Kam Raslan’s Talking Edge

(Reprinted from The Edge – Options pullout, 3 April 2017 issue)

Dear Kam,
My son is always watching YouTube videos when he should be studying. I tell him he must do nothing but study. That way, he can make money and I can retire and play golf. Why is he so selfish?
Worried

How do we learn, and how do we remember what we have been taught? Perhaps it is enough that we have been entertained. I was watching a fascinating YouTube video about nuclear weapons. I have no particular interest in nuclear weapons, but I was fascinated by this interesting video. It was in fact the most fascinating thing I had ever seen in at least the last 10 minutes. It was 3am and I had begun my YouTube journey many hours earlier by watching a video about how to fix a problem with my oven, and somehow it was now many hours later and I was watching a video about nuclear weapons.

I looked at one of the comments: “How did I get to nuclear weapons from GPU testing?” I asked myself the same question except that I did not know what GPU testing was. So, I watched a video about GPU testing, thereby closing somebody else’s YouTube circle.

And yet, despite all the hours I had invested, I cannot now remember anything I learnt about nuclear weapons or GPU testing and I did not even fix my oven because I called a specialist to come and fix it, which is what I was always going to do anyway and I do not know why I ever pretended I was going to fix it myself. Just because I watched a YouTube video it does not mean I am suddenly an expert. Or does it?

I have some friends who are now farmers. They are not from farming families and they did not formally study farming but they got a piece of land and decided to make a farm. So, they taught themselves how to farm through trial and error and by watching YouTube videos. After only a few years and starting from zero knowledge, they now have a successful farm and have learnt the important lesson that there is no money to be made in farming. But YouTube helped them to get to this point.

Search on YouTube for “how to” and the first thing that comes up is “How to make slime”. Why does anybody make a video about how to make slime and why would anybody watch it? But the video from Toys Channel has over seven million hits and it is fascinating, although comments included “I want 4 minutes of my life back” and “It did not work”.

I guess YouTube is all my childhood fantasies become reality (if it also came with a jet pack and the ability to walk through walls). I would have loved to have known how to make slime when I was a kid. I was not a consumer back then but now the people behind Toys Channel have found a way to monetise foolish childhood wants because seven million hits for a cheap four-minute video must make some money.

I find myself drawn to YouTube videos that may or may not have been made for the money, but are ultimately driven by a passion to teach the unnecessary. I really do not need to know about nuclear weapons, but when the lesson is entertainingly presented, I am transfixed, not by the subject matter but by the teacher. As far as I’m concerned, it is enough that we have been gripped and entertained. We learn the lessons that we choose to learn and nobody has any control over what that might be.

Dear Kam,
I’m from KL and yet I always get lost in KL. I’m not from London but I never get lost in London. How come?
Puzzled

North London has a very different character from South London. To come from the Right Bank in Paris is very different than from the Left Bank. But what about East KL and West KL? Do you even know if you live in the north or the south? Very few KLites know if Cheras, Bangsar or Taman Tun are west or north of where they live because until the invention of Waze, nobody ever looked at a map. My spatial awareness of KL is based on a set of connections I have imagined between landmarks and roads, the names of which I have never bothered to remember.

But if I am suddenly asked to make a new journey, then I feel completely lost. I might know the two places very well, and they might be right next to each other, but I cannot imagine the easiest connection because I do not know if I am going east or west until Waze came along and now, I do not have to even think about it.

I think I do not know how to navigate KL because it did not grow like other cities. Malaysia, both East and West, has always lived by trade on rivers and the sea, and yet its capital city is not a port city, which makes KL a very rare sort of capital city. A port and a navigable river create a historic focal point, but KL was able to grow in big leaps because it grew with the railway and the car so that Petaling Jaya has no imagined connection with Petaling Street. And where exactly is Petaling? I have no idea.

As soon as I am out of KL, I know if I am going north or south, but inside KL, I am driving blind in a twilight zone seemingly without history or compass bearings. I drive beside rivers and I do not even know their names. This would not be the case in any other town in Malaysia. But if you start looking at the history of KL, and without any nationalist delusions, then you can start to see that there is some sense to how and why it exists and grew. And then you can start to care.

Reprinted with the kind permission of