October Editorial 2005

All great people have great risks in their life. The risk of losing popularity because you've been there too long, is one, whilst the worst of all is others might want to get rid of them through dubious ways, such as name smearing and even to the extent of hiring hit man to kill. That's the news of the media on 26th December 2001 with Dr. Mahadzir and his Deputy Datuk Abdullah Ahmad Badawi and to hear the source of this news from an overseas newspapers is something that puzzles our people. Often enough, all bad news seem to originate from outside our country. Just what is this ? Is it because our own intelligence agencies are not efficient enough to be well entrenched in the underground world to get the first tips on such things ? It could also be the work of pranksters who are many out there with the free flow of writings on the Internet these days. Whatever it is, it benefits no one to eliminate our Prime Minister and his Deputy, then and now, this way as others will take over after them and they share the same philosophy and principles as the former having been in the same cabinet set up for the past years as the ruling members of the Malaysian government. We are not a dictatorial country . Hence killing one or two men will not change the government structure or put the country into chaos, so to say.

And that reminds me of my college days when a group of our seniors wanted to get rid of an expatriate teacher. At that time, expatriates were not what you would imagine it to be. There were a lot of English, Australian, Indian and Pakistani teachers in our College but it was the norm then because the country was short of teachers, and we were under the British. To cut a long story short, the attempt was a failure and resulted in the expulsion of a few of our seniors, one of whom later on became a prominent politician and journalist. What is worthy of note here is, this was indeed the first semblance of independence movement by visionary students. Of course the real independence movement took place many years later.

As one progresses in age, it is not unusual to become forgetful on almost everything at times. Of course this can be most irritating too more especially when it comes to people's names or names of interesting places recently visited on those very expensive trips overseas. Do this thing ever happen to you too ? Well, whilst we are on this subject, I will not want to forget January 3rd 2002 when I lost not only an uncle but a great friend in need. He was 76, the same age as our then Prime Minister Dr. Mahadzir, who was as active and energetic as a young man of twenty, so most of those who followed him on his duty tours have said admiringly. The same could be said of my demised uncle too when he was alive. The difference was, my uncle was active in his dusun land just behind his house. He has on it all the popular fruit trees such as durian, rambutan, nangka and chempedak, bananas and coconut. Each time, those trees bear fruits, he seldom failed to invite us over or else he himself drove and delivered the fruits to our house albeit the distance which took him driving for at least two hours returned. Now that he has passed away, we are going to sadly miss him but for me, there has been stores of pleasant past memories on him when I was in school and during my early working days.

My uncle, the late Kamaruddin bin Suriadi, led a very simple lifestyle. He married young but only had three children, the eldest a boy and the next two, girls. It was fated that he got a Mongoloid girl in the second child, who strangely enough outlived him when everyone thought she would have long passed away as a teenager. At least this proved the pundit wrong, in this instance. A few years ago, my uncle lost his wife through cancer . Many years later, he decided to marry again, having found a woman who was a nurse by profession, who was willing to accept responsibility to help look after his Mongoloid daughter. Everything seems to fall in place for my uncle, who later on led a seemingly happy life again.

I recalled those many occasions during my early school days when he used to take me to see movies. He loved movies those days and could not miss on any new ones in town. Of course we were then in Kuala Lumpur and he stayed in a room in our house. My father was then Keeper of the Rulers Seal - a very senior post in the then British Government. It was during these early formative years of my life that I started to love watching movies which hobby continues till today. However, for my uncle, he later on totally abandoned the movies. His excuse ? "They are all the same ! " Nevertheless he continued to relate his movie adventures to us later on in the years as if it's still his favorite past time.

His house has always been my favorite abode whenever I came home for the school holidays. His wife was a great aunt too. She loved watching movies too. When my uncle's interest on movies eventually waned and ended, my aunty would seek my company to the movies instead and she would comment just how sad that my uncle now no longer go to the movies. To this day, I cannot fathom why he decided to abandon this favorite hobby of his other than the excuse that "It's all the same' . May be, it could be economic reasons since he then had three children to upkeep with his small salary as the Police Inspector, who those days were not well-paid. If not for the fact that he was given government quarters to live in, he would not have been able to afford living in Kuala Lumpur then.

I recall the basic foods we ate daily. It was rice with gulai taugay, fried kangkung,or masak kubis, ikan bilis and occasionally some fish and chicken. However, they were great food all the same.

