the alternative party brief report

it was raining heavily yesterday! i was hesitant to go attend the alternative merdeka party organised by ong. lucikily i met a friend and convinced her to give me a lift to the venue. at that time it was about 7.45pm.

since it was raining heavy non-stop, there were not so many people around when i arrived. later though, a few people did dropped by. the party started only at 8.50pm!

it was fun. ong was very creative to come up with different kind of activities and games. we started off with the ‘mini theatre’.

then we have the ‘poetry recital’ where we had to make up a poem with just these 3 words – merdeka, mereka, rekaan – picked randomly by us to string them together to make a sentence/phrase. so it can be ‘mereka mereka merdeka’ (they invent independance), ‘rekaan mereka merdeka’ (their invention become independant), ‘merdeka merdeka rekaan’ (independant independant invention) and so on. doesn’t matter if it doesn’t really make sense but the point/message is there, good enough.

ong also did an activity where he showed us that things are not always as we see they are.

i have to leave at 9.45pm as i need to catch the last bus at 10.00pm. what a pity. i missed a lot. read the report from ong here.

oh yeah, as i entered the place, i saw a display of interesting books (as you can see from the picture here). most of them are what ong call ‘alternative books’ (eg books by NGOs or activists), that you can’t find in popular book-shops. he said he intend to start an alternative book-shop. hope this will get going as i do like reading these kind of books. i spy a book by a blogger, fathi aris omar, who blogs at patah balek (3rd row, third from left). i became aware of his blog sometime back when he linked one of my post regarding article 11. it seemed that ong said he had once invited him as a speaker in one of the function he organised.