HERE IN MY HOME

The Forgotten Story of … Abraham Klein, the 'master of the whistle'

2012-03-24T15:49:00.005+08:00

Clockwise from top: Abraham Klein at his museum in Haifa in 2012; booking Francis Lee during the 1970 World Cup; and presiding over the Italy-Brazil classic in his final World Cup game. Photograph: Abraham Klein/Popperfoto/Getty Images

The little Israeli Abraham Klein survived politics, prejudice and even the Holocaust to become the best referee in the world.

Posted by

Rob Smyth

Thursday 22 March 2012, 10.31 GMT

This is a feature-length piece, so you may wish to print off for the journey home or some such.

Abraham Klein had his hands in his pockets. He was 36 years old and about to referee his first World Cup game. To one side stood Pele, Carlos Alberto, Rivelino and Jairzinho; to the other Bobby Moore, Bobby Charlton, Geoff Hurst and Gordon Banks. This was the grandest game, between the favourites Brazil and the holders England; the final before the final. The referee was an unknown Israeli. One report said that appointing him was "like sending a boy scout to Vietnam".

Klein trusted his ability; so did Fifa. But anybody with an anima would have been nervous. He had refereed international games before. Only five of them, though, none anywhere near this stratosphere. This was a football opera, and his hands were trembling like a violin string. It gave a whole new meaning to the pre-match handshake. "I was very nervous," he says. "My hands were shaking, so I put them in my pockets. I did not want the players to see how my hands were moving. Then I took them out and I decided to be strong in my body and in my hand." He met both captains with an unyielding handshake, looked left and right and blew the whistle for the start of the match. His life had just taken an almighty fork in the road.

Cinderella as done by HBO

The past may be a foreign country, but that's no excuse for xenophobia. The arrogance of modernity dictates that the best we have ever seen becomes the best that ever there was. How would we know?

It's certainly true of referees. At the end of the 20th century, Pierluigi Collina was widely perceived to be the best referee in the history of football. Collina was a wonderful referee, surely the best of his generation; beyond that, we don't really know. Suggestions that he was bald head and shoulders above all other referees is an insult to those who excelled before him – not least Abraham Klein, the marvellous Israeli referee who was generally accepted as the world's best in the 1970s and early 1980s. In a piece in the Times during Italia 90, the veteran football writer David Miller said Klein was "probably the best referee for the past 20 years". Alan Robinson, the overseas and services secretary of the English Referees' Association from 1968 to 2004, described him as "the master of the whistle". In the interests of balance, we must point out that not everybody concurred. Klein did not appear in Graham Poll's list of the 50 greatest referees of all time, a list that includes – and you'll like this – Graham Poll.

Klein's is an astonishing story, pitched somewhere between feelgood fairytale and life-affirming quality drama; Cinderella as done by HBO. To say his is a life less ordinary doesn't begin to do it justice. He survived prejudice, politics and even the Holocaust to reach the top of his trade. He made his World Cup debut in one of the tournament's most famous matches - when, in referee years, he was barely out of short pants. He missed the 1974 World Cup because of the Munich massacre of his fellow Israelis two years earlier. He was scandalously deprived of the World Cup final of 1978, punished for his own scrupulous excellence. He ran the line in the 1982 World Cup while not knowing whether his son was alive or dead. He overcame all that to be regarded as peerless. No wonder he says determination is his strongest characteristic.

It would be enough to take decades off most men, yet Klein is a miracle of fitness and optimism. He turns 78 on 29 March, but his physical and mental sharpness defy his age. He is still the same weight as he was when he refereed Brazil and England in 1970. Look down at your stomach now and imagine that it will be the same in 42 years' time. Exactly.

Klein is the type of person who sees the good in everything and everyone (except baseball, a rare hate). When we talk, back in January, he is full of the joys of Novak Djokovic versus Lleyton Hewitt in the Australian Open. "Wonderful tennis. What can I tell you?" Even on the phone from the other side of the world, he radiates an avuncular wisdom. He has a habit of saying, "I must tell you …", and when he does you feel like you are settling down for an audience with Mr Miyagi. Klein is also unfailingly polite; when you say matter-of-factly that he was the world's best referee, he says simply, "Thank you, thank you".

If this paints a picture of Klein as a soft man, don't believe it. He has an innate toughness that allowed him to control matches with natural authority in an age when hard man roamed the green with malevolent intent. That, and a level of preparation that would put most modern referees to shame, never mind those 30 years ago, were two of the keys to his success.

Klein has the lovely habit of talking in the present tense, with a voice that – although his generally excellent English is occasionally broken – you want to present verbatim. He regularly uses the phrase "I feel it", testament to the sixth sense that served him so well on the field. Another of his favourite words is "unbelievable". This is no Chris Kamara-like tic. Klein's story is one you wouldn't dream of scripting.

'Don't eat all the bread!'

Timisoara is often described as the most beautiful city in Romania. A piece in this paper spoke of its "bold, age-worn architecture", "handsome, cracked grandeur" and "wealth of genuinely grand Habsburg buildings". This gallery shows that your retinas could do a lot worse. Yet sometimes beauty is in the mind's eye of the beholder. There is no beauty for Abraham Klein. Timisoara is where he was born and spent his first 13 years, six of them during the second world war. "My memories from that city are so bad that when I was in Romania as a Uefa observer two or three times they ask me if I want to go to Timosara to see my city," he says. "I told them, 'I don't want to go'. What I remember, I don't want to remember again."

Klein eventually escaped Timisoara, one of 500 children who were put on a train to Holland. "My mother was still alive," he says. "Many of my family were killed in Auschwitz, in the concentration camps. My father was lucky that he left Romania in 1937 before the war starts. When the war starts it was impossible to leave the country with my mother. For five years it was very difficult for us. My mother had six sisters; we lived with them and the parents in two rooms. The situation was not the best." It's so far beyond our comprehension that there's no point even trying to empathise.

The train journey took three weeks, with very little food and no parents; those who were still alive had to stay in Romania. The children were taken to a school in Apeldoorn – "a very small place in Holland, a beautiful place" – where they would stay for a year. "I remember the first meal we had. It was lunchtime after three weeks on the train. When we arrived at the restaurant there was plenty of bread on the table. We run inside, all the children, we start eating the bread. Then they come to tell us, 'Wait, wait, we have plenty of food – we have soup, milk, potatoes. Don't eat all the bread!'"

The memories are some of the happiest of Klein's life. "I must tell you that whenever I come back to Holland, I go to see Apeldoorn." After a year, he went to a kibbutz in Israel, then back to live with his parents in Haifa. "I come to the conclusion that the life in a kibbutz is not for me." The kindness that he found in Apeldoorn tattooed itself on his soul. "There are things in life that you cannot forget. When, after the second world war, a country like Holland gives you the feeling that you are at home; when they give you everything: food, education, sport, etcetera, etcetera … these are things that you cannot forget. It was something unbelievable."

Preparing to succeed

Abraham Klein was not supposed to be a referee. He loved football and wanted to be a footballer. His father had played for MTK Budapest in Hungary; Klein was good, but not up to that standard. Serendipity did what needed to be done. In the mid-50s, on a break from army duty, his parents sent him to buy some trousers from a tailor called Jonas. Jonas was about to leave to referee an amateur game. He told Klein to come with him, and that he would make his trousers after the game.

Jonas turned an ankle during the match. He asked Klein to step in.

"I told him, 'I don't know the laws of the game'.

'But you've played the game?'

I told him, 'Yes I was a player, not the best but I know what is a foul.'

So he said, 'The laws of the game are very simple, it's not university. Somebody make a foul, you whistle.'

'That's all?' That's all the laws?'

'That's enough for this game.'

Klein showed such natural aptitude for refereeing, and such enjoyment of it, that he soon took the formal refereeing examinations. He would catch up with Jonas more than two decades later. Jonas later moved to New York, and found Klein among 60,000 people at a New York Cosmos game. "But," said Klein in this interview, "he didn't have my trousers …"

By then, Klein was wearing the trousers on the field of play. He rose through the ranks, refereeing army games, youth games, Israeli league games – and even the first meeting between teams from West Germany and Israel. In 1969, Hapoel Nahariya played against an amateur German team named Bayern Hof. Klein had no idea of its significance until he was interviewed by a German TV company 40 years later for a documentary.

He had refereed his first Israeli league game in 1958, at the age of 24; six years later he graduated to international football, when Israel played a friendly against the Netherlands. In 1965, at the age of 31, he was given his first major game: Italy v Poland in Rome. It was on a scale previously unimaginable. The biggest grounds in Israel held 20,000; now he would be officiating a World Cup qualifier in front of 80,000. Klein decided to take matters into his own hands – a week before the match, on his own initiative and out of his own pocket, he went to watch Roma play Napoli at the Stadio Olimpico.

"I decided, alone, to take a plane in the morning," he says. "I come back late with Alitalia, 10 o'clock at night I remember. I went to the game, I bought a ticket; nobody knew that I was there. I was in the stadium with the people, in the crowd, and I feel the weather, you know; I feel how they behave. I was shocked, because 80,000 people were shouting and crying."

He was not shocked a week later when he returned for the Poland game. Klein's preparation could not have been more thorough. He learned as much as possible about the players – this in an age before computers, never mind the internet, and when phone calls overseas were extremely expensive. Klein wrote to a friend in Poland, asking for information on their team, and persuaded Gazzetta dello Sport to send him a series of cuttings. "They wrote everything every day about everybody," he says. "They know more than the family about the player." He learned that Gigi Rivera was a star player "and that the defenders try all the time to kick him". Klein, always a keen exponent of the advantage rule - "one of the most beautiful things in the game" - vowed to play it wherever possible. Three of Italy's goals in a 6-1 win came from advantages. The Fifa observers at the ground took notice.

Throughout his career, Klein was not prepared to fail. The level of his preparation, both physical and mental, was extraordinary. He was not years ahead of his time; he was a generation ahead. "It's a good advantage – not just in refereeing but in everything in life – if you know the person who is standing before you," he says. He would study hours of videos to see what tactics the teams used, which players dived, which tried to bully opponents or referees. In 1970 he arrived early and spent a fortnight in the Camino Royale in Guadalajara, acclimatising and studying teams.

"I know the tactics of the Brazilian players," he says. "I saw that inside the area – or just outside, because of Rivelino's free kicks – that if it was shoulder to shoulder they would be very close to the grass. If you remember the [England] game, [Alan] Mullery with Pele inside the area, shoulder to shoulder and Pele was down. So I tried to learn everything, and also the behaviour when you make your decisions.

"Before every tournament I try to learn the language. Of course I know Hungarian, my mother language (Timisoara was originally part of Hungary), and Romanian. I speak some German, not the best. I learn Spanish, French, Italian because at school I learn Latin so it's very simple. I understand not 100%, but if I understand more than 50% when I read sport magazines, that is enough."

He understood 100% about diet and exercise. In his 1995 guidebook for officials, The Referee's Referee, Klein goes into rare detail about his preparation. Everything is explained down to the last carbohydrate portion, the last check of your pulse rate, the last 2,000-metre jog and the last 50-metre sprint (backwards, this time, to simulate match conditions). In the mid-1970s, when Prozone was but a glint in Sam Allardyce's eye, Klein measured that he ran seven and a half miles in a match.

Before that Mexico World Cup he climbed mountains in Israel to help cope with the altitude; before the Argentina World Cup eight years he trained in a similar climate in Cape Town. In 1982, concerned that, at the age of 48, his fitness was not what it should be - "the passing of time started to put marks on my body" - he commissioned a physical trainer called Jacob Almor, who prepared a bespoke program.

"It was based on gradually increasing my stamina and my physical conditioning," wrote Klein in his 2010 autobiography, The Master of the Whistle. "It included long-distance running on sandy beaches and on hard surface streets of my town, Haifa. Long-distance endurance cycling and short speed sprints on an athletic field as well as utilising a gym, where weight lifting and rubber-bands equipment helped my load endurance and flexibility. We started slowly but then picked up the tempo. The training was intense twice each day, mornings and evenings. It was murder; very hard; plenty of suffering for a 48-year-old chap. I shed nine pounds in four weeks and prepared my body for 120 minutes of a physical stress load so as to allow me proper refereeing stamina for extra time, just in case."

Almor wanted no money, and said it would be an honour to help Klein. But always the preparation was done off Klein's own bat and, when necessary, out of his own pocket. In his day referees had to pass the Cooper Test – running 2,600m in 12 minutes – as part of their preparation. When he later became chairman of the referees' committee he immediately upped it to 3,000 metres. "I told the referees: you must be fitter than the players, because there are 11 players on the field. You have to be in the right position. A striker can miss a goal, but if a referee misses an incident it can be catastrophic. Some very, very famous referees – I don't want to tell you their names – made some bad decisions in World Cup games. It was their last World Cup. I made mistakes in my country in some games, I know, but I couldn't afford for 1970 to be my last World Cup."

Learning from those mistakes was a key part of his development. "The first analysis is the most important thing after the game – to learn, and not to think you are the best in the world. When I met my wife she told me: every time you can do better. And she is right. You can do better in everything. When I made a mistake, then I try to avoid these mistakes again. I had a semi-final in Tel Aviv when the ball was not over the line but I was in a poor position and awarded a goal. Everybody wanted to kill me.

"In Italy v Brazil in 1982 – the last moment of the game - you can see Dino Zoff on the line with the ball [after saving Oscar's header]. I had an excellent view. You can see the Brazilian players wave their hands that the ball is in, but you can see me wave that the ball is on the line."

In the last minute of his last World Cup game as referee, Klein's immaculate preparation had paid off one last time.

Emotional intelligence

Abraham Klein arrived in Guadalajara in late May 1970. For the next two weeks, he ignored the not inconsiderable temptations of a fascinating city, and concentrated on his usual preparation. "I didn't leave my hotel for two weeks, even for one day, to see the city," he says. "I didn't see the city at all, only the hotel and the stadium. I want to concentrate only on the game. I know that I cannot have a bad game. It was very important for me because I know that, coming from a small country, I have a big responsibility to the Fifa members who appointed me to the game. Later I ask Sir Stanley Rous or Ken Aston (the Fifa president and chairman of the referees' committee, respectively) why they chose me. I was a very young referee with no experience, only five international games. Aston always told me: we trust you, you are honest, you make good impression and you are in good physical condition."

