Cultural Taboossss

         Taboos are basically an exclusion for use or practice, cultural taboos may vary from one another, with over 1500 different culture groups in the world, there may be a lot of taboos that we might not be able to explore. Sometimes, the simplest of customary actions in one's society may be misinterpreted as improper in another. For example as westerners are accustomed to shaking hands when introduced or even when they meet their friends, it would be considered bold if they were to do the same in some Asian countries like Japan as bowing is much preferred as sign of goodwill. While,some might be alarmed by it, in other cultures shaking hands could also be considered insolent. That's why it's very important you study the customs and cultural taboos of a country before you travel to avoid awkward situations. We also have cultural taboos in Malaysia, such as:

• Do not discuss ethnic relations or the political system. They are both sensitive subjects
• Do not drink alcohol. The country’s large Muslim population does not drink alcohol.
• Do not ever involve in illegal drugs. There is a mandatory death penalty for trafficking.  
• Do not kiss in public. Public behaviour is important in Malaysian culture. Most Malaysians refrain from displaying affection such as embracing or kissing in public.
• Do not wear hot pants and vests at mainland beaches if you are female. Topless sunbathing is a no-no. Malay women usually go swimming fully dressed and some keep their scarves on.
• Do not point your feet towards people or sacred images.
• Hugging and kissing, even between husbands and wives, is forbidden in public.
•  It is considered rude to point at anyone with the forefinger. Malaysians use the forefinger only to point at animals. 

Now let us go through some of the weird cultural taboos we have in the world

In Vietnam, the women of a hill tribe known as Lu would blacken their teeth with a combination of tree resins, iron nail fillings and burnt stick coconut husks to beautify themselves because they wouldn't want to be mistaken as demons, wild animals and savages who are known traditionally as the only ones with white teeth.

In India, the Aghoris who worship the god of destruction, Shiva, would consume feces, drink out of human skulls, eat the flesh and smear themselves with the ashes of corpses which they retrieve from graveyards, they believe that there is no distinction between purity and impurity.

In Ukraine, if you wish to give flowers as a gift, you must make sure that the number of flowers are odd and do not include yellow flowers or easter lily as they are only used for funerals as well as flowers in even numbers.

The V sign is considered a sign of success in British, this is because back in the Anglo-French war, the British shooters were threatened that their fingers be cut off by the French but since they won the war, they made it to show that their fingers are still intact. But be careful when making this sign, make sure you don't let the centre of the palm face to you as it would be considered as a provocation.

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Baby Dumping

        Recently, we always see that baby dumping cases come out on the front page of the newspaper. Everyday there are several numbers of infants being found in rivers, dustbins, and even sometimes somewhere that we cannot imagine such as travelling bags. These babies are died in the situation that cannot be accepted by most of the people as the ways of killing these babies are too cruel and cold-blooded. As the number of baby dumping cases has been increasing days by days.

       The first reason is teenagers are lacking of sex education. Parents and schools do not inject sex education onto teenagers' mind since they were small. Parents always think that their children will understand everything about sex when they grow up. They do not understand their bodies and some of them may not know what is the differences between boys and girls. Due to the lack of these basic knowledge, surely they do not know how and where a baby comes.

           When these teenagers reach puberty, they will curious about themselves and also other people. At the level of puberty too, teenagers are full of curiousity and they want to try everything that they have not tried before. They will curious about their boy friends and girl friends. Urged by their strong curiousity, they have a special relationship with their partners. After the process, they might have a baby. When they face problems such as pregnancy, they will try to solve the problems illegally and the best solution to them is baby dumping.

          Besides, the economic state of teenagers also contributes to baby dumping cases. Teenagers are not able to raise a baby on their own. They are under age and what they have to do now is enjoying their school or college lives. Themselves also have to rely on their parents at this stage of early ages and how could they raise small families on their own. They will never ever get into the matter. In order to solve their problems, most of them would choose baby dumping as the best way inspite of other methods. Only through baby dumping, they will forever say goodbye to their burden of raising a baby. Most of them consider baby dumping as the best way because it will not leave over effects on them in the future. But, their thoughts are definitely wrong because they have killed innocent babies and they will suffer from that bad and memorable nightmare throughout their whole lives.

          In conclusion, baby dumping is morally and physically wrong. Teenagers should keep a distance from the crimes. They have to learn to be responsible on what they have done and think maturely on the pros and cons of things. They should be able to differentiate good things and bad things. All in all, starting rom today, parents and schools must play their roles in fighting baby dumping cases by imposing enough sex education in their children and always beware on their children's action. Baby dumping should be eliminated from now on and leave a peaceful and caring society for us.

  

THIS IS BABY IN WOMB'S VIDEO. LET'S PLAY AND WATCH. LOVE FROM US.

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Childhood Memory

Time to refresh the childhood memories.

