It has to do with the socio-political system and culture

I just read Su's latest post titled "Would they give away their wealth like Tun Sambanthan? "
She wrote :
"One of the first Ministers I had the great privilege of working for, almost 35 years ago, was the late Honourable Tun V.T. Sambanthan (1919-1979), the fifth President of the Malaysian Indian Congress (1955). ....................
............Although Tun V.T. Sambanthan was born into a rich family he spent all his personal wealth on the MIC and the people who approached him for asistance. It is a well known fact that Tun Sambanthan gave up his fortune for his people."

This led me to look at present day's China leaders, Singapore leaders, Ah Bien of Taiwan, the late Mr President Roh of Korea and our country's leaders, American leaders , leaders of the West, the Russian leaders etc.. I could not find a correlation between a clean leader and his family wealth before he becomes a leader. Neither can I find a country totally free from self serving leaders. But do not get me wrong. I am not saying corruption is tolerable . My point is we really need a socio-political system and culture that has the in-built effective check and balance mechnism to minimise s such intolerable practice of the country' leaders and those leaders who manage to escape the scrutiny of this check and balance mechnism will surely could not enjoy freely the wealth they have accumulated.

Keep Status Quo, No Future Is Certain! Go For Change, Better Future Is Possible

"Keep Status Quo, No future Is Certain!
Go For Change, Better Future Is Possible!"

A week before 308(March the eighth of 2008) I sent out sms carrying the above message to many people. My nephew , a young man in MLM business, on receiving my sms was very worried thinking that he had no future in this line of business. In actual fact he was and is doing very well. Another relative was angry with me;we had a dinner with her recently and she obviously had shed a lot of weight and looks nice and fit. But majority of the receivers relate it to 308. A professor in a local university called me excitingly saying it sounded like Obama's. I told her that I just want to contribute in a small way for the well being of my country during my last lap of my existence in this world. My wife was very nervous and worried I could be ended in jail. It is interesting to note that a message not specific will give rise to different response according to the experience, perception and the relationship one has with the sender of the message. If I were to continue to write vote for Party A or Party B, then all the responses would be along the same line.

Frankly I was hesitating to send out this sms and finally after some pondering I decided to make it vague. With this inccident I suddenly realised that all this while I thought and felt that I was living in a democratic and free country but in relaity my wife and I have this deep rooted fear inside us. My goodness I've been "slaved" in certain way for so many years.

Government servant- a mouse deer between two fighting elephants

I really feel sorry for the Perak State Secretary and the State Assembly Secretary. At the moment they are like what the Malay proverb says: when two elephants fights, the mouse deer stands between them will perish.

I recalled my personal experience when I was working in Penang. Around 1989 and early 90s, when Anwar was in BN , he was wrestling with Pak Lah for the control of Penang Umno. Shariff Omar was aligning with Pak Lah and he was the Parliamentry Secretary of the then Ministry of Agriculture where my department was in. During this period when he came back to Penang , through my boss in KL, JPS Penang would take care of him for his official visit to JPS works in Penang. Once we were asked to launch a official opening of a project for him to officiate. Although these were federal functions none of the senior officers in KL appeared in these functions. As he came in as Parliamentary secretary of my ministry and my boss in KL so decided to instruct me to do it, I had no choice but to carry out the order. The political undertone was so obvious that once an EXCO member friendlily told me that I could be an UMNO member already. I had to explain to him my predicament.

When the dust had settled, not long after, I was transfered back to KL with short notice to hold a post less prestigious than State director although i still held the same rank. I had mentioned in my first post , later my boss apologized to me. Until today i was still not sure the exact reason for this transfer.

If we are heading towards a two party system, it looks like there is a need for the heads of Civil Service to take the lead of showing the government servants how to stay neutral or above politics so as not to get perished whenever there is a change of government.

May 13 Inccident

On the night 0f 13 May 2009 when I got into Su's blog then only realized it was May 13. I admired Su's courage to write about her personal recollection of the ugly day of May 13 in 1969 and at end of her post she wrote: The Malays and Chinese could not have suddenly decided to fight. I don't think it was like that. I blame it all on politics and the politicians.