Klein wasn't plucked out of thin air; he was picked because he could cope with thin air. He had shown that during the Mexico Olympics in 1968, and Fifa knew he was fit enough to cope with Mexico's oppressive heat. England's Terry Cooper would lose 12 pounds in the match. For Klein it was squeaky-bum time in more ways than one. He still had the problem of being perceived as the boy scout in 'Nam. The players of Brazil and England did not know who he was. "In the first moment, they look me: 'Who is standing here in the middle of the field?' They knew nothing about me. I try from the first moment to respect the players; I look their eyes. A little later during the game they understood that they must also respect my refereeing."

He controlled the game calmly from the first whistle. It flowed gracefully from end to end, a festival of goodwill and mutual respect, and is still one of the World Cup's iconic contests. "A referee is feeling during the game and after the game, how is he refereeing, how is his performance. If you make a mistake, you alone know immediately. You feel it: you feel it because of the behaviour of the player, you feel it when you watch the coach. I'm not talking about [José] Mourinho; he always protests against the referees. You have some coaches who you respect. If they wave their hands once every 10 years you think about it. But I feel very good in that Brazil/England game."

There were a couple of major incidents. Francis Lee was booked for a late challenge on the goalkeeper Felix; then, just before half-time, Pele fell in the area after a challenge from Alan Mullery. It would have been so easy, too easy, for a young referee to be seduced by the greatest player in the world. Klein simply waved play on. He later called it "the best decision of my life".

His performance received universal and divine haskamah. "It was a tough game," said Pele, "but he always had total control of the action." In his Story of the World Cup, Brian Glanville said the game was "admirably refereed by the obscure Israeli referee Abraham Klein, an inspired appointment".

What was most striking was his apparently effortless authority. Unlike some of the other great referees, Collina and Jack Taylor in particular, Klein did not have physical authority. He was 5ft 5in, a fraction over 10st. But he could impose himself in other ways. He was a big believer in body language; a firm handshake, a perfectly upright stance, a decisive signal or whistle; and eye contact, always eye contact. It soon became apparent he did not suffer insolence or indiscipline. He was the teacher you knew not to take liberties with. In a sense, his control was supernatural. After that Brazil game, the Fort Scot Tribute said he "showed he had the mysterious and decisive power to move into an explosive situation and calm then down by the simple exertion of cool authority".

He could impose himself physically, in his own little way. Before one game, Klein was inspecting the footwear of a notorious troublemaker and decided to squeeze the player's wrist. "I merely applied a little bit of pressure, ever so slight, so he knew I was making a point: we'll have no problems today, will we?" During an NASL game, when Johan Cruyff was faffing, refusing to retreat 10 yards at a free-kick, Klein jolted him into compliance with a zesty blow of the whistle only a couple of yards from Cruyff's earlobe.

"You either have authority or not," says Klein. "I didn't need to give red cards. I feel that I was able to control the game and the players respect my decisions. I was very happy [that I did not have to give too many red cards]. I felt that the most important thing in the game is that the players respect me; if you gain their respect you can do what you want in the game."

His control of games came in no small part from his amateur psychology. Later, after reading the work of Daniel Goleman, he could give it his own name: emotional intelligence. "Goleman wrote in his book one thing which I think is very important: that to be successful in your life you need to have emotional intelligence. You have it or not; you cannot learn this; you cannot go to university for this. I know many people, many famous referees – I do not want to give you names as it is not very nice – who did not finish high school, yet they were excellent referees. They have emotional intelligence, because they feel what other people think, and can imagine what the other person is going to do. You have many politicians and businessmen: they are not intelligent, but they are very successful in what they do in their life.

"I think you can learn how to prove your authority, but you must have your authority in the first place. You can see it with Jack Taylor. I can't remember a player that has come close to him. He's a tall man, like a rock, and when he looks at players – they run away! He has it, you know. I don't know what he is doing today. Give my best regards to him, I love the gentleman.

"Jack Taylor was the best referee I ever saw in my life. I learned a lot from him. I remember when he refereed the World Cup final in 1974 and awarded the penalty kick against West Germany, and Franz Beckenbauer just start to come close to him. I saw him stood like a rock with his hands waving, and Beckenbauer - one of the biggest players in the world – left immediately, he ran away from there.

"This is the referee for me. Even if he makes a mistake, the players respect him, everybody respects him. This was [Pierluigi] Collina, this was Jack Taylor, this was [Karoly] Palotai, this was Leo Horn. These four referees in my opinion were the greatest referees."

The authority of Klein's performance in the England/Brazil game impressed everybody. "Whenever people introduce me, even now, they say, 'Abraham Klein who refereed England v Brazil', not Brazil v Italy or Italy v Argentina." The pride Klein takes in his career is evident throughout – not just on a personal level, but because of what he achieved on behalf of a small football country. After the game he paid a local photographer $100 - "at the time it was big money for me" - for a negative of him tossing the coin with Carlos Alberto and Bobby Moore. It is one of hundreds of items of memorabilia on display in a little museum at his home. It includes the match balls from England v Brazil in 1970 and Italy v Brazil in 1982; a series of cards on which he is photographed with the likes of Alberto, Moore, Dino Zoff and Karl-Heinz Rummenigge; rosettes; a silver plate signed by the Italy squad of 1982; a watch with a dedication from Ken Aston ("you never let me down, not as a referee and not as a friend"; and even a toiletry bag from the Scottish FA. Every memento tells a story.

He has a less welcome memory of the 1970 World Cup: Montezuma's revenge, which meant he had to pull out after originally being awarded the quarter-final between Italy and Mexico. "I was very, very, very upset because I feel good after the Brazil game." His mood was improved when Sir Stanley Rous told him: "It's not your last World Cup."

Klein was paid £10 for refereeing the game. In the future he was lucky to get that; at the 1982 World Cup the referees were paid only expenses. Back then – and this will be hard for younger readers to understand – people really did do it for the love of the game. He never gave up his day job as a PE teacher. "Money for me was not important. To have a game like England-Brazil or Italy-Brazil is much more than a million dollars. Believe me, if I had a million dollars at that time and they asked me if I want pay a million dollars to referee Brazil v England, I would write a cheque. It changed my life."

It not only changed his life; it came to define it. "I feel very good with this, believe me. I live this game all my life, more than any other game."

A great and serious mistake

The letter cut straight to the point. It was written in 1995 by Ken Aston, the former chairman of the Fifa Referees' Committee, and addressed to Klein.

"Thanks you for your book … It is a great shame that you made a great mistake in your refereeing career. A very serious mistake which you could never recover, and one which everyone connected with the appointment of referees at international level remembered. And what you ask was this great and serious mistake? Simply that you were an Israeli. I must tell you that had I still been chairman of the Fifa Referees' Committee in 1982, you would without any doubt have been carrying the whistle and not the flag. I was happy to have been able to support you throughout your career simply because you deserve such support."

Politics cost Klein the World Cup final in 1978 (and perhaps 1982), a place in the 1974 tournament, and permeated his career. There was, at first, a mistrust of a referee from a small league, although that kind of prejudice was the least of Klein's worries. In 1981, when he went to French Guiana as part of the Fifa Coca-Cola Project, he was originally refused admission because Israelis were not allowed. When the rest of the Fifa party said they would get on the first return flight unless Klein was allowed in, the authorities relented. Far more damagingly, the Munich massacre of 1972, in which members of the Israeli Olympic team were taken hostage and killed, meant it was not safe for Klein to go to West Germany for the World Cup two years later.

Israel did not become a member of Uefa until 1990, so there was no chance for Klein to officiate major European league games. He does not have any grievance and says that Fifa "were 100% correct with me". If he couldn't quite access all areas, he at least got to go backstage. "No Israeli was allowed to officiate in the east countries in Europe, but I refereed USSR twice. I also refereed Cuba v Poland in the opening game in the Montreal Olympics, all the communist countries I was not allowed to enter. Fifa let me referee these nations when they play abroad." He also refereed the Intercontinental Cup match between Nottingham Forest and Nacional in 1980.

Klein became a whistle for hire (although 'hired' is a generous term given the amount he was usually paid). He refereed around 100 NASL games in four seasons, and covered nine games at the Mini World Cup in 1972, six as referee - including a quarter-final, semi-final and the final – and three as linesman. This was a particularly impressive achievement; shortly before the tournament Klein lacerated a muscle, had to put his leg in a cast and was told to forget about participating.

There was also a seriously awkward World Cup qualifier between Italy and England in 1976). There had been a climate of mutual mistrust for years, which exploded in a nasty match at the US Bicentennial Tournament six months earlier. With the stakes so much higher in Rome, Fifa called for its top man. The Sunday Mirror described Klein as "the man with the most unenviable job in football". He dismissed as "nonsense" reports that he had been visited at his home by Italians, and said simply: "The game doesn't worry me." It worried almost everyone else. A bit of the old ultraviolence seemed inevitable. "If all that Abraham Klein has to watch this afternoon is tongues," wrote David Lacey on the day of the match in the Guardian, "he will be fortunate."

Klein, on advice from Aston, used the advantage sparingly. It meant more fouls than usual – 48- but a game that never got out of hand. "The game, while hard, was refereed firmly and sensibly by the Israeli Abraham Klein … who was quick to clamp down on anything that might provoke retaliation," said Lacey in this paper. The Mirror said he ruled "with an iron hand". Klein's excellence gave a lie to the old adage to the referee should be invisible. You couldn't fail to notice that you hadn't noticed him.

Instead of becoming notorious, the match is now remembered for a classic goal from Roberto Bettega in Italy's 2-0 win. After the game, he received another letter from Ken Aston:

19 November 1976

My dear Abraham,

Bravo, well done. Mrs Aston said to me, 'Abraham didn't let you down', and she knows how important it is to me. The fact that England lost does not perturb me in the least; it might be said that Italy were the better team, and certainly they were, but the best team was the third team of match officials. Please pass on to your two colleagues my congratulation …

Klein covered so many great games around the world. But he never refereed a World Cup final.

A real hero

The English tabloids have not always been known for their support of foreign referees. The hounding of Urs Meier after Euro 2004 was a disgrace, while Tom Henning Øvrebø was openly ridiculed when he made a mess of the 2009 Champions League semi-final between Barcelona and Chelsea. Thirty-one years earlier, the tabloids had only kind words for Klein. Particularly the Daily Mirror. "The first authentic hero of the 1978 World Cup has emerged at last – and it is not a pampered, overpaid professional footballer," wrote Frank McGhee under the headline 'Abraham restores our faith'. "He is Abraham Klein of Israel."

Klein was praised worldwide for his immaculate performance in the group game between Italy and the hosts Argentina. With both teams having qualified for the second phase, it might have seemed like a nice easy dead rubber. It didn't quite pan out that way. Klein says it was the most difficult game of his career.

At the time Argentina was run by a military junta, and the sense persisted that anybody else winning the World Cup was simply not an option. After they beat Holland in the final, one of the Dutch players said that his side would not have got out of the stadium alive had they won. He was only half joking. You can't overestimate how intimidating it was. In Argentina's first two games, 2-1 victories over Hungary and France, the referees had caved in to the relentless pressure of 77,000 shrieking fans.

Hungary had two players sent off; France conceded a dodgy penalty and didn't get a much clearer penalty of their own. "You can ask Platini what he thinks about that game," says Klein. "You can ask Hungary for their opinion about that game."

Argentina needed to beat Italy to stay in Buenos Aires for the second group stage. In his History of the World Cup, Cris Freddi said that Argentina's "excesses were kept in check by the best referee in the world". Italy won 1-0. "The crowd were very upset. I had no problem with the players; they respect me. The crowd, you know, they pay and when they pay they can tell you whatever they think about you and your mother."

Klein turned down a couple of penalty appeals just before the break, which led to vicious abuse either side of half-time. This time his hands were not in his pockets. He strode off the pitch knowing he had made the right decisions, a proud monument of conviction and moral courage. "When I'm on the pitch, only two things are important to me: being fair to both teams and making my decisions bravely," he told Simon Kuper in Ajax, The Dutch, The War. "I think all referees are fair, but not all of them are brave, probably."

He looked the beast in the eye and did not blink. "There was nothing more impressive in this World Cup," wrote Brian Glanville, "than the way he stood between his linesmen at half-time in the Argentina-Italy game, scorning the banshee whistling of the incensed crowd."

This is not to say Klein was entirely unaffected by the abuse. He is human and he needs not to be hated. "The feeling is very bad," he says of his reaction at half-time. To avert a similar reception, he decided to delay his return on to the field. Instead of leading the players out, he let the Argentina players go first; his return was lost in the hero worship. It was an ingenious and highly successful manoeuvre.

"I felt stronger in the second half because I know all my decisions were correct. I feel very good with this. Even after the game, they told me, 'don't go out, the crowd is waiting for you'. I told them, 'I'm not afraid'. I was never afraid in my career. I know that the crowd will do nothing after the game. I was not afraid to do what a referee must do in the game. There was no problem."

He keeps a scrapbook full of praise for his performance:

'Diesmal kein Heimschiedsrichter' ("No home-favouring ref this time").

"Abraham Klein from Israel, who was unwaveringly insistent on applying the laws as they were written - with the resultant hail of abuse from the home country, when they lost, and widespread acclaim in Europe. Ironically, his brave, conspicuous performance robbed Klein of his rightful claim to the final." (From The Argentina Story by David Miller)

'Il miglior fischietto è Klein' ("The best referee is Klein")

"I hope the brave, little Israeli ref, Abraham Klein, gets the final." (Brian Glanville in the Sunday Times)

'Ganz gross, Herr Klein!' ("Fabulous, Mr Klein!")

The comments were echoed in the Guardian. "Italy produced a marvellously balanced and co-ordinated performance to beat Argentina," wrote David Lacey, "and much of the credit for creating the circumstances in which they were allowed to do so must go to Abraham Klein, of Israel, whose firm, fair refereeing was precisely what the situation demanded."

