Small worldness

I go to a primary schoolmate's wedding dinner at the Renaissance Hotel, sit myself down at a table and, being the friendly guy that I am, start introducing myself to the people on the table (of which there were 3 when I arrived). 2 of which I already knew from 2 decades ago (3rd one's the wife). Sheesh.

Nice nice catchup catchup, and turns out that one of them (primary schoolmate)'s cousin was in Tunku. Playing Malik. The other one of them's cousin was in Enemy of the People, and Six Characters Looking For An Author.

Small world 2 - Big world 0.


I go outside for a drink, I greet the groom and who does he introduce me to? A dude from my secondary school, who I re-met through Facebook and is old family friends with the groom. I look around, and who do I see? Rashid Salleh, being MC of the night, who knows the groom through the dad through the rugby club.

Small world 4 - 0.


Halfway through the night, I bump into another secondary schoolmate, who knows the groom through their siblings. No, my primary and secondary schools are very different.

Small world 5 - 0.


She's involved with her family business which is interestingly to do with recycling. Seriously Plastic, apparently (no idea where Beranang is though). After my compulsory "why aren't you doing more in Malaysia"-type interrogation, turns out that, as with many more-advanced things here, our infrastructure is incomplete.

As a mini side-note, we've done wonderfully well in terms of basic modern society infrastructure and we're keeping it up pretty well. Seriously. Transportation, waste management, plumbing, electricity, legislature, governmental, political, etc - all present and decent (just about, for some). Our concerns are very much more developed-country nowadays - human rights, animal rights, freedom of speech, freedom of press, etc. Malaysia's Level 4 in Maslow's pyramid man, pretty damn good over 50 years. Not saying that we should stop or anything, just that we have it good and we can still have it all better. Ok rah-rah side-note done.

So her company takes in all the scrap plastic and makes new stuff out of it. So noble eh. Thing is, we don't have a sufficient collection system here, so there's limited supply locally - and her company IMPORTS SCRAP PLASTIC. Container-loads of used plastic from Europe and shit. Can you imagine? Affluent Malaysia, with take-aways in plastic bags, kopi ais in plastic bags, tau foo far in plastic containers, shopping malls with hundreds of people carting away loads of plastic every day, sited in a region of billions of people hastily adopting American consumer mentality - and we're buying Europeans' waste plastic?!?

Mind boggling.


The good news is, this status quo won't last for long. Some people are already collecting plastic, and soon it'll be crazy not to do it. Imagine - people give you their scrap plastic for free, all you gotta do it collect it and deliver to these recyclers. It's all about logistics. Then, regionally. We've got some very populous neighbours who are developing rapidly.

Malaysia, Green Capital of South-East Asia.


Sexy, innit? Question is, why not?

The world's too small to not care.