Year End

The Chinese Dang Yuan festival (22/12/2010) has come and gone.

Soon it will be Christmas.

Shopping malls, supermarkets and department stores are competing with each other to come up with the most imaginative christmas trees and decorations to attract customers.

One shopping centre even has "snowfalls".

                                               
                                                                        snow in K.L !


The Chinese believe that once you have eaten dang yuan you have become one year the older.

                                                                        dang yuan

But do we become one year the wiser?

After Christmas, the new year.

Time flies.

But what does the new year herald for us ordinary Malaysians?

For sure, more price increases.

Just recently, the Star newspapers reported that the price of a tin of evaporated milk is expected to increase by some 30 sens.

This, following so soon after the recent increase in the price of Ron 95 petrol of 5 sens per litre.

What is going to happen is both predictable and illogical.

Restaurants, mamak stalls and kopitiams will rush to assure us long-suffering consumers that they will try not to increase the price of your favourite cuppa of teh tarik.

Which promise, as we all know, is not going to be kept. And so, folks, we will just have to grind and gnash our sweet teeth to fork out an additional 10, 20 or even 30 sens per cuppa.

This is the illogical part.

The predictable part is that government will assure the public that stern action will be taken against would be profiteers who dare even to think of making a quick buck out of the impending price increase of evaporated milk.

After a few days of ho ha, everything quietens down and we are back and stuck with the familiar but nevertheless unpleasant sense of deja vu, viz, that we have gone through all this before, many times!

And stuck with the inevitable realisation that we have to tighten our already tightened-to-breaking-point belt that our kind and wise government has all this while been paternalistically enjoinig us to do to save our day!                                                                         


Q -  have you ever felt so helpless and hopeless like you are falling into a deep abyss and you cannot do anything about it as prices of goods continue to increase while your salary stagnates?