In the Mirror, Frank McGhee said "he didn't make a single wrong decision in the whole 90 minutes of a marvellous match … My most abiding memory of the match is the way both teams queued up at the end to shake hands with Klein. They knew, we knew, he had done most to make it a match to remember."

After another excellent performance in the second group stage match between – of all teams - Austria and West Germany, he seemed a certainty for the final. Pele thought it; Jack Taylor thought it; even educated fleas thought it. But it went to the Italian Sergio Gonella – reportedly on the casting vote of another Italian, Dr Artemio Franchi, the chairman of the referees' committee. Klein's consolation prize was the third-place play-off between Brazil and Italy. Clive Thomas, the Welshman who also referred at the tournament, called the decision an "utter disgrace". Cris Freddi also described it as "disgraceful" in his World Cup history.

"To tell you the truth I was very disappointed," Klein says. "I think at that time I was fit to referee the final. But only one man can referee the final, and if I look back I am still happy with what I had in my life, in my refereeing life." Klein is certain he would have had no problem being impartial, despite his affection for Apeldoorn.

Gonella lost control of the match even before it started, with the kick-off delayed by over 10 minutes by Argentinian gamesmanship. First they came on to the field late; then they complained about the bandage on Rene van de Kerkhof's arm, even though he had been wearing it all tournament. The match was a nasty affair. Argentina did what they had been doing most of the tournament; Holland showed us why Netherlands is all but an anagram of neanderthals.

There are a couple of theories for Klein's rejection. One is that Argentina protested about his links with Holland. It sounds good, but at that stage nobody knew of his year in Apeldoorn. "Nobody knew because nobody asked me," he says. "Nobody at the Argentinian government or Fifa knows about it, so this cannot be true."

More likely is that he was punished for his performance in the Italy game; that Argentina bullied Fifa into picking another referee. "Maybe this was the reason," he says. Either way, there is a startling lack of bitterness. "Some of the journalists told that some of the members of the referees' committee wanted me, but I cannot tell you one wrong about the referees' committee or the Fifa president. They support me throughout my career. You cannot find many referees from small countries who had the games that I had. I refereed Brazil seven times, Italy seven times. They gave me the best games in the world. Maybe Gonella was better than me."

The bell rings

Klein knew about control. For over a decade, he had controlled the best players in the world. He thought he knew about control. He was wrong.

"It is the one time I lost control," he said. He was sat in a hotel in Spain, preparing for the World Cup. He had no idea where his son was, or whether he was alive.

After 1978, Klein was due a quiet, trouble-free World Cup. Some chance. First came yet more politics. With Kuwait and Algeria having qualified, Arab TV stations threatened to boycott the World Cup if an Israeli was allowed to referee. On 15 March, when the referees list was to be announced, Klein paced around the room like a teenager waiting for a call from the one they mistakenly thought was The One.

"I kept fiddling and checking my phone," he recalled in Master of the Whistle. "Is my line connected? Do I have a dial tone? As time passed by I have gotten more nervous, more morose. I was in agony and felt I was going crazy." A few hours later came relief: Klein's candidacy had been unanimously approved by Fifa's referees committee, who had reached a compromise: his name would be erased from the screen during broadcasts to Arab countries.

After more bureaucracy – the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports originally rejected his application for leave – Klein prepared to depart for Spain. Then things took a darker twist. Palestinian terrorists shot Shlomo Argov, the Israeli ambassador for England, in the head. He was in a coma for three months. Retaliation was inevitable. Klein's first born, Amit, was on active duty, but he reasoned with himself that a new recruit would not be in the firing line.

He landed in Spain and settled in for a few days. Then the phone rang on 6 June; his wife told him that the war was on in Lebanon, and that Amit was on standby. "Suddenly I went through a range of emotions that I never felt before; a worry mixed with fear," he wrote in Master of the Whistle. "My body got numb and a cold sweat started to cover me head to toe. All I could do was to sit on my bed, feel sorry for Amit and for myself. And then uncontrollable tears started to come down my cheeks. For the first time in my life I was not in control; I lost it and it was a feeling I could not bear."

The next day Klein found out that his son was in combat in the hot spot of Damour. He requested a meeting with Dr Franchi, the chairman of the referees' committee, and told he was in no fit state to referee a game. "'Are you sure about this?', he asked. 'Yes I am 100% sure. My son is in combat in Lebanon. My family has not heard from him. We have sign, no word, whether he is alive. I am extremely worried about him and his whereabouts and therefore I do not feel like I am in the proper state of mind to referee a World Cup game.'"

Klein spent the first round as either linesman or fourth official. For nearly two weeks he had no word of his son. On 18 June he ran the line in Italy v Peru. "I did my job while my mind was floating. I felt like I was enclosed in some space bubble. Mostly my thoughts were with Amit." That evening he returned to his hotel to find a letter waiting for him at reception.

Shalom dear dad,

Today is Friday and as you know it happens to be my birthday. I am celebrating it here in far away Lebanon. Everybody got recruited and called in. The Core of Engineers has been operating on the Litani for three weeks. Sadly a lot of guys that I knew got either killed or seriously wounded and my heart is broken. I am already waiting impatiently to see a World Cup game refereed by you (I wish to see you referee many games as well as the final). Here, everybody is collecting newspaper clips about the games and passes them on to me. Much success! We are all crossing our fingers for your success.

Love, Amit.

"I could not stop my tears," said Klein. "It is difficult to explain to someone the emotions that father goes through when reading a letter from his son in combat. What a difference a sign of life in the form of a small letter can make on a parent." Later he heard his son's voice for the first time since arriving in Spain. "When the phone rang in my hotel room and I heard Amit's voice on the other side I thought I was hallucinating: how the heck he has managed to reach me on the phone in the middle of a war to communicate with me? It was one of the most exciting phone conversations that I had ever had in my life. He was not on the front combat lines as I had assumed but his unit had done a considerable mileage on foot in search of the hidden enemy."

His son implored Klein to return to refereeing. Amit Klein would go on to become an international referee himself, and today he is a Uefa observer. His old man wasn't quite finished yet. He had been assigned to Brazil v Italy in the second stage. The magnificent Brazilians needed a draw to reach the semi-finals; an unconvincing Italy needed to win. Klein was peculiarly unexcited. He thought Brazil would win easily. He told his two linesman that "it will be a game that nobody will remember in a few months".

"How wrong was I?" he reflects. He never refereed a World Cup final, but perhaps the greatest game in World Cup history is a decent alternative. When Paolo Rossi scored his second goal to put Italy 2-1 up after 25 minutes, Klein says "the bell rang" in his head. "I realised that I was part of history in the making."

The heat and end-to-end nature of the game would have been too much for most 48-year-olds, but Klein's fitness served him well. With the score 1-1, Brazil appealed for a penalty when Claudio Gentile pulled Zico's shirt so hard that he almost ripped it off. The linesman had flagged a second earlier for offside, however. "If the linesman's flag would not have been raised to indicate an offside call I would have whistled without a hesitation for a penalty and given Gentile a second yellow card. However, Zico had a hard time accepting my decision. He was furious with me and continued to show me again and again the great tear in his shirt. 'So go change your shirt' I told him in return."

Italy went on to win an epic match 3-2, despite a furious late assault from Brazil that included Zoff's save on the line from Oscar. "It was an invasion, like in Normandy, with all the players," he remembers. Again he seemed a likely candidate for the final, but Fifa went for Arnaldo Coelho. "The obvious choice was Abraham Klein," said Brian Glanville in his Story of the World Cup. "But the Referees' Committee, pleased with itself and as incompetent as ever, compromised pathetically by assigning Klein to … the replay." Klein was appointed linesman for the first final.

"In 82, the best referee of the tournament was Coelho, and I was very happy that I was on the line," he says. "I was the first man to congratulate him and I told him I was very happy I was with him." Had there been a replay, Klein would have refereed the World Cup final at the age of 48. Italy won 3-1.

So now then

Klein retired in 1984, at the age of 50. He would later be chairman of the referees committee in Israel, and a Fifa referees instructor. He also refereed at the Special Olympics in 1995 and 1999. Now 77, he has the chance to experience the globe, not just colour it in on a map, and to enjoy the friendships fostered through football. "It's unbelievable," he says. "What refereeing has done for me is not only about the games, and not only that I saw the world – because when I was a referee I travelled around the world but I didn't see nothing from the world. Today if I land anywhere in the world somebody is waiting for me. It's a good feeling, and when they come to Israel I do the same, believe me."

He goes everywhere with his wife Bracha. "I have a wonderful wife, believe me. She accompanies me around the world." Last year they went on a cruise from Rome, first stopping off at the same hotel that Klein had stayed in before the Poland game in 1965. "In reception there was a man, not old but maybe 60. I give him my passport He look my passport, he look my passport, he look my face. '82, Italia-Brasil!' He look me. I told him, 'Yes, Italia-Brasil'. He give me my key. It was a pre-paid room. We get the lift and go to our room. It was a suite, an unbelievable suite. I told my wife, we go back to the luggage, it was a mistake. I did not pay for a suite, I pay for an ordinary room. I go back, I told him, 'We are very sorry, I pay for another room'. 'Nonononono, it is our great pleasure that you stay in our hotel'. Then he sent to our room wine and chocolate. Unbelievable."

Klein still lives in Haifa, close to his daughter and his granddaughters. "I am living in an apartment hotel, very close to the sea. I feel the winter air." He still does around three hours' exercise a day: swimming, gym work or just walking along the bench. Even now, as he approaches his ninth decade on earth, he sticks to his fighting weight. "I am very fit today. I am 65 kilos (just over 10st), the same as when I refereed England v Brazil. When I go on a cruise I put on two or three kilos because they feed you 24 hours a day, but when I get home I work it off. I am a very rich man. You know why? I don't need to buy any clothes! Not the same shoes but the same clothes …"

Then there are the leisure pursuits for which there was so little time during his career. "I tell you I am very busy. I am busy with my training, with my family, with reading books, going to concerts or the opera, meeting friends. I love sport, I play tennis I watch sport every day, NBA, English football. I am a happy man I can tell you, very happy. And if I am looking back, I am very happy with my career. Very, very happy."

There is no arrogance, just pride and still, perhaps, a hint of incredulity at this unbelievable life. He does not need the validation of being called the best referee of all time. He gets validation every time he looks in his museum, or every time he flies to a different part of the world and is introduced as the man who refereed England v Brazil in 1970. It's enough to say that Klein was one of the greatest referees of all time. And that he has lived a life like no other.

Thanks to Abraham Klein, Dan Friedman and Cris Freddi.

[ORIGINAL LINK IS HERE]

Phone call from a special one

2012-02-22T22:18:00.002+08:00

Perhaps I’m waiting for your call, and

Hunting for your attention and kindness, I

Obsess with your companion and compassion, but

Neither can replace your true physical and emotion presence,

Even you aren’t coming here.

Curiosity always urges me to understand you more;

Apart from your voice, I like your smile too.

Lemons sometimes taste very sour, but,

Lemon honey always brings back fond memory.

The Matrix: Phone call

On that day...

2012-02-13T23:53:00.008+08:00

6 days before I return to Nibong Tebal. 6 days which feel like 6 hours. 6 days which will become only 1 day on 19th February 2012. 6 days before I face the brutal assault of the hype of CGPA – Constant Grumbling Pointless Arsehole. After all, those are just numbers.

Throughout the last 3 weeks, I attended numerous reunion, gathering, hang out, whatnot. The best feeling was to have your old pals with you, playing Big 2 and Baccarats, with the winner is exempted from sipping the beer. Poor winner.

After all these good times, they left one by one. Foo Ang went back to Sunway. Prof Dr. Khoo, Parkville. Kim Ming, Petaling Jaya. After 6 days, Cheuck will go back to Sintok, along with Kooi Heng. Song You, Sunway. Zhing Yik, Kota Kinabalu. Chea Teik, Kuching. Wei Keat, Batu Pahat. Kheng Jie, Bangi. Kai Hsiang, Skudai. Jason, Melbourne.

By the time I go back to Nibong Tebal, Sherlock Ho will be lying on his crouch. Zhen Sin will be eating Laksa at Taman Sri Wang. MMU always try to be the odd ones.

I’ll remember the good old time when we key in the markah disiplin, the time when we boiled water to cook instant noodles in the class, the time when we soaked in our sweat after completing the ghost house (which really invited spirit into it), the time when we played football at school’s field on the graduation day, the time when we trolled each other and the staunch, loyal ~~dogs~~ prefects.

I really don’t know when we’ll gather again. Take care.

************************

Now, I know how he feels. Diing Shenq, ayam kambing back. Those day where we ate crappy rice will come back to haunt us. Anyway, I did survive the apocalypse for four months. Gun loaded, we’ll be trolling again during our dinner. Kae Hoong, please be alert to any intra or inter school stories! The news headlines will be coming back as well.

************************

Goh Chun Chang is damn handsome.

************************

I turned to my left, I thought you were sitting there talking to me, but, you weren't there. I saw you were staring into my eyes, but the seat in front of me was empty. What lingered around my mind was your back and your shadow.

************************

Last time when we were playing Baccarats, nobody raised their hand when being asked who isn’t single. It’s kinda weird to see there are so many couples breaking up, even the one who is praised by our oracle, Cik Ngan. So do I.

************************

We will spend 2 days in Sandakan, 1 day in Kundasang, 1 day in Labuan, 1 day in Kudat, 1 day in Kota Kinabalu. After that, I hit the backspace for 10 seconds. This trip isn't workable. We are going to Langkawi instead. Kelantan is not bad too.

************************

I had a good time at Little Cottage.

Power & Accuracy: He is showing us how to strike a ball... :p

When I saw he parked his car at OIB office

2012-02-01T11:59:00.002+08:00

I still remember it was at Class 34, Block B. Hung Yao told me his name is Ah Yeoh, his tuition centre is called Intanjaya and his class starts in December. I was in Form 3 that time. Fast forward to December 2006, I went to his tuition centre. The whole class only had less than 5 students and he taught us about Quadratic Equation. By January, the whole class increased from 5 to 55 and I make and re-make a lot of friends. Chuah Chian Yeong. Tan Foo Ang. Jason Tan. Ooi Wai Cheuck. Lau Kok Leong is so good in Add Maths that he skipped many classes. And definitely, Yeoh Kooi Chuan.

