Behind the smile of Seona

from w
Here's another article I pinched from the Fiji Times, this time by Seona Smiles, the very funny journalist who writes from the point of view of a family in Flagstaff, Suva. Beyond or behind the jokiness though there's something to ponder in this article - the Magna Carta, personal freedom and so on. Good on you, Seona.
Charter of liberty
Seona Smiles
Sunday, November 21, 2010

I set house rules, but they might just as well have been the Fiji Constitution. When the daughters were infants, I made it simple, like the doctors'oath: first do no harm. This meant "don't damage stuff or irritate anyone else, especially the cat and more especially, me."

Yet no sooner would I be steaming away over a hot keyboard or talking about important things to a friend on the phone when a childish voice would pipe persistently in my ear, like a basketball bouncing off the side of my skull: "mum, mum, mum, mum, hey mum, mum.." Eventually the child would get the attention it deserved, trust me. Then she would go off and complain to her Aaji, which at least kept her out of my hair for a while.

Later the rules became more sophisticated: no drinking under 18, no sex before 35, no drugs ever.They laughed, poured another glass of wine and went out with their boyfriends while I stayed home and got stuck into the Panadol. But as far as I know, neither of them is a triple axe murderer, has a lifestyle disease or has joined Hillsong, so maybe something worked.

Which brings me eventually to a reluctant respect for the rule of law, even if the quality of mercy is somewhat strained, not to mention the quality of justice. The big deal in law is the Magna Carta, now rocking up to its 800th anniversary. You may say, like British comedian Tony Hancock: "Does Magna Carta mean nothing to you? Did she die in vain?" Or "bless her and all who sail in her" because a luxury barge plying the Thames is indeed named Magna Carta. It probably docks at Runnymead, a boggy place in England where in 1215 Bad King John was bullied by a gang of barons to sign up to certain rights and freedoms on something that looks like a dirty vest or old sheepskin.

Loosely translated, MC probably means 'Piece of Paper'. It was supposed to stave off a civil war, which it didn't.

But it did become what some see as the starting point for democracy (never mind the Greeks) and embodied an important principle that remains to this day: that all people, including the king (or equivalent, say, Rajah or Ratu) are subject to law.

This has been controversial in Fiji from time to time, but by and large, works.

There is another bit in the MC that stuck around long enough to become the legal remedy of habeus corpus, with which we are familiar in Fiji during politically difficult periods.

According to last month's London Review of Books, habeus corpus has in recent years lost much of its practical importance.

Not because judges are less protective of personal liberty, but because the function of hc has to a large extent been subsumed within versatile and extensive judicial review.

However a striking feature of hc, according to the Review, is that "in times of perceived emergency, when the security of the people is trumpeted as the highest political imperative, personal freedom, and with it the remedy of habeas corpus, are its first casualties."

Despite the fact that by the second half of the 19th century nearly all the Magna Carta clauses had been repealed in their original form, it is generally considered part of the uncodified constitution (of Britian, which famously doesn't have a constitution).

Lord Denning, of Fiji"s Denning Report fame, described it as "the greatest constitutional document of all times - the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot."

And good luck with that.

Some of its clauses are better off being repealed, for instance those that dealt with Jews who were able to lend money because they were unconstrained by Christian teachings on usury.

I don't know what happened to that, maybe bank bosses don't go to church or maybe it is perfectly Christian to charge "fees".

Anyway, Jews were not allowed to charge children interest on an inherited debt and widows and children had to be provided for before paying off an inherited debt, which actually sounds good to me and would serve right all those banks who wouldn't lend to women.

You could leave the kingdom without prejudicing allegiance except for outlaws; the king's hostages had to be returned (good one for Sudanese pirates and Middle East kidnappers); unjust fines had to be remitted (take heed, LTA); and there was something about the restoration of disseised Welshmen, but I don't know either what it means or any Welsh persons.

I think it is something to do with land and probably not useful in Fiji.

The clause I liked best was the abolition of all evil customs connected with forests.

What were they doing behind the bushes in 1215?

Or maybe, like today's environmental protection laws, the clause was intended to prevent destruction of the planet.

The Magna Carta is such a big deal that the anniversary celebrations are starting now and running through the next five years, to 2015.

