Kam Raslan’s Talking Edge

(Reprinted from The Edge – Options pullout, 26 September 2011 issue)

Dear Kam,
What? The ISA is going to be repealed? What about the communists?
Freebird

Finally, it is going to be discarded. Long after the threat of a communist revolt that it was created for has disappeared, not just from Malaya/Malaysia but from the whole world. The PM has announced that the Internal Security Act will be repealed. It’s about time too.

The ISA was not actually a British colonial law. It was introduced in 1960, but it was based on an older law. So theoretically, it’s not a colonial relic but its incredibly wide-ranging powers have long been not in keeping with the spirit of democracy. Credit where credit is due, it’s being repealed. Well done!

Malaysia is a better place without the ISA. It has long been a mystery to me why any politician would choose to stake their reputation and political future on vigorously defending the existence of a law that was not only vile and repressive but also deeply unpopular. It seemed so self-defeating.

The PM made the announcement in front of all the top government VIPs at an event that was broadcast live on TV. The VIPs appeared to be excited by the announcement and the mood of self-congratulations was clear. I turned to Twitter to watch a wider reaction and fans of the government were in a very good mood. Many felt that with one brilliant move the government had won the next general election by undercutting one of the opposition’s main platforms. One person even gleefully likened the action to Michael Corleone’s eradication of all his enemies at the end of The Godfather, which was an, er, interesting analogy. I could not find anybody saying that the ISA was a repressive law that should have been repealed long ago. But who cares about any lack of sincerity as long as the ISA is gone.

Amidst the clamour of excitement it was also declared that the ISA would be replaced by two new laws. The law called the ISA will be repealed but will it be replaced by other laws that do the same job but go under a different name? Will the 4th floor be called 3A? Or are we entering a new age where opponents of the government will no longer be locked up indefinitely but be given a box of Belgian chocolates and free tickets to watch Disney On Ice? We will have to wait and see.

Politicians are expected to make hard, even unpopular, decisions but surely, they should also be in the business of always working to increase the realm of individual liberty and not always working to decrease it to a tiny dot?

Dear Kam,
My dad is always saying that things were better in the old days. He says he used to enjoy writing with a pen. My question is, what the heck is a pen?
Ctrl Alt Del

Were things better in the old days? Consider this story. In 1919 Lawrence of Arabia (T E Lawrence) wrote a book about his adventures in Arabia during World War I called The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. It’s still a very good book and he was an exceptionally good writer. But he had a big problem during the writing. After he had finished writing the first draft he took the manuscript with him on a short train journey and he accidentally left it in the waiting room at Reading Station. When he eventually got back to Reading Station, the manuscript was gone. He was already an international celebrity and the newspapers helped him call for the manuscript’s return, but it was never seen again. It’s estimated that Lawrence had lost 250,000 words (this column is about 1,000 words) and he must have been absolutely distraught. But he sat down and wrote it all over again. Maybe the lost version was better than the final version, maybe it was worse, we’ll never know, but The Seven Pillars of Wisdom is a very good book. If anybody does ever find the original manuscript, it’s probably worth millions.

Personally, I don’t know if I could come back from a disaster like the one that befell Lawrence at Reading Station and his story always haunts me whenever I do any work and save it on my computer. I was reminded of the story when I got a phone call from a friend of mine. She told me how she was cleaning up the memory on her computer by deleting old files. She deleted several important files thinking that she had saved them somewhere else. You can probably see where this sad tale is going — she had not saved them anywhere else, and now they were all gone. Also, some burglars had recently broken into her house. Fortunately, she was not harmed and the burglars were quickly scared off, but in the few minutes that they were inside the house, they stole only two things — her two external hard drives. I think most of us assume that saving on an external hard drive is safe because why would anybody want to steal an external hard drive? As she was telling me her sad story, I was busily backing up all my files and desperately trying to find an absolutely secure hiding place for my external hard drive.

There are hidden dangers in this Digital Age. Computers make you think that everything is securely saved and yet I have lost more stuff from the Digital Age than from the Analogue Age. Back in the old days of typewriters, I had to print everything so now I have boxfuls of paper that I wrote back in the 1980s and early 1990s. But after that time and until very recently, I have virtually no record of anything I have done. I tried to be sensible back then and saved everything on floppy disks but that technology is as dead as the dinosaur. I have also lost everything on three computers because of lightning strikes, which would never have happened if I had been sensible and written with a feather quill.

So, consider this to be my public service announcement. Please save your stuff in every conceivable way. Save on your computer, an external hard drive, in the “cloud”, on your email account, on ancient papyrus as Egyptian hieroglyphics, as oral history to be handed down from one generation to the next, get the Amazing Mr Memory to memorise your spreadsheets and save on a CD because surely nobody would steal a CD.

Having said that, my wife has been asking to see our wedding video. It is on a little CD and (this has to be strictly between you and me) I cannot find it anywhere. So if anybody finds my wedding video, I will be very grateful.

Reprinted with the kind permission of