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On the Books I Would Write if I Had All The Time in the World, Part I

A random assortment of the titles of books I would write if I was independently wealthy enough to just spend all my days writing books:

1. The Trip: From Kuala Lumpur to Oxford in the Summer of 2018

2. UMNO: A Biography of Malaysia’s Grand Old Party

3. Kanun Sastera Melayu: Menelusuri Khazanah Persuratan Bangsa dari Tun Seri Lanang ke Usman Awang

4. Sakau: How Najib Razak Destroyed Tun Razak’s Legacy

5. The Tattered Hibiscus: Poems on and about Malaysia

6. Reformasi, 1998-2022: Suatu Penilaian

7. Tan Sri Asri Muda: Sebuah Biografi Politik dan Peribadi

8. The New Economic Policy: Achievements and Failures in Malaysia’s Bumiputera Policy

9. How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Other People and Pay Attention to the Prospect of My Own Impending Death

10. Essays: A Decade of Writing, 2023-2033

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On Keeping Your Head Down (or, the Hang Nadim Problem)

In my first few months of boarding school, a well-meaning dorm mate of mine pulled me aside and explained, “You got to keep your head down. Don’t be so proud. I see when we were taking our class photos, you were putting your head up, looking too proud. Don’t.”

Naturally, I bristled at this.

It took me a while – being a boy from KL who suddenly found himself in a boarding school with 600 other boys and girls, most of them being Malay kids from kampungs across Melaka and Muar – to realise that I was entering a different world, with a different moral code at play.

Jangan tunjuk pandai.

Jangan eksyen.

Jangan pasang butang baju yang paling atas, nampak sangat macam geek.

Jangan baik sangat dengan budak puteri, nanti ada orang ingat kau try nak kacau awek diorang.

Over my six years in boarding school, I got used to the rules of the game. It didn’t always make sense to me – why is it a problem that I can speak English fluently, and why should I take pains to hide that fact? And at the start of my time there, I chafed against these rules that seemed to be arbitrary and mindless.

But in boarding school, where you are pretty much left to your own devices, potentially defenceless against boys much bigger and stronger than you, you learn very quickly to fit in and play along.

If there was an overarching principle in all those years in boarding school, it was to keep your head down. Malay culture certainly puts a premium on being humble and grounded, but in the hothouse of a boarding school environment, the imperative can almost seem like a necessity for survival.

All these lessons from my youth were heavy on my mind during the last general elections, when Khairy Jamaluddin went all out, in the face of heavy anti-UMNO sentiment in his Sungai Buloh constituency, to declare that he wanted to be Prime Minister someday.

Uh-oh, I thought. That’s a no-no.

In Sejarah Melayu, the tale of Hang Nadim is a cautionary one – don’t make yourself appear too clever, such that you end up appearing to be a threat to others. Yes, I suppose Malays have a problem with hasad dengki, but isn’t this basic human nature at work? Even for the best of us, we have a responsibility to maintain our viability, to avoid getting “assassinated” for posing a threat to others.

Maybe Malays will always have this Hang Nadim problem. We can complain about it – or we can accept that to survive and thrive in any human community, some amount of keeping one’s head down is necessary – if only to keep one’s head when everyone else is losing theirs!

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On Malaysian Foreign Policy in the Age of US-China Decoupling (or, ZOPFAN21)

I am old enough to remember when Malaysia’s foreign policy was already quite clear and bedded in. Yes, we started out as a reliable partner for the West, given our heritage as a British colony. (In fact, we were so hard up for Western approval and protection that we even patterned our national flag after the Star Spangled Banner!) But as the Cold War wore on, we gradually edged towards a more neutral position, marked by our active membership in the Non Aligned Movement (NAM), our active participation in South-South initiatives, and most importantly, our core role as a founding and active member of ASEAN. The latter adopted, on the urging of our very own Tun Razak, a stance of studied neutrality, in accordance with the concept of ASEAN as a Zone of Peace, Freedom and Neutrality.

