Tag: Malaysia

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On First and Third Worlds

It was a typical balmy KL afternoon as we were driving towards Mid Valley. The sky was clouded over, and there was a faint promise of rain. As I was steering the car gently towards the basement parking entrance of the Gardens mall, the entrance booth slowly came into view. I did the usual instinctive thing, reaching out to the console on the car’s dashboard where I normally keep my Touch ‘n’ Go card. Just as I was about to lift the card out of its faux-leather sleeve, I noticed, at a glimpse from the corner of my eye, that the parking terminal accepted not only the usual cashless payment of Touch ‘n’ Go, but would also accept credit card payments, including MyDebit, with its distinctive Wifi-looking logo.

“Eh. Can pay with credit card now. I wonder if I can use Apple Pay for parking here.”

“Ooh,” Kat replied. “Try lah.” My wife knew me too well enough by now to know two things. One: I hate unfair and inefficient monopolies on public services, with a level of detestation that Kat herself would normally reserve for cat torturers. Two: ever since I was able to use Apple Pay on my iPhone, I have been constantly delighted at the ability to merely double-press a button, look at my phone to unlock the Apple Pay pay option, and then simply swipe my phone over a terminal to effect payment – my favourite First World-level dopamine shot.

I tried it – and voila, it worked! There I was, happily steering my car past the parking entrance booth with a big smile on my face. Never fails.

Anyways, some minutes later, I found a parking spot not too far from the lobby entrance (another pet habit of mine, the pursuit of which can sometimes drive Kat out of her mind), and as we were heading up the escalators and found ourselves walking past the shops on the lower ground level, a sudden thought came to my mind:

“Alamak! Now I remember: the last time I used Apple Pay to enter a parking lot, I couldn’t exit. This silly building in Bangi hadn’t updated its parking system, and so I could enter the parking with Apple Pay, but the parking terminal couldn’t recognise my Apple Pay when exiting. Hmm. I wonder if I might get stuck when we exit later.”

“Oh well,” Kat said, as she normally would when entertaining my sudden bouts of petty anxiety. “If we can’t exit nanti, you just hit the intercom and ask for help, lah. You’ll be that guy, but it won’t be the end of the world.”

“Hmm, okay.” I shelved the thought away from my mind, and for the next two hours, I didn’t think much of it: the movie turned out to be much more entertaining than I had expected, and by the final joke at the end of the movie credits, the entire hall erupted in whoops of delighted laughter.

“Good movie, huh?? Jarnathan hahah!!!” I was beaming.

“Yeah!” Kat grinned. We fell into talking about our favourite parts of the movie, excitedly. It was a good afternoon.

We did some errands at the pharmacy and the supermarket, and then it was time to head back home. As we got into the car, and I was driving towards the exit, I remembered again with distaste that there was a possibility that I might not be able to easily exit. What I was really anxious about, typically, was that getting stuck at the parking exit would delay others behind me whose lives would be unduely disrupted by something I had committed. The dictum of hidup jangan menyusahkan orang was something I held very closely to heart, and I was happy always to lambast those who would break it. Now it could well be my turn to menyusahkan hidup orang.

As the parking exit booth loomed closer, I slowed down the car to a halt, and pressed the button on my right to roll down the window. (Remember those days when you had to actually wind a crank to bring the window down? Amazing.) I lifted my iPhone from its resting place in the centre console of the car, did the usual Open, Sesame gestures on my phone, waved the front of the phone near the parking console, and winced quietly as the seconds ticked, until –

The exit bar lifted up! It worked! In a fit of delight, I did a little whoop, pumped my fist into the air and yelled out with the car window still down: “Oh yeah! First world, baby!”

As the car eased its way past the exit booth and climbed upwards through the exit ramp into the open air, Kat couldn’t resist: “Hmm. If Lee Kwan Yew could crow about bringing Singapore from Third World to First, I guess we can be proud that Malaysia already has First World moments while still in Third!”

Ba-dum-tishhhh.

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Tentang Lebai Alphard

(dengan pohonan ampun maaf buat penulis lagu asal)

Sepohon kayu daun berlendir
Lebat bunganya serta buahnya
Walaupun mulut berbuih "takbir!"
Kalau dah tak ikhlas apa gunanya?

