Malaysian scene (since, seen or sin?)

I wrote this article about 1 month ago and have blogged it. But I have cancelled that original blog, so I am re-woking on it now.

The Malaysia attitude has not changed much, though the new PM seems to be more liberal than the previous one who was a martinet in my opinion.

On the National Service (Malaysia style), the first batch has passed out, a few teething problems which are now being resolved. A couple of deaths had occurred due to drowning, one in Sarawak and one in Kelantan. A few fights had resulted in some camps and a couple of girls have run away and a few sexual encounters have taken place.I suppose when you are talking about 80,000 participants in all its not really surprising, they being young, inexperienced and multiracial. There are of course the good points resulting from this NS experiment, such as each race understands better of each others likes and taboos, the urban youths mixing with the rural youths and learning from each other, each measuring himself/herself on their leadership capabilities and each assessing himself/herself on how well he/she will perform in real life situations.
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I have been reading some very interesting press reports lately in the Malay Mail (MM).
MM Monday 19/4/04 - Call for 'only girls camp' - Front page.
Sunday Mail 18/04/2004 - When fans are banned from cheering' - Page 63.

I thought this is really what Malaysians are, reactive and repressive. In the first instance it only happened after an Instructor had raped a participant in the National Service scheme, where else but in Trengganu (the favourite 'blame them' place). And in the second instance is when school boys were prevented from cheering their hockey team, in a final championship match. And the boys have even hired buses to go to that match. The official excuse? In case there is trouble. Very flimsy I think. We cannot even trust our own school children can we? The scene was in KL.

I don't want to sound really like an old man - I must admit that I am old - but I thought Islam had already warned that mixing of sexes can cause sex trouble. And one of them is sex encounters, the most serious being rape. I mean, at 18 years old, those young ladies can really be very tempting to some young Forces men, who are also their Instructors. Unethical maybe, but which sex act is ethical? Especially if the Forces man is not that well educated. Probably that was one of the cases reported, but other sex encounters may not have been reported, Malaysian being very 'face saving' conscious. What about among the participants themselves? Would not like to say.

In the second case, this is where I think Malaysian lacks the participative spirit, I mean if the school children are not encouraged to cheer even for their school team playing in the final. What do we expect them to do? Sit by the side line and just keep silent? Even now our school children have gone into a stage of inactivity. Why? Any activity must always have an 'official' sanction, so many have taken the attitude as "Why bother?". Why take the initiative? You can observe this if you go to any official function in Malaysia or even when Malaysians are present. When they are free Malaysians behave like animals just released from a cage, for example when free food are served they become very greedy, they will try to cart away everything for themselves. You can see this happening in a public 'open house' like Hari Raya time. And when Malaysians are at a 'good time' party they will wait, most likely sitting on chairs or decorating the walls, for someone to start the participating move, if ever these Malaysians participate at all. But in most cases they just like to be the spectators while everyone else enjoy themselves.

So we Malaysians are reactive, when we are in trouble, and just be spectators when we are at a gathering. Or are we just repressed? We all know this but would we ever admit it?



To shout back, e-mail: mylias@tm.net.my