Two days later (15 May 2009) I read P. Gunasegaram's column"COMMENT" in The Star. The title of his comment that day was "Forgetting May 13". He started off by saying " It (May13 incident) rose out of a confluence of unfortunate factors fanned by politicians...." and he went on to say without giving names: " The politics of that era is the realm of his (current PM) predecessor's predecessor, now a ripe 85, who was viewed as a young and upcoming Umno ultra at that time." This is very interesting and amazing. As a young and upcoming young Umno member without holding any major post how he managed to do that. 

The question here is what is the point of getting to the bottom of the truth. As P. Gunaegaram put it, it will be better off forgetting May 13 and cutting it out of our memory but with one caveat , history needs to be retold more accurately.  To me it is important to get the record straight as it is part of the whole check and balance system so that in future the leaders would take decision with utmost care lest his wrong doing will be exposed and recorded in history.

For Malaysia to achieve greatness and oneness, to me one of the prerequisite is its people is courageous, forthright and open-minded in discussing issues freely to get to a solution which is fair and rational. 

It is internet service provider's doing

Since last month very often I could not get connection to internet for my home PC. My wife and I are not IT savy and our children are not with us at the moment, Phei Yuin is working in Penang and Chern Yuik is studying in US . We (my wife and I) felt so helpless. We restarted the router; retarted the computer, unlugged and plugged back all connections including telephone line and even the wall plug. Once I pushed the plug of the router before I switched on the computer, ha I thought I solved the problem because I got the internet connection. I tried the same trick again the next time it did not work. It was so frustrating but at least I knew that my router was alright. We were without internet service for a few days. My wife tried again. This time she pushed the wall socket . She was so happy because she got the internet connection. I doubted this was the solution. True enough, we could not get the connection again the next day. I started to think it all over and suddely realised could it be the Streamyx service provider trying to shed load because of congestion. I suggested to my wife to call up streamyx and we found the root cause of the problem: it is the internet service provider doing. The customer service person tried to explain the problem but we were not interested with their problem . We just want our problem solved. They did something to their server and we got our internet connection back. We were told next time it happens again just call 100 to inform the problem and they will fix it for us. But hello Mr CEO of TM when are you going to give me a permanent solution! Are we going to get our rebate for the days without the internet service !

tell tale sign of heart problem

Last sunday (26 april) afternoon while playing mahjong with Thean Soon and Tan I received several sms informing the sad news that Law Kong Fook, a former colleague , suddenly passed away in the morning. Later I learned from the late Mr Law's family he had a chest pain on that fateful morning and collapsed in the toilet. 

I met Law about three months ago in the ex-JPS Chinese New year gathering. I could still remember vividly I congratulated him looking so radiant, relax and kind. In fact Lee Hin Lee told me that Law had made appointment to see her on the  afternoon of  27 april not knowing that Law had just passed away the day before. A few  friends called to enquire how Law felt before he suffered the heart attack. Law might be unfortunate to belong to the group of heart patients, about 20%, who did not have any warning sign and symptom of forth coming heart attack. However my personal experience and observations are that we tend to use the excuse "old age" or 'age is catching up" to dismiss the tell tale sign of heart problem  such as getting tired easily like dozing off in the meeting , getting sleepy when driving long distance which never happen before in younger days. Since I had my engioplasty done I seldom doze off in the meeting and can drive non stop from KL to Penang without having to stop halfway to take a nap. Another tell tale sign of forth coming heart problem is the feeling of heart burn and or feeling of  bloating  after meal especially after dinner ,  which we normally blame it to indigestion and it is correct but not knowing that the indigestion is caused by short of blood supply to the stomach due to blockage of heart vessel. A few months before the episode of heart problem, I felt slight heart pain after having a lap (abut 400m) of brisk walking and i just brushed it off as stamina problem. Two weeks before the episode, I suddenly felt breathless after walking down from three story building and continue to walk just about 20m or so, by then I suspected my heart had problem. I was watchful with my heart responses since then until that fateful night which I mentioned in my earlier episode. 

