Thursday, November 19, 2009

Give Me Back My Mozart

By Chip Tsao | published Nov 19, 2009

I called my solicitor last week. I asked him if I could sue a woman’s voice, which claims itself a “road safety commission”, which had abruptly interrupted my peaceful driving while crossing the Hung Hom tunnel.

I was driving with my car radio on. It was on Radio 4, the classical music channel rarely listened to by most Hong Kong people. And it was Mozart’s clarinet concerto No 622, performed by some members of the London Symphony Orchestra. With an elementary knowledge in the field of music, you know it is not only one of Mozart’s best but one of the most heavenly pieces of melody ever created in human history. My hat’s off to RTHK, which is the provider of such a good service, in a city full of meaningless noises.

But the short moment of serenity was brutally ripped out in the middle of the tunnel. A Chinese woman’s voice, claiming to be representative of the body, reminded all the cars in a stuttering Cantonese, followed by some broken English, “to keep a safe distance” from each other. Transmitted through a compulsory interference electronic device, the woman’s most boring voice completely destroyed my Mozart, like a big black fly buzzing around which suddenly drops dead, falling into a glass of champagne. That calamity was enough to get me depressed for the rest of the day.

I’m seeking to sue the so-called road safety commission, apparently another junk body formed with taxpayers’ money, for this reason:

People with a driving license need to be reminded to “keep a safe distance” in a tunnel, or anywhere else indeed, as much as a 70-year old granddad with five grandchildren needs to be instructed how to have proper sexual intercourse? For someone like Donald Tsang and his third-rate Chinese civil servants who have shown a total administrative failure in the past 12 years, they may need to be told everyday how their former British colonial master used to run Hong Kong with common sense. Not me, and I believe, neither do any of the drivers shuttling through the tunnel everyday. We are adults, and we have a more sober and mature mind than this dumb government.

If the “road safety commission’’ has to act like an omnipresent burbling nanny constantly intruding into drivers’ peaceful ears, what about those who never tune into a radio channel in their cars? That means they would miss that broadcast. And how stupid, bang, they crash in the tunnel, and they well deserve it.

Yes, there could be drunk drivers, but in a community with a bit of common sense, such reminders are normally displayed, (if you have to treat your citizens like absent-minded children), on a banner hung beneath the tunnel ceiling, in deep red color.
How much should the Hong Kong SAR government pay in compensation to all those like me, apart from the crime of blasphemy against Amadeus, the son of God? Give me back my Mozart, with his clarinet concerto No 622, in one single piece, on that afternoon. It’s priceless, compared with the $230,000 paid as monthly salaries to that little-bang-for-the-buck bunch of under-secretaries.

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