The Kuala Lumpur Traveler

Watch out…. come 3pm, 10th November 2007, the city of Kuala Lumpur will suppossedly be painted with yellow. The mission was to mobilize 100,000 citizens all dressed in yellow, to march from Dataran Merdeka to The National Palace to hand over a memorandum to The King seeking help from the Royal Highness to intervene and help to ensure fair elections in Malaysia. The yellow rally, if it ever happens, is organized by Bersih, a Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections.

Malaysiakini however reported that the PM Pak Lah has vowed to crack down on Bersih rally.

“The police have said no, yet they still want to proceed. In that case, surely something bad is going to happen,” said Abdullah during his presidential winding-up speech at the end of the Umno general assembly today.”

Source: Malaysiakini

In the mean time, I had searched Wikipedia and there is a long list of articles associated with this colour yellow.

From the human culture points of view, I found these facts about yellow rather interesting:

• Yellow is a bright, cheerful color, often associated with happiness and peace.
• In the English language, yellow has traditionally been associated with jaundice and cowardice.
• In American slang, a coward is said to be “yellowbellied” or “yellow”.
• In Hindu mythology it is considered that yellow has the power to influence the intellect.
• In ancient China, yellow was the symbol of Centre and Earth, one of the main five colors.
• In South Korea the color yellow is associated with jealousy.
• Near the end of the 19th century, the color yellow was often associated with mental illness, specifically including insanity, and with other sorts of mental problems (e.g. depravity). Examples include The Yellow Book, The Yellow Wallpaper, The King in Yellow, and The Yellow Sign.
• In Chinese culture, yellow is associated with royalty, as it is also in southeast Asia. In China, commoners were not allowed to wear yellow until modern times.
• In the Malay the term budaya kuning (lit. “yellow culture”) is used to refer to lewd or uncouth behaviour, with the implication that such culture is an import from Western societies.
• There is a yellow smile, in Arab culture, which is an ingenuine smile. A yellow smile is used when a person is concealing lack of interest, fear, or any emotion he wishes to keep hidden. It is sometimes used as a joke, by making a face of a crooked, ingenuine smile, when somebody tells a bad joke or is trying to make others laugh for something they do not find humorous enough.
>”Yellow” (“giallo”), in Italy, refers to crime stories, both fictional and real. This association began about in 1930 because the first series of crime novels published in Italy had a yellow cover.
• There is also a French expression “rire jaune” (“yellow laughter”) which could be translated into English as “mirthless laughter”, laughing without mirth, laughing when you don’t find the joke funny, or when the joke is directed at you.
• Pencils are often painted yellow because of the association of this color with China, where the best graphite is found; in the past, only pencils with Chinese graphite used to be painted yellow
• “Yellow journalism” was sensationalist journalism that distorts, exaggerates, or exploits news to maximize profit. The term came from Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal American, who engaged in sensational reporting during the late 19th and early 20th century, most famously during the Spanish-American War. The term was derived from the color comic strip The Yellow Kid, which appeared in both papers.
• In the United States, a Yellow Dog Democrat was a Southern voter who consistently voted for Democratic candidates in the late 19th and early 20th centuries because of lingering resentment against the Republicans dating back to the Civil War and Reconstruction period. Today the term refers to a hard-core Democrat, supposedly referring to a person who would vote for a “yellow dog” before voting for a Republican.

Read more about yellow at Wikipedia.

Whatever yellow means to you, it would be interesting to see what will happen today in the city center of Kuala Lumpur. Stay tuned….

[tags]Bersih, yellow[/tags]

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