The best part about all this is, at no time did my uncle ever apologize for not serving any better food. After all what was there to apologize when these must be almost the foods of everyone those days. After all, there were no supermarkets then. The variety of food stuffs on offer were also limited then. When there are not much else on offer, what was there to complaint on choices of foodstuffs ? It was one of life's best moment for me as a student, and to this day, I treasured the good memory of a blissful life with little worries apart from having to pass those school exams which were three times a year then.

Having termly exams were good because they kept us alert on our learning although for
exceptional students this could create stress in their life. Hence we got a few cases of our friends who got boils on their bodies. These termly exams made all of us look at exams as something natural and hence we were less nervous or stressful when we faced the real big exams such as the promotional yearly exams , the Cambridge Exams for School Certificate and the Cambridge Higher School Certificate . Yes indeed, in those days we had to go through the annual exam before we could be promoted to a higher class, failing which we would remain in the same class for another year. If again we fail, if our age no longer permitted us to be in the same class, we would have to leave school for good ! Of course, there is a drawback to this system. We get a lot of uneducated or semi-educated children in the community who would later on grew into adulthood not being able to get decent jobs for living. But the results of this too, create opportunities for the setting up of private schools, which were prepared to accept these failures irrespective of their ages.

These days, students are automatically promoted until Form Three and then again after that until Form Five. The setback to this system is that we get all the weak students in the class, and the difficulties confronting the teachers trying to make progress with the school syllabus. The worst part of it all is teachers have so much paper work to do each day that make them exhausted and hence spend lesser time with the weak students during spare time. Teaching became a burden to the teachers in general. Ainul herself went for earlier retirement. She was so fed up about teaching that she developed headache each time she thought of going to school. There were at least two instances when she took unpaid leave for months on end just to get out of sight from her school. Whilst she delight in the company of her fellow teaching mates, she had a complete dislike of her headmaster who she claimed was dishonest with the school funds and other money collections. She was victimized by her headmaster when he realized Ainul's threat to his exploits. Hence Ainul was transferred to another school whose headmaster was a close friend of her former headmaster. And all this was done through the headmaster's connection with the Education Department. At her new school, the headmaster gave Ainul an equally hard time, making her teach subjects not relevant to her teaching proficiency.

It was a blessing to be transferred to another school later on and this was done through Ainul's own connection at the Education Office. In the new school which was a mission school of sort, Ainul stumbled upon another misuser of school funds but this time , instead of putting her nose into it, she finally decided "enough is enough " and opted for early retirement ! But of course this was not an ultimate decision without first getting my consent and assurance that her retirement might not cause severe hardship to our cost of living. Although to a certain extent it did at first but later on we managed to adjust and never looked back again !

In life we just have to look ahead. Sometimes the future might look hazy but given time we should be able to adjust and make good what we have. This is very true to most of us when it comes to changing our job or profession.

I recall the first time I changed my job. I had been pretty comfortable in the Federal Land Development Authority (FELDA) my first permanent job after graduation with a Bachelor of Arts Degree from the University of Malaya at Pantai Valley. We were the pioneer local batch for the newly formed university after Malaya gained its Independence on 31st August 1957. This was June 1959. There were less than 400 undergraduates enrolled then with the majority being in the Engineering and Science streams and the rest in the Arts stream. Of the racial composition, less than 50 were Malays. I graduated in June 1962 - thankfully for that- which is another story to tell later !

My decision to resign from FELDA to take a new job at a French Bank called the Banque de L'Indochine was made almost instantaneously then. Earlier on at a dinner in a friend's house - my wife's friend, Tunku Fauziah ,whose husband Syed Adam Al Jaffri, worked in Bank Negara as it's Deputy Governor, had as one of his guests the Manager of the said Bank. The dinner was in fact a setup for me to meet up with Marriet , the said Bank's Manager - an arrangement made by my wife through her friend since I had mentioned to her that it would be nice to have a change of job if it gives better salary and prospects for advancement. The dinner meeting went off very well indeed when I traded conversation with the French Bank Manager.

It was one fine morning a few weeks later when I thought of giving Marriet a call just to find out if he could remember me. As it turned out, he remembered me well enough to lead our conversation to a job offer at his Bank. Although I told him that I had no banking background nor any experience in banking matters, he fully assured me that I could easily learn and be trained on the job. I was shy to negotiate on the salary offer and accepted one which paid me just RM100.00 more to my FELDA's, but with an annual increment of RM150.00 a month plus annual bonus. It seemed a good offer to me then considering that in FELDA the annual increment was only RM50.00 a month and no annual bonus.