Lihatlah, situ, si Lebai Alphard
Kopiah putih, hidupnya mewah
Rumah banglo tersergam megah
Akhlaknya bau bak ubat gegat!

Tunggang agama sehari-hari
Elaun berkoyan poket sendiri
Supaya nanti peroleh undi
Kuasa duniawi dijunjung tinggi.
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On Guns, Israeli Settlements, and Other Sacred Cows

I woke up in the morning yesterday to read about yet another fatal shooting in America. This time, it was three children and three adults shot dead in a school in Nashville.

Every day, 111 people are shot dead in America. Every day. It seems like madness. For someone living in Malaysia, who has grown up rarely even seeing a gun, let alone seeing gun crimes being enacted, it appears like a collective form of psychosis. “Thoughts and prayers” have become the cynical refrain, every time someone is killed: some politician will promise gun control reforms, some other politician will claim that it is a mental health issue, then amidst the claims and counter-claims, more others will die at the end of the barrel of a gun.

I am no expert in gun control laws, but what little I know seems to suggest that it is very difficult to solve what might appear to be a straightforward problem for most other countries, when the obvious and proven solutions are in contradiction to some deeply-held public narrative.

In the case of the US, the story of America as a land of pioneers, and the ideal of “rugged individualism” has, over recent decades especially, cemented the belief amongst many Americans that owning and carrying firearms is somehow a constitutional right. That brandishing and unleashing a weapon is considered a sacred and treasured act in the name of self-defence. Never mind that most Americans no longer live in the frontiers with the threat of armed natives hanging over their daily lives. Never mind, either, that many other countries have ended the gun violence that continues to be a regular occurrence in America, through gun control laws that have curbed widespread ownership and usage of arms, without diminishing the sense of public security and peace amongst their citizens.

Stories matter. Our founding myths, so crucial to the binding together of people into a united and coherent nation, can also become a psychological stranglehold that locks us into repeatedly and unrepentantly inflicting inhumane and mindless acts of violence on each other.

Take another example: the ongoing proliferation of Israeli settlements in Palestinian lands, displacing native populations and heaping insult and violence on one’s own neighbours, on the pretext that “this land is mine.” How could it be that honouring a Covenant with God ought to lead to such ungodly destruction and brutality?

But perhaps every nation struggles with this – the original sin of public narratives that lead us to believe that our unjust and inhumane actions have some justification in some ancient code, or some social contract. The hammering-together of peoples into one can often lead to the forging of exclusionary and narrow-minded narratives that lock us into a descending spiral of inhumanity.

In Malaysia, we too suffer from a similar bind. The narrative of Malay-ness, crucial to the forging together of a united identity across the Malays of the several colonised states of the Peninsula, was expanded somewhat into a larger conception of Bumiputera-ness, but still leaves a significant segment of the Malaysian population feeling as though they are being treated as second-class citizens. It has been more than half a century since Independence and the formation of Malaysia, and we are still unable to break out from the vise of ethnic exclusion, even when most of us Malaysians, no matter where our grandparents and great-grandparents have come from, can now imagine no other home other than our own tanahair.

And the vicious spiral visits itself ever onwards and outwards. Today, we are seeing more Malaysians being unafraid (and frankly, unashamed) to act in a racist fashion to the many migrants who have come to Malaysia to earn a living by helping to clean our homes, serve us in restaurants, haul our palm oil to the mills, and build our skyscrapers. Granted, the idea of citizenship is by its very definition exclusionary, but that does not give us the right to then treat non-citizens less humanely.

Guns. Settlements. Racism. These are all unjust and inhumane forms of violence, wreaked by Man unto Man, for the very basic reason that we have told ourselves stories that make us believe we are justified in performing random and consistent acts of inhumanity on our fellow humans. And human history has shown us, that sometimes no amount of reasoning can rid us of these warped beliefs. Often, it takes violence and revolution to erase past narratives, and to forge a new – and not always enlightened – founding myth in its place.

And such is the nature of the crooked timbre of humanity.

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

What do you do when you have grand plans of writing grand books, but have neither the time nor the discipline to actually write them? You just list down the titles, and berangan that someday you might miraculously find the time to write them, or (perhaps more realistically) inspire someone else to actually take the trouble to write them out. 