It would be excellent for Fiji to spend the time discussing and sorting the basic concepts and freedoms of the MC as applying to a modern developing country.

This time let's try to have something that we don't throw out in the first five minutes, but that will last at least as long as the magna carta.

Seona Smiles makes you smile

from w
Even though her writing is really funny at times, the colummist and activist Seona Smiles who lives in Suva, touches on interesting topics. Seona comes from Australia and has married into a feisty Fiji Indian household. Her short stories are very well written and full of details of everyday life in Suva. Here is her response to some Fiji academic mouthing off about half the population of Fiji being 'lazy', which is of course not true at all.

Seona writes in the Fiji Times today, as follows:

No lazy talk

Seona Smiles
Sunday, August 15, 2010

I can't wait to tell the so-called Head of Household that he is part of the lazy population. According to what the Nadi Chamber of Commerce was told this week, a total of 44% of the population aged 15 years and over is non-economically active.They include 'a lot of lazy people who do not contribute to the economy'. "What kind of attitude is this?" the speaker asked. Our Head of Household is waaaay over 15 years old.

So are our daughters. So are our resident mothers. None of them have paying jobs or produce things for sale. But they would all like to give anyone who calls them lazy a serious smacking. I suppose you could call their attitudes varying from scornful to extremely cross indeed. Even the Dreaded Violet would be miffed if she woke up long enough and got it together enough. At 93 I think we can count her out of the equation, there must be some point at which you can stop work.

Aaji, well into her 80s, has taken on a strictly supervisory role and retired from her fulltime career in household management.

It was work that never earned her a cent except the grateful contributions of her sons and daughters. Her noble occupation was to take care of the home and nurture those who lived in it, including making sure there was enough to eat.

As a widow, this involved stretching the meagre resources, tending a garden, sewing new clothes from old, walking instead of taking transport, knowing about home remedies to avoid doctors visits and medicine, saving, swapping and scrounging things needed for school, and all the other little things that clever, hard-working women without a regular cash income do.

Our daughters have never known that sort of hardship and I consider them grossly over-indulged, although they claim they could probably report me to the Social Welfare for child neglect. The point is, neither of them has a wage-paying job. They study. The older one has been sporadically economically active and certainly knows what the term means. She has given up all that to learn more about very important things. Whatever they are.

I don't know what the other one is studying, nothing that will ever get her a paying position unless it is perhaps as a bank robber or extortionist. This semester she is doing a unit on terrorism, which I fully believe is not 'how to do it'.

Although I sometimes feel an overwhelming sense of responsibility to contact her lecturer and let him know that her stated ambition in kindergarten was to become an assassin.

I didn't even know she knew the word, but she said it paid well, which would certainly take her out of the economically inactive bracket.

Both of them strenuously deny being lazy. What I see during semester breaks is young women taking a well-deserved rest, apparently, and not idle swine who don't get up until dinnertime and certainly never bend as far as the floor to pick up anything. As for them not being economically active, I don't know. It's true they don't go out to work to earn anything, but they certainly contribute to the economy.

I think they probably keep half the coffee shops and bars in Suva in business, on my money. The Fiji Times that reported the statement about 267,162 people being non-economically active also had an article that said about 28,000 people are unemployed.

The Head of Household, who knows a thing or two about statistics, is currently on the high seas in a yacht headed for Thursday Island. At this point he is contributing nothing to anybody's economy, there not being a lot of clubs or pubs in mid-ocean. He is not, however, being lazy, although frankly I've never met anyone more suited to the life of retirement and utter idleness. These days, however, he is standing his watch, knowing his ropes, and keeping things shipshape.

When he is not doing that, he is reading because in retirement he has become an even more serious economic supporter of bookshops, news stands, amazon.com and any other purveyor of the printed word.

He works hard at it, often late into the night. He could possibly point out that statistically there is a vast difference between the lazy, the unemployed, the economically inactive, and all those people including thousands of women who lead extremely hardworking lives that are essential to the wellbeing of society and, I dare say, the economy.

Most people these days understand that not all work, especially the vast amount of women's work and subsistence work, can be quantified in monetary or economic terms. They may not get paid for it, but they sure aren't lazy. Nor are those poor sods, including so many of our youth, who spend day after dispiriting day trying to find a job.