He gave out 120-page notes worth about RM 10 for free and asked us to donate the money to orphanage or old folk’s home instead. He purposely bought custom-made tables which are much heavier and more stable than the ready-made ones. He invested a lot in the infrastructure until he made losses (I think is more than RM 6,000 if I am not wrong) every year. The monthly RM 25 tuition fees were meant to tell you not to take things for granted and not for making profits.

We were even scolded for taking things for granted. He scolded Jason that Jason took things for granted that every time Jason was always late in paying fees. Song You was told to be more hardworking. I was reminded not to disturb people even I had finished solving all the problems.

He taught about 无师自通. He spoke about learning without teachers. He always advised us not to continue our study and go out to chase our dream. He is one of the pioneers in Olympiad Mathematics. In fact, he was included in the first batch of Malaysia National Olympiad Mathematics Team.

He rarely spoke about his early life. But one rainy day, after seeing only 2 students turned up for his tuition class, he put the teaching aside and started to talk a bit about his early life. He studied in UTM and he did some research. His research was about turning a complicated function which involved multiple parameters into a circle equation, and from there he could find out the centre of the circle. This research would have make serious impact on many things, i.e. engineering, military, weather forecast and etc. He even took out his thesis paper to give us a look. At the end, he was forced to relinquish his research due to lack of funding. He never told us where he continued his study after graduated from UTM but he did continue his postgraduate study overseas. In fact, he studied until PhD. We must refer him as “Our honourable Dr. Yeoh Kooi Chuan” and not Ah Yeoh.

Once, I received a RM 50 angpau from him. He rewarded me for getting decent result in SPM. Chuah Chian Yeong got RM 100 as he sapu all 1A. Even those who were with him during Form 3 will get substantial angpau from him if you get decent result in PMR. Even when you do not have any exam to squeeze any money from him, he might buy you some pisang goreng or banjo burger to light up your day, just after he received the tuition fees.

After we left Form 5, we still visited him, looking for advice on our future. He is an entrepreneur and businessman. Hence, his advice will be given in terms of business context. He opined we must change and evolve all the time and not stagnant or proud of our past glory. He encouraged us to find something (mostly business) to do, and chase our dream when we are still young. But, sometimes, we lack the much needed maturity to succeed and thus we enter university to train our mental strength.

Education is about gaining knowledge, and not for our career or for the sake of exams. What you can achieve if you have the best result in the world? It is about turning your knowledge into earnings. Of course the earnings is to survive, led a comfortable life and make sure your children do not need to worry about financial constrain. Being successful does not mean you must earn a million a year or drive luxury car. We must not indulge in material-centric life or fame.

Yes, he is not perfect. But he still has a lot of good qualities to learn from. Some successful businessmen venture into politics or make newspaper headlines very often. He runs the tuition centre although he made losses every year. He makes sure his students the best quality he can offer, from the fees, the notes, the infrastructure and etc. I see it as part of social responsibility. 取之社会，用之社会，回馈社会。He still quietly supporting Olympiad Mathematics activities and sometimes he even acts as Basketball Team Coach of SMK Ibrahim.

The last time I saw him, he looks older than before. His hairs turn hoary. But, you are still my mentor, maestro.

Pisang Goreng: If he is happy, you will get this, If he isn't, you will get stick.

Last minute

2012-01-29T23:55:00.003+08:00

“…This is not about Midas touch, or luck. In fact, this is calculated risk. This is science. This is about STRATEGIC PICKING.

First, do not do unnecessary things before exam. I see some people like to bulldoze everything before they enter exam hall. Please, never do all the questions. If you want to do it, don’t do for the sake of exam, do it for your mum. Perhaps she will be proud of you that her children managed to sapu all questions before going for exam.

Next, think of who will be setting the questions and which area will be tested. Based on these two things, you can formulate your own way to score the highest marks. Normally, it will be (a) maximize your knowledge or (b) maximize your understanding. Of course, you can make a hybrid from both methods.

Pinpoint which topics you MUST understand well and spend more time on it. Don’t forget to revise on the important topics at least once before the exam. Remember, you have to take risks and smartly during exam. This is because you never study consistently. But, you control what you write during exam and therefore you make decisions during exam in order to maximize your marks.

Since you don’t understand well the chapter because you study last minute, you have to use your own smart way to answer. Never stick to your limited knowledge since you can’t absorb much at the last minute and you won’t understand well. Hence, you need to use what you have inside your brain to do whatever which you do not know.

This is just like building something. What you need are materials which means you have to choose the materials which can build anything. When they ask you to construct a weird building, you need to use what materials you possess and build whatever to satisfy them. Take some risks to select only certain materials that will be useful to you. This is the SPOTTING part. One engineer may buy all materials in the shop; some may only buy basic materials and some may select the most important only due to time and financial constrain.

But honestly, this is not safe at all….”

– Revelation from stupidhsiang

“During our secondary school time, we are trained to survive even we are only given the last minute to prepare.” – Sherlock Ho

Last minute: Everything starts here

Pearls Before Breakfast

2011-12-02T18:59:00.003+08:00

Can one of the nation's great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour. Let's find out.

By Gene Weingarten

Washington Post Staff Writer

Sunday, April 8, 2007

HE EMERGED FROM THE METRO AT THE L'ENFANT PLAZA STATION AND POSITIONED HIMSELF AGAINST A WALL BESIDE A TRASH BASKET. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play.

It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush hour. In the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by. Almost all of them were on the way to work, which meant, for almost all of them, a government job. L'Enfant Plaza is at the nucleus of federal Washington, and these were mostly mid-level bureaucrats with those indeterminate, oddly fungible titles: policy analyst, project manager, budget officer, specialist, facilitator, consultant.

Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he's really bad? What if he's really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn't you? What's the moral mathematics of the moment?

On that Friday in January, those private questions would be answered in an unusually public way. No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities -- as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?

The musician did not play popular tunes whose familiarity alone might have drawn interest. That was not the test. These were masterpieces that have endured for centuries on their brilliance alone, soaring music befitting the grandeur of cathedrals and concert halls.

The acoustics proved surprisingly kind. Though the arcade is of utilitarian design, a buffer between the Metro escalator and the outdoors, it somehow caught the sound and bounced it back round and resonant. The violin is an instrument that is said to be much like the human voice, and in this musician's masterly hands, it sobbed and laughed and sang -- ecstatic, sorrowful, importuning, adoring, flirtatious, castigating, playful, romancing, merry, triumphal, sumptuous.

So, what do you think happened?

HANG ON, WE'LL GET YOU SOME EXPERT HELP.

Leonard Slatkin, music director of the National Symphony Orchestra, was asked the same question. What did he think would occur, hypothetically, if one of the world's great violinists had performed incognito before a traveling rush-hour audience of 1,000-odd people?

"Let's assume," Slatkin said, "that he is not recognized and just taken for granted as a street musician . . . Still, I don't think that if he's really good, he's going to go unnoticed. He'd get a larger audience in Europe . . . but, okay, out of 1,000 people, my guess is there might be 35 or 40 who will recognize the quality for what it is. Maybe 75 to 100 will stop and spend some time listening."

So, a crowd would gather?

"Oh, yes."

And how much will he make?

"About $150."

Thanks, Maestro. As it happens, this is not hypothetical. It really happened.

"How'd I do?"

We'll tell you in a minute.

"Well, who was the musician?"

Joshua Bell.

"NO!!!"

A onetime child prodigy, at 39 Joshua Bell has arrived as an internationally acclaimed virtuoso. Three days before he appeared at the Metro station, Bell had filled the house at Boston's stately Symphony Hall, where merely pretty good seats went for $100. Two weeks later, at the Music Center at Strathmore, in North Bethesda, he would play to a standing-room-only audience so respectful of his artistry that they stifled their coughs until the silence between movements. But on that Friday in January, Joshua Bell was just another mendicant, competing for the attention of busy people on their way to work.

Bell was first pitched this idea shortly before Christmas, over coffee at a sandwich shop on Capitol Hill. A New Yorker, he was in town to perform at the Library of Congress and to visit the library's vaults to examine an unusual treasure: an 18th-century violin that once belonged to the great Austrian-born virtuoso and composer Fritz Kreisler. The curators invited Bell to play it; good sound, still.

"Here's what I'm thinking," Bell confided, as he sipped his coffee. "I'm thinking that I could do a tour where I'd play Kreisler's music . . ."

He smiled.

". . . on Kreisler's violin."

It was a snazzy, sequined idea -- part inspiration and part gimmick -- and it was typical of Bell, who has unapologetically embraced showmanship even as his concert career has become more and more august. He's soloed with the finest orchestras here and abroad, but he's also appeared on "Sesame Street," done late-night talk TV and performed in feature films. That was Bell playing the soundtrack on the 1998 movie "The Red Violin." (He body-doubled, too, playing to a naked Greta Scacchi.) As composer John Corigliano accepted the Oscar for Best Original Dramatic Score, he credited Bell, who, he said, "plays like a god."

When Bell was asked if he'd be willing to don street clothes and perform at rush hour, he said:

"Uh, a stunt?"

Well, yes. A stunt. Would he think it . . . unseemly?

Bell drained his cup.

"Sounds like fun," he said.

Bell's a heartthrob. Tall and handsome, he's got a Donny Osmond-like dose of the cutes, and, onstage, cute elides into hott. When he performs, he is usually the only man under the lights who is not in white tie and tails -- he walks out to a standing O, looking like Zorro, in black pants and an untucked black dress shirt, shirttail dangling. That cute Beatles-style mop top is also a strategic asset: Because his technique is full of body -- athletic and passionate -- he's almost dancing with the instrument, and his hair flies.

He's single and straight, a fact not lost on some of his fans. In Boston, as he performed Max Bruch's dour Violin Concerto in G Minor, the very few young women in the audience nearly disappeared in the deep sea of silver heads. But seemingly every single one of them -- a distillate of the young and pretty -- coalesced at the stage door after the performance, seeking an autograph. It's like that always, with Bell.

Bell's been accepting over-the-top accolades since puberty: Interview magazine once said his playing "does nothing less than tell human beings why they bother to live." He's learned to field these things graciously, with a bashful duck of the head and a modified "pshaw."

For this incognito performance, Bell had only one condition for participating. The event had been described to him as a test of whether, in an incongruous context, ordinary people would recognize genius. His condition: "I'm not comfortable if you call this genius." "Genius" is an overused word, he said: It can be applied to some of the composers whose work he plays, but not to him. His skills are largely interpretive, he said, and to imply otherwise would be unseemly and inaccurate.

It was an interesting request, and under the circumstances, one that will be honored. The word will not again appear in this article.

It would be breaking no rules, however, to note that the term in question, particularly as applied in the field of music, refers to a congenital brilliance -- an elite, innate, preternatural ability that manifests itself early, and often in dramatic fashion.

One biographically intriguing fact about Bell is that he got his first music lessons when he was a 4-year-old in Bloomington, Ind. His parents, both psychologists, decided formal training might be a good idea after they saw that their son had strung rubber bands across his dresser drawers and was replicating classical tunes by ear, moving drawers in and out to vary the pitch.

TO GET TO THE METRO FROM HIS HOTEL, a distance of three blocks, Bell took a taxi. He's neither lame nor lazy: He did it for his violin.

Bell always performs on the same instrument, and he ruled out using another for this gig. Called the Gibson ex Huberman, it was handcrafted in 1713 by Antonio Stradivari during the Italian master's "golden period," toward the end of his career, when he had access to the finest spruce, maple and willow, and when his technique had been refined to perfection.

"Our knowledge of acoustics is still incomplete," Bell said, "but he, he just . . . knew."

Bell doesn't mention Stradivari by name. Just "he." When the violinist shows his Strad to people, he holds the instrument gingerly by its neck, resting it on a knee. "He made this to perfect thickness at all parts," Bell says, pivoting it. "If you shaved off a millimeter of wood at any point, it would totally imbalance the sound." No violins sound as wonderful as Strads from the 1710s, still.

The front of Bell's violin is in nearly perfect condition, with a deep, rich grain and luster. The back is a mess, its dark reddish finish bleeding away into a flatter, lighter shade and finally, in one section, to bare wood.

"This has never been refinished," Bell said. "That's his original varnish. People attribute aspects of the sound to the varnish. Each maker had his own secret formula." Stradivari is thought to have made his from an ingeniously balanced cocktail of honey, egg whites and gum arabic from sub-Saharan trees.

Like the instrument in "The Red Violin," this one has a past filled with mystery and malice. Twice, it was stolen from its illustrious prior owner, the Polish virtuoso Bronislaw Huberman. The first time, in 1919, it disappeared from Huberman's hotel room in Vienna but was quickly returned. The second time, nearly 20 years later, it was pinched from his dressing room in Carnegie Hall. He never got it back. It was not until 1985 that the thief -- a minor New York violinist -- made a deathbed confession to his wife, and produced the instrument.

Bell bought it a few years ago. He had to sell his own Strad and borrow much of the rest. The price tag was reported to be about $3.5 million.

All of which is a long explanation for why, in the early morning chill of a day in January, Josh Bell took a three-block cab ride to the Orange Line, and rode one stop to L'Enfant.

AS METRO STATIONS GO, L'ENFANT PLAZA IS MORE PLEBEIAN THAN MOST. Even before you arrive, it gets no respect. Metro conductors never seem to get it right: "Leh-fahn." "Layfont." "El'phant."

At the top of the escalators are a shoeshine stand and a busy kiosk that sells newspapers, lottery tickets and a wallfull of magazines with titles such as Mammazons and Girls of Barely Legal. The skin mags move, but it's that lottery ticket dispenser that stays the busiest, with customers queuing up for Daily 6 lotto and Powerball and the ultimate suckers' bait, those pamphlets that sell random number combinations purporting to be "hot." They sell briskly. There's also a quick-check machine to slide in your lotto ticket, post-drawing, to see if you've won. Beneath it is a forlorn pile of crumpled slips.

On Friday, January 12, the people waiting in the lottery line looking for a long shot would get a lucky break -- a free, close-up ticket to a concert by one of the world's most famous musicians -- but only if they were of a mind to take note.

