1Malaysia and Me

Someone asked me recently what I thought about the ’1 Malaysia’ concept. I pondered for a while, my eyes staring blankly into the horizon and blurted… You wanna know what ’1Malaysia’ is? Just take a trip down memory lane… my thoughts were instantly transported to my growing up years in the suburbs of KL.. to a place called ‘Peel Road’.

 
Now, here is a community which embraced the 1Malaysia concept in totality. The fact that we were made up of different racial backgrounds with different religious beliefs were of little significance, and it didn’t make any of us any less a muslim or christian or hindu or buddhist. My best friend then was a Chinese, Mah Seng Teck, and his whole family was like my second family. I had no qualms about staying over at his place and spending almost the whole day in his house…including having meals with them, and they were understanding enough about my religious beliefs and totally abstained from cooking pork.

My immediate right neighbour, was a Hindu family, while the one on our left was a Eurasian family and as far as I can remember we never had any quarrels and the kids would come over for a game of ‘konda-kondi’ in the evenings since our house had a larger lawn. On weekends, we would gather at the nearby football field and play our hearts out. After the game, we would all gather around the public water pipe and drink straight out of the tap head… and none of us had cholera or any other sickness as a result of it!

At times a game of ‘chopping’ at Mah’s place would leave all of us with tennis ball marks all over our clothes (for the benefit of the Gen-X’ers, ‘chopping’ is a game of eliminating the other players from the field by throwing a really wet tennis ball at them). Almost always, I’d get a good tongue-lashing once I got home!

But never in my wildest dreams then, would I have thought of labeling any of my friends, or even mere acquaintances for that matter, as ‘pendatang’ or question their loyalty to the country. And they in turn never really bothered about ‘ketuanan Melayu’ or fear the Keris in the display cabinet at the corner of our living room. Religious celebrations were celebrated by all and sundry… I remember joining my Eurasians friend when they went carolling from house to house on Christmas eve… and my other friends would accompany me to the Mosque on the morning of Hari Raya and wait until the prayers were over… then we would all go from house to house, collecting duit raya… in the evening we would all go and have a good time with the ‘collections’.

Aaah! those good ol’ days… if only we could re-live that spirit now, and watch our children do the same things we did then, ’1Malaysia’ would not be a slogan, but rather the very essence of Malaysians.