Kam Raslan’s Talking Edge

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

Dear Kam,
Whatever happened to sedition? It was once so popular.
Seditious Lim

Much, much older readers of Talking Edge might remember Tommy Page. He was an American singer who was very popular in Malaysia back in the early Nineties, but he was absolutely unknown anywhere else, including in his native America. Back in those long ago times, an English friend of mine came out to visit me when I had first moved back to Malaysia. My friend looked a lot like Tommy Page, but neither of us had heard of him at the time. My friend and I felt very confused whenever we went out onto the streets of Kuala Lumpur because we could see lots of girls excitedly whispering and pointing at him. Some even asked to be photographed with him, and we didn’t know what the hell was going on. Obviously, he loved the attention from all these girls and he wanted to move to Malaysia. Obviously, I found it very annoying. Why were these girls so infatuated with my friend? He had no claim to fame (he was just a professional vegetarian at the time) and I didn’t think he was particularly good-looking (okay, I admit, he was a nice-looking fellow). In those days, both of us thought we really knew the pop music world inside out, so it didn’t ring any bells whenever we heard “Tommy Page”. Perhaps it was a term like Mat Salleh, but to describe nice-looking white boys. Finally, we discovered that Tommy Page was an actual person and that was the only reason why Malaysian girls were interested in my friend. Obviously, my friend was very annoyed and obviously, I thought this was very funny. Tommy Page soon passed from Malaysian consciousness to be replaced by newer, bigger acts like, I don’t know, Michael Learns to Rock. Remember them?

For some strange reason, Tommy Page comes to mind when I think of the Sedition Act. There was a time, not so long ago, when the Act was the most popular thing ever. Lots of people were being stopped on the streets to be photographed, but not together with pretty girls but wearing purple prison garb. The Sedition Act was all the rage, it was all over Twitter and yet now it seems to have gone. Have Malaysians suddenly become less seditious? Was the Sedition Act just a Tommy Page moment, something hugely popular in Malaysia but unknown anywhere else? Perhaps it is the Tommy Page of Malaysian laws, now overwhelmed by an endless stream of Michael Learns to Rock and the Thriller from the WSJ? I’m sure our legal Tommy Page will have a comeback tour, but its moment has passed.

Dear Kam,
My son spends all his time playing video games. I keep telling him to get a job and earn some money, but he says he can earn more money than I ever could, and just by playing video games. I mean, that’s crazy, isn’t it?
New World

Have you ever heard of Felix Kjellberg? He’s very famous. Ask anybody under the age of 13 and they’ll know, or they might know him better as PewDiePie. He is Swedish and he has a YouTube channel that has racked up seven billion views from his 37.7 million subscribers, which helped him make US$7.4 million (RM28.23 million) last year. All he seems to do is scream a lot and play video games. I respect him even if I can barely decipher his appeal, but one heck of a lot of young people appear to be able to see something of importance in what he does. Maybe his appeal is that he is like a child in the body of a grown-up who is proving to the world (and to their parents) that the future doesn’t have to mean putting away childish things and studying to become a quantity surveyor. Instead, perhaps PewDiePie shows that the key to unlocking achievement can lie in getting to level fi ve and telling the world about it.

Children don’t always see happy people when they look at their parents. They are told to study hard so that they can earn money and have a good lifestyle in the future, but their parents aren’t always a good advertisement for what that comfortable lifestyle can bring. Instead, they often see, or sense, people who spend their lives worrying about dropping out of the middle class. PewDiePie isn’t worried about dropping out of the middle class. PewDiePie is clever, classless and free. And all he has to do is play video games all day long. It looks so easy.

No matter how much he may want it, your son will almost certainly never be as big and successful as PewDiePie. He is one in more than a trillion and he has stumbled on a formula that perhaps even he doesn’t fully understand. I don’t think someone who is even as clever and opportunistic as Simon Cowell could create a new PewDiePie. With the internet, children can now choose their own idols and, for some reason, they truly love a young Swede who calls himself PewDiePie.

Dear Kam,
There’s something I really have to do, but I don’t want to do it. Any suggestions for how I can get out of it?
In a Rut

Sometimes I have to go out for some event, but I really don’t want to leave the house because I’m just not in the mood. So, as I’m reluctantly preparing to leave, I suddenly seem to find an abundance of really important reasons for being delayed: I’ve got some work to do, it’s raining somewhere in Petaling Jaya, I’ve got to do the washing-up and did I switch off the gas? By the time I’ve dealt with all these “important” issues, it’s already so late that the event would probably be finished by the time I get there anyway and I might as well just not go. So, I carry on watching TV and scrolling through Facebook. And for some strange reason, this scenario comes to my mind when I think about the possible future course of the prime minister’s legal challenge against The Wall Street Journal. The accusation that he had RM2.6 billion in his own personal bank account is so damning that he simply has to sue in order to clear his name.

Reprinted with the kind permission of