From high BP to brain drain issue

In 2008 I was having high BP and cholesterol problem. I did blood test, then the doctor prescribed medicines to lower my cholesterol level. When I got pregnant in Dec 2008, my blood pressure returned to normal unexpectedly which the doctor found it quite unusual. Most women my age would have higher BP during pregnancy but my in my case it was the opposite.

I was very happy as my BP remained within the normal range throughout 2009 and 2010. However, two months ago it went up again. I went to see the doctor when I had one of my gastric attacks and she made a remark that I was already at Stage 1 of hypertension.

I was unhappy mainly because I’ve been cautious with what I ate and regularly exercised. The only thing I don’t have luxury to do is getting enough sleep because Zarif still wakes up a few times at night, sometimes for feeding and most of the times he’s uncomfortable because of the heat.

We can’t put the air conditioning on high because of his asthma problems and we definitely won’t turn the ceiling fan on at night. So, he would usually wake up at least twice at night and since I’m not the type that can easily go back to dreamland, I end up getting about 4 – 5 hours of sleep only, which is so not healthy.

Work pressure could be the other factor. I have to deal with similar depressing things now as in mid 2008. The problems and the people are so similar that it felt like Déjà vu. Well, even when the doctor lectured me also felt like Déjà vu.

Sometimes I wish I could tell people to treat others better so that the number of hypertension cases in the IT industry will be less. Frankly speaking, doing IT is not a difficult job. What make things difficult and bad is always the people. Some are just too ignorant and proud to let engineers like us to negotiate on effort and timeline. Some are just plain stupid to even understand what’s going on.

The country is facing brain drain because most workers don’t go through proper skills development programs. So, the claims made about our best workers have gone to migrate to work and live in more developed countries are not completely true. After so many years of moaning and sulking over those professionals who became specialists in foreign land, it’s about time to look inwards and invest more in the resources we have in the country.

I’m not a teacher and was never involved in the local education scene but the first thing I’d do to ensure we have quality workers is to raise the bar for SPM grading. When A only stands for Average, we’ll only produce Average professionals in their respective fields. When people tell me about their nephews or nieces getting 12 or 13 As for SPM, I seriously don’t know how to react. If we’ve been having 20- 40% of the students getting straight As for SPM, then why are we still having this brain drain issues?

We all know the answer. The students aced their SPM papers because of spot questions that can be obtained so easily and memorizing past years’ exam answers. This is not only happening to SPM students, the trend continues in universities as well. Even lab results, assignments and tutorial answers can simply be copied from seniors.

So, how are we going to be an innovative nation when everything is being copied over and over again?