When you can't live without bananas

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Tuesday, August 16, 2005

I was poking around the Net and found that someone had spammed Google with his essay on racism in Malaysia:

"My dad is a racist; so is my mom. Similarly racists are my brother, sister and relatives. All the Malaysian friends I now have are, and those I had were or at the least had been, racists too.

Well, perhaps thanks to all these people, I have become - and remain - a racist as well.

You see, we are the members of a much larger community: Malaysia - the racist nation!

The term community is somewhat misleading. We are not united as such as a nation should be. We are only united by the fact that all of us - at one time or other - had been are or will become, racists……

All of us formally became racists in the year of 1971, when racism was institutionalised in Malaysia. Not that racism didn’t exist before: it did; it lurked underneath, which — as everyone knows — erupted as the May 13 ethnic riots. Hence came the New Economic Policy, set up to divert the winds off the sails of racism. Ballasting the boat, and listing it in favour of the economically disadvantaged malay-Malaysians may lead to Malaysians seeing each other as equals, it was thought."


On rotten KL infrastructure:

"We have infrastructure good enough to be considered first world or better. Look at the Cyberjaya, Petronas Twin Towers, Putrajaya?

Gleaming high-rise buildings but also in every city, dirty toilets abound, litter clogging up the drains, public telephones damaged, plus unreliable rubbish collection and disposal. We just treat public facilities badly, not caring about others.

Being an urban dweller myself, I am constantly disheartened by the poor public infrastructure and upkeep in our capital city.

Faulty pedestrian traffic signals, illogical positioning of bus stops, poor public cleanliness, poor quality sidewalks (which are paved using slippery tiles), un-integrated and poorly managed public transportation system, the list goes on.

Your children can't even walk safely along the Kuala Lumpur streets, as they might be bags snatched, kidnapped, murdered, raped, or robbed, as they do not know the jungle laws of Malaysia. The police won't help much as they now have a big pile of corruption cases running after them.

You owe nothing to Malaysia, you pay your due, so live on."


And on Med School in Malaysia:

"As an ex-lecturer at one of the medical schools in Malaysia for 13 years, I taught medical students during their first year at the medical faculty.

We (the lecturers) began to notice the difference in the quality of the students - between those coming from the STPM (mainly non-bumis) and those coming from the matriculation system (the bumis).

Although the students from matriculation were also the cream of the bumi students, in general they could not fare as well as the non-bumis. No matter how hard the lecturers try to coax (sometime to the extent of spoon feeding) and motivate them, we could see the difference.

Even when answering essay questions in Bahasa Malaysia, the non-bumis fared better. I could tell the difference in the script.

Students coming after STPM are more confident, independent, mature, motivated, resilient, self-directed and with high self-esteem. The students from matriculation are hardworking and also motivated but something is amiss with their pre-university education i.e. during matriculation...

When I suggested to some post-SPM malay students (who excelled in the SPM) to choose STPM over matriculation, they refused to do so, citing teachers who said that the STPM was difficult and more so for malays because Form Six teachers were mainly Chinese and non-bumis!"
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