When the Muslim trainees went for Friday prayers, the non-Muslim trainees were left behind to rest.

If this is being discussed as a literary episode, its significance is less about the bodily detail itself and more about what Swami is conveying: the harshness, humiliation, absurdity and deliberately boundary-crossing nature of some military training experiences. The juxtaposition of Friday prayer, religious practice and an extremely degrading physical task makes the episode particularly memorable and uncomfortable.

It would distinguish, however, between what Swami records as his experience and that such treatment was, maybe standard practice at the training centre. 

This continuation makes the ordeal even more striking because the humiliation does not end when the feces exercise ends.

1. The instructors tell the men to prepare for lunch.
2. There is no water available, so the men run into the sea and dive in, trying to wash themselves without soap.
3. The smell of feces remains despite washing.
4. Swami searches his pack, finds a bar of soap, and uses it.
5. The men then run to the dining hall.
6. When Swami approaches the commandos, they wrinkle their noses because of the lingering smell.
7. Even before being allowed their lunch, the trainees have to perform ten chin-ups to qualify for what Swami sarcastically calls that “crappy lunch.”

Why this passage is so effective

The episode has a remarkable progression: contamination → desperate cleansing → social humiliation → physical exertion → food.

The sea provides only a partial solution. The fact that the smell remains means that Swami cannot simply wash away the experience. Then the reaction of the commandos—wrinkling their noses—makes the ordeal socially humiliating, not merely physically unpleasant.

The final requirement of ten chin-ups is particularly telling in the narrative. Hunger does not exempt the trainees from another physical test. Lunch itself becomes something they must earn.

Taken together with the preceding pages, this is one of the book's most visceral descriptions of military training. Swami isn't romanticising the experience. He records the disgust, smell, exhaustion, humiliation and absurdity of the moment, including his own disbelief at what he is being subjected to.

And there is an important narrative detail: the episode is remembered through the senses—feces on the body, the smell that will not disappear, seawater, soap, the reaction of the commandos, and finally the chin-ups before eating. That makes the scene unusually difficult for the reader to experience passively. 

That detail adds another layer to the episode. Based on what has been described from the passage, the training environment is presented as deliberately austere rather than comfortable or ceremonial.

The lingering smell of feces would naturally make eating difficult, so the irony is striking: after the trainees have struggled to clean themselves, they still have to perform chin-ups before receiving lunch. The meal is therefore presented less as a normal break and more as another part of the ordeal.

The detail about the uncovered dining area reinforces that atmosphere. When it rains, the men have to eat their meal which becomes soupy from their mess tins, rather than retreating into a conventional dining hall. In combination with the earlier episode, Swami is portraying training as an environment where discomfort is continuous—heat, rain, hunger, exhaustion, contamination and lack of basic amenities.

Literarily, the contrast is powerful:

feces → sea washing → lingering smell → chin-ups → lunch → rain → mess tins

It gives the account its warts-and-all quality. The military experience is not presented only through combat, courage or achievement; Swami also records the unpleasant, degrading and mundane physical realities of becoming a commando.

Most are modest operations run by former teachers, part-time educators or family businesses structured as sole proprietorships or simple partnerships. Few are large incorporated entities. They operate on thin margins, serving local communities, often in the mother tongue of non-Malay students to bridge gaps left by the national curriculum.

The Ministry of Education has now embedded a 30% Bumiputera equity requirement into the registration rules for private education centres. From 2027, centres that fail to meet this threshold risk losing their licences. Foreign equity is barred entirely for tuition centres. Existing operators must either restructure ownership or close. The ministry has offered little public explanation of the policy rationale or whether the rule applies retroactively to long-established centres.

This is not an isolated administrative tweak. It mirrors the earlier imposition of Bumiputera equity rules on the freight forwarding and customs brokerage industry back in 2021. In that case, operators were told to restructure shareholding to retain licences. Many resorted to proxy arrangements or “Ali Baba” partnerships in which a Bumiputera name appears on paper while operational control and risk remain with the original owners. Costs rose, procedures slowed, and competitiveness suffered. Some firms contemplated relocation. The same dynamic now threatens the tuition sector.

Forcing equity dilution on small family businesses does not create genuine entrepreneurship. It creates rent-seeking opportunities. Finding a suitable 30% partner who contributes capital, skills and genuine involvement is difficult in a sector built on personal reputation and teaching expertise.