Bell decided to begin with "Chaconne" from Johann Sebastian Bach's Partita No. 2 in D Minor. Bell calls it "not just one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, but one of the greatest achievements of any man in history. It's a spiritually powerful piece, emotionally powerful, structurally perfect. Plus, it was written for a solo violin, so I won't be cheating with some half-assed version."

Bell didn't say it, but Bach's "Chaconne" is also considered one of the most difficult violin pieces to master. Many try; few succeed. It's exhaustingly long -- 14 minutes -- and consists entirely of a single, succinct musical progression repeated in dozens of variations to create a dauntingly complex architecture of sound. Composed around 1720, on the eve of the European Enlightenment, it is said to be a celebration of the breadth of human possibility.

If Bell's encomium to "Chaconne" seems overly effusive, consider this from the 19th-century composer Johannes Brahms, in a letter to Clara Schumann: "On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind."

So, that's the piece Bell started with.

He'd clearly meant it when he promised not to cheap out this performance: He played with acrobatic enthusiasm, his body leaning into the music and arching on tiptoes at the high notes. The sound was nearly symphonic, carrying to all parts of the homely arcade as the pedestrian traffic filed past.

Three minutes went by before something happened. Sixty-three people had already passed when, finally, there was a breakthrough of sorts. A middle-age man altered his gait for a split second, turning his head to notice that there seemed to be some guy playing music. Yes, the man kept walking, but it was something.

A half-minute later, Bell got his first donation. A woman threw in a buck and scooted off. It was not until six minutes into the performance that someone actually stood against a wall, and listened.

Things never got much better. In the three-quarters of an hour that Joshua Bell played, seven people stopped what they were doing to hang around and take in the performance, at least for a minute. Twenty-seven gave money, most of them on the run -- for a total of $32 and change. That leaves the 1,070 people who hurried by, oblivious, many only three feet away, few even turning to look.

No, Mr. Slatkin, there was never a crowd, not even for a second.

It was all videotaped by a hidden camera. You can play the recording once or 15 times, and it never gets any easier to watch. Try speeding it up, and it becomes one of those herky-jerky World War I-era silent newsreels. The people scurry by in comical little hops and starts, cups of coffee in their hands, cellphones at their ears, ID tags slapping at their bellies, a grim danse macabre to indifference, inertia and the dingy, gray rush of modernity.

Even at this accelerated pace, though, the fiddler's movements remain fluid and graceful; he seems so apart from his audience -- unseen, unheard, otherworldly -- that you find yourself thinking that he's not really there. A ghost.

Only then do you see it: He is the one who is real. They are the ghosts.

IF A GREAT MUSICIAN PLAYS GREAT MUSIC BUT NO ONE HEARS... WAS HE REALLY ANY GOOD?

It's an old epistemological debate, older, actually, than the koan about the tree in the forest. Plato weighed in on it, and philosophers for two millennia afterward: What is beauty? Is it a measurable fact (Gottfried Leibniz), or merely an opinion (David Hume), or is it a little of each, colored by the immediate state of mind of the observer (Immanuel Kant)?

We'll go with Kant, because he's obviously right, and because he brings us pretty directly to Joshua Bell, sitting there in a hotel restaurant, picking at his breakfast, wryly trying to figure out what the hell had just happened back there at the Metro.

"At the beginning," Bell says, "I was just concentrating on playing the music. I wasn't really watching what was happening around me . . ."

Playing the violin looks all-consuming, mentally and physically, but Bell says that for him the mechanics of it are partly second nature, cemented by practice and muscle memory: It's like a juggler, he says, who can keep those balls in play while interacting with a crowd. What he's mostly thinking about as he plays, Bell says, is capturing emotion as a narrative: "When you play a violin piece, you are a storyteller, and you're telling a story."

With "Chaconne," the opening is filled with a building sense of awe. That kept him busy for a while. Eventually, though, he began to steal a sidelong glance.

"It was a strange feeling, that people were actually, ah . . ."

The word doesn't come easily.

". . . ignoring me."

Bell is laughing. It's at himself.

"At a music hall, I'll get upset if someone coughs or if someone's cellphone goes off. But here, my expectations quickly diminished. I started to appreciate any acknowledgment, even a slight glance up. I was oddly grateful when someone threw in a dollar instead of change." This is from a man whose talents can command $1,000 a minute.

Before he began, Bell hadn't known what to expect. What he does know is that, for some reason, he was nervous.

"It wasn't exactly stage fright, but there were butterflies," he says. "I was stressing a little."

Bell has played, literally, before crowned heads of Europe. Why the anxiety at the Washington Metro?

"When you play for ticket-holders," Bell explains, "you are already validated. I have no sense that I need to be accepted. I'm already accepted. Here, there was this thought: What if they don't like me? What if they resent my presence . . ."

He was, in short, art without a frame. Which, it turns out, may have a lot to do with what happened -- or, more precisely, what didn't happen -- on January 12.

MARK LEITHAUSER HAS HELD IN HIS HANDS MORE GREAT WORKS OF ART THAN ANY KING OR POPE OR MEDICI EVER DID. A senior curator at the National Gallery, he oversees the framing of the paintings. Leithauser thinks he has some idea of what happened at that Metro station.

"Let's say I took one of our more abstract masterpieces, say an Ellsworth Kelly, and removed it from its frame, marched it down the 52 steps that people walk up to get to the National Gallery, past the giant columns, and brought it into a restaurant. It's a $5 million painting. And it's one of those restaurants where there are pieces of original art for sale, by some industrious kids from the Corcoran School, and I hang that Kelly on the wall with a price tag of $150. No one is going to notice it. An art curator might look up and say: 'Hey, that looks a little like an Ellsworth Kelly. Please pass the salt.'"

Leithauser's point is that we shouldn't be too ready to label the Metro passersby unsophisticated boobs. Context matters.

Kant said the same thing. He took beauty seriously: In his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, Kant argued that one's ability to appreciate beauty is related to one's ability to make moral judgments. But there was a caveat. Paul Guyer of the University of Pennsylvania, one of America's most prominent Kantian scholars, says the 18th-century German philosopher felt that to properly appreciate beauty, the viewing conditions must be optimal.

"Optimal," Guyer said, "doesn't mean heading to work, focusing on your report to the boss, maybe your shoes don't fit right."

So, if Kant had been at the Metro watching as Joshua Bell play to a thousand unimpressed passersby?

"He would have inferred about them," Guyer said, "absolutely nothing."

And that's that.

Except it isn't. To really understand what happened, you have to rewind that video and play it back from the beginning, from the moment Bell's bow first touched the strings.

White guy, khakis, leather jacket, briefcase. Early 30s. John David Mortensen is on the final leg of his daily bus-to-Metro commute from Reston. He's heading up the escalator. It's a long ride -- 1 minute and 15 seconds if you don't walk. So, like most everyone who passes Bell this day, Mortensen gets a good earful of music before he has his first look at the musician. Like most of them, he notes that it sounds pretty good. But like very few of them, when he gets to the top, he doesn't race past as though Bell were some nuisance to be avoided. Mortensen is that first person to stop, that guy at the six-minute mark.

It's not that he has nothing else to do. He's a project manager for an international program at the Department of Energy; on this day, Mortensen has to participate in a monthly budget exercise, not the most exciting part of his job: "You review the past month's expenditures," he says, "forecast spending for the next month, if you have X dollars, where will it go, that sort of thing."

On the video, you can see Mortensen get off the escalator and look around. He locates the violinist, stops, walks away but then is drawn back. He checks the time on his cellphone -- he's three minutes early for work -- then settles against a wall to listen.

Mortensen doesn't know classical music at all; classic rock is as close as he comes. But there's something about what he's hearing that he really likes.

As it happens, he's arrived at the moment that Bell slides into the second section of "Chaconne." ("It's the point," Bell says, "where it moves from a darker, minor key into a major key. There's a religious, exalted feeling to it.") The violinist's bow begins to dance; the music becomes upbeat, playful, theatrical, big.

Mortensen doesn't know about major or minor keys: "Whatever it was," he says, "it made me feel at peace."

So, for the first time in his life, Mortensen lingers to listen to a street musician. He stays his allotted three minutes as 94 more people pass briskly by. When he leaves to help plan contingency budgets for the Department of Energy, there's another first. For the first time in his life, not quite knowing what had just happened but sensing it was special, John David Mortensen gives a street musician money.

THERE ARE SIX MOMENTS IN THE VIDEO THAT BELL FINDS PARTICULARLY PAINFUL TO RELIVE: "The awkward times," he calls them. It's what happens right after each piece ends: nothing. The music stops. The same people who hadn't noticed him playing don't notice that he has finished. No applause, no acknowledgment. So Bell just saws out a small, nervous chord -- the embarrassed musician's equivalent of, "Er, okay, moving right along . . ." -- and begins the next piece.

After "Chaconne," it is Franz Schubert's "Ave Maria," which surprised some music critics when it debuted in 1825: Schubert seldom showed religious feeling in his compositions, yet "Ave Maria" is a breathtaking work of adoration of the Virgin Mary. What was with the sudden piety? Schubert dryly answered: "I think this is due to the fact that I never forced devotion in myself and never compose hymns or prayers of that kind unless it overcomes me unawares; but then it is usually the right and true devotion." This musical prayer became among the most familiar and enduring religious pieces in history.

A couple of minutes into it, something revealing happens. A woman and her preschooler emerge from the escalator. The woman is walking briskly and, therefore, so is the child. She's got his hand.

"I had a time crunch," recalls Sheron Parker, an IT director for a federal agency. "I had an 8:30 training class, and first I had to rush Evvie off to his teacher, then rush back to work, then to the training facility in the basement."

Evvie is her son, Evan. Evan is 3.

You can see Evan clearly on the video. He's the cute black kid in the parka who keeps twisting around to look at Joshua Bell, as he is being propelled toward the door.

"There was a musician," Parker says, "and my son was intrigued. He wanted to pull over and listen, but I was rushed for time."

So Parker does what she has to do. She deftly moves her body between Evan's and Bell's, cutting off her son's line of sight. As they exit the arcade, Evan can still be seen craning to look. When Parker is told what she walked out on, she laughs.

"Evan is very smart!"

The poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all babies are born with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother's heart is in iambic meter. Then, Collins said, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us. It may be true with music, too.

There was no ethnic or demographic pattern to distinguish the people who stayed to watch Bell, or the ones who gave money, from that vast majority who hurried on past, unheeding. Whites, blacks and Asians, young and old, men and women, were represented in all three groups. But the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent. Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.

IF THERE WAS ONE PERSON ON THAT DAY WHO WAS TOO BUSY TO PAY ATTENTION TO THE VIOLINIST, it was George Tindley. Tindley wasn't hurrying to get to work. He was at work.

The glass doors through which most people exit the L'Enfant station lead into an indoor shopping mall, from which there are exits to the street and elevators to office buildings. The first store in the mall is an Au Bon Pain, the croissant and coffee shop where Tindley, in his 40s, works in a white uniform busing the tables, restocking the salt and pepper packets, taking out the garbage. Tindley labors under the watchful eye of his bosses, and he's supposed to be hopping, and he was.

But every minute or so, as though drawn by something not entirely within his control, Tindley would walk to the very edge of the Au Bon Pain property, keeping his toes inside the line, still on the job. Then he'd lean forward, as far out into the hallway as he could, watching the fiddler on the other side of the glass doors. The foot traffic was steady, so the doors were usually open. The sound came through pretty well.

"You could tell in one second that this guy was good, that he was clearly a professional," Tindley says. He plays the guitar, loves the sound of strings, and has no respect for a certain kind of musician.

"Most people, they play music; they don't feel it," Tindley says. "Well, that man was feeling it. That man was moving. Moving into the sound."

A hundred feet away, across the arcade, was the lottery line, sometimes five or six people long. They had a much better view of Bell than Tindley did, if they had just turned around. But no one did. Not in the entire 43 minutes. They just shuffled forward toward that machine spitting out numbers. Eyes on the prize.

J.T. Tillman was in that line. A computer specialist for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, he remembers every single number he played that day -- 10 of them, $2 apiece, for a total of $20. He doesn't recall what the violinist was playing, though. He says it sounded like generic classical music, the kind the ship's band was playing in "Titanic," before the iceberg.

"I didn't think nothing of it," Tillman says, "just a guy trying to make a couple of bucks." Tillman would have given him one or two, he said, but he spent all his cash on lotto.

When he is told that he stiffed one of the best musicians in the world, he laughs.

"Is he ever going to play around here again?"

"Yeah, but you're going to have to pay a lot to hear him."

"Damn."

Tillman didn't win the lottery, either.

BELL ENDS "AVE MARIA" TO ANOTHER THUNDEROUS SILENCE, plays Manuel Ponce's sentimental "Estrellita," then a piece by Jules Massenet, and then begins a Bach gavotte, a joyful, frolicsome, lyrical dance. It's got an Old World delicacy to it; you can imagine it entertaining bewigged dancers at a Versailles ball, or -- in a lute, fiddle and fife version -- the boot-kicking peasants of a Pieter Bruegel painting.

Watching the video weeks later, Bell finds himself mystified by one thing only. He understands why he's not drawing a crowd, in the rush of a morning workday. But: "I'm surprised at the number of people who don't pay attention at all, as if I'm invisible. Because, you know what? I'm makin' a lot of noise!"

He is. You don't need to know music at all to appreciate the simple fact that there's a guy there, playing a violin that's throwing out a whole bucket of sound; at times, Bell's bowing is so intricate that you seem to be hearing two instruments playing in harmony. So those head-forward, quick-stepping passersby are a remarkable phenomenon.

Bell wonders whether their inattention may be deliberate: If you don't take visible note of the musician, you don't have to feel guilty about not forking over money; you're not complicit in a rip-off.

It may be true, but no one gave that explanation. People just said they were busy, had other things on their mind. Some who were on cellphones spoke louder as they passed Bell, to compete with that infernal racket.

And then there was Calvin Myint. Myint works for the General Services Administration. He got to the top of the escalator, turned right and headed out a door to the street. A few hours later, he had no memory that there had been a musician anywhere in sight.

"Where was he, in relation to me?"

"About four feet away."

"Oh."