About 5 years ago, one day when i went into the office of Raj, a colleague in the Ministry of agriculture, I saw him sweating profusely in the air-conditioned room, I advised him to drop everything and go to seek a cardiologist advice. He took my suggestion and the doctor diagnosed  him having vessel blockage in the heart and he had since successfully done a by-pass. 

My classmate Kian Yong wanted me to share my experience when we were attending a world wide assembly of Chung Ling old boys in  melbourne in 2007. A few months after coming back from Australia I received a call from him that he had just an engioplasty and he was appreciative of the tips I gave him.

By the way the late Mr Law was a vegetarian for about 20 years and he had been doing regular brisk walking three times per week. Many could not believe that he had died of heart attack. Of course I cannot offer an explanation to this as we know that there are various causes of heart problem. But what i want to say here is  we should always be listening to our body and do not hesitate to consult doctor when we feel some thing is not right to our body. Of course we should also be careful not to be a hypochondriac and scared ourselves to sickness.

If Malaysia has more of this family.....

Yesterday (13 April 2009) I took a taxi from KLIA to my home after my site visit to Sg. Perai Project. In the journey back home I struck a conversation with the taxi driver. It was an enlightening conversation and gave me ray of hope for my country, Malaysia. He spoke such a fluent English that aroused my interest wanting to know him more. 

According to him when he finished his primary school , a Malay medium school, in 1965, he had a choice to continue his education in Malay medium or English Medium secondary school. He took the advice of his mother to have his secondary school education in an English medium secondary school although which meant that he had to spend one extra year in remove class instead of starting straight in year one if he chose the Malay medium school. To his mother if he chose the Malay medium school he had to be sure to get to university  in order to be guaranteed a job after graduation;  if he chose an English medium school and could not manage to get a place in university he would not have a problem to land a job with his Cambridge School Certificate ( the Cambridge School Certificate  was later replaced by MCE which was then replaced with SPM until today). 

He landed a job in a factory and rose to quite a high position but during the financial crisis in 1997 the factory was not doing well and he took a decision to resign. He moved the whole family to Johore Bahru selling "nasi lemak" to make a living. The whole family, his wife and four children (3 boys and one girl) chipped in to run the business of selling "nasi lemak". He and his wife decided to stop at four at the age of 32 worrying that they just could not bring up the children well if they had more children to look after. The biggest worry in his  mind was drug. When the eldest child went to kindergarden, he and his wife decided that the wife quit the job and stayed at home to look after the children. He instilled in his children that they must make it to university  otherwise when they grew up they might have to have 2 to 3 jobs to raise a family. He smartly and rightly spurred his eldest child to study well to give a good example to the other siblings. He did not allow his children to watch TV programme during school days. Considering that in Johore Bahru there were so many channels available from Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia, it must be very tough to discipline the children not to watch TV programme during school days. He made it a point to have early dinners like most Chinese families so that the kids could have more time to study after dinner. After 10pm every night all the children would come out of the room from studying and march into the kitchen to help in the preparation of next day's "nasi lemak' business.

He made it. All the children are now university graduates except the youngest one who is still in university.  I congratulated him for his success and said to him that driving taxi now is his hobby and not his job. To my surprise he disagreed with it. Tax driving is still his job because he has no pension to depend on. Although the children do give the mother money but they would keep the money for the children. He and his wife are now saving up his hard earned money to go for their first pilgrimage to Mecca.  

This is such a marvelous man  who brought up his family with such success on his own feet and  does not feel that  others and the government are owing him and his family a living. En Md Nasir Nordin ( I got his name from the name card he passed to me hoping that I can call for his service the next time I want to go to KLIA from home), I am so proud of you and thank you for brightening me up and giving me ray of hope for this country. If  Malaysia has more of this family like yours there is no doubt our future generation would have a very bright future. I wish my former colleague En Kassim, who is now very involved in literary work, has a chance to read this and decides to write a story on you because you are such a fine role model for others to emulate.