It's lazy thinking to suggest otherwise.
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Seona was responding to this story:
44pc of population lazy
Margaret Wise
Tuesday, August 10, 2010

FIJI has a huge "lazy population"of economically inactive people, says chartered accountant Dr Nur Bano Ali. She said according to the 2007 census statistics provided by the Bureau of Statistics, the country had a 594,150 population aged 15 years and over. The economically active or populace in the workforce numbered 326,988. "The non-economically active was 267,162 or 44 per cent," she said. "There are a lot of lazy people around a whole lot of people who do not contribute to the economy. What kind of attitude is this?"

Dr Ali made the remarks at the annual seminar of the Nadi Chamber of Commerce in Nadi over the weekend. She is the president of the Suva Chamber of Commerce. Her address centred on the perceptions and challenges faced by the private sector where she listed "dealing with the lazy bureaucracy" as one of the challenges for those in business. etc. etc.

Smile with Seona over her TV troubles

from w
Seona Smiles is a part-time columnist for the Fiji Times, lives in Suva, probably still works at the USP, has an Indo-Fijian extended family, writes very funny short stories and her column in the paper about the ups and downs of daily life in Suva are sometimes hilarious. Here is a sample:

Where is the remote control?SEONA SMILES
Sunday, September 14, 2008

WE have this TV dish that lets us watch more television as if it was necessary or desirable. We got it during the recent bout of sporting plague known as the Olympics, so we could watch something different, or even more sport, as it turned out.

We got the dish off a chap who sort of left it on the roof and gave us the electronic box. He'd probably had enough sport during the previous Olympics and was glad to see it go. Just plug her in and push the right button on the remote and away you go, he said.

Not. Problem one, the aged television we had would not connect. I like my TV small and discreet, not a focus of the household, however popular the medium.

But like computers, once you get one you are tied to the cycle of new and improved programs that do not connect with the quite workable, effective and useful equipment you already have. Someone you work with or who lives in the household gets the new and improved version and you all have to follow or be marginalised along with horse-drawn trams and hand-operated washing-machines. So the satellite TV dish project went on hold while I resisted buying a new goggle box.

Needless to say, I lost, and one day I came home to a bright new monstrous screen leering from the corner of the living room. Whoopee!

When I stopped feeling overwhelmed by the electronics, I quite liked being able to see people's faces clearly and notice subtleties of colour, such as green (as opposed to greenish red) grass and yellow (as opposed to reddish brown) flowers.

It was nice to discover that not all news presenters are Martians with bright red complexion but they do have a lot more spots and wrinkles than I thought.

Now we could plug in the box but couldn't get the satellite channels to show, no way. Obviously, we needed the man.

You can't just look in the yellow pages for "man to fix the TV dish", it is going to be under some other obscure listing that I won't possibly be able to think of. So we had to find a friend, who knew a chap, whose brother-in-law had a business, that dealt with TV stuff.

He was off work but told us about the other person and gave us a telephone contact.

It was one of those you ring and ring and finally a voice says "you have reached the telephone of Mumble, please leave a message after the beep and he will do his best to get back to you as soon as possible" next year.

Much to our astonishment, the man called, and not long afterward, turned up. Nothing to it, he said of our TV problem.

Three hours and a foot through the roof later, there were only a few little difficulties left to overcome. We could have settled an hour earlier for 27 channels in Portuguese, several in Italian and a couple in French but we felt we should at least have something we had a fighting chance of understanding. The man duly twiddled the dish and we now have many channels in Chinese, some in Arabic, an excellent channel in English with an Arabic accent, a German channel, a French cooking channel, something really weird with an American accent, the fashion channel, a channel that speaks no known language but sometimes bursts into English, and several Hindi channels that are strong on soapies and religion.

The poor man had to keep going to the internet to checking the settings. I thought we could have some quite interesting channels but the so-called Head of Household stopped me from plying the man with liquor and he packed his pliers and went home.

We have only one remaining problem. Where oh where did we put the remote control?

I'm getting tired of watching the wonders of the Chinese business scene in Mandarin.