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©New Straits Times (Used by permission)
by Umapagan Ampikaipakan

IT'S that time of the year again. When the essayists, editorialists, bloggers, hacks, and all those other men and women of letters begin to roll out their obligatory pieces on "Merdeka".

But composing a birthday message is never easy. It's trying to find that right balance between critiquing the present and still having faith in the future. It's hoping without gushing. It's hard. This is to be my fourth attempt:

So here's the thing about birthdays. In the beginning, each one is something to be celebrated, each one a watershed event. The first five years especially.

Your first birthday is, in many ways, the most important one. Being new to this world, your very being faces a multitude of challenges.

You're young and fragile, delicate and vulnerable. Anything could happen. Everything could go wrong. Complexities abound and your first birthday is usually a big congratulations for making it: "You're still here. You're alive. You've survived the first 365 days. Well done and all the best for the future. Because from here on out begins the steep and slippery slope."

Years 2 through 5 are similar, but to a somewhat relaxed degree. Things slow down for a while, until you reach your mid-teens. And then the milestones come fast and far too frequently.

Between the ages of 16 and 30 there's always something to commemorate. You're sweet and you're 16 and you're already sneaking alcohol from that locked cabinet that's always been just out of reach; too little too high, until now.

Before you know it, you're 18 and teetering towards adulthood. After that, it's 19 and you're celebrating the last of your terrible teens.

And then you're bringing in the 20s, followed swiftly by 21, the big Two-One, adulthood at last. You can vote, you can drink, you can watch those dirty movies.

At 25, you revel at having lived a quarter century, because for some reason, 100 seems a logical target.

At 30, you're all grown up and the vagrancies of youth are no longer defensible. By this point, your grandparents were already married with 17 children and a dog. Your dear old granddad was working 15 hours a day and had just suffered his second heart attack. What's your excuse?

From this point on, we only ever observe in multiples of 10. Your 40th, your 50th, and then your 60th -- at which point Hindus believe the cycle of life renews itself.

By the time you reach your 80s, it's back to celebrating every year.

You're old and fragile, delicate and vulnerable. Congratulations. You're still here. You're still alive. You've survived another 365 days. Well done and all the best for the future. Because from here on out begins the steep and slippery slope.

Now here's the thing about milestones. It's what to do after that that's the problem. And so, as we begin our 51st year, I am left feeling somewhat bathetic. There seems to have been an unintentional lapse in the mood from the sublime to the ridiculous.

For the first 50 years, milestone or not, there was always a sense of something come Independence Day. What that something was, I never knew. I only knew that it was there.

This year, however, just felt anticlimactic. It felt like we were idling. It felt like we were disinterested. Like we had given up. Malaysia, thus far, has been an impressive series of events and this year just felt like a disappointing end.

There were hardly any flags, even. Maybe it's because they weren't being handed out for free this year. Or maybe it's because the midlife crisis that was our 50th year has left us somewhat disenchanted.

All the signs were there; all the classic symptoms. We were questioning everything. We were making changes for the sake of change. We were exhibiting overly-impulsive behaviour. We were feeling unusually restless; it felt like we were running out of time.

Suddenly dissatisfied with all of our previous goals, we felt like nothing that we've accomplished actually means anything. And we've spent the year excessively reminiscing the past.

Fantasising about the glory days of yesteryear, of how great everything was then as opposed to now. We've been perfectly willing to sacrifice our present to reclaim some glorified past.

Now don't misunderstand me. It isn't that our midlife misgivings have been unjustified, it's just that our indignation has given way to some sort of bitterness. And it is something that isn't at all healthy.

We seem to have misunderstood the very reason we celebrate our independence. We aren't celebrating what we are, or even what we've become. There was no need to tone it down in order to reflect or even to take heed. Because we aren't celebrating "Malaysia, right or wrong".

No. Every year, on August 31st, we celebrate the concept of Malaysia, because Malaysia, as an idea, has always been a great one.

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