NOVEMBER 4 — My friends are already groaning about the toll hikes. “My route’s gone up a ringgit! Not a few sen, a ringgit!”

Now my friends who use public transport are facing 100 per cent fare increases. No one is safe it seems from the spectre of increasing costs.

Everything’s gone up. My friend, visiting from Australia, couldn’t believe teh ais was now more than RM2. The last time she had it here, even RM1.80 for the drink was considered expensive.

Yet there are still industries in Malaysia where RM1,500 is still the starting salary. You could get by on that in the interior maybe but in Kuala Lumpur? You’d be subsisting on one loaf of bread to sustain you for a week.

I remember once being so broke starting a new job ( my last employer disbursed my salary rather late) that I avoided lunch with colleagues, secretly taking bites from a cheese loaf I hid in a drawer. My new colleagues thought I was being a snob. I was just counting my pennies and too embarrassed to admit I couldn’t even afford a teh ais.

Now on broke days I can still afford to boil dashi and miso paste on the stove (thank you, Daiso) and have crackers with peanut butter or cheese spread. But what about those with no wiggle room? Who can’t, unlike me, just buy cheapish convenience store food when hungry? Who knows the cost of a teh ais is as much as their train or bus ride home?

The squeeze is so much more felt in the city, but the jobs, unfortunately, are in the city. If even the middle-class are beginning to scrounge for change, what more the poor for whom even a 10 sen coin must not be lost? People will soon start going hungry. Hungry people are often tired. Perpetually hungry people will, however, eventually snap.

I went without food or sleep once for nearly three days (during a depressive episode) and the experience was rather surreal. By the third day, everything was tinged with green as though I’d fallen into a murky pond. Yet my mind was clear, ridiculously clear though I had no way of knowing how sane I was at the time.

I was nonchalantly describing the situation to friends — haha I haven’t eaten in days, I don’t even know if I want to. Fortunately my friends could tell I was likely going mad and threatened me until I gave in and ate.

No one’s going to be force feeding the poor, starving and hungry.

It’s gotten me thinking that the only way things will change is when finally everything just goes to hell. Does it really have to come to that? I fear it might, seeing how the privileged keep living large and yet the poor remain that way.

The Opposition should really stop telling people to vote with their consciences. Their consciences aren’t going to keep them up at night, the way the acid eating at their stomach linings will.

Citizens, stop using your brains and think of your stomachs. In the long run, how do we keep all those stomachs filled? The simple fact of the matter is we really need to stop trusting those whose stomachs are way too soothed to care about those whose tummies are empty.

Or we could just eat our fat cat politicians and solve the bad leadership crisis as well as feed the hungry. In the meantime let me know if you think Ibrahim Ali would taste better with orange sauce or hollandaise.

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.