It came a shock to FELDA's Chairman, Tan Sri Taib Andak when I met him to say that I wanted to resign. When I gave him my reasons which was to have a better salary and prospects and an opportunity to learn something new in another industry, he gave me his blessings and wished me well in my new career. I asked for a 24 hour notice release without penalty to which he consented.

Almost nobody else in FELDA knew about my resignation, so much so, I left quietly and without fanfare ! It would not suprise me if it was rumored that I got sacked ! However, I never got around to finding that out because I never stepped again into FELDA until many years later and any other communications with FELDA later on was made through letter writings only and these concerned the arrangements I had to make to settle my housing loan which I had taken then to purchase my present house. That is another story again !

All told, I was very happy in my new job in the French Bank, being given an easy job in comparison to the one in FELDA. I started learning all about banking starting from basic things such as cheques clearings and postings, accounts postings and balancing, overdraft and security documents and liaisons with legal firms and government bodies, and spot checking on customers stocks at their premises and godowns. The best part was that I could create my own working schedules which made time very flexible to allow me to send and fetch my wife and children to and from their respective schools daily without fail. The only set backs were I was deprived of enjoying New Year's Eve celebrations when I had to remain in the Bank to see to the final annual balancing of accounts for the profit and loss for the bank. Each year, I only got back home after two in the morning and very seldom earlier than one o'clock in the morning.

These days, I don't know what Bankers or bank officers do. Now that the computers have taken over most of the work that involve postings of accounts and ledger keeping etc. by right therefore they should have more time for other things. However, what is noticeable is that they seem to be working even longer hours ! And to add to that the daylight robberies of banks accounts seem to be on the rise too ! Access to private accounts are no longer controlled by the officers concerned but are accessible on the PC of almost every bank's staff ! What security have we got here ? It is not uncommon these days to hear of credit cards and ATM cards fraud or the same being accessed by ATM robbers. I know of one instance when my nephew was shocked to find someone had stolen almost all his savings account money with the National Savings Bank. There was no way he could prove to the Bank that he did not withdraw the money since it was all done through the ATM ! All he heard from the Bank was that they pretty well know that there were hackers up north in Perlis who did it all. However, the Bank is not about to compensate unless the account holders themselves can prove otherwise about the drawn accounts ! That's technology at its" best" !

It was little wonder that my English business partner Ron Whitehouse had very little respect for the computer usage in our office, in those early days. He felt that it was a complete waste of time when most things could be done on the spot using the traditional thinking methods ! Of late of course his original thinking must have changed for we now have PCc' in our office for all our staff ! How else could we have accomplished so many things speedily with all those projects we had to handle then and now if not with the computers help ? This merely goes to show, ideas and thinkings do change for the better or for worse over time. Just as the saying goes "Old wounds heal over time".

You might not agree on that though. We have seen so many political and ethnic quarrels and wars which still exist. Take the case of Israel and Palestine. The killings and abuse of weapons to kill continue unabated these days and the worst part is, the whole world seems to be almost silent about it simply because the most powerful nation of the 21st Century, the United States of America is seen to condone it all. There is no exception too to the most powerful international body of nations, the United Nations Organization, which seems powerless to stop these killings in Israel and Palestine. The worst part of it all is the whole world knows the background of the Israel's Prime Minister Sharon who is a terrorist and a mass killer in his previous occupation and yet the whole world did nothing to condemn his killing policy on the Palestinians. The world simply watched the opened destruction of the Palestinians airfields and the office of Arafat's, with the latter being grounded for good !

There is no denying, the United States too have lost its sense of direction in world peace keeping. Its current "War against Terror" has made it totally blind and deaf to the world opinions on its policy to isolate and condemn Muslims as potential terrorists. Our own people, the Malays, are now skeptical about going to the States for there has been reported cases of total abuse of personal and luggage inspections at arrival and departure terminals at US airports. Our people had been bluntly assumed to be terrorists and put in handcuffs and detained for days at these places until finally released with minimum apologies ! What the US has now done is create a hate image to all Muslims. Its campaign and war against terror will lead to more terrors from non-potential terrorists who will turn terrorists ! This is what the abuse of power is all about and it is a sad world indeed for the 21st Century for mankind !

