This article first appeared in Capital, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on July 20, 2020 - July 26, 2020

This is the end, beautiful friend,
This is the end, my only friend,

The end
Of our elaborate plans, the end
Of ev’rything that stands, the end
No safety or surprise, the end
I’ll never look into your eyes again,
Can you picture what will be,
So limitless and free,
Desperately in need of
Some stranger’s hand
In a desperate land

That, dear readers, is a popular song from 1967, courtesy of James Douglas Morrison aka Jim Morrison, and his band, The Doors. While the song, The End, is said to have many inferences and connotations, it’s been playing in this writer’s head since going to a mall in Cheras — and being practically pronounced dead.

Comprendre? The End, yes, you read that right — dead, deceased, expired, departed, gone, no more, passed on, passed away, late, lost, perished, fallen, slain, mati.

According to the cekai thermometers used by many shops, my temperature has been erratic. Sometimes, in a span of minutes, the readings can vary by as much as a few degrees. This, in turn raises my blood pressure over the anxiety of wondering whether I have contracted a fever.

At the entrance of an eatery in the mall recently, my temperature was determined to be merely 31°C.

At 31°C, yours truly should be comatose, unconscious and without reflexes, with very shallow breathing and a slow heart rate, and possibly serious heart rhythm problems.

While some bosses have questioned this writer’s mental capacity, and some have used words such as brain dead, to be pronounced dead by an electronic gadget is another thing altogether.

The guard was instructed to take another stab at it, but this time the thermometer read 28°C — which would mean severe heart rhythm disturbances, breathing difficulties and imminent death.

Many thoughts passed through my mind — I should have bought those rubber glove stocks, or not wasted time voting in 2018, among a long list of random matters.

A third check did not produce a reading. The guard — Bahadhur from Kathmandu — whacked, slapped and shook the thermometer a few times, much like my dad used to slap his old Grundig black-and-white TV in the late 1970s.

Back to the temperature, there was a pharmacy nearby, but the loud techno music emanating from two large speakers outside proved to be a deterrent. Maybe the plan was that the music would give patrons a headache and thus improve sales.

Come to think of it, only in Cheras would you find a pharmacy blaring techno music. Also, only in Cheras would you find gold cars. Yes, some people stick gold coloured paper wrappers on their cars, which is considered stylish. Maybe after looking at the cars, you may need to go to a pharmacy to get something to remove the glare from your eyes.

Anyway, taking comfort in a Confucius quote, “A lion chased me up a tree, and I greatly enjoyed the view from the top”, yours truly could only thank the Almighty that the security guards and mall operators take temperature-taking seriously.

In the meantime, enjoy the bull run, with even industrial glove makers gaining traction even though they have nothing to do with Covid-19, while a battered company that no longer has any ships is building a RM1 billion e-commerce hub to ride the exponential growth in the e-commerce business across Asia.

Now, this is really the end, don’t you think?

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