Here’s another list from my overactive imagination:

  1. One Must Wait Until the Evening: The Life of Rahmat Harun
  2. Mahathir dan Anwar: Sebuah Novel Puisi
  3. Malay Republican: Ibrahim Yaacob and His Legacy
  4. Candu Rakyat: Pengaruh Konservatisme Islam dalam Masyarakat Melayu di Awal Abad ke-21
  5. Sesak: Perancangan Bandar di Kuala Lumpur, 1974-2020
  6. Pak Lah & Endon: Damai Abadi
  7. Khairy Jamaluddin: Hang Jebat atau Hang Nadim?
  8. Novel Modern Melayu: Dari Ahmad Rashid Talu hingga Abdullah Hussain
  9. Monkey: The Life of a Well-Loved Cat
  10. Bumiputera: The Biography of an Invented Identity 
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On Mat Som

One of the injustices of modern Malaysian culture is that so little regard and respect has been given to what I personally think is one of the top works of contemporary Malay literature: Lat’s singular graphic novel, Mat Som.

Perhaps it is because we associate Lat predominantly with saccharine cartoons on national unity, or nostalgic depictions of kampung life (both of which, of course, remain as indelible contributions from Lat to the Malaysian public discourse.) Maybe it is because we do not have any real tradition of the graphic novel as a legitimate and respectable vehicle for aesthetic expression and cultural commentary. The graphic novel, in the Malaysian mind, is too easily mistaken for its adolescent cousin, the comic book.

This is why there is hardly any discussion in the public space about the contributions of Mat Som to the narrative of modern Malay culture. Even amongst Lat’s abundant oeuvre, Mat Som is so often overlooked.

For more astute readers of Malay culture, Mat Som is an invaluable and singular artifact of a fracturing Malay polity, forced to undergo one of the most rapid and dizzying socioeconomic transformations of the modern age.

Within just a generation, thousands of poor young Malays were taken out of their villages, and handed the keys to education that would unlock opportunities beyond their wildest dreams. Many were sent overseas to learn the secrets of modern science and technology, and told to come back to serve the nation. Most of these young Malaysia came home with burning ambition, but were also deeply confused: they were told that to study overseas, and to go to the cities and get a corporate job and to enrich themselves beyond their parents’ imagination, was a noble vocation – but as they sought to find their place in their new urban settings, they were also told that many of the habits they had taken to be emblematic of what it meant to be “modern”, were shameful and to be castigated. The very modernity that they were told to seek, was labelled as “budaya kuning”, worthy only of disdain and censure.

In Mat Som, Lat would dramatise the rapid social change of the late 20th century amongst the Malays, but from a more rooted perspective: that of the young Malay from the kampung who makes his way to the city to earn a living with words. The young journalist finds himself attracted and entranced by the whirling pace and the glittering lights of the city, but is repulsed by the crass commercialism and the capitalistic striving of the rising Malay middle class. Lat, in Mat Som, romanticises the poet, the working journalist, the common Mat on the street.

Mat Som puts into stark focus the cultural confusion of the Malays of that generation, forced to choose between traditional values and the modern world that threatens to unmoor the Malay from familiar ground. If Umno’s Revolusi Mental and Mahathir’s Malay Dilemma were loudly exhorting the Malays to change their mindsets and embrace modernity, to discard old-fashioned values that were seen to be holding back the community, then Lat’s Mat Som was a cri de coeur for the common Malay man – that the way to traverse the rapid currents of social upheaval was to hold fast to the wisdom of old.

To be fair, Mat Som was not a blind rejection of modernity – Yam could be at ease in a baju kurung, or wear a pair of jeans if she wanted to. But the ideal Malay, in Lat’s telling, was someone who was not merely throwing the baby out with the bath water, when it came to the values that would anchor and centre the Malay. One could be modern, and still be Malay, without merely aping the West.

Lat’s genius, of course, was to wrap all this cultural commentary within a simple and heartwarming story of a young man trying to find his way, and his heart, in a city that can often appear heartless and cruel. Bridging that gap between modernity and tradition is still an ongoing dilemma for the young Malay today, and Mat Som reminds us that there is a path through the thicket of confusion, if we only remain clear-eyed about who we are and where we came from.