     These days, almost all kids play video games or soccer, tennis and basketball. Games like Congkak, Main Lereng, Baling Tin, Sepak Raga or Gasing are bygones. Traditional games were not just mere games. They were designed in such a way that one can develop lot of skills like logical thinking, building strategy, concentration, basic mathematics, aiming and lots more. These games have rich culture and heritage value and were tools of passing on some ancestral knowledge or the other.

       The values that we achieve by playing these games are more when compared to the games that we play nowadays. We get a chance to learn about our culture and history, and the most important thing is that it is suitable for all ages, and they increase the interaction between generations.

       Kids these days grow up surrounded by technologies, to a point that their playmates are substituted by Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo, Apple and friends o R2-D2. Rarely will they get the chance to experienced what their parents did, hence very few of them are appreciative of the luxuries which were given to them.

       Future of these good old school games which involved physical activities, which involved learning, which involved improvement of skills are in question. Many are clueless about these traditional games and alternate means of fun.

       Since it's our Made in Malaysia issues, I have compiled a list of games that I have played or heard of in my childhood days. Why don't we take pride in keeping our traditional games alive and at the same time, take a walk down memory lane. It's time to put down the Playstation and that iPad of yours and indulge in some old time fun with the kind of games your grandparents and parents played back in the days. Besides, in case you are a victim of a power failure and your Playstation goes dead, you'd know what to do. The enjoyment you get is more than the Playstation and Xbox and whatever toys put together. Reminiscing those wild childhood days brings a bright smile to my face.

1. Paper Airplane

By making using of the old books and deserted paper, we would compete with each other to find whose planes could fly the longest distance.

2. Blowing Bubbles

It came with a basic bubble wand, and dipped the wand into the bubble mix, and gave it a gentle blow and lots of little bubbles came flying out.

3. Gasing or Top Spinning

Gasings are spin with a string, cord or rope. To spin a Gasing, a string is first tightly wound around the top. With the player holding on to one end of the string, the Gasing is thrown or launched to set it spinning.

4. Keting-ting or Hopscotch

Keting-ting is a playground game in which players toss a small object into numbered spaces of a pattern of rectangles outlined on the ground and then hop or jump through the spaces to retrieve the object.

5. Rock Paper-Scissors

Rock paper-scissors is a hand game usually played by two people, where players simultaneously form one of three shapes with an outstretched hand.


THIS IS ALSO OUR CHILD MEMORY VIDEO. LET'S PLAY AND WATCH. SPREAD LOVE FROM US.

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Poverty

Above are photos of what we may know as poverty, an awful condition faced by many of our brothers and sisters. It may not be something that we commonly see in our country Malaysia but in some parts of the globe it is a very big crisis. It is a very sad thing which in many cases leads to death, this is because when one becomes pauperized they would find it difficult to obtain life needs for survival such as food, if such a simple necessity like that becomes a struggle for them, let alone shelter.  Needless to say, poverty gives more damage to children than they already do to adults since children are obviously weaker . Poverty has been affecting people for a very long time and it seems like there’s nothing much that we can do to stop it, the economy is on it’s rise and these people aren’t getting any richer, so tell me how we can fix this, if not by lowering down the standards of the economy which we all know would never happen, we can help these people by donating them with money, food and essentials rather than being selfish and pig on everything, but that being said, not many are willing to give out help, many give pity but that’s about it, it’s human nature and even many of us do it, it’s rather unavoidable, people would go on saying “if it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be” but if we were to treat life as such, we wouldn’t go far would we? Correct me if I’m wrong, with the least knowledge I have, wouldn’t it be nice if we could all collect money to build non-profit institutions in developing countries to help educate them so that they could acquire the qualification needed to earn a proper living. With 7 billion of earth’s human population, I doubt it would be a problem for us to help our needful neighbours.  

Talking about poverty, I got reminded by this story I once heard when I was young, this happened when poverty struck some parts of Africa a while ago, a journalist approached an elderly lady who confused him as she was mixing stones in a pot heated on fire , she had her son lying on the sand across her sleeping, he then asked her what was her purpose of doing so when you obviously cannot eat stones and she replied saying that it was to make her starving son think that she was cooking something for him and that he would soon fall asleep thinking there would be food when he wakes up.  It was a tragic story and it sucks just by thinking about it. Just give it some thought, what help are we contributing?

LET'S PLAY AND WATCH WHY POVERTY ? VIDEO. LOVE FROM 3 OF US.

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Impoliteness Among Youth

Assalamualaikum and have a great day everyone ! This is our second entry after Oh My English Member ! entry last week. We hope you enjoy reading our new entry. This week we want to share about 'Impoliteness' and we choose 'Impoliteness VS Teenager Life' as our entry title because nowadays, many teenagers associated with impoliteness in their daily lives and they do so without shame even by their own parents.

Impoliteness. It is a discourteous manner that ignores accepted social usage. However, nature of courtesy is becoming increasingly important in our lives. This issue has been raised among those who stated that they agree and accept impoliteness properties for several reasons and anyone who thinks that these traits do not fit to be a rude to others no matter when it happens. Personally and from my point of view, bad manners can cause harm to our relationships with family and friends, efficiency in work and a future in politics and business. When we were together with family and friends, our rude attitude will hurt the feelings of those we love and care about us. They are the most important people in our lives. So, do not use bad words or violence to hurt their feelings and their love for us. There will be a gap between us and our parents, and it can cause problems in communication with them.

