries to equalise the pressure difference or pressure gradient. That's how Mother Nature works. It always try to bring the earth back to a state of equilibrium.


Boat Crew preparing as we leave Auckland Harbour

As we proceeded into the Bay, the water turns slightly choppy. We were told that the boat is going to take us to a position near Rangitoto Island (see map below). That's about half an hour of sailing. A lot of small yachts and cruiser were seen criss-crossing and zig-zagging around us. Not seen so much sailing activities as I have seen here in New Zealand. I have been told that the Kiwi's have many notable sailors : Sir Russell Coutts, Sir Peter Blake, Dean Barker and Chris Barker just to name a few. Winning the America's Cup have brought fame and much needed publicity to the Country which was famous for her meat and dairy products.





will continue.......

Sunday 11 May 2014

Distorted History

I have been wondering during my younger days....why have the British and European painted a different story to our real history ? Off late we heard a lot about conspiracy theories and false flag operation.....which benefited none other than the so-called Master Planner.

Darwinism for instance distract us from truly believing in the Oneness of God. Causing such confusion to the young minds and make believe that we have evolved from primates to human beings. However, we never bother to think......why hasn't human behaviour changed over all these years. Corruption, enmity, jealousy, hate, selfish, greed, cheat .....human being does all these deed in order to survive the  vicious cycle of weather generations after generations. The Good one came only in small numbers.

The fact that God put us to test and not knowing the result in a lifetime caused human being to continue making the same "mistake" over and over again! The detractors will continue hiding the truth and in doing so will deviate more and more people into the state of despair. Some that could not take it took their own life, while others continue living as if nothing will affect them.

A case in question is the origin of the malay race. I read this interesting article in the NST (local paper) which contradicted with the history books that I read in my primary school. This stark contrast should trigger the Ministry of Education to embark on research project to exactly find out the origin of our fore fathers.

Please find below for your reading pleasure the article which I mentioned earlier but I could not verify how true this is. However, it is still very interesting to note that many of the facts are very relevant and logical.

"DATUK Dr Ananda Kumaraseri's comment piece, "Malaysia reflects its rich varied heritage" (NST, Nov 2), was a fair attempt at describing Malaysia's population and cultural variety, based on ancient history.