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On the Dark Side of Malaysia Boleh

All Malaysians of a certain age will remember the boisterous confidence of the 1990s. The stock market was booming, the economy was the darling of investors, and everyone was making money. Politically, Malaysia had come through a rough patch at the end of the 1980s, and everyone was eager to look forward, beyond the traumatic events of Ops Lallang and the deregistration and rebirth of Umno and the fiercely-contested general elections of 1990 that saw Kelantan fall back into the stewardship of PAS. Many were still disgruntled, or fiercely opposed to the iron fist of Mahathirian authoritarianism, but the rise of Anwar at that time gave hope that there was a more liberal future in store for Malaysia. Understandably, some Malaysians looked at the political upheavals of the late 1980s and decided “that’s enough for me, I’m off“, leaving the country for different shores. But for those left behind, the 1990s had a balming effect of soothing the wounds of the body politic with the elixir of rising wealth and prosperity.

One of the slogans (and there were many, during the Mahathir era) that truly captured that moment in time was “Malaysia Boleh“. A pithy and confident assertion of can-do positiveness – our very own version of the American Dream. After the trauma of 1969 and the political battles of the 1970s and 1980s, Malaysians were finally ready to step into the sunshine of economic prosperity. The fall of the Berlin Wall gave rise to a unipolar world, in which the US presided over a new age of globalisation, as the tendrils of capitalism extended outwards into the frontiers of the the Third World, and Malaysia was standing ready to welcome intrepid investors into the brave new world of emerging markets.

Never one to miss a grand opportunity, Mahathir parlayed his utter political dominance into a flourish of edifice-building and infrastructure investments. The North-South Highway had whetted his appetite – and likely enriched his party’s coffers as well! – and he took Malaysia into a new era of infrastructure investments: KLIA. The new stadia and new hotels and new train systems for the Commonwealth Games. The Petronas Twin Towers. And for the coup de grace, Malaysia was to unveil a whole new capital city, built from scratch with petrodollars out of the marshes and oil palm plantations of Prang Besar.

Much ink has been split, of course, over the eventual economic boom-and-bust of the 1990s. There was definitely irrational exuberance, and the collapse of many of the premier conglomerates of that age were textbook cases of corporate overreach. “Malaysia Boleh” became licence for frantioc dealmaking, and everything was being fueled by cheap credit and a stonkingly-bullish stock market. There was already blowback even then: “Malaysia Boleh” came to be viewed with bitterness and cynicism by a number of Malaysians who saw their country’s transformation into “Bolehland“, where anything goes, as long as one had the wealth, or power (ideally, both) to push one’s way through the red lines of regulations and morality.

But there was also another, darker psychological side of “Malaysia Boleh“: the race for performative “achievements” became a favourite mode of expression, especially for those eager to curry favour with those in power. The longest Malaysian flag. The longest satay barbecue. Biggest cake. Biggest ketupat. Swimming over the English Channel (as if there weren’t already hundreds, if not thousands, of others who had already done the same.) Climbing Everest.

Not to dismiss some of these deeds – I cannot ever imagine climbing Everest, or even having the desire to, really. But too many of these “achievements” were clearly low-ball efforts at garnering attention. And it laid bare the contradictions at the heart of the “Malaysia Boleh” project – we wanted attention and recognition from the world, but often unwilling to do the hard things that would be truly meritorious. Biggest flag, tallest flag pole – boleh. Eradicating politik wang, weaning the economy off cheap foreign labour, paying Malaysians fair wages for the work that they do – these ones tak boleh.

And this frustration strikes at the core of today’s Malaysia Madani project: what are we doing now that is so different, now that we have a man who was probably unjustly imprisoned and shut out of power for more than two decades, now at the helm of the government? Two decades of calling for Reformasi. What is so different now? Why are we still playing the same old games of state propaganda – the slogans and the logos and the theme songs? Why are we still treating appointments to state agencies and government-linked companies as ghanimah? And why is it that for the truly hard and necessary measures that we need to enact, to bring out the potential for our great nation, the answer is still “tak boleh”?

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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 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!