In other words, they reward us something of value for them but we do not appreciate the gift and thought it was the worst gift in our lives. Besides, they are also being worried and want to reach out to us even where we are.but we always want to be independent without them. But this conflict that we created does not indicate that we does not need rude to our parents because this is for our own good since they care about their children well.

In addition, rude attitude will cause prejudice to the other people in the work environment and no one is willing to work with people who are rude. Especially when we control things in politics and business, politicians and leaders need to make a positive and good impression to the public and workers because what they show not only themselves but the company, the state and the country. What they show is a group rather than individually. Discussions or negotiations between them will not be successful if both parties show impoliteness each other and the federation will not be sustainable if both of them separate the relationships with friends.

The major factors contributing to these occurrences are :

1. Desire to prove something

As a youth, we know exactly what most youths want to prove when they start being rude. It is to prove superiority. Aggression, use of abusive language and use of clearly intentional rudeness are the results of being pushed beyond the limits they can handle with limited patience.

2. Influence

Most youths are like fluid in a container. They are influenced by the people in the place they live. or instance, in a place where most people swear, it is very likely that the youths there swear too. It is an unintentional rudeness.

3. Awareness

Sometimes we hurt other people with our words without knowing. Sometimes we realize it immediately, sometimes we don't and, sometimes we never do. Awareness makes all the difference. Lack of awareness of the meaning of impoliteness and lack of empathy combined often become the reason of impoliteness among youths.

Youth Crime Statistics

Is there a reason for ignoring the soft attitude of self and society ? Of course the answer is 'yes'. There's no denying that the permanent establishment is difficult at all times and it can indicate to others that we are a brave and not be criticized. But it does not mean rude is a good attitude which at a certain level is the best way to show impropriety and the courage to be a gentle man of iron.

In conclusion, the attitude of impropriety will hurt the people that we care such as family and friends and can destroy the future of the work environment. Sometimes although we ignore the gentle attitude is a courage movement but it is not a good reason to be rude.


Example of Impoliteness Behavior

THIS IS AN EXAMPLE OF IMPOLITENESS VIDEO. DO NOT KEEP IT REAL. LOVE FROM US.

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Oh My English Member !

Assalamualaikum and a very good day to our dear readers,

today we would like to inaugurate our new blog for the subject fundamental in English which is actually a task handed to us. We would like to call ourselves the Colericators, we got the name Colericate from the Spanish word Colerico which basically means passionate, we would like to think of ourselves as very passionate individuals and thus thought that it was most suitable. The Colericators were created by three ladies who are students studying Bachelor of Chemical Engineering Technology (Hons) Process in University Kuala Lumpur Malaysian Institute of Chemical and Bio-engineering Technology situated in Taboh Naning, Melaka. 

FIRST MEMBER. AIRINA.

Let me tell you a little bit about myself, I'm Airina Binti Marx Aideit, previously I studied Foundation in Science at UiTM Puncak Alam. I've been living in the town Subang Jaya,Selangor for as long as I can remember. I'm indeed very passionate about music and have been playing the piano from a young age. Being the last child out of four siblings, makes it very hard for me to interact with children as I get very awkward and weird around them, I don't know if telling people about it is necessary, but that's that.  Last but not least, I enjoy talking to strangers and chasing people on the streets along with my best buds when we're bored. 

SECOND MEMBER. NADIA.

Bismillahirahmanirrahim. Hi guys. My name is Nadiah binti Hasanuddin. I was born on 6th March 1991, which means I am 22 years old now at Hospital Bentong, Pahang. My respected father, Hasanuddin bin Jamaluddin is a teacher and my lovely mother, Norihan binti Hamzah is a housewife. Being the third of seven siblings , I have always been taught to be an independent girl. In the past, I studied Diploma in Oil and Gas at International Technology and Professional College Indera Kayangan, Perlis. I was born and have been living in the town of Kuantan, Pahang. I have got I am very passionate about art and I've been drawing a portrait of a house from 7 years old. 

THIRD MEMBER. AQILAH.

At 7.30 p.m on 28th September 1994, a little baby was born at Hospital Islam, Kuala Lumpur. Nur Aqilah binti Zahari is the name given by my grandmother which means bright and a person who is awesome. I have three brothers and I'm the only princess in my siblings. I'm a happy and friendly girl. Now, I'm studying at UNIKL MICET in Bachelor of Chemical Engineering in Process. After 4 years, I will be a successful engineer. Lastly, I have got I am very passionate about dress and I have been creating a dress from a young age.

However, this is only just a part of us. All these words have such a great meaning about our life and it's amazing to think it has only just began. Thank you guys for reading :)

OUR FRIENDSHIP SONG VIDEO

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