Any Other Business

I.e., what would you be willing to give up for it? Or what’s it worth to you?

Someone once asked me, “How badly do you want it?” I can’t remember what “it” was or even the context of the question, but I remember the question and I remember how hard it hit home.

It’s so easy to say I wish I had this or I want to do that, but it’s a lot harder to decide what price we’d be willing to pay for this and that. It’s also easy to look at things other people have accomplished and put it down to luck, but in doing that, we’ve just belittled their sacrifice and effort because nothing of worth comes without effort.

Finally got round to linking AnyOtherBusiness with my FB page. This is just a test to see how well it works.

Gosh, it’s been a while since I posted anything.

“The dismaying thing about the classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, though mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined.

Hence the cuckoo clock in Hell - keeping perfect time eight minutes and thrity-three seconds, jumping ahead two seconds, keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping ahead a year.

The missing teeth, of course, are simple obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases.

… That was how Nazi Germany could sense no important differences between civilization and hydrophobia.” - Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Mother Night

I saw the phrase “Malay dominance” in the news again today. I wonder what that’s suppose to mean. Terms like supremacy and dominance, in relation to race, often leave me befuddled. This even more so when these terms are used to describe Malays. In what fields do they dominate? How are they supreme? Isn’t this what the German Aryans believed of their race? Though, I can think of quite a few notable Aryans but no Malays of note.

When you learn from a young age to believe a certain reality it’s difficult to come out of it. When you are habitually guided and instructed to remove certain teeth from your machinery of reasoning, you stop to miss them. This is why it is so difficult to reason with a totalitarian mind. They don’t see the gaps in their reasoning.

My grandparents remember May 13. They also remember WWII. They learnt from experience to be afraid of people who are different. My generation is not afraid. We believe that we live in more civilized times. However, the sad truth of the matter is that there are many people out there who still believe as my grandparents do. The difference between these people and my grandparents is that while my grandparents buy bigger locks for the doors and stock up on canned food, these people buy bigger machetes and stock up on kerosene for Molotov cocktails.

To these people, I ask them to consider a few facts:

1. There have been Chinese settlements in Malaya since the early part of the 15th century. Even the Portuguese only came a century later.

2. The term Malay Archipelago was coined by the whites to identify the region.

3. The real aborigines (Orang Asli) do not consider themselves Malay. They have their own language and culture.

4. The Malay language was derived from Sanskrit, a classical language of India and the language used in Hindu and Buddhist liturgy.

5. It was an Indian that founded the Malacca Sultanate.

6. Mansur Shah (fourth Sultan of Malacca) took a Chinese bride.

7. Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, the bastion of Malay language and culture has seen fit to include words such as “I” and “you” into the DBP’s Malay language dictionary.

And one opinion:

1. The fact that the constitution of the country has to define what a Malay is should be terribly embarrassing to the whole race, if you can call it one.

I wish I had the guts to be Dilbert during company townhalls.

The daily also quoted Nazri to have said that the series of attacks against the houses of worship has proven that the government was right in its decision to restrict the use of the word. “Banning the use of ‘Allah’ by Christians was a pre-emptive move to stop outbreaks of religious violence in the nation,” he reportedly said. Nazri also drew a parallel between the “Allah” dispute and the ‘cow head protest’ in Shah Alam last year, against the relocation of a temple in the Selangor capital. “Take for example, there is no law in the country that states stepping on a severed cow head is wrong but when a group of Malays did that in their protests against the building of a Hindu temple we hauled them up and charged them because that act was disrespectful to the Hindus,” he reportedly said.

So here, we have two groups of people in two different situations: a bunch of cow-head-stomping protesters and the Catholic Church of Malaysia. This Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department seems to see parallels in these two situations.

For the benefit of those who don’t understand Malay, here’s a teensy bit of what the guy in the blue shirt in the video said, “Jaga-jaga. Kami cabar kamu datang ke Seksyen 23 andai kata kamu ingin melihat berdarah.” Translation: “Watch out. We challenge you to come to Section 23 if you wish to see blood flow.”