There's nothing wrong with Myint's hearing. He had buds in his ear. He was listening to his iPod.

For many of us, the explosion in technology has perversely limited, not expanded, our exposure to new experiences. Increasingly, we get our news from sources that think as we already do. And with iPods, we hear what we already know; we program our own playlists.

The song that Calvin Myint was listening to was "Just Like Heaven," by the British rock band The Cure. It's a terrific song, actually. The meaning is a little opaque, and the Web is filled with earnest efforts to deconstruct it. Many are far-fetched, but some are right on point: It's about a tragic emotional disconnect. A man has found the woman of his dreams but can't express the depth of his feeling for her until she's gone. It's about failing to see the beauty of what's plainly in front of your eyes.

"YES, I SAW THE VIOLINIST," Jackie Hessian says, "but nothing about him struck me as much of anything."

You couldn't tell that by watching her. Hessian was one of those people who gave Bell a long, hard look before walking on. It turns out that she wasn't noticing the music at all.

"I really didn't hear that much," she said. "I was just trying to figure out what he was doing there, how does this work for him, can he make much money, would it be better to start with some money in the case, or for it to be empty, so people feel sorry for you? I was analyzing it financially."

What do you do, Jackie?

"I'm a lawyer in labor relations with the United States Postal Service. I just negotiated a national contract."

THE BEST SEATS IN THE HOUSE WERE UPHOLSTERED. In the balcony, more or less. On that day, for $5, you'd get a lot more than just a nice shine on your shoes.

Only one person occupied one of those seats when Bell played. Terence Holmes is a consultant for the Department of Transportation, and he liked the music just fine, but it was really about a shoeshine: "My father told me never to wear a suit with your shoes not cleaned and shined."

Holmes wears suits often, so he is up in that perch a lot, and he's got a good relationship with the shoeshine lady. Holmes is a good tipper and a good talker, which is a skill that came in handy that day. The shoeshine lady was upset about something, and the music got her more upset. She complained, Holmes said, that the music was too loud, and he tried to calm her down.

Edna Souza is from Brazil. She's been shining shoes at L'Enfant Plaza for six years, and she's had her fill of street musicians there; when they play, she can't hear her customers, and that's bad for business. So she fights.

Souza points to the dividing line between the Metro property, at the top of the escalator, and the arcade, which is under control of the management company that runs the mall. Sometimes, Souza says, a musician will stand on the Metro side, sometimes on the mall side. Either way, she's got him. On her speed dial, she has phone numbers for both the mall cops and the Metro cops. The musicians seldom last long.

What about Joshua Bell?

He was too loud, too, Souza says. Then she looks down at her rag, sniffs. She hates to say anything positive about these damned musicians, but: "He was pretty good, that guy. It was the first time I didn't call the police."

Souza was surprised to learn he was a famous musician, but not that people rushed blindly by him. That, she said, was predictable. "If something like this happened in Brazil, everyone would stand around to see. Not here."

Souza nods sourly toward a spot near the top of the escalator: "Couple of years ago, a homeless guy died right there. He just lay down there and died. The police came, an ambulance came, and no one even stopped to see or slowed down to look.

"People walk up the escalator, they look straight ahead. Mind your own business, eyes forward. Everyone is stressed. Do you know what I mean?"

What is this life if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

-- from "Leisure," by W.H. Davies

Let's say Kant is right. Let's accept that we can't look at what happened on January 12 and make any judgment whatever about people's sophistication or their ability to appreciate beauty. But what about their ability to appreciate life?

We're busy. Americans have been busy, as a people, since at least 1831, when a young French sociologist named Alexis de Tocqueville visited the States and found himself impressed, bemused and slightly dismayed at the degree to which people were driven, to the exclusion of everything else, by hard work and the accumulation of wealth.

Not much has changed. Pop in a DVD of "Koyaanisqatsi," the wordless, darkly brilliant, avant-garde 1982 film about the frenetic speed of modern life. Backed by the minimalist music of Philip Glass, director Godfrey Reggio takes film clips of Americans going about their daily business, but speeds them up until they resemble assembly-line machines, robots marching lockstep to nowhere. Now look at the video from L'Enfant Plaza, in fast-forward. The Philip Glass soundtrack fits it perfectly.

"Koyaanisqatsi" is a Hopi word. It means "life out of balance."

In his 2003 book, Timeless Beauty: In the Arts and Everyday Life, British author John Lane writes about the loss of the appreciation for beauty in the modern world. The experiment at L'Enfant Plaza may be symptomatic of that, he said -- not because people didn't have the capacity to understand beauty, but because it was irrelevant to them.

"This is about having the wrong priorities," Lane said.

If we can't take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that -- then what else are we missing?

That's what the Welsh poet W.H. Davies meant in 1911 when he published those two lines that begin this section. They made him famous. The thought was simple, even primitive, but somehow no one had put it quite that way before.

Of course, Davies had an advantage -- an advantage of perception. He wasn't a tradesman or a laborer or a bureaucrat or a consultant or a policy analyst or a labor lawyer or a program manager. He was a hobo.

THE CULTURAL HERO OF THE DAY ARRIVED AT L'ENFANT PLAZA PRETTY LATE, in the unprepossessing figure of one John Picarello, a smallish man with a baldish head.

Picarello hit the top of the escalator just after Bell began his final piece, a reprise of "Chaconne." In the video, you see Picarello stop dead in his tracks, locate the source of the music, and then retreat to the other end of the arcade. He takes up a position past the shoeshine stand, across from that lottery line, and he will not budge for the next nine minutes.

Like all the passersby interviewed for this article, Picarello was stopped by a reporter after he left the building, and was asked for his phone number. Like everyone, he was told only that this was to be an article about commuting. When he was called later in the day, like everyone else, he was first asked if anything unusual had happened to him on his trip into work. Of the more than 40 people contacted, Picarello was the only one who immediately mentioned the violinist.

"There was a musician playing at the top of the escalator at L'Enfant Plaza."

Haven't you seen musicians there before?

"Not like this one."

What do you mean?

"This was a superb violinist. I've never heard anyone of that caliber. He was technically proficient, with very good phrasing. He had a good fiddle, too, with a big, lush sound. I walked a distance away, to hear him. I didn't want to be intrusive on his space."

Really?

"Really. It was that kind of experience. It was a treat, just a brilliant, incredible way to start the day."

Picarello knows classical music. He is a fan of Joshua Bell but didn't recognize him; he hadn't seen a recent photo, and besides, for most of the time Picarello was pretty far away. But he knew this was not a run-of-the-mill guy out there, performing. On the video, you can see Picarello look around him now and then, almost bewildered.

"Yeah, other people just were not getting it. It just wasn't registering. That was baffling to me."

When Picarello was growing up in New York, he studied violin seriously, intending to be a concert musician. But he gave it up at 18, when he decided he'd never be good enough to make it pay. Life does that to you sometimes. Sometimes, you have to do the prudent thing. So he went into another line of work. He's a supervisor at the U.S. Postal Service. Doesn't play the violin much, anymore.

When he left, Picarello says, "I humbly threw in $5." It was humble: You can actually see that on the video. Picarello walks up, barely looking at Bell, and tosses in the money. Then, as if embarrassed, he quickly walks away from the man he once wanted to be.

Does he have regrets about how things worked out?

The postal supervisor considers this.

"No. If you love something but choose not to do it professionally, it's not a waste. Because, you know, you still have it. You have it forever."

BELL THINKS HE DID HIS BEST WORK OF THE DAY IN THOSE FINAL FEW MINUTES, in the second "Chaconne." And that also was the first time more than one person at a time was listening. As Picarello stood in the back, Janice Olu arrived and took up a position a few feet away from Bell. Olu, a public trust officer with HUD, also played the violin as a kid. She didn't know the name of the piece she was hearing, but she knew the man playing it has a gift.

Olu was on a coffee break and stayed as long as she dared. As she turned to go, she whispered to the stranger next to her, "I really don't want to leave." The stranger standing next to her happened to be working for The Washington Post.

In preparing for this event, editors at The Post Magazine discussed how to deal with likely outcomes. The most widely held assumption was that there could well be a problem with crowd control: In a demographic as sophisticated as Washington, the thinking went, several people would surely recognize Bell. Nervous "what-if" scenarios abounded. As people gathered, what if others stopped just to see what the attraction was? Word would spread through the crowd. Cameras would flash. More people flock to the scene; rush-hour pedestrian traffic backs up; tempers flare; the National Guard is called; tear gas, rubber bullets, etc.

As it happens, exactly one person recognized Bell, and she didn't arrive until near the very end. For Stacy Furukawa, a demographer at the Commerce Department, there was no doubt. She doesn't know much about classical music, but she had been in the audience three weeks earlier, at Bell's free concert at the Library of Congress. And here he was, the international virtuoso, sawing away, begging for money. She had no idea what the heck was going on, but whatever it was, she wasn't about to miss it.

Furukawa positioned herself 10 feet away from Bell, front row, center. She had a huge grin on her face. The grin, and Furukawa, remained planted in that spot until the end.

"It was the most astonishing thing I've ever seen in Washington," Furukawa says. "Joshua Bell was standing there playing at rush hour, and people were not stopping, and not even looking, and some were flipping quarters at him! Quarters! I wouldn't do that to anybody. I was thinking, Omigosh, what kind of a city do I live in that this could happen?"

When it was over, Furukawa introduced herself to Bell, and tossed in a twenty. Not counting that -- it was tainted by recognition -- the final haul for his 43 minutes of playing was $32.17. Yes, some people gave pennies.

"Actually," Bell said with a laugh, "that's not so bad, considering. That's 40 bucks an hour. I could make an okay living doing this, and I wouldn't have to pay an agent."

These days, at L'Enfant Plaza, lotto ticket sales remain brisk. Musicians still show up from time to time, and they still tick off Edna Souza. Joshua Bell's latest album, "The Voice of the Violin," has received the usual critical acclaim. ("Delicate urgency." "Masterful intimacy." "Unfailingly exquisite." "A musical summit." ". . . will make your heart thump and weep at the same time.")

Bell headed off on a concert tour of European capitals. But he is back in the States this week. He has to be. On Tuesday, he will be accepting the Avery Fisher prize, recognizing the Flop of L'Enfant Plaza as the best classical musician in America.

Emily Shroder, Rachel Manteuffel, John W. Poole and Magazine Editor Tom Shroder contributed to this report. Gene Weingarten, a Magazine staff writer, can be reached at weingarten@washpost.com.

The original article is here.

So close yet so far away

2011-11-07T23:05:00.000+08:00

The train reached Bukit Batok LRT Station, and Stupid and I made our way out of the LRT station to my cousin’s house. We were lost and we needed to use map. And even we looked at the map we couldn’t locate the direction (ie, north, east, south, west, etc). We asked shopkeepers - 3 shopkeepers before we found our direction.

We came across a mini park which is a bit hilly and we needed to climb stairs. When we reached the top of the park, we found something is wrong. It is not only wrong, but creepy in fact – we saw a signboard of waist height in front of a pile of earth, and same kind of signboard every few meters apart. We stopped. I looked at him and so did he. Everything pointed that we were not in a park but cemetery zone.

We tentatively walked towards the signboard, and found out that it really is a signboard – signboard containing instructions for equipment in the park. We were relieved. Stupid even took few photos of that imaginary cemetery.

What a way to end a day which captured our fantasy. In very same morning, we went to Nanyang Technological University to attend its open house. The facility is great, the university is impressive and the fees are expensive too. While our local varsity has Ramli Burger outlet, NTU has McD and Subway. I had my first Subway’s foot long bread there.

On top of that, we had our own tour guide during the open day. She invited us into her hostel room, which would not happen in a million years if it is USM or UKM. We had a fair share of chatting and played a share market board game. To end our short trip to NTU, three of us had a dinner before we parted our ways.

Just now, after having dinner, I cycled back to my hostel. When I saw the images in front of me – dim street lights, big trees and stretch of cow grass, I strolled down the memory lane. Both of us now end up in local varsity and not MIT or ANU or NUS or NTU or whatnot. We dreamt big before we were brought back to ground but at least we had dreamt before. Sometimes, it seems to be so near yet so far. Perhaps someday when Stupid set his sight across the Johore Straits, he will recall back the night we stepped on the cemetery land.

P/S: Today is her birthday - the girl who became our tour guide in NTU, who biologically is no longer a kid, who physically still is and who in-person is a lovely girl. Happy birthday, Jenny!

Alone: So close yet so far away

Craving for brave new world

2011-10-21T18:06:00.005+08:00

Today, I am going to dedicate this piece of writing to him.

When I first took notice of him, I just began my first half year of my 18-month Form 6 (I hate to use the word STPM as what we endured were more than just an exam.) He was in a relationship with my fellow Form 6 schoolmate. He was Form 5 that time and would be taking SPM at the end of the year. Everything went smoothly. Or perhaps I never knew there was something wrong. Not even him. Only God knows and He knows the best.

Fast forward to March 2010, SPM results were released and he did something any school would be proud of by grabbing 12As. I never met him afterwards until the 1^st day of 2010/2011 batch Form 6. I was due to talk in front of all my juniors, along with President Cheuckolate and Secretary Li Ching. What I saw afterwards amused me – his name was on the name list of reporting students. But given the fact that many pre-university programs start later than Form 6, it is not a huge surprise to see those ridiculously good result students reporting for Form 6.

But, a few weeks after Form 6 commenced, he was still there - L63, 2^nd floor of Block C. And after doing some ask-around, I was told he was forced to temporarily abandon Petronas scholarship due to health problems. This made me recalled back the fate of my friend. My school has Hari Anugerah Cemerlang or Excellent Awards Day. The winner name list will be announced through PA system several weeks before the big day.

That year (2008) is the year I took SPM. The announcer first announced Hong You Wei swept 5 (FIVE) best subject awards, which included Chemistry, Biology and Physics. This was by far a mean feat and whole school applauded. Next in line was Khoo Wee Min. And he swept the same number of best subject award – 5 (FIVE), albeit more on linguistic subjects. Whole school applauded, this time was even louder (for both of them). At the end, both of them never really got what they deserved. They were not receiving oversea scholarship.

