Kam Raslan’s Talking Edge

(Reprinted from The Edge – Options pullout, 12 January 2015 issue)

Dear Kam,
2014 is finally over. Was it the worst year for Malaysia ever?
Bare Witness

Another plane has crashed. It’s heartbreaking. The year 2014 has been a bad one for Malaysia. And as the floodwaters recede, so many are discovering the loss of everything they own. I hope 2015 is going to be a better year. The only bright spot has been witnessing Malaysians volunteering to help in the flood-affected areas. But I’ve been witnessing this from afar because I’m still on holiday in London and watching news about Malaysia from this distance is a very different experience.

The Malaysian flood (and the prime minister’s golfing trip) has been on the nightly news in the UK, but the reporting suggests that the entire nation is under water. I know it isn’t, but you’d think from the news that all Malaysians are currently living on their roofs. One of my English friends was surprised when watching the news. He thought Malaysia had a tradition of building houses on stilts. This was once true. Building on stilts was once the default Malay/Malaysian design, but not anymore. Perhaps we need to return to building houses in a style that is meant for the Malaysian climate.

The Indonesia AirAsia crash has also been extensively reported. Tan Sri Tony Fernandes and Indonesians’ response to the tragedy has been compared favourably to the astonishingly ramshackle Malaysian handling of Flight MH370. Although AirAsia can come out of this setback relatively well, my English friends now think there is something fundamentally wrong with Malaysian-related airlines.

Watching the Malaysian news from afar gives the impression that the floods and the AirAsia crash must surely be the only stories gripping Malaysian minds. But when I go on the Net, surf my Facebook and look at local Malaysian news websites, I see that there are other stories that are equally, or perhaps even more, gripping. For instance, how come Malaysia’s official government jet has been on a trip around the world, coincidentally to some of the world’s best shopping locations? Why didn’t it go straight back to Malaysia from Hawaii? This kind of story would be of no interest to a foreign audience but it taps into the current Malaysian mindset — a feeling that the nation is adrift, rudderless, driven by extremism in the apparent absence of clear and reasoned leadership.

News reporting isn’t just about giving the facts, because that would be boring. It’s about telling a story and gripping the audience emotionally. A good way to get an emotional response is to confirm people’s pre-set prejudices. A British audience would want to feel pity for faraway people but have suspicions of foreignness and the belief that they are naturally incompetent. The British audience wants to feel safe and fearful at the same time. The Malaysian audience, when looking at local news headlines, wants to feel indignant about incompetence and injustice. This is a completely different emotion from, say, 20 years ago when the only allowable emotional response was helplessness, isolation and victimhood. Now the news stories are driven by a strong sense of outrage and an ever-growing sense of empowerment. Unfortunately for the Malaysian government, they are, well, not very good at dealing with either.

But I’m far away from Malaysia at the moment, so watching the news and reading the Internet leaves me with a sense of helplessness. When I’m in Malaysia, the news makes me feel indignant and it can also make me feel that everything is doomed, that the crazies are taking over. It’s only by being on the streets of Malaysia (okay, KL) that I’m able to witness normalcy and that things are not that bad. Being away and only seeing the starkness of the headlines only leaves me with the sense that everything is doomed. So, I’m going to ignore Malaysian news as much as possible while I’m away. And I’m feeling better already.

Dear Kam,
Is it my imagination or is the world being taken over by people who make sweeping generalisations about people?
Just Sayin’

So I’ve been away for several weeks, in London and England. I mentioned in last week’s Talking Edge that these are two different countries. London is packed full with foreigners but when I visited England I saw hardly any, and yet British politics is now driven by the fear of foreigners. The two established political parties are having to deal with the new upstart UK Independence Party (UKIP), which argues that the nation is being swamped with immigrants and that this must be stopped. Daily news and newspaper commentaries appear to confirm that foreigners are moving to Britain in droves and changing the culture. And the worst foreigners are obviously Muslims with their terrorism, treatment of women and so on. There is a hysterical fear of foreigners and yet when I leave London and go into England, I don’t see any foreigners, except for two German tourists who were lost. There is righteous indignation about the dangers of mass immigration and yet I don’t personally see that England is any less English than it ever was.

I’m in London doing research for a book I’m writing and I’ve been spending many very happy hours in a library reading books about India and Malaya written by British men in the 1890s and 1930s. In that earlier age, when British men ruled the world, there was no “political correctness” and these authors had no problem describing entire cultures with sweeping generalisations or calling entire peoples steadfast, untrustworthy, brave and/or lazy. They write about communities I know with words that I can’t bring myself to tell you, even if I often agree. They describe entire peoples in ways that present-day Malaysians are happy to say in private but never in public. Well, except for Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad.

After spending hours in the mindset of the 1890s, I think that the growing popularity of a party like UKIP, and its equivalents in Malaysia, might be because it’s an angry reaction to a new-age brake on language. People want to be able to describe other communities with sweeping statements, usually derogatively. People want to say that we are good because they are bad, we are poor because they are rich, and they are bad and rich because we are good and poor. Life is so much easier if they are bad because they are bad, and we’re just helpless victims.

But life isn’t easy. There are shades of grey and motivations and economic impulses rarely tell easy stories of heroes and villains, exploitation and victimhood. There are always deeper historical, economic and emotional reasons for actions and movements. I don’t want to give in to the easy sweeping generalisations, however tempting it may be. I mean, the laziest person I have ever met is Chinese. Oops, I did it again.

Reprinted with the kind permission of