Grandma’s Gangsta Chicken Curry and Gangsta Stories from My Hippie Sixties

In these lie my story – of separation from my tribe so to speak. Of culture its constructions and complexities. The strange and the familiar has become me. Of the anthropology of the self globalized in all its absurdities.He is no longer him. At ten he saw a beheading in his backyard he too an accomplice. He roamed his village sometimes barefoot wading through streams backyards of his neighbors’ houses where young men were high smoking ganja. He once saw a group of men in red headbands with Arabic words on them ready to march to the capital city to slaughter many. He fought demons cried when the family dog died battling a cobra. He saw men in a trance munching on broke glasses and hibiscus petals high on Javanese trancedance music turning into horses. A spaceship landed on the school field. He thought he died shot by Martians.He was saved from being a Taliban. Saved by music of the American Hippies. He saw a boy who would be a jihadist later in green robe and white turban preaching jihadagainst music. He chased the young mullah out of the school. This is his story told in the language of the sixties. Of Beat poetry. Of rap seemingly. A story of a boy in a Malay village whose memory of his grandma's gangsta chicken curry and the Hippie Sixties saved him from being another jihadist out to destroy humanity. A story of separation and alienation of the joys and pains of growing up in a world where he could have been dead - high on drugs and religious extremities if not for his curiosities and his love for philosophy in the songs that have set him free!