The first group marched down a public road chanting slogans (amidst the usual allahuakbhar yelling) and carrying banners, made a speech about the sanctity of Malay supremacy, threatened to spill blood if challenged and then proceeded to stomp on a severed cow head, basically giving the middle finger to all the Hindus in the country. All this because they didn’t want a Hindu temple to be built at the edge of a particular suburb. What was the intent of this group? Obviously, they intended to threaten with violence and to incite hatred. They intended to deliberately insult the Hindus as religious demographic. All this, obviously, against the law. Therefore, it was the simple enforcement of the law that they were, as the minister put it, hauled up. Again, fairly simple.

The second group went to the courts for clarification on whether or not they were allowed to use “Allah” in their magazine, a Catholic magazine with a Malay edition. To them, it only makes sense to use “Allah” as the Malay translation for God since practically all Malay speaking Christian congregations in Malaysia use “Allah” as the translation for God, be it during worship services or in Malay and Indonesian translations of the Bible. Why is Indonesian being brought up here? Well, because back in the day, the government banned the printing of Malay bibles, therefore Christians had to import Indonesian bibles for Malay speaking congregations. In a nut shell, this group of people basically want to use a proper noun (not just any noun, mind you) in a magazine published only for internal circulation. A proper noun that they have been using for eons, but were recently told to cease and desist. According to Article 11 (3a) of the Malaysian Constitution, every religious group has the right to manage its own religious affairs, subject to clause (4) - the one about proselytizing to Muslims. Now since this magazine is only meant for internal circulation, obviously they have the right to use whatever terms they wish to describe whatever they want.

Compare and contrast: one group broke the law, the other sought clarification on the law. Fairly simple. And our “fearless” leaders keep telling us to compare oranges to oranges. Let me say it again, imbeciles and morons.

The events dominating Malaysian news headlines these past few days breaks my heart. When the first news reports of the church bombings came out, my first thoughts were, “I want to be home. With my people. That’s where I should be.”

I don’t understand what’s happening. The Malays I grew up with and went to school with would not do these things. The Malays I worked with would not do these things. Am I missing something? And it doesn’t help that I have many friends in one of the churches that was targeted (,never mind that I’ve lost touch with them).

The thing that upsets me the most is that for all appearances, it seems as if these people are itching for a fight and will use any excuse to start a war. If it’s not stepping on cow heads to insult the Hindus, it’s tossing molotov cocktails at churches. They have literally threatened to spill blood if their dignity is insulted, but how dignified can you be if you intentionally desecrate what some consider to be a sacred symbol and vandalize and destroy buildings? If you have no dignity, it is impossible for me to insult it.

So many Malay Muslims have spoken about the context of the use of the noun “Allah” and yet these people don’t care. They don’t care that the “Allah” has been used as a translation for God in Sabah and Sarawak for eons, they don’t care that Christians in Indonesia and the Middle East also use “Allah” as a translation for God. They say things in Malaysia are different but they can’t explain why or how. They say it’s different and expect us to just accept it. This must be how their religious classes are conducted.

Yes, we are different from Indonesia. My Indonesian Chinese friends do not have any friends who are Javanese or Acehnese, etc. They all went to private schools where they led insular existences apart from the other races. We in Malaysia do not. I went to a public school. So did my brother, cousins, parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents. I have friends who are Malays, Indians, Eurasians and mutts comprised of more than one race. One of my father’s cousins married a Malay, which means technically, I have a Malay aunt. My parents’ house is flanked one one side by an Indian home and on the other side by a Malay home. Across from us, one Chinese Buddhist family and one Chinese Christian family. So no, I don’t understand what’s going on. It has never been a part of my understanding of what Malaysia is. I don’t understand why some people are offended when we eat pork. I don’t expect them to eat any. More for me if you don’t want some, I say. I don’t understand why they are offended that I like dogs. You don’t have to like them if you don’t want to. At least dogs don’t lob molotov cocktails at every little thing that offends them.

Do you see where I’m going here? Is it obvious to you how ridiculous all of this is? Full grown adults throwing temper tantrums and behaving like petulant children. Respect is earned. If you want us to respect you and your beliefs, then act like it.