Kam Raslan’s Talking Edge

(Reprinted from The Edge – Options pullout, 13 April 2015 issue)

Dear Kam,
What is the “silent majority”?
Minority Malaysian

Our present prime minister now finds himself in the unenviable situation of being, er, questioned by a previous prime minister (yes, that previous PM). But the present PM does not appear to be worried because he says he has the backing of the “silent majority”. Who or what are the silent majority? Is there a silent majority?

A quick Google search reveals that the term was first popularised by former US president Richard Nixon back in 1969. This was before the Watergate scandal that ultimately got Nixon thrown out of office, but even before that, his approval rating had dropped to around 50%. There were demonstrations against the wildly unpopular Vietnam War and the young baby boomers were all turning into “counter-culture” hippies. It looked like Nixon was losing his grip on the nation and so he made a speech in which he appealed to and said he spoke for what he called the silent majority. This community, he inferred, were the older, working class and socially conservative people who didn’t go on demonstrations and who lived far away from the densely populated radical hotbeds of California and New York. After Nixon made his speech, his approval rating shot up to 80% and his presidency looked secure. And then the Watergate scandal happened and despite declaring, “I am not a crook”, he was kicked out of office because absolutely everybody turned against him and he became, and has remained, the least popular US president ever. But the lift in his approval rating after invoking the silent majority has suggested to all beleaguered leaders ever since that such a community does exist. Maybe Nixon did discover a dormant silent majority but although they may have had energy enough to tick a box on an opinion poll questionnaire, they didn’t have the energy to rally to his defence when scandal broke. I guess they are silent for a reason.

The Malaysian tolerance for governmental scandal is somewhat different from America’s. Malaysians appear to be a very forgiving people but what if scandals were to start mounting in number and backing up like a traffic jam on the Federal Highway?

If there is a silent majority, then they are very fickle and unreliable but, heck, that’s voters for you. If there is a silent majority, then they probably just want to have a quiet life and stay out of trouble, and it’s becoming increasingly easy to get into trouble in Malaysia. And now we find ourselves in the situation where a previously silent minority of one (yes, that one) has become unsilent and has retracted his support for a leader for the third time. It’s always heartening and never horribly depressing to witness our democracy in action.

Dear Kam,
Is it my imagination or is KL very boring? I mean, how many shopping malls do we need?
Bored Cityboy

I was in a KL shopping mall the other day, it doesn’t matter which one because they’re all the same. The same shops selling the same stuff. I was really bored because there was nothing I wanted to buy and there was nothing I needed to buy. It was depressing, I was just wandering around, I couldn’t think of anything else to do in KL other than shopping and eating. But then my wife suggested we go to Kampung Baru. For the longest time, we had been wanting to try some food there that we had heard about. A trip to Kampung Baru would be about eating but it beat the deadening experience of aimlessly walking around a shopping mall.

It had been many years since I had last gone to Kampung Baru, even though I drive past it almost every day. I have extended family members who grew up there but I’ve never asked them about it, which is something I plan to correct because Kampung Baru is fascinating. There’s something strange about walking around Kampung Baru because in the background are the familiar tall buildings of the KL skyline where I had just been, with their cinemas, flavourless cupcakes and racks of made-in-China clothes, but in the foreground were really old wooden houses where perhaps generations of KLites have been raised or which have served as a halfway house for new arrivals. It felt strange being able to see the Petronas Twin Towers so close. What are they doing there, because in front of me was something more reminiscent of an east coast pasar malam.

It was clear I was in the midst of a real community, but one I can’t pretend to comprehend. I could hear Indonesian voices but the busiest stalls were selling Kelantanese or Malay versions of Thai food. We went to one restaurant and had the most delicious and cheap Kelantanese food where a Chinese but very Kelantanese family were happily filling themselves. Yes, Kampung Baru is a Malay world, but one which seems to encapsulate the whole spectrum of that very large and very diverse world.

Despite its name, there is nothing baru about Kampung Baru. It was gazetted as Malay reserve land by the British in the earliest days of their administration of KL. Back in the 1890s, the British were very keen on annotating distinct racial classifications and they registered Selangor Malays as being distinct from, say, Perak Malays or Sumatrans and Javanese, and the British censuses noted that Kampung Baru steadily became inhabited by Sumatrans who found work as artisans, carpenters and farmers servicing KL’s tin-mining industry. By the early 1900s, the British gave up making separate distinctions and all were simply called Malays but I’m sure an old Sumatran twist can still be found there.

Because it has its own character, there is a notion that Kampung Baru is somehow a separate world from the rest of KL, which today appears to exist around highways, suburbs and shopping malls. But Kampung Baru (or Chinatown or Brickfields) is no more separate from KL as an arm is from a body. We might want to view communities as entirely different entities that are alien to each other because they eat different food and worship different gods but KL came into being because individuals came here in search of a better life and worked together symbiotically. It’s a terrifying thought that some might see communities as merely the real estate upon which they sit. Looking down from a nearby skyscraper, Kampung Baru might look like wasted real estate where there could be more offices, another shopping mall with a delightful water feature where kids who rarely get out of air-conditioned areas can play. Kampung Baru is much more than real estate — it is a bustling community in the heart of KL. I am really glad I made the effort to visit.

Reprinted with the kind permission of