Many owners will face pressure to hand over shares at depressed valuations simply to keep operating. Others will go underground, conducting classes in living rooms without licences, precisely the informal sector the regulations claim to professionalise. Quality control, student safety and accountability will suffer.

The timing is especially damaging. Malaysian students already lag peers in Vietnam and Thailand on international assessments. The private tuition market has been one of the few responsive parts of the system, allowing parents to address weaknesses the public schools have not fixed.

Injecting racial equity conditions into ownership of these centres does nothing to raise teaching standards, improve teacher qualifications or expand access for poorer students. It simply politicises a service that thrives on merit and parental choice.

Specialised centres teaching emerging skills, such as AI, advanced IT, creative arts will be particularly constrained. Start-ups in education technology and niche training require agility and founder control.

Mandatory equity restructuring raises barriers to entry, deters investment and signals that successful non-Bumiputera operators will eventually be required to dilute ownership. This is the opposite of an innovation-friendly environment. Countries that have improved education outcomes have focused on curriculum, teacher quality and competition, not ownership ethnicity.

The original New Economic Policy (NEP) aimed to raise Bumiputera participation in the economy. Half a century later, the instrument has become a blunt bureaucratic tool applied indiscriminately. Requiring every individual firm in an industry to meet a fixed equity percentage ignores the diversity of business models and the reality that overall sector participation can be measured more flexibly through total equity, employment or number of firms, without dismantling existing enterprises. Family businesses that have served communities for decades should not be forced into artificial partnerships as a condition of continued existence.

The policy also sits uneasily with claims of reform under the current administration. Education regulation ought to prioritise standards, safety and outcomes. Linking licence renewal to the racial composition of shareholding introduces an extraneous criterion that will generate compliance costs, legal uncertainty and resentment without demonstrably improving learning.

Small operators who cannot or will not restructure will exit or operate informally. Students lose options. The informal market expands. Trust in institutions erodes further.

Malaysia cannot afford to damage one of the few functioning parts of its education ecosystem while international rankings decline. If the objective is genuine Bumiputera participation and capability-building, the focus should be on skills, capital access and competitive opportunity, not forced equity transfers that reward connections over competence.

The freight industry experience showed the costs of such rules. Applying the same approach to tuition centres risks repeating the mistake on a larger social scale.

One need only turn to Jacob William Rees-Mogg, who recently defended Islam, for a perfect example of how this fallacy works.

As we have already shown, his “defense” often relied on “lies by omission.” He suggested, for example, that Sultan Mehmet’s brutal sack of Constantinople in 1453 was nothing like the crusader sack of 1204—being apparently instead driven by a “benevolent” concern to preserve “scholarship and philosophy.”

As Mogg continued it became clear that presenting Islam’s past as much more advanced than Europe’s was his ultimate point. Thus he cited several Muslim polymaths, including al-Khwarizmi (780 – 850), who produced Arabic-language works in mathematics, astronomy, and geography; and Ibn Khaldun (1332 – 1406) an Arab historian, philosopher, and sociologist.

Mogg’s implicit point is this: how can a civilization, in this case, Islam, be at the cutting edge of science, philosophy, medicine, even architecture—and yet be accused of being inherently backwards, barbaric, and/or radical? Clearly all the radicalization we see today—including ISIS and other terrorist groups—are aberrations, unfortunate byproducts of historical forces and evolving circumstances (poverty, ignorance, grievances, colonialism, territorial disputes, etc.). Clearly Islam itself is innocent, seeing how enlightened it was during its heyday.

Even if one were to accept the claim that Islam was historically more advanced than the West (which will be addressed another time), note the unspoken assumption: the more advanced a civilization is, the more progressive, enlightened, tolerant, and peaceful it must be. Where X exists (say, science and scholarship), so too must Y (peace, tolerance, and coexistence).

This is a fallacy: civilizations can be scientifically and technologically advanced; they can produce and appreciate literature and scholarship—and yet they can still be intolerant, cruel, violent, and supremacist.

There is no contradiction here: the presence of the one (science, etc.) does not necessitate the presence of the other (tolerance, etc.).

One need only look to Islam’s paradigmatic example of Córdoba to prove this. During its tenth century “golden age” zenith, it became one of Europe’s wealthiest and most sophisticated cities. Córdoba possessed a manuscript culture, impressive waterworks, public baths, monumental architecture, and important traditions of medicine, astronomy, and mathematics.

The prisons department folks run around like headless chooks to determine how to implement house arrest. They now spend taxpayer's money to secure the home like Alcatrez! 

