Kam Raslan’s Talking Edge

(Reprinted from The Edge – Options pullout, 2 February 2015 issue)

Dear Kam,
I got really scared the other day. Facebook was down.
FB Addict

The end of the world happened recently, for about 45 minutes. Facebook was down. It stopped working. Fortunately, Twitter was still working and every tweet was about how Facebook was not working. I didn’t feel any panic that Facebook wasn’t working because it’s not that important to me. Or is it? I have become used to it. It gives me a sense of being in touch with how a segment of Malaysia is thinking. It makes me feel like I’m involved in a very big conversation. But when Facebook was down, I tried to remember what life was like before the Internet, and the scary thing is I simply couldn’t remember. I had a vague recollection of what life was like before mobile phones when I had to make appointments over the telephone and then I had to be there. I couldn’t send a message saying I would be late, or to change the venue, or to say I couldn’t be bothered to go. I had to be there. But I can’t really remember life before the Internet.

I think we must have been more fragmented, isolated from each other. I now “know” or am “friends” with people I neither know nor am truly friends with. I now have meaningful conversations with people I will never meet. But I’ve also become sceptical about human beings in a way I never had to be before. Before the Internet, I would meet people in the flesh, they would be standing in front of me and I knew they existed. A middle-aged man couldn’t, for example, pretend to be a 13-year-old girl because I could see with my own eyes the reality. But now I don’t know if people on the Internet are what they say they are or if they even exist at all. This isn’t a big problem for me but young people who might be preyed upon must now instinctively go through their own protocol to decide who is this person, and what is this person. I never had to ask myself that question when I was growing up.

Assuming that the zombie apocalypse doesn’t happen tomorrow and the world carries on for a few more decades yet, then I will be a member of a steadily diminishing community that lived in the age before and during the birth of the Internet. All that comes after will only know the Internet with its quick if shallow answers. And I don’t think I’ll be able to tell them what it was like before.

Dear Kam,
There’s a lot of negativity in Malaysia at the moment. What about something positive for a change?
Looking for Change

I was driving along and I saw a Malay woman on a motorcycle. Nothing extraordinary about that. But I remembered something a Pakistani woman once said to me. She’s a friend of the family and she was visiting Malaysia for the first time and the one thing that really stunned her was the sight of Malay women, Muslim women, riding alone on motorcycles. My Pakistani friend was squealing with delight and envy, saying that such a thing would never happen in her homeland. A woman would simply never go out alone because it would be too dangerous. She would be insulted and perhaps worse. Two Muslim societies with such different cultural practices.

Dear Kam,
We fixate on race. What about economics?
Undergrad

The political scene in Malaysia has been getting increasingly ugly over the last few years and the recent event in Taman Keramat is perhaps the ugliest thing yet. A group of people tore down the barriers of a development site, demanding that the project be stopped. My life in KL has been blighted by new developments. I was kicked out of my last home because of a redevelopment project and I now live under the shadow of a possibly monstrously huge development on a notorious hillside just behind my present home. I’ve been kept awake at nights for fear of developments, concocting fantasies of protest in my head. So I can sympathise with protests against developments. But in Taman Keramat, the protest was claimed to be because the development would turn the area into a “Chinese district”. I can’t find the words to describe how ugly I find that. It is inconceivable that such an event could have happened as little as five years ago, and yet now, we simply wait for the next one.

The project’s developers have said that none of the units have yet been sold and that the 1,097 interested buyers are all bumiputeras. The protesters were entirely wrong. But that was probably never the point. I live near Taman Keramat. It is a very Malay area and I’ve always assumed that it’s Malay Reserve Land. I know several people who live there, people I respect and admire. The tragedy of the event is that it claims to speak for all the residents of Taman Keramat and forcibly includes them in the ugliest of language. Suddenly, people who were quietly going about their lives are forced into choosing sides in a “battle” that is entirely fabricated.

Malaysians are so used to speaking the language of race. Race seems to explain everything but it is becoming increasingly clear that the real story is about an ever-growing class/economic divide between the haves and the have-nots, and about how development projects seem to be unstoppable.

Reprinted with the kind permission of