Each ASEAN member, of course, had their own independent leaning, one way or the other between the US and the USSR, but by and large when the stakes were at their highest, we banded together as small-ish nations to insist on a path forward for global affairs that would work, in our own small way, towards averting the nuclear Armageddon of full-on superpower rivalry.

Many years later, after the economic and geopolitical boon of a unipolar world had led to a rapid rise in prosperity for many countries, including Malaysia and its ASEAN neighbours, we are entering a new world of geopolitical rivalry. Thucydides had warned us that this day would come, and now it is here. The ban on advanced semiconductor technologies, the ongoing spat on the status of Taiwan, the threat to ban TikTok – these are all opening salvoes of what must surely be the dominant geopolitical rivalry of the 21st century.

Malaysia has so far been careful to balance itself off the two polar opposites. Pak Lah and Najib were temperamentally inclined to hedge closer to the Americans, but the incendiary scandal that was 1MDB had inevitably led Najib to turn to China to cover up his billion-dollar hole, to no avail.

Mahathir’s second tilt at the premiership was a strange throwback to the 1980s – his close courting of Japan was merely another instance of the maestro happily replaying his greatest hits of the late 20th century.

Muhyiddin and Ismail operated in a world of geopolitical stalemate as the world grappled with a global pandemic, but as we begin to emerge out of that health emergency, and the US marches even more determinedly in the path towards confrontation with China after Trump’s wilful realignment of US foreign policy, we will find ourselves pressed to make choices.

Anwar, of course, has a history of being pro-West. But the world has changed radically from his previous stint in government. Will he, too, like Mahathir, fall prey to the nostalgia of rehashing past glories?

My sense is that Anwar has an opportunity here to place Malaysian foreign policy firmly in the non-aligned camp. To treat with both the US and China as fairly and as equitably as possible, accept gifts as they are offered, but be firmly determined to chart out a more independent path. Perhaps not always equidistant between the two, but certainly never getting too close as to fall inescapably into one orbit or the other.

There are a few structural as well as coincidental challenges here. On one hand, our geographic and cultural proximity to China will always exert a geopolitical pull that may prove very difficult to resist (although resist we certainly must.) On the other, surely it must be more than coincidence that not only is Anwar himself an avowed Americophile, but his Foreign Minister holds a PhD from Temple University. There will be personal and philosophical ties that may well tilt this government towards the West.

As mentioned earlier, we have already survived one geopolitical contest by treading a neutral and independent path. Surviving this one, in this century, may necessarily require us to do the same. We have an opportunity here to lead ASEAN, yet again, in troubled times. A ZOPFAN21 could be Anwar’s greatest legacy for Malaysia, as it charts a trajectory forward in a brave new and dangerous world.

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On Interregnum

One of my favourite novel series of all time is Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series.

Anyone who has ever read any of these books will know that Isaac Asimov isn’t exactly Faulkner or Proust. His writing style can be a bit wooden, his characters often very thin vessels who help to carry his plots forward. But that plot! The imagination! The twists and turns of human drama!

In the Foundation novels, Asimov invents his own science of “psychohistory” to imagine a way for human civilisation to rebuild after the decline and fall of the Galactic Empire. Directly inspired by Gibbon, Asimov imagined an outpost, exiled in the farthest reaches of space, where the best and brightest of humanity could seek refuge as galactic civilisation shatters into pieces over the course of several centuries – much like the fall of Gibbon’s Roman Empire.

I have been thinking about the Foundation series a lot lately, whenever I think about the current state of Malaysian politics.

After unbending domination of many decades, the Barisan Nasional has lost its grip over Malaysian politics, reduced to a pale shadow of its former self. A succession of governments and Prime Ministers have come and gone – the narrative of Mahathir as saviour eventually gave way to a parade of expected and unexpected faces, and now, Anwar Ibrahim is at the helm.

The very manner of the cobbling of this Kerajaan Perpaduan, and the recent ensuing developments, suggests to me that Malaysian politics is now deep in the Second Empire phase of the Interregnum, and that we are now waiting for our Mule: that enigmatic, unexpected, random element that refuses to bow to the inexorable forces of psychohistoric prediction. The wild card. The red herring.