The latest war on terrorists was when the U.S staged the propaganda to get the world to agree to complete the Gulf War by bombing Iraq and kill its President Sadam Hussain. For years past the United Nations had not done anything positive to stop it's own total embargo on all forms of trade by Iraq to the extent that millions of children suffer malnutrition and the country as a whole completely lacked medical facilities. It was the most cruel act of Mankind in civilized history and yet the whole world seemed to condone on this act. The U.S and its best ally Britain seemed to get away with their inhuman acts to the constination and helpless observation of the Muslim world . Indeed the 20th and 21st Centuries seemed mired in its creation of dividing the World into two major religious groups of Muslims and Christianity ! This could be the beginning of another Crusade war for the West when the first one of centuries ago was failure for Christianity. With the stubborn stand by Bush, the attack on Iraq seemed imminent and this took place in October 2002 !

Just what has that war accomplished for the U.S and for the world for that matter. Yes, Sadam Hussain's regime collapsed and he himself is now a prisoner, but what of Iraq itself ? We cannot see any peace in that country today, albeit a democratic government of sorts have been set up by the Iraqis through United Nations supervision. However, the fighting between the Iraqis freedom fighters and the coalition forces of U.S and Britain is still going on. In addition the whole country is torn apart with religious wars between the Sunnis and Shiite. Suicide bombers rule the day in Iraq. As a leading Iraqi stated at a CNN interview recently, Iraq was never like what it is today even at the worst period of Sadam's regime. At that time, all the people coexist in their religious differences without any killings of any sorts and most certainly there were no suicide bombers. What is the greatest accomplishment of these Gulf wars of the Bushes then ?
It is the beginning of the terrorist global wars against any regime that they consider as unfair to any community. Hence, it is a war without boundaries, and hence a most dangerous one for any one and any country. The Gulf war has disturbed the hornets nest !

These days, we all live in a stressful environment of sorts. In the cities there are the snatch thieves in addition to the usual house breakings and burglaries. Then there's the catastrophic disasters of the volcanic eruptions or earthquakes, floods, bush fires, and tsunamis, which kill people by the thousands, and added to all these are the suicide bombers. Even London that has pride itself as a troubled free city has today suffered traumas of suicide bombers which shocked the city recently. Indeed, this is the message that no city in the world is free of this new phenomena of the 21st century. Just what are we all going to do then ?

There has been so much abuse going on in this world today. Those in authority and power have been seen to abuse their authority, the old have abused the young, the employers abusing their employees., and everyone tries to play out or cheat one another, whilst substandard wares continue to flood the market under the guise of modern technology. Virtually, nothing is made to last any more. I recall the first time I was introduced to and got attracted to a Marks and Spencer's underwear. It was my best friend, the late Din Ahmad, who was then an rubber Estate assistant manager, who gave me as a present this brands underwear. That first underwear lasted for over ten years ! Today, the same brand's product not only bear defects at times but it's made of inferior quality albeit it is still more lasting than all the other brand's out there. It all goes to show, nothing is made to last any more, just as governments of countries change or collapse every so often these days. There is no more quality or indeed quality is questionable these days ! The saying "Let the good time roles" is no longer seen to exist and instead it is nothing better than the rat race and the good time is only superficial ! The world is now ruled by hypocrites and in Islam the hypocrites are the firewood of hell in the hereafter !
I sound very fiery in this article of mine for the month. Please accept my apology if any of my statements tend to affect or offend any of my readers. I am only sounding off the general feelings of all of us still saint people out there. When you look at the number of hospitals that mushroom in our country today, which to most people is a sign of prosperity in the country and indeed they are right too considering that it shows so many people can today afford to be treated at these expensive hospitals, it makes us wonder, why these should be there in the first place, if not for the fact that more and more people get sick at a much younger age these days. Stress with modern life style and excessive good and unhealthy food and lack of daily exercise, could easily be blamed for this malady of today's society. What a shame for modern civilization !

I think I have written enough for this time less I might vomit with disgust at what I see of the happenings of our life time. The next time, I will try to reminisce to more pleasant times of our lives. After all, we are all living on borrowed time, they say. Why not make the best of what we have and rejoice in the fact that "There but for the Grace of God, go I "!

Cheers !