Lat

MUSINGS ON MALAYSIA 

“A bunch of money grubbing,’ greenhouse gassing, seal clubbing, oil drilling, Bible thumping, missile firing, right to life-ing, lethal injecting   hypocrites, whose idea of a good time is strapping a dead panda to a pick-up truck and running through a gay parade. – Comedian Richard Jeni, on the right-wing in the US. 

The many arguments against democracy can seriously unnerve you. 

Listen to Winston Churchill. “The best argument against democracy,” argued the great man, “is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”  The actor Frank Dane was even more pessimistic – “Get the fools on your side and you can be elected to anything.” 

It’s enough to drive a man to drink. 

But as we approach Malaysia’s 60th birthday, we can take some heart in the fact that we haven’t quite reached the stage of missile-firing hypocrisy. 

Yet, we are a fractured nation, split between the political will and a religious won’t, a mutually suspicious, rural-urban chasm, and an East-West divide that could get implacable if not addressed. Presiding over this uneasy mix is a person determined to keep an unlikely coalition together by all manner of means.

It’s enough to give dirty politics a bad name.

And yet Premier Anwar Ibrahim has a lot going for him. Malaysia’s fundamental growth story is still intact, its resilient export-led expansion still sustained. 

Our education system can’t be all that bad because we continue to throw up entrepreneurs at a good rate. I know this because my wife has, for some years now, been on the EY panel that selects the country’s best. 

There’s a young guy, for example, who’s already the country’s largest vanilla producer and he grows it on small, high yielding, “intelligent” farms. Currently, Madagascar is the world’s largest producer, but it, allegedly, uses child labour, which is a no-no. 

Our boy doesn’t.  Which is why he thinks, that by expanding to East Malaysia, he will eventually secure 10% of world supply.

There is another who uses genetic sequencing to produce hardy and exclusively male prawn fry for sale to farmers: the male of the species is bigger. 

And yet another who fattens fly larvae by feeding them agricultural waste only to grind said fatties into protein for fertiliser and animal feed. On a large scale, it’s enormously sustainable. 

Tony Fernandes once told me that he was summoned to see Lee Kuan Yew the first time he landed in Singapore on Air Asia’s first flight. 

“He wanted to know what made me tick,” said Fernandes. “I replied that I thought it was because I was Malaysian.” 

Apparently, the old man gave him a hard stare, perhaps thinking he was being facetious. 

It may have been the truth. 

I’ve been in Singapore for almost five years, and I can quite unequivocally state Malaysians are far friendlier than their southern counterparts. Our dinner invites are almost entirely from Malaysians living on the island. The only exceptions have been a long-time friend and my niece. 

That is Malaysia’s true strength, the multi-racial, multicultural, experiment that’s so far been sustained by its people: the country of my childhood, the Malaysia captured by Lat.

That’s what we need: more Lats and less Mahathirs. 

ENDS 

WAS IT REALLY THE GOOD OLD DAYS?

Why are Lat cartoons so popular?

I’ve put some thought into it, so listen up. They allow us to believe that our country is more than the sum of its parts, deserving to be seen through a mist of bittersweet nostalgia and hope, the way we think it ought to be viewed.

That was Lat’s special genius. His Malaysia had an innocent quality about it, a halcyon time when Mat, Ah Chong and Muthu were, indeed, besties; P Ramlee, cendol and Walls cones from the ice cream man’s motorcycle on a hot Sunday.

People like me, a child of the sixties, can easily relate to Lat because there really was an innocence about the time. I remember taking a bus from Rembau, really a village then, to Seremban in, I think, 1969, and there was a mother nursing her baby as if it was the most natural thing to do on a bus. No one gawked or seemed to think anything of it, so it probably was.

I wonder if Malaysian millennials can relate to Lat? I hope so but who knows? When you have parties like the Islamic Party which deems immorality as the morality of anyone having a better time, you tend to have your doubts.

Back then, there seemed to be none. My classmates used to come to my house on Deepavali when my mother would invariably cook mutton curry. No one – most were Malays – would even think of asking my mother if the meat was halal. It probably wasn’t but it would have been the height of rudeness to ask.

Not anymore. Now it’s considered positively de rigueur to ask upfront.

Certainly, we were far more innocent then. I remember holding hands with a male classmate every time we had to march back to our respective classrooms after Assembly. This went on even when we were in the Sixth Form but no one, least of all, my classmates, thought it was strange or bad form for men to behave thus.

Actually, one suspects that it would only have been derided in Western societies. Not so much in Asian ones, methinks.

But even in Western societies, a lot of things can assume darker and less innocent, connotations because of 21st Century mores amid a newly resurgent, and tiresome, political correctness.

It was the Beatles, for example, who kicked off a global hit in the 60s with these lines: “She was just seventeen/ You know what I mean.”

No, we don’t Sir Paul. What do you mean?

It might have been worse for Ringo Starr whose 70s song was also written by Sir Paul:
You come on like a dream/
Peaches and cream/ Lips like strawberry wine/
You’re sixteen/ You’re beautiful/
And you’re mine.

The song was titled You’re Sixteen and it went on to become a hit, even here in Malaysia. And no one thought it might excite your average pedophile anywhere.

I suppose the moral here is that things change and nothing’s ever written in stone. Take manners which you might think were written in stone.

We are repeatedly told you display good manners at the dining table by the noise you don’t make when eating soup.

But that would be rude in Japan, where it is both courteous and mannerly to show appreciation for the soup by slurping it.

ENDS