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 ©The
Star (Used by permission)
by Noor Arianti Osman
The shackles of generally accepted standards or privileges
afforded to some at the price of creating discontent amongst others must be
removed.
THE Merdeka celebrations are around the corner but to many the past one-year has
been an unhappy time.
More and more young Malaysians are leaving the country as a result of some
policies, which in my view are now outdated. Can we continue down this road?
Less than a month after last year’s Merdeka celebration, we saw the Walk for
Justice, followed very closely by the Bersih and Hindraf rallies and the
People’s Freedom Walk in celebration of the World Human Rights Day.
The first quarter of this year saw the general election and the shocking wave of
change brought by it.
Soon after that the people struck again with various rallies and assemblies, big
and small, in protest of the fuel price hikes. There were also other less
sensational rallies and assemblies and hype over Namewee, Fitna and the arrest
of Raja Petra.
Then came the furore over the Bar Council’s forums on the “Social Contract” and
“Conversion to Islam”. In the latter’s case, the abbreviation of the title,
which resulted in much misunderstanding, is still very much in our minds.
The latest was the UiTM students’ assembly. And not to mention the cancellation
of Ella’s performance and Beyonce’s concert. I am pretty sure I have missed a
lot more!
And yes – all these happened in just one year. The reason for these can be
summed up in three words – race, religion and politics. Perhaps not in that
particular order.
In the closed network of young legal practitioners, we have been busy attending
farewell parties. Our friends, mostly non-Malays, have been leaving in droves to
work in Singapore. Most of those leaving are up and coming lawyers who I think
are amongst the best brains of the new generation in the legal profession.
Our friends from the engineering and architecture departments back in college
are suddenly quitting their jobs and moving their families to the United Arab
Emirates, Qatar and even Syria.
Our friends who are now medics, high achievers in their respective overseas
universities, only exist to us as online identities in Yahoo! Messenger, Google
Talk, Skype and Facebook.
They simply refuse to come back and serve in the country and they have
convincingly good reasons for doing so.
We also often hear “good news” from some other friends that their applications
for permanent resident status have been approved by a foreign government –
generally Australia.
This “brain drain” or flight of human capital has been an increasingly worrying
trend for quite some time now.
Having gone past the golden anniversary of Merdeka, we Malaysians have become an
unhappy lot. We have a lot to shout about. We are running away!
What are the causes for this state of unhappiness?
In the eyes of a Malay Muslim young lawyer keeping tabs with of all these
calamities of late, I would say, it is the curtailment on our freedom of thought
which has been instilled in each of us since a tender age.
Didn't our parents tell us that we should become engineers, doctors, architects
or lawyers when we grow up and that becoming musicians, painters, professional
hockey players or go-kart drivers would not take us anywhere in life?
So some grew up believing this and later realising that it was not entirely true
after all.
How many of us grew up listening to the pearls of wisdom from our elders that
the only way to get ahead must be to seek the help of a certain Yang Berhormat
or business tycoon who is close to a certain Datuk if we want to enter boarding
school, college or university; or to get scholarships, government jobs or
business opportunities? And that these are our privileges.
There are also some of us who grew up being told that these privileges do not
apply to us. We watched our friends enjoy the privileges in silent envy and we
secretly harboured contempt for them.
And we were reprimanded by our elders not to say anything about it as it is a
“sensitive” issue.
Some of us grew up realising that we could have made it, and did make it, on our
own without such privileges after all. There are still some of us who have not
grown out of it.
We need to halt this fiction. The only way for us to grow is to believe that we
are the ones in control of our destiny.
We must remove the shackles of generally accepted standards or privileges
afforded to some of us at the price of creating discontent amongst others.
Malaysians born post-Merdeka, Malays and non-Malays alike, whether they realise
it or not, are screaming for a complete makeover of this orthodox paternalistic
approach.
Continued interference with their liberty of action and their freedom of choice,
and outright discriminatory means which is used to preserve the rights of one
section of Malaysians over the other irrespective of their actual needs should
no longer be seen as a necessary form of protection, but a weapon of mass
self-destruction.
The makeovers the young ones want, to a large extent, entail real changes in our
laws and policies.
Feel good community service messages such as “I am not Chinese, I am not Indian,
I am not Malay, (altogether) we are Malaysians!” just won’t cut it anymore.
Our Proclamation of Independence says that we “shall be forever a sovereign
democratic and independent State founded upon the principles of liberty and
justice and ever seeking the welfare and happiness of its people and the
maintenance of a just peace among all nations.”
After 51 years, it seems to many that this has not been fully achieved.
> The writer is a member of the Bar Council’s National Young Lawyers
Committee (NYLC). Putik Lada, or pepper buds in Malay, captures the spirit and
intention of this column – a platform for young lawyers to articulate their
views and aspirations about the law, justice and a civil society. For more
information about the young lawyers, please visit
www.malaysianbar.org.my/nylc
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Circular No 023/2012: Talk on ISO 9001 | 2008 Quality Management System Certification
Thank you Yanti for encapsulating how some of us feel, and for the courage speak out in difficult times. It is really time in the landscape that we learn and then put in action the ability to separate rhetoric from reality. The NYLC under the leadership of Roger Tan and his co-deputy chairs is best placed to show us the way.
Perhaps a new political wave riding on the current one is needed? What is you view?
Edmund Bon Tai Soon