Now, KWM is studying in Australia while HYW’s case is a sad one. He went to Perlis Matriculation College and came back few months’ later, citing health reason. With his return, we were confident that our batch Form 6 will be one of the best, if not the best batch ever studied in SMSM Form 6. During my lower 6 end of year exam, he was the top scorer for 3 subjects – Pengajian Am, Maths T and Biology in his class but he was ranked 11 out of 24. The reason was he failed Chemistry. He failed as he was absent during the exam day for Chemistry. He was just ridiculously excellent.

But after that, he never appeared at the school anymore. His family cited health reason but majority believed it is a combination of mental health and physical health. One 4.00 student was taken away under our noses. And this time around, it happened again.

Okay, that is enough. Let’s go back to the issue. As a direct senior of him, we had some interactions. On top of that, he was elected as Treasurer of Form 6 Society, taking over from me. This perhaps opened the door for me to understand better about him or vice-versa. He was dedicated to his responsibilities, always trying to do the best he could for F6S. He was equally dedicated to his study as well. Sometimes, he would ask for advices from seniors.

Since the turn of the year, I left the school and while I still keep in touch with my juniors, we seldom meet up. Last week, I went back to SMSM. School Administrator Board announced about his conditions and pleaded the public to support him. I was stunned. I never knew it would deteriorate into such condition. His news soon appeared on the headline of major Chinese newspapers. [HERE and HERE] Social network sites followed by spreading the news through electronic media.

This piece of news really struck my heart. Perhaps not in a million years we will think about difficulties endured by people around us. Today, a student of all teachers, a junior of all seniors and a bright prospect of our beloved country is facing sticky situation. Physically, it was about the money to undergo the operation. But to me, it is all about courage, bravery and gratitude to accept challenges and crave for a brave new world. Take a bow, Neoh Yi Kuan.

CN Tower: Ridiculously excellent

Nasi Lemak 1.0

2011-10-20T01:10:00.004+08:00

Once, Stupid ate Wantan Mee for 3 days in a row. Bakar Arang’s Ah Niu, The-shop-beside-Singer and his native Taman Ria’s. We used to ajak-mengajak to Bakar Arang, just to have a taste on the noodles and a good chat, in the morning. Ahh… The good old times.

Here, what I have for my breakfast are a packet of Nasi Lemak, 2 karipap and a cup of hot Milo. Ultimate pleasure. Joash said this is the typical Malaysian breakfast. Perhaps this is typical, but typical 1BlackForm6 breakfast. One Nasi Lemak, 3 karipap and one bottle of bancuh-sendiri Milo. Just ask Cheuck.

*******************************

Who says dialects aren’t important? To me, dialects are as important as foreign language. Some are willing to pay RM 300 for 10 classes of Spanish or French or Japanese or Korean. Perhaps it sounds cool when you can pop out a few foreign words. Perhaps it sounds cooler if you can speak dialects. Hokkien. Teowchew. Cantonese. Hakka. Hainan. Foochew.

And since we’re 1Malaysian, it will be no harm to learn Tamil so that we know what the hell Indians are talking about. If you throw in Thai, it would be perfect. You can enjoy without being cheated in Haadyai, Bangkok, Phuket, Pattaya, etc.

Look at your CV. Mandarin, English, Malay, Tamil, Hokkien, Teowchew, Cantonese, Hakka, Hainan, Foochew, Thai. Isn’t that impressive?

Nasi Lemak 1.0: Nostalgic and delicious

Nasi Lemak 2.0: Simply rockin'

The Supper

2011-10-03T11:27:00.004+08:00

It has been 5 weeks since the last post. It is a long hiatus but given the inconsistency that the blog endured since its inception (even forced to shut down for a few months thanks to some ISA-like threats), this 5 weeks are just peanuts.

Anyway, I just came back from PIMPIN Siswa camp, albeit with some sore throats and influenza. When I was having my breakfast just now, that issue spring into my mind again. Is USM Transkrian campus that bad?

If I never stepped my foot on Kolej Teknologi Timur (KTT) and Rumah Syaitan, perhaps I will answer “YES!” Ahmad knew very well about KTT and Rumah Syaitan. In fact that was some sort of “foundation” class for those who are going to India. There is a saying that, if you came back Malaysia from studying in India, you can eat rotten food for 2 weeks here in Malaysia and still survive.

First of all, I need to explain the locality of KTT and Rumah Syaitan. KTT is a JPA-sponsored A-Level college, mainly for medicine students who are going to continue their degree study in India, Czech Republic and etc. It is located at Salak Tinggi, the nearest housing estate to KLIA. The landscape around KTT is very rural and mainly oil palm plantation. There are a few rows of shop lots in front of KTT but have no tenants. The nearest shopping complex is Giant, 15 minutes’ drive from KTT. The only way you can go out from KTT is through taxi service, with the trip to nearest train stations, Nilai KTM or Salak Tinggi ERL costing around RM 15. Rumah Syaitan is a house rented by KTT to accommodate their students since the hostel within KTT is not enough. It is located within 5 minutes’ walking distance from KTT.

With all respect to Ahmad and his friends, Rumah Syaitan is really literally devil’s house. 13 guys cramped into a double storey terrace, with only 10 could sleep inside their room while the rest needed to sleep in another room – living room. Out of the 10 lucky ones, 6 cramped into the master bedroom (2 double decker and 2 normal bed), the rest divided equally into 2 small rooms. Perhaps out of his love to his housemates, Ahmad chose to sleep in the living room.

Before I went to KTT and Rumah Syaitan, Ahmad did tell me some pictures about the condition. He texted me that he didn’t know whether I can stand Rumah Syaitan even for a night and now I would be going to stay there for 2 nights! Anyway, due to my curiosity towards his college, I chose to go there.

Okay, back to the topic. Inside Rumah Syaitan, there are 4 corners in the living room. One corner of course is the staircase to the first floor while 3 mattresses lied on the other corner. And there was where Ahmad slept. Before I went there, Ahamd promised me I would have place to sleep and when I reached there, Ahmad asked one of his friends to donate his bed to me and joined them downstairs. For a moment, I was touched.

There were 3 toilets, one at downstairs, one is the master bedroom attached bathroom and another is shared between 2 small rooms. The one downstairs is dipping water from the ceiling 24/7, while the one inside master bedroom is also dipping water from shower hose 24/7. Most of the residents bathed at the car porch!

One night, Ahmad and his friends came back from playing futsal at 12.30am and one of his friends was hungry. The friend wanted to fry some eggs, so he took out the hot plate, put a flat pan on the hot plate and waited for 20 minutes for the pan to heat up since there was no gas stove in the house. After the pan was hot enough, the friend put in 2 eggs. Astonishingly, the egg white and egg yolk diffused together immediately, without any stirring. The friend has no choice but to throw away the fried eggs.

Ahmad decided to become the chef and cook for everyone. So, he searched for anything can be cooked. He found vermicelli, some gingers, tomatoes, and canned mushroom. All these stuff were bought a month ago. Anyway, out of food, they had no choice. The friend told Ahmad the tomatoes were rotting. Ahmad replied that only one was rotting but not the whole bag of tomato. So, they took the good tomatoes and sliced it. When the friend cut the tomatoes, we could see the seeds were germinating. For the first time in my life, I saw germinating tomato seeds, inside the tomato.

Next was the canned mushroom. They had the canned mushroom but the can opener was rusting. I had no idea whether they succeeded to open the can. Then, Ahmad started to cook the supper. It was already 1.30am and I went upstairs to sleep. I guessed they had a good meal, vermicelli with ginger, germinating tomato and mushroom. Yummy! The next day, I told Song You about the supper and he said luckily I had my dinner with him last night. If not, I would be enjoying the supper with them.

Compare to what we have now in Transkrian. Couldn’t we appreciate what we have right now instead of grumbling about what we do not have? Yes, here in Transkrian we have nothing but Charlie and oil palms. But I am sure you know the condition here before you fill in the form at pohon@USM. So why grumble now? The economy rice tastes sucks but what would you prefer between crappy economy rice and yummy vermicelli with ginger, germinating tomato and mushroom?

I felt grateful to have the chance to visit KTT and Rumah Syaitan. It really opened my eyes and taught me about gratitude. Thank you, Ahmad, Krishna, Narahari, Ravinder, Farhan, Vinod and the supper. I really enjoyed my time there.

Tomato: Is it better than the crappy economy rice?

My car was waiting for me

2011-08-23T12:00:00.000+08:00

When we arrived at the bus terminal, we found out something very unpleasant. That particular day, there was no bus to Alor Setar. So, we had to take a cab to Kangar as only Kangar as bus bound for Alor Setar.

The trip from Kuala Kedah to Kangar was about 20 minutes. The cab passed by the Malay villages along the way. The scenery was truly magnificent as that time the paddy was ripe enough, waiting to be harvested. Behind those yellow-golden paddy fields were hills, unexplored hills which combined with paddy fields to present us magnificent view. When we arrived at Kangar, we managed to catch 1700 hours bus to Shahab Perdana. I was so tired that I slept the almost whole 1 hour 15 mins journey from Kangar to Alor Setar.

At Shahab Perdana, we were finding bus bound for Sungai Petani. We found out there was no express bus to Sungai Petani. Instead, there was a transit bus to Sungai Petani, the bus which would stop every 5 minutes until we reached Sungai Petani. It was 1830 hours and the sky was becoming darker and darker. We had little choice and reluctantly boarded the bus.

The final 2 hours of homecoming journey was not a very pleasant one. The bus was not air-conditioned and slow (but steady). We were closer to our homes, inch by inch. The bus bought us to the kampungs, enabling us to see rural area of Kedah, far from the “advancement” in the city. My watch showed 20:32 and my car was waiting for me.

the end

Kedah ~~Maju 2010~~ Sejahtera: We were served with this thing during our final 2 hours journey.

She was napping!

2011-08-22T12:00:00.002+08:00

12th of January, 2011

The clock showed 13:00 and we were at Kuah jetty. Just to show the true spirit of Malaysia’s efficiency, there was no counter to sell ferry tickets to Kuala Perlis. Instead, the whole waiting hall has a information counter, with a staff sleeping on the desk. We went to the counter, and asked for ferry tickets. She woke up, rolled her eyes twice, then phoned another staff to come over and give us the tickets. Truly Malaysia.

The ferry will depart at 1430 hours, and we will only arrive at our hometown 6 hours later. The journey from Kuah to Kuala Perlis was another type of experience compared to Kuala Kedah. The ferry passed by several small islands, inhabitable islands. The waves were not so strong compared to Kuala Kedah route. Our phones were temporarily switched to Thailand line, perhaps due to its proximity to Thailand.

We arrived at Kuala Perlis at 1330 hours, and our friend was already waiting there, with 5 pre-ordered chicken rice. After having the truly “special” lunch at pondok, we were discussing ways to go back Sungai Petani. There is a bus terminal within walking distance from the jetty, which has buses to Alor Setar and not Sungai Petani. We walked there.

to be continued...

Sleeping beauty: Power nap? Or rotten to the core?

The Train has Gone

2011-08-21T18:53:00.001+08:00

10th of January, 2011

It was 0605 hours, and I was walking towards the train station. Bizarrely, there were not much people there. Suddenly, a middle-aged man said: “The train has gone.” I couldn’t believe it. He repeated it again, “The train really has gone, just 5 minutes ago.” I stared at him.

We had not much choice, and we decided to take bus to Alor Setar. My friend’s dad would like to fetch us to bus station, but my dad said this was a lesson, and suggested we should walk to bus station. We walked. We passed by the clock tower, the HSBC, the Pelita, the Fairy and reached the bus station. It was 0630 hoursand we waited for the bus. We waited. Finally, the bus arrived, and exactly at 0700 hours, it departed. This, was just the beginning.

It was 0800 hours, and we were at Shahab Perdana. We were told there was no bus to go to Kuala Kedah and we needed to go to Pekan Rabu for the bus. We waited for 30 minutes at Pekan Rabu and a 70’s bus written “Kuala Kedah” arrived. We immediately jumped on the bus. We arrived at Kuala Kedah jetty at 0900 hours, in time to catch 0930 hours ferry, bound for Langkawi.

To be continued...

Emotive: When train has gone

Closing the Reality Gap

2011-08-17T11:57:00.004+08:00

Klaus Toepfer: Executive Director of UNEP once wore Bermuda shorts with slipper during an international meeting.

1986 was United Nation’s International Year of Peace. In that year, I was in Bangladesh and working with a NGO called Gono Unayan Prochesta (GUP).

GUP was founded by a group of community activists who fought against President Hossein Mohamed Ershad, who was notorious with corruption at that time. I had the chance to work with GUP through Naserudden Ahmed, a former student activist who was expelled from University Dhaka. I met him during a program in University Thammasat, Bangkok.

During a meeting discussing about International Children Convention on Environment which was scheduled to take place in Kuala Lumpur in 2007, I was as usual wearing jeans and slipper. But when I saw Executive Director of UNEP, he was even worse than me. He wore Bermuda shorts and slipper. Most of delegates from Asia wore coat and tie while those from Europe wore T-Shirts.

The conference room provided by hotel was quite tight until some delegates were standing. One of the delegates complained that this was unfair. Thus, Director of UNEP, Klaus Toepfer from Germany requested suggestions from delegates to solve the problem. Some said it was fair, because early birds should be seated while latecomers should stand. Those who were standing were angry and demanded to move to a bigger conference room.

Klaus Toepfer stood up and said, “You people are typical Asian politicians - wasting so much time to solve a simple problem.” His words were directed to Asians as those who complained were Asians. They were late yet they still complained. At the end, Klaus Toepfer asked hotel staffs to move out all stools so that everyone could sit on the floor. Problem settled!

The meeting was conducted in a very informal manner. Suddenly, a delegate stood up and asked Klaus Toepfer, “Who is taking down the minutes?”

Klaus Toepfer replied, “Why do we need minutes?”

The delegate asked again, “Then who is going to remind us of our responsibility?”

Klaus Toepfer shook his head, “Are you from Malaysia?”

The delegate answered, “No, I am from Bangladesh.”