C'mon lah, the criminal now breathes the non cell air only. He is too old to run away from home like we did as kids. Let him run to Timbuktu for all I care. The main thing now is for us, the citizens to seek relief from having our children and their children to pay the massive debt created by this devil in disguise. 

Squeeze out every sen stolen from the defaulter, his family and his future generation. The goings on in our country is morbidly comical. A government of imbeciles and smart people thieving away our wealth. My heart bleeds. Our fortunes, glory and identity is defined by our role as the defenders of our sovereignty. 

The Veterans Of Before 2013 Are Still Waiting - For The Streamlining Of Pensions

Sadly, the politicians don't recognize this. Isn't this our fault? We sucked up to them for rank, appointment and post service goodies.

That very situation put us in subservience. Today, we need to go to the courts to get our rightful pensions. How humiliating is this? 

I cannot bear to see our retired Generals and senior officers wallowing in self preservation, afraid to say the truth!

If the Federal Court rules against us its a slap on the faces of all the Generals who sat in the AFC. Im going to be very rude, but blunt.

If you Generals don't stand up now, you're not worth the respect of the stars on your shoulders! 

I'm still baffled that no initiative to approach our Supreme Commander has been made! Doesn't he have a say?

I remain for God, King and Country.

Sheldrake

Battle For Jerusalem

Only now, 60 years later, images can be shown from three opposing points of view, telling a whole new story. The events of the 1948 war of Jerusalem, which would lead to the founding of Israel, had been immortalized through the photographies of two war phtographers, British and Palestinian. 

John Philip, the British photographer, was one of the first photo journalist in the world on the war in Jerusalem. His camera documents the Jews perpective, the evacution of thousand of Jews from the Old City of Jerusalem. 

Philip captures, for Life Magazine, the destruction of the Jewish Quarter of the Old City. Meanwhile Ali Zaarour was one of the few photographers who took photos of the Palestinian side of the story. His photos has never been seen before his grandson discovered them, and undertook an tremendous task to illustrate the catastrophe that this war was also for the Palestinians. 

The Naqba, the catastrophe and the darkest day, where 750,000 Palestinians lost their homes and became refugees. The documentary also focuses on Jack Padwais, producer of the first major film about the founding of Israel, "Hill 24 Does Not Answer" directed by Thorold Dickinson. 

Coming from a right wing Jewish family, he recreated the battle for Jerusalem from an Israeli perspective. To this day, his film is consistently used in schools as the definitive account of that historic battle.

Irgun

Not a single Jew was left alive in the areas occupied by the Arabs. They had either fled or been slaughtered, often with the bodies mutilated. That speaks volumes. 

And it’s history constantly repeated. Arab nationalism was influenced by Nazism. Begin refused to leave the burning Altadena and was thrown over by his supporters. The Palmach (who had been shooting at the ship and those swimming to shore) tried to capture Begin but he managed to escape. 

He went on the radio and called the Irgun fighters not surrender, to avoid a civil war. Kfar Vitkin was a labor (Ben Gurion's) faction settlement. Its location for disembarkation was "odd" and slowly Hagana men began to surround the Altalena's ground crew. The initial fighting caused the deaths of Irgun men.

In 2023 came the killings of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Bashir Ahmad Peer, Khalistan Commando Force chief Paramjit Singh Panjwar and Jaish-e-Mohammed operative Shahid Latif. Pakistan later accused Indian agents of orchestrating at least some of the killings using local intermediaries and recruits. 

India dismissed those claims as anti-India propaganda. The Guardian reported that Pakistani intelligence linked nearly 20 killings since 2020 to an alleged covert campaign, though its documents could not be independently verified. This episode of Axis Deep Dive asks the central question.

A photograph of Nyima Tenzin was kept in the corner of his house, surrounded by warm light spilling from oil lamps. The hum of prayers continued in the next room, where family members, relatives and Buddhist monks were chanting.

Days earlier, the 51-year-old soldier had died in a landmine blast near Pangong Tso Lake in the Himalayan region of Ladakh, where Indian and Chinese troops have been facing off in recent months. Sources in the Indian army told the BBC that he was killed by an old mine left from the 1962 war the two countries fought.

"On 30 August, around 10:30 in the night, I got a call, saying he was injured," Tenzin's brother, Namdakh, recalled. "They did not tell me that he had died. A friend confirmed the news to me later."