Unfortunately, his narration of the past was based on outdated theories and knowledge. There were no "waves" of migration into Southeast Asia, nor did Malays originate from Tibet or southern China, as he mentioned.
Dr Ananda was reading knowledge of the 1930s, basically just archaeological knowledge.
Lots of new evidence in archaeology and linguistics, as well as DNA studies, in Asia more recently have overturned the theories and views about Southeast Asia that originated from the 1930s.
For a round-up of some of the new evidence, refer to the book Tamadun Alam Melayu (by M.A. Ishak 2009, published by Persatuan Sejarah Malaysia).
The picture is now emerging that it was in Southeast Asia that man first began to differentiate and that the races began to emerge in Asia.
This evolution apparently resulted in the emergence of a spectrum of peoples, from darker-skinned Negritos to lighter-skinned ones (Jakuns) and the still lighter-skinned "Malays".
That is to say, the Malay population did not go through the process of being deutero Malays and then proto Malays, as is so commonly mentioned.
What the new evidence seems to suggest is that Malays and Negritos both evolved together in Southeast Asia during prehistoric times.
At that time, southern Southeast Asia was one large block of land which then broke up to form the Malay Archipelago following rises in sea levels three times from 14,000 to 8,000 years ago. (For a comprehensive account of the sea floods and its significance in the history of Southeast Asia, please refer to the book Eden in the East by Stephen Oppenheimer, 2001).
Some of the people who arrived in Southeast Asia from Africa (about 60,000 to 80,000 years ago) did not stay in Southeast Asia long and moved on without going through the process of early differentiation in Southeast Asia. They became the aboriginal peoples of Papua New Guinea and Australia as we know them today.
Some others continued moving northwards instead and they differentiated further and became Tibetans, Yuehs, Thais and others, and only much later did the Chinese, Koreans and Japanese emerge.
In other words, human migration was from south to north, and not from north to south as suggested by the theories of the 1930s.
Thus, the Chinese are, in fact, a distant sub-set of Southeast Asians, and not the other way round.
The largest DNA studies conducted by scientists from 10 Asian countries, including Malaysia, China and Singapore, published their findings in December 2009.
They concluded that migration of man in East Asia was from south to north.
The 2009 findings reinforced findings from several earlier but much smaller studies, which also carried the same conclusions.
But much later, migrations of man from north to south in East Asia (and Chinese historical accounts mentioned these events) did take place. These migrations brought Vietnamese, Thais, the people of Myanmar and others into Southeast Asia.
These were thus back-migrations to the south, and these happened because of the pressure of the expanding Chinese population in the north.
But Malays have always been in the southern part of Southeast Asia.
There are no historical accounts, whether in China or wherever, of people who could be identified as Malays migrating south during historical times.
Malays (or, any other present-day Southeast Asians) could not have migrated south from the north earlier, meaning during prehistoric times either, as DNA studies have shown human DNA in Southeast Asia is older than that in China (in other words, human movement could only have been northwards during prehistoric times), and DNA composition in China showed a heavy Southeast Asian content, meaning Southeast Asian origin.
Over time, Malays having flourished as natives of Southeast Asia (alongside the Negritos) from the original migration from Africa and split following the break-up of their homeland -- the southern Southeast Asia land mass -- into the Malay Archipelago.
This resulted in the Malays becoming the population of all the islands of the archipelago. Their land-and-sea environment then caused the ancient Malays to develop a maritime way of life and maritime skills.
Eventually, the Malays sailed right into the Pacific Ocean populating all the islands there (where they are now known as Polynesians and Micronesians), and also to Madagascar across the Indian Ocean.
Malay kinship across these two oceans has been indicated by DNA studies from the 1960s and even earlier linguistic studies.
Their ancient presence in the archipelago led to the development of sub-identities like the Javanese, Bugis and others among the Malay ethnic group, also known as Malayo-Polynesian.
It is wrong, therefore, to suggest that Javanese or Bugis, for instance, are immigrant people in Malaysia, as all these people are mere sub-ethnic groups of a larger ethnic family, all inheriting a single common and extensive ancient homeland.
Thus, to get our prehistory and history right based on the new knowledge, Malays are the ancient ancestral people of southern Southeast Asia.
They did not migrate from anywhere else in Asia. The whole archipelago that resulted from the break-up of the original land mass of southern Southeast Asia was their original homeland and they kept sailing to and fro within the archipelago, even until present days.
The high cultural and linguistic diversity in the Malay Archipelago (despite being occupied by only one language family) is further proof of the Malays' ancient presence as linguistics theory suggests the more ancient a people are, the more they generate linguistic diversity.
Linguistic diversity among Malays in the archipelago is, in fact, the highest in the whole of Asia, thus pointing to their very ancient presence.
It is this ancient Malay population that is at the base of the country that we now call Malaysia.
Dr Ananda was right in suggesting that Malaysia's past shaped the "thinking, attitudes, ethos and the nature and substance of its statecraft".
Diversity is nothing new to the archipelago or to Malaysia, even before the arrivals of Chinese and Indians during very recent historical times.
I look forward to the revision of our school history books to keep abreast of the new evidence.
A.I, Kuala Lumpur


Read more: MALAY ORIGINS: Evidence suggests otherwise - Letters to the Editor - New Straits Times http://www.nst.com.my/opinion/letters-to-the-editor/malay-origins-evidence-suggests-otherwise-1.167600#ixzz31PrGXEZ2 "


Happy reading.....

Sheer Sailing Pleasure o/b Americas Cup Racing Yacht

It has always been my childhood dream to sail on big boats. I was raised near the longest river in Peninsular Malaysia. I would often sneaked out from my strict home to catch a glimpse of the boat or "sampan" as they called it in Malay. This sampan ply the trade between my hometown and the town or I would rather say Village across the river. The current can be pretty strong at times, especially during the rainy season between November to March. This chance to view the sampan "cross-river" operations only occurs on my way back from prayer at a nearby mosque.

I was astonished by the good seamanship of the coxswain who steered and manoeuvred the boat each time prior coming alongside the small jetty. I noticed that the bow of the boat is always pointing at a fix point, although bodily the boat had drifted closer to shore and thus eventually landed on the jetty with minimal impact. Thus, were the complex and yet (later I was made known how scientific it was) taken for granted by the local folks as a "norm" that the boatman or coxswain should know what to do.

Recently I was onboard a huge sailing yacht in Auckland, New Zealand. This exact boat once used to compete in the "Americas Cup" which is a prestigious match race between two two sailing clubs : the defender and the challenger whereby Royal NZ Yacht Squadron won the Cup ! To know more about the Americas Cup , do check it out at the link below:
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America's_Cup

As we proceeded out of Auckland harbour, we were made as "crew" and being given a quick lesson about trimming the sail and steering the boat. Most of the people that join the boat were non-mariners. We were lucky as the weather was great. Clear visibility and very little low lying clouds. The view of the city of Auckland from the boat was magnificent.

There were a lot of beautiful bungalows and mansions stretching along both sides of the bay. The boat that we were on must be cruising at least 15 knots (about 28kph). The single-hull boat was cutting through the wave with great ease. The billowing wind catching on to our big sails and with the perfect weather......this is the dream that I have always dreamnt when I was a young boy. Now,  I definitely believe the saying "Life is Good" bearing it's real meaning !

will continue ......