[Excerpt from "Closing the Reality Gap 1", by Mat Saman Kati (MSK), 15 August 2011. Retrived, modified and translated by Kyle Hampden]

Aku sokong Lord Ferg

2011-08-12T13:11:00.002+08:00

Sir Alex believes 84 points is enough to win the league this year.

Well, for the past 10 seasons, the statistics for champions are (Median; Mean):

(i) Point garnered: 88.0; 87.8

(ii) Number of match won: 27.0; 26.8

(iii) Number of match drew: 7.0; 7.4

(iv) Number of match lost: 4.5; 3.8

(v) Result: P38 W27 D7 L4 (88)

This is inconsistent with what Lord Ferg believes, but…

For the past 10 seasons, the statistics for runners-up are (Median; Mean):

(i) Point garnered: 83.0; 81.3

(ii) Number of match won: 24.5; 24.3

(iii) Number of match drew: 8.0; 8.3

(iv) Number of match lost: 5.5; 5.3

(v) Result: P38 W25 D8 L5 (83); P38 W24 D9 L5 (81)

This implicates 84 points is enough to make any team crowns champion.

My tip for champion: P38 W25 D9 L4 (84)

宁静 | 安详

2011-08-10T19:10:00.004+08:00

古木参天，到处都是树荫，气候非常凉快，

空气清新，没有半点丝毫的污染。

这里没有宽敞道路，只有羊肠小径。

外边，还保留着五十年代英式大平房，附近还有童笑声，

里边，还保留着三十年代甘榜大老屋，没有篱笆，没有围墙。

橡胶，榴莲，香蕉，红毛丹，稻米，芋头，羊角豆。

远离城市的繁忙，这里让人感觉那么宁静而安详。

这里，才是人类住的地方，

这里，才是没烦恼的地方，

这里，才是长命百岁的地方，

这里，才是世外桃源 – 香格里拉。

Who the hell is 黄彩霞?

2011-08-08T16:34:00.001+08:00

I would like to congratulate S.E. Wong on her appointment as principal. You certainly are the best candidate to get this job. Well done. You are one of few who can emerge with your reputation intact from the Head of Student Affair position (PK HEM).

It is important to note that an organization can only be efficient and successful if the leader has plenty of right-hand-man helping beside. 林南进 is certainly one of them. He is highly respected and has big ambitions which the school will benefit from it. Since S.E. Wong is promoted, the position she leaves will be sadly filled by One of the tyrants of Sin Min. Please guess it yourself. It doesn’t need rocket scientists to figure it out.

I am happy to see ~~Bak Cheong~~ Bak Chuan holding Form 6 portfolio. His place will be filled by Mdm. Li Lee Ching, which would not create any controversy. The afternoon session will duly welcome Mdm Ho Keng Tin after years of oppressive rule by One of the tyrants of Sin Min.

It is predictable that the only GKM who isn’t promoted is left out due to his allegiance to another tyrant of Sin Min. 黄彩霞 will be filling the post vacated by 林南进 but the school has no idea who the hell 黄彩霞 is. There is no such teacher in the school. Mdm Tang Mun Phing is touted to step up to HKT’s post.

The last post remaining is a bit confusing as there are at least 2 candidates who are vying the post. LLC would be happy to see Chan Mee Lee, who is hardworking completing the last piece of jigsaw. But the problem is, the-person-who-make-headline-recently is also interested. Whether she has enough Kemanusiaan to replace LLC is still to be seen with her past track record suggesting the opposite.

RELATED ARTICLE IS HERE

Until now, they hadn’t found the writer?

2011-08-03T20:41:00.003+08:00

I saw him, and walked to his place. “Hi, sir,” I greeted him.

“How’s your life? Which university you get?” he asked me.

“USM, sir, mechanical engineering, with the prospect of becoming a mechanic,” I replied him.

He laughed, “That’s great. Next time help me to fix my car then.”

“Anytime, sir. By the way, I heard the school naik surat khabar again,” I said, “So what really happened?”

He signaled me to come closer to him and from his pocket; he took out a piece of newspaper clipping. I somehow knew what is written on the newspaper clipping, but just to confirm the whole thing, I read the headline. It was sama sebiji with this.

“It was her,” He said, while pointing towards a side, directly at her, “There would be only one person in the whole school who would do such thing,” he uttered while staring at her.

“She said the letter also pointed out Malam Budaya also had some problems. I showed her the newspaper clipping. You see, which part Malam Budaya is mentioned? Malam Budaya was a successful event and because of that, she wanted to drag me along,” he continued.

“Actually, what the letter mentioned was true,” he added.

“Until now, they hadn’t found the writer?” I asked.

“Well, it is easy to trace who wrote the letter. But, she denied she was the one. If she wasn’t the one, that’s good lah, Anyway, I never care about this as I’m not that close with those outsiders,” he answered.

“I think we stop here lah, this is a sensitive issue,” he concluded.

I Need a Doctor

2011-08-01T12:00:00.004+08:00

His grandpa migrated to this land; He graduated from overseas and became a doctor; Love him or hate him, he is my man!

I’m going to dedicate this piece of writing to someone.

No matter how much difficulty you faced

Eventually you will succeed

Eternally your contribution will be remembered

Don’t ever have a doubt on yourself

After all you are serving your community, society and country

Dated back the day you affirmed your wish,

One day you want to be successful and to see

Children of yours to study with your own wealth.

That day won’t be that far away from now

One day you will see your dream come true, but

Right now, study hard, play hard, party hard.

Go pilot!

2011-07-31T14:34:00.005+08:00

Is this how our friend will look like in 2 years time?

Great success never comes easy

Or comes ready on a plate for you

Potential needs appreciation

I’ve love to give you that, but

Luckily, Uncle Tony gives you now,

Opening the door of opportunities

To endless boundaries.

Now, they get RM 100,000

2011-07-29T20:09:00.000+08:00

PM umum RM1.1 Juta untuk SMJK, sekolah persendirian

Will the school use the money to buy Pedigree so that he can end his eternal search for food?

Kerajaan persekutuan memperuntukkan RM1.1 juta kepada tujuh buah sekolah menengah jenis kebangsaan (SMJK) Cina dan sekolah persendirian di Kedah, demikian diumumkan oleh Perdana Menteri, Datuk Seri Najib Tun Abdul Razak hari ini

Turut menerima peruntukan itu ialah jawatankuasa perayaan ulang tahun ke-100 Sekolah Menengah Jenis Kebangsaan Keat Hwa 1 di Jalan Kuala Kedah di Alor Star, katanya di majlis bersama rakyat serta sambutan 100 tahun penubuhan SMJK Keat Hwa di sekolah itu hari ini.

Sekolah Menengah (Persendirian) Sin Min Sungai Petani dan Sekolah Menengah Jenis Kebangsaan(SMJK) Keat Hwa masing-masing menerima sumbangan RM200,000.

Selain itu, SMJK Keat Hwa 2, SMJK Chio Min, SM (Persendirian) Keat Hwa, SM (Persendirian) Sin Min Alor Setar, SMJK Sin Min Sungai Petani dan jawatankuasa Perayaan Ulang Tahun Ke-100 SMJK Keat Hwa masing-masing menerima peruntukan RM100,000.

Najib yang dalam lawatan sehari ke negeri ini, menyampaikan sumbangan itu kepada wakil setiap sekolah di majlis berkenaan.

Hadir sama Menteri Dalam Negeri Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Tun Hussein, Menteri Perumahan dan Kerajaan Tempatan Datuk Seri Chor Chee Heung dan pengerusi badan perhubungan Umno Kedah, Datuk Ahmad Bashah Md Hanipah.

Lembaga pengelola SM (Persendirian) Sin Min Sungai Petani Ching Chuen Leong berkata sumbangan yang diterima oleh SMJK dan sekolah Persendirian Cina menunjukkan perdana menteri prihatin dengan nasib mereka.

"Selama ini SMJK dan persendirian hanya bergantung kepada sumbangan syarikat korporat dan juga dana daripada Persatuan Ibu Bapa dan Guru (PIBG) untuk membiayai operasi sekolah dan murid.

"Bantuan yang diterima dapat meringankan beban yang ditanggung pihak sekolah selama ini dalam usaha meningkatkan prestasi pelajar dan sekolah," katanya.

Pengetua SM (Persendirian) Sin Min Alor Setar, Loo Tong Hua berkata beliau terharu dan berterima kasih kepada Perdana Menteri atas sumbangan yang disampaikan.

Katanya bantuan itu membolehkan pihak sekolah menambah baik kemudahan yang sedia ada di sekolah, seperti menambah bilangan komputer untuk kegunaan pelajar.

- Bernama

ORIGINAL ARTICLE IS HERE

School discipline raises questions

2011-07-27T20:54:00.005+08:00

I AM a single parent whose child is currently studying in a cluster school in Sungai Petani, Kedah.

Decorative picture: It has nothing to do with this issue, but...

My daughter, an average student, is taking her SPM this year.

However, just last week, she was taken out of class during Chemistry lesson by the discipline teacher for not having pinned up her hair in accordance to school regulations and was made to spend the entire following hour sitting in the middle of the school’s basketball court, writing lines.

While the public humiliation and unreasonable punishment is still understandable (and even expected of in most Chinese schools), what I really cannot tolerate is how irresponsible the teacher was for taking her out during an important lesson (this near to trials) for such a trivial matter.

What really riles me is that this is a “government-deemed excellent school” which rarely lets students out of class, even for competition preparation.

This obvious hypocrisy by the teachers isn’t just damaging to the students, but poisonous as well, as these future leaders will take what they’ve learnt and carry it into the real world.

It really makes me wonder what is deemed excellence?

Is it merely a school which appears neat and well organised on the outside? Or a school that teaches students how to balance academics and – should academics not be their forte – how to expand and improve on their other skills as well?

Obviously, our education discipline system still has a long way to go in terms of handling priorities.

FRUSTRATED PARENT,

Sungei Petani.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE IS HERE

Angry Birds Physics

2011-07-26T16:48:00.009+08:00

Instantaneous horizontal displacement, x at time t is

x = ut cos θ

55.0 = (2.50) u cos θ

u cos θ = 22.0 ms^-1 ---------- (1)

Instantaneous height, y at any time, t is

y = ut sin θ – ½ gt²

2.0 = (2.50) u sin θ – (0.5)(9.81)(2.50)²

u sin θ = 13.0625 ms^-1 ---------- (2)

(2) u sin θ 13.0625

---- , -------- = ---------

(1) u cos θ 22.0

θ = 30° 42’ from x-axis

Dear Tony

2011-07-16T12:44:00.001+08:00

Dear Tony,

Over the last month or so we have been reading tons of stories about the alleged injustice that you have received. How much is true and how much is exaggerated I don’t really know. Nevertheless, there are many who are most upset about this whole episode. If it is one or two complaints then maybe we can question the accuracy of the allegations. But when there is a flood of complaints then certainly some of it must be true. I do not want to discuss whether the complaints are true and if so how much of it is true.

If you know there is fraud then get out. Boycott the applications. Raise the complaints if you wish and get them attended to. But if they denied your allegations then there is nothing more you can do. You can always ask for justice to be done. Whether you do or do not get justice is for the powers-that-be to decide.

I am tired of reading about the grumbling, bitching, complaining, moaning and groaning. Dah letih dengar. Meluat!

If the fire is too hot, get out of the kitchen. Distribution of scholarships in Malaysia will never be clean, free and fair -- whether they are local scholarships, oversea scholarships or FAMA scholarships. If you want to apply for any scholarship then accept the fact that you will be faced with many incidences of fraud.

If you still want to apply then do so quietly. Walk softly and carry a big stick. If you can’t stomach what is going on then this is not the game for you. Quit now!

Let us say, in spite of all the fraud that you say is going on, you get the scholarship and become JPA scholar. Will you then declare that the selection was fraudulent and insist that the scholarship be declared null and for a new selection to be called? Or will you ‘accept the decision of JPA’ and stay on as JPA scholar?

If you are a man of principles, even if you receive scholarship, you should decline the scholarship because you would have got it against the backdrop of a fraudulent selection. How can you accept the scholarship when it was selected through a fraudulent selection? You should decline the scholarship and ask for the scholarship to be declared null and for a new selection to be called.

Since you are going to stand on principles, you should not give the selection legitimacy even if you receive the scholarship. You should distance yourself from what you say is a fraudulent selection and not legitimise it by staying in the application.

You should not grumble, bitch, complain, moan and groan only when you lose. If you believe that there is fraud then you should grumble, bitch, complain, moan and groan even if you win. And if you are going grumble, bitch, complain, moan and groan when you win and refuse to accept the post on point of principle, then don’t waste your and everyone else’s time by applying in a scholarship that you consider a farce.

Get out and get out now. Then people would say you have principles and are not a cry baby who grumbles, bitches, complains, moans and groans only when you lose but will accept the verdict of the selection if you happen to be selected.

I remember the BBC HARDTALK interview of 2004 when Anwar Ibrahim was asked why he is getting too personal about Dr Mahathir. Anwar replied that he is not being personal but opposes Dr Mahathir on point of principle.

The BBC interviewer then asked Anwar if he is opposed to Dr Mahathir on point of principle then why did he remain in the Cabinet? Why did he not resign if he did not endorse the manner in which Dr Mahathir was running the country?

Anwar did not have an answer.

Best Regards,

Jarmen Kell

Status + Like = Agree with you?

2011-07-13T19:42:00.003+08:00

I am puzzled. Perhaps I shouldn't at the first place. Status with negative vibrations will appear under Top News while those promote positiveness are swept under Most Recent. Cocaine's production has been sky-rocketing for the past years. But, everyone knows cocaine is bad. Perhaps they don't know after all. Perhaps.

Facebook never gives us enough options. And enough is the keyword. Like. Comment. What's else? Where is the UnLike button? Perhaps at the first place Facebook is meant for promoting positiveness. So, they only put Like and hope that those who wish to UnLike will transfer the count for UnLike to Like. Blardy genius.

So, don't be too excited when many people Like your status. It might have something wrong there. After all, people only can Like and the same people are bashing you. Don't blame them, blame on Facebook. Because Facebook never gives us alternative options. Don't blame Facebook, after all people are the one who decide whether to Like. Either way, you are spared from the blame.

Perhaps you are the one to be blamed. Perhaps. Just perhaps.