For now, the questions remain: How are we retooling the Malaysian economy for the challenges of a decoupled global economy? As multinational companies look to “friendshoring” and rejigging their supply chains, how is Malaysia charting its way forward? How do we set up our geopolitical stance amidst the rising risk of conflict in East Asia? Can we finally come to a reconciliation over the religious and ethnic fault lines that continue to divide our polity? How do we rebuild a consensus around development and civilisational advancement? What does it mean to be Malaysian in the 21st century?

All these questions will remain largely unanswered over these coming few years, it seems.

For now, we merely have to resign ourselves to our political class continuing to work through their neuroses, and hope that they will eventually discover, probably the hard way, that they will continue to be rejected by the voting public who only wants them to (finally) put the public interest ahead of their own petty squabbles and thievery.

For the rest of us, we must simply suffer what we must, until that bright Aurora finally comes.

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On Things I Wish I Had Known When I Was 25

For some years after I had just turned 25, I would joke with my friends that my “internal mental clock” was stuck at 25. This lasted for some time, until of course the fiction could no longer be maintained as the body increasingly refused to play ball with my gentle conceit.

This year, I will be turning 45. It won’t be as harrowing as when I was turning 40, I think. By now I’ve come to some amount of reconciliation with who I am and what Life means. I recognise that in many many ways, I have been stupidly fortunate, and remarkably undeserving of many things that have graced my existence of these few decades.

I also recognise that to the extent that I still hold feelings of Envy for others, and Self-Pity for myself, for the many missed opportunities and desired achievements that have eluded my ham-fisted grasp, there is still work to be done in learning on how to become a better human being.

Maybe the lesson will never be fully learnt until my time on this Earth is up.

I am now old enough to know that time travel is a fanciful idea, nothing more – but if I could go back in time and talk to that blithely-hopeful young man of 25, I would be telling him a few things, like these:

  1. It’s ok to make mistakes. All your life, you will fear making them, and you may well have missed out on any number of wonderful things that could have been part of your life, if only you had that little extra ounce of Courage to try and risk failing. You will find, ironically, that some of the best things in your life will come out from what you may have thought, from the outset, was a regrettable and irredeemable error. Be prepared to be wrong, often.
  2. There is no such thing as “The One” person for you – this is mere hogwash invented by movies and Hallmark cards to make money off your naivety. When you truly Love someone, your concept of Love and Self will grow to encompass the larger person that you should and will become as a result of loving that someone.
  3. Family will hurt you and disappoint you. Because they, too, are human, and will commit the mistakes and mishaps that humans do. Some of them might never deserve your forgiveness, but at the very least, you can learn to live with the hurts and the disappointments, and save room in your life and in your heart for the ones who truly love you and care for you.
  4. Ambition is important to your personal growth and livelihood, but never forget that these are all means to a far more important end: to learn what it means to be who you are, and what you are meant to do on this Earth.
  5. In work, try your best to gain the right Skills that will make you useful as you grow older. Since you weren’t born with Wealth, you must sell your Labour like most others on this earth – gain the right skills that can make your Labour useful and worthwhile, to yourself and to others.
  6. What you might think is desperately and shatteringly important to you today, will likely end up being something rather “meh” as you grow older, and your priorities change and grow to encompass the bigger and better and more mature person that you become.
  7. Friendships – you need to pay attention. Too often, in the past and in the years to come, you will let friendships lapse and wither out of lack of tender care and attention. Don’t do this. Spend the time to reach out. At least drop a text from time to time – better yet, make the time to meet over coffee. The friends you have are the most precious gift you will have in this life – we are all ships passing by silently in the night, but it is no small consolation to know that we can sail alongside each other for a while and make that loneliness a little easier to bear.
  8. Reading will save your Life. Not merely the influx of information, as mundanely important as that might be. Rather, reading offers you a window to constantly reflect on Life and the big questions that will increasingly haunt you as you get older and closer to your own mortality. Some of the best highlights of your life will come from the epic, beautiful and haunting reads that lie in wait for you.
  9. On the point of mortality: Death is the ever-present phantom, the one thing that makes you truly human, that bittersweet pill that each one of us will need to take one day. Raging against Death will serve you no purpose: running away will only lead you astray, and cause you to twist and turn in the most unnatural and transmogrified ways. The only truly human way to live life is to constantly think of Death, and look Death in the eye – and embrace what it means to live well so that you can die well.
  10. Love yourself. You will find that you are one of the lucky ones on this earth, who can count on a good number of people in your formative years as well as in your later years, who have loved you truly and unconditionally and unreservedly. More than anything, and despite everything, this has been the best gift of your life, because it has taught you that you can love yourself. In the end, all you will have ever have is yourself, to live within and to live with.
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On Mangosteens