Tenzin, his family told the BBC, had been a member of the Special Frontier Force (SFF), a covert military unit largely comprising Tibetan refugees. It reportedly has about 3,500 soldiers.

Tenzin was a refugee too and he had served in the force for more than 30 years, his family said.

Little is known about the SFF, whose existence has never been officially acknowledged by Indian officials. But it's also a well-known secret, familiar to military and foreign policy experts as well as journalists who cover the region. Yet, Tenzin's death - in the last weekend of August amid rising tensions between India and China - prompted the first public acknowledgement of Tibetans' role in the Indian military.

- Mario Puzo, The Godfather

COMMENT | The political elites in this country are busy blaming each other for who caused the Rohingya issue, which has become a major flashpoint for the Malay community, especially working-class Malays.

The fact of the matter is that the people who are vilifying the Rohingya community are the same people who voted in successive bangsa and agama politicians who used the Rohingya when convenient and are horrified by the economic insecurity they have created.

What we are dealing with is the reality that working-class Malays are in economic competition with various migrants, and this in turn has fuelled xenophobic movements born out of frustration with decades of failed government policies meant to uplift the majority community.

Instead of helping them, such policies have deepened the class conflict within the community.

Forget about political parties or personalities. This is about how the mainstream political establishment used the Rohingya issue to boost religious bona fides without thinking of the economic and social consequences of allowing foreign elements into the local ecosphere already riddled with class and ethnic tensions.

When it was convenient to use these migrants for political and religious purposes, Malay political operatives from both sides of the divide used them as examples of the “injustices” faced by the global Muslim community and as a rallying cry for local Muslim solidarity.

From this day to the ending of the world,But we in it shall be remember’d; We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he to-day that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile. Read it all here, your england must be good.......... 

Captain Ivan Lee with his brother, Steven in the USA

Rest & Recreation with Captain Ho in Mombasa

Somali Stalls

Captured Weapons

Major Len Olivero's Base

Overlooking University of Mogadishu

US Hovercraft

Ivan very gung ho with Major Juan Chow Huat

IFV

Zulfaqar, Bakar and Ivan all bored waiting

Ali Mahdi's gunmen in Somalia and adversary of Farah Aideed and Ivan asking for a seat in the Somali government

Paki Tank

Major Taufik (Ordnance) with Ivan

Bravo Company's IFV's

Somali Taxi

Airport our initial camp

Somebody's birthday (R to L) Major Len, Me, Ivan, Col Radzi, Lt Col Mukhtar, cannot remember the other two

Ivan's baptism with Rev Fr Mariarokiam

Overlooking a village

Len Olivero and the forever Adjutant at high noon waiting for a gunfight

Ivan (Softie)with Somali orphans

Patrolling for drunk officers, me

Preparing to go on patrol

Airport camp

Happy Hours with Macabee beers (Israeli) with the Green Berets

Ivan with my OC Major Christopher Joseph in a US Blackhawk helicopter

Visit By PTD

Hoover craft offloading M1A1 Abrams Tanks

My crew

Do the authorities, including the Pardons Board, really not understand the depth of public feeling and anger this man still evokes?

Don't we have more important things to deal with? The cost of living. Energy security. A volatile global economy. Migration and the Rohingya issue. Cross-border haze. Climate troubles.

These affect millions of Malaysians. And yet here we are again. Regurgitating Najib ad nauseam. Seriously. How many times must Malaysians revisit the same man?

Najib was convicted and sent to prison. His 12-year sentence was reduced to six years. His RM210 million fine to RM50 million.

Then came the house-arrest battle, and now, another pardon application.

On Sept 11, the Pardons Board deferred it but released 65 other prisoners. Then one week later, reports say the board may meet again on Sept 18 - today.

The official announcement did not explain why the application was deferred, or why the board might reconvene so quickly. So why does this one case appear to require such urgency?

More importantly, what is the principle behind this priority?

YellowZebra1419 : It's not a case of 'do they not know '; it's more 'they don't care'. The Elite will protect the Elite at ANY expense. As in reality, it doesn't matter. BN has just won two State elections while parading cardboard Najibs around and asking, 'What do we have to be ashamed of?' If the people won't hold them to account at the election box, what good are 'feelings'?

Koel : In Malaysia, steal milo to feed your starving children and you are a criminal. But steal 2.6 billion from your country as the titled PM and you get a "house arrest" in a lovely mansion after spending 4 years in detention while wearing your designer finery. What a pathetic state of affairs.