Playground Lessons

Today I am going to talk briefly about my alma maters. My first alma mater has a special place in my heart as this is where my friends and I spent the bulk of our teenage lives in that then small town of Seremban. This is where I learnt about being independent, being far away from family, discipline, responsibility, time management and life in general. This is also where I made friends and cultivated friendship that remains to this day. We were having the time of our lives there (well, most of us anyway and most of the time. I hated my physical ed sessions, domestic science classes and Arabic lessons) and we were a pretty closely knit bunch.

Then when we entered our fourth year, we discovered that we would be having new fourth formers – the best-performing students from other schools – join us. ‘What? Why?’ we the thoroughbreds raged furiously on. Who decided on this? Why weren’t we consulted? What could we do to stop this? And worse still, the Social Science class which had traditionally been assigned the N letter would now be assigned the letter M. ‘Outrageous! Sacrilegious!’ we fumed hotly.

The inevitable happened. The new fourth formers (NFF) came. Some took a look at the situation and decided that befriending us was wiser. And we reciprocated albeit a little reluctantly at first until we realised they were there to stay. Of course there were those newcomers who chose to just ignore the rest of us and the rest of themselves and decided becoming bookworms were much better.

We learnt a lot of things from the NFF though it’s not easy to admit so (I’m sure they learnt a lot from us too). We learnt that we must now compete with these newcomers – in academics, sports, inter-form English dramas, inter-house dancing competitions - and work with them in inter-school debates and band competitions... it didn’t help that these newcomers were the top performers at their old schools. We sat up, took notice and bucked up, knowing that the bar had been raised. The sooner we accepted the situation, addressed it and dealt with it, the sooner we could move on. And by doing so, we weren’t stuck in the level of mediocrity that we may have fallen into had these newcomers not come into the picture. We stepped out of our comfort zone, took a long, hard look at ourselves and decided that we might as well accept the fact that they were there to stay and strive together with them in upholding the image and the excellence the institution is famed for.

All in all, I think that change brought about a change in the thoroughbreds (OK, there were still those lazy bummers who couldn’t be bothered to change. Well, that kind of people are everywhere anyway).

This Used To Be My Playground. Pictures googled and nicked from an old friend’s album

After O-Level, I then went on to do A-Level at a local college. We were a mixed bunch of people from all kind of backgrounds, ethnicity, income levels and religions but we got along well and we performed well too if I may say so myself. But there was another group of MARA students who were all Malays and, boy, I can seriously say they were not an inspired lot, what more hardworking. Subsequently I went to England to pursue my degree and returned there a few years later for my Master’s degree - and needless to say, of course over there one needs to compete with everyone from around the world, all types of backgrounds and religions.

So it was with some kind of surprise, despair and dismay that I discover about the protests by the UiTM students over the proposal for a 10% intake of non-Bumiputeras into UiTM. Seriously, if you can’t even compete with non-Bumiputeras at school, what are the chances of competing or integrating at the workplace? How do you expect them to compete regionally or internationally if they can’t even compete locally with other races? How do you ensure that these students’ minds evolve when they can’t even begin to consider the proposal without being emotional about it? How do you get them to be visionary, far-sighted, mentally matured and open-minded – after 51 years of independence, no less - when they can’t even view the suggestion with an open mind? Heck, there are even people in the office who were also up in arms about the proposal, so what do you expect from the students who could be easily their children (I know for a fact that at some UiTM campuses, the students were actually being called to have their protests)? Why is there even a need to politicise the subject when we know there are as many low- and middle-income non-Malays as there are Malays? How would we feel if a neighbouring country prohibits Malays from entering their universities? And if the US implements single-race universities, some only for coloured people and some only for white, I’m sure we will accuse them of racism.

Besides, I doubt that it is prescribed anywhere in the Constitution that the student composition at UiTM is part of the Malay special rights (I stand corrected).

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I was so happy to receive a friend request from an old playground mate: we’ve lost touch since our graduation. We used to chat in between our work assignments on various topics: clothes, fashion, travelling. He (yes, it’s a he and he does shop!) is one of the nicest English blokes around who didn’t care about my funny accent among other things. Maybe it’s because he himself is married to a Russian and hence is able to look beyond skin colour, background, creed, ethnicity and religion.