When we came back from the US, I was still just three years old. We moved into my grandmother’s house in Kuang, a wooden home set off several paces from the main kampung road, right across from the local masjid. One of my greatest sadnesses is that when I try to envision that kampung house in my mind, all I can see now is that wide expanse where the wooden house used to be, and the stone-hewed bungalow which now stands where, many years ago, my late grandmother used to tend to her mangosteen orchard at the back of her kampung home.

Her husband had passed on when I was very young, and so many of my childhood memories was really filled with memories on Nenek. She was the third wife, and she gave her husband three sons; my father was the middle child. My mother tells me that my father was his mother’s favourite son, and so when fate had destined that I was born first of all his mother’s grandchildren, I quickly became my grandmother’s favourite. I am not sure if this is indeed true, but when I do think of my paternal Nenek, a warm glow of overwhelming and enveloping love is what always comes to mind.

My memories of Nenek, I suppose like most Malaysian memories, would revolve around food. Even after my parents had divorced, my mother would insist that we visit Nenek from time to time, and everytime we made the trek to Kuang via Old Klang Road, I remember Nenek would be there to greet us with a bowl full of bahulu and hot piping Nescafe susu. And when they were in season, there would be buckets of mangosteens waiting for us when we arrived.

I am a fussy eater – always have been, but I was especially difficult as a child. I had some inexplicable aversion to most local fruits – my friends used to say that my refusal to eat the durian should be a basis for withdrawing my Malaysian citizenship!

The fact of the matter was that I was not very fond of fruits at all – and the only fruits I would eat, after much cajoling, would be oranges or apples or watermelons. Until today, I have very little time for papayas or jackfruit or even duku or langsat. On a good day, maybe rambutans.

But mangosteens? They’ll always have a special place in my heart. They will always remind me of Kuang, of that kampung house, my Nenek and my childhood.

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On Deliverance (A Prayer)

Ya Allah deliver this Nation from the grasping hands of these thieves who engorge themselves at the trough of the public trust.

Ya Allah bring Your Justice to bear on these arrogant ingrates who treat the public trust as if it is their own private sport – to play games with the livelihoods of millions of innocent souls.

Ya Allah punish them for their insolence and their greed and their selfishness and their corruption. May their Birkins and Brioni suits and Bugattis bear witness to the evils that they have committed on this Earth! May their ill-gotten gains become the very shackles that tie them down as they rot in your Hellfire!

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Tentang Kematian (atau, Sebuah Kehidupan Bangsawan)

Ya Tuhan,
Sungguh sungguh aku takut akan Mati
Aku takut bila jantungku t’lah terhenti 
Dan jarum masa enggan berputar lagi 

Tuhanku,
Aku tak sanggup menerima hakikat 
Bahawa Kehidupan ini seolah sesaat 
Dan aku sebenarnya t’lah lama tersasarsesat 

Ya Tuhan,
Berikan aku masa lagi untuk berghairah 
Masa untuk aku berbesarmegah 
Bermandi dalam syurga duniawi mewah

Tuhanku,
Sungguh sungguh hidupku berdagangbeli 
Kuasa, perempuan, hidup berpuji - 
Berapa harga redhaMu, Ilahi?