Kam Raslan’s Talking Edge

(Reprinted from The Edge – Options pullout, 7 November 2016 issue)

Dear Kam,
I miss the 1990s. The Malaysian economy was growing at record pace and every day we were adding new entries to the Malaysian Book of Records. We should bring back the Nineties.
Supersonic

Back in the Nineties I did not like the British rock band Oasis because they were rubbish. My dislike for Oasis is so intense that I am unable to enjoy watching their favourite football team, Manchester City. Oasis was just a sad pastiche of a great British rock heritage and, unlike their forebears, they were only ever popular in Britain, where they were huge.

There is talk that Oasis will reunite in 2017, which will be big news in Britain, but they will still be rubbish. Their sound was not groundbreaking and, if I really wanted to hear somebody murder Beatles songs after having drunk too many beers, then I would go to a karaoke bar. And I also hate karaoke, which was another awful invention of the 1990s.

I spent far too many nights in karaoke bars back in the Nineties cringing with embarrassment. How was it fun watching people sing really badly, and then being forced to sing badly in public myself? It wasn’t fun at all.

Instead, karaoke was like my recurring nightmare where I’m suddenly back at school doing my exams — I haven’t studied, I’m completely naked, my teeth are falling out and I’m being forced to sing a karaoke version of “Unchained Melody”.

Back in the Nineties, my friends would insist on going to karaoke bars because, they said, it would be “fun”. It turned out that sticking hot needles in my eyeballs would have been more fun and, eventually, I didn’t join them anymore. Instead, I stayed home watching Friends. I did realise that it was ironic that I was staying at home to watch Friends on VHS instead of being out with my actual friends. But we were on a break.

I just saw a recent photo of Liam Gallagher, the lead singer of Oasis. I was surprised to see that he still has the same haircut he sported back in the 1990s. Back then, it was a silly hairstyle but perhaps befitting of a rock star in his 20s who sang in front of stadiums filled with tens of thousands of adoring fans. But after his marginally more talented songwriting brother left Oasis in 2009 and he tried and failed with a new band singing his brother’s old songs, Liam Gallagher finally got the message from a disinterested public and now, as far as I can tell, he’s unemployed. And yet he’s nearly 50 and he isn’t a rock star anymore … but he still has the same haircut. He looks like what he is: a middle-aged man who is (embarrassingly) clinging on to the memory of his glory days in the 1990s.

Some people should just let the Nineties die. But Malaysia will not let the Nineties die either. In the 1990s, the Malaysian economy saw record growth, which spurred record growth, likewise, in the breaking of pointless and non-existent records. There were feats that had never been attempted before — like dropping a Proton car onto the North Pole, presumably to impress the all-important polar bear market, and, in Penang, there was the world’s longest sandwich, which if anybody had eaten it could have led to the world’s longest queue for the toilet.

Recently, we saw a return to the 1990s with a smashing of the record for the world’s largest Sarawak laksa, previously held by Latvia. Actually, the record was not held by Latvia. The record was not held by anybody because, seriously, who would want to? After the record for the world’s largest Sarawak laksa had been smashed, the whole thing was promptly thrown away. Naturally, the entire exercise was met with derision.

Much has changed since the 1990s when embarrassing so-called records were all being achieved. Back then, there were only a handful of newspapers that blew the same collective trumpet and the perpetrators of these wasteful exercises could convince themselves that they had achieved something clever. Now we have the internet, where they are treated like the numbskulls they are.

And back in the Nineties we didn’t have much competition. There was Thailand, to whom we very generously gifted an auto industry, but Vietnam and Indonesia had not yet fully awoken. And China simply didn’t exist. Now, if China wanted to, it could easily drown Malaysia in laksa and thereby claim for itself everything we have not yet already given it.

Back in the Nineties, we could flatter ourselves that we were somehow special but just frustrated that the world wasn’t recognising our magnificence. So we lamely copied a Volkswagen commercial and dropped a Proton onto the North Pole and then tried to convince ourselves that the whole world was watching. Fortunately, nobody was.

These days, Malaysians know that the whole world is not watching Malaysia (except when we ban the use of the name ‘hot dog’). Malaysians today are so very different from Malaysians of the 1990s, who were a supremely confident, even arrogant, people. Since then, we have discovered that business and industry goes where it can get the best returns (something that post-Brexit Britain will soon discover). Now, we are more realistic, even if some of us are still desperately clinging to the old fictions.

Let’s not try to pretend we’re still living in the Nineties. Let’s not make and then throw away the world’s largest Sarawak laksa. And let’s not have a reunion of Oasis. They were crap then and they’ll be crap now, just older. Instead, let’s hark back to something that is easily attainable.

My schooling was in England and it was very expensive; but when I meet Malaysians who went to government schools in the 1970s and early 1980s, I realise that they had a better education and at a fraction of the cost. If there was anything special about us back in the Nineties, it was that we had excellent human capital. If any company is looking for publicity, then don’t waste your money on stupid stunts. Invest in the tragic victim of the 1990s. Our education system